The Great Ones…Jackie Gleason And Pat McBride
It would be extremely interesting to hear the stories Dennis Patrick McBride could tell about his 40 plus years at CBS behind their cameras. This photo was taken in February of 1955 at a rehearsal of ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’ at CBS Studio 50, better known as The Ed Sullivan Theater. Pat worked on the Sullivan show as well as lots of CBS Sports broadcasts and became one of their top sports cameramen. In 1966, he was described in an article as CBS’s longest working cameraman. I think he joined CBS just after WW II and stayed on the job till sometime in the 80s. While shooting Barbara Streisand’s first television special on location in Boston with 3 of the new Marconi Mark VII color cameras, two of them went out and with Pat’s help and deep experience, he made the taping work and got shots no one thought you could get with only one camera. This decorated veteran of WW II and Emmy Award winning television pioneer passed in 2004.
I learned on the MK VII’s, they were always broken.
The first color Streisand special was Philadelphia. We just watched the DVD ! She told the story of dead cameras in the intro !!! Amazing.
This must be from the final season of the JG show before the half hour Honeymooners and Stage Show aired, as this is not the Electronicam camera. A great picture of that camera can be found in the book The Official Honeymooners Treasury.
Gleason was so much more than what ppl commonly perceive…..
The first Streisand special was in black and white.
The set behind him is the ‘Honeymooners’ apartment. If it’s 1955 then this would be just before they moved to the Aldelphi Theatre, where the sitcom was produced.
I started in TV in the late 70’s. Back then there were a fair number of WWII vets that started right after the war. The expression then was, “That guy started in TV when it was radar.”