The Original Amateur Hour With Ted Mack: Part 4

‘The Amature Hour’ originated from The Adelphi Theater in NYC which is most remembered as the place where the classic, 39 episodes of ‘The Honeymooners’ was shot using the Dumont Electronicams. The Adelphi was located at 152 West 54th Street in New York City, with 1,434 seats. It was owned by Dumont from around 1950 till 1957. In this photo of the show in progress, we see the two Dumont Iconoscope cameras that were used to shoot the show. Photo courtesy of Albert Fisher…the show’s producer.

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Even From The Back, You Know Who This Is…

If you grew up in the 50s, you’d know Roy Rogers from any angle! Here’s Roy and Dale doing an interview in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1961. I suspect they were there for an appearance at the state fair.

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Ellerbee Camera Collection Video Tour

For those of you that have never seen this, here it is again. I shot this a couple of years back with a small 35mm photo camera and it shows all of the 16 cameras I have on display here in my home. At the time, I had about 25 cameras, now, with the addition of the 70+ ENG cameras, there are about 100 cameras in the collection. Enjoy!

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Marconi Mark IVs and RCA TK60s In Action!

From Jerry Lewis’s ‘The Patsy’ from 1964, this clip captures two great TV studio scenes. The first shows the Marconis in action and the second shows the TK60. Had the camera uses been reversed, it would have been correct as Sullivan never had TK60s, but did have Marconi Mark IVs. Since KTLA was owned by Paramount at the time, the Marconi cameras were theirs and that scene was probably shot there.

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See Anything “Interesting” In This 1907 Photo?

Yes…a microphone! Believe it or not, Thomas Edison had been working on adding sound to film as early as 1895 with the Kinetophone. Basically it was a wax cylinder recording that was not synchronized with the images and debuted in the peep show style, single viewer, flip book consoles that predated the projection of film.

Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome. In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the “Vitaphone” system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this process was actually accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that “talking pictures”, or “talkies”, were the future. A lot of attempts were made before the success of the Jazz Singer,

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The Edison Studios…Home Of The First Motion Pictures

In 1907, Edison had new facilities built on Decatur Avenue and Oliver Place in the Bronx and the photo below was taken there in 1908. This was the third studio Edison built. Its first production facility, Edison’s Black Maria studios in West Orange, New Jersey, was built in the winter of 1892–93. The second facility, a glass-enclosed rooftop studio built at 41 East 21st Street in Manhattan’s entertainment district, opened in 1901.

Edison Studios was the original American motion picture production company owned by the Edison Company of inventor Thomas Edison. The studio made close to 1,200 films as the Edison Manufacturing Company (1894–1911) and Thomas A. Edison, Inc. (1911–1918) until the studio’s closing in 1918. Of that number, 54 were feature length, the remainder were shorts.

The first commercially exhibited motion pictures in the United States were from Edison, and premiered at a Kinetoscope parlor in New York City on April 14, 1894. The program consisted of ten short films, each less than a minute long, of athletes, dancers, and other performers. After competitors began exhibiting films on screens, Edison introduced its own Projecting Kinetoscope in late 1896.

The earliest productions were brief “actualities” showing everything from acrobats to parades to fire calls. But competition from French and British story films in the early 1900s rapidly changed the market. By 1904, 85% of Edison’s sales were from story films.
Some of the studio’s notable productions include The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1910), the first Frankenstein film in 1910, the first ever serial made in 1912 titled What Happened to Mary, and The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912). The company also produced a number of short “Kinetophone” sound films in 1913–1914 using a sophisticated acoustical recording system capable of picking up sound from 30 feet away. The studio also released a number of Raoul Barré cartoon films in 1915.

In December 1908, Edison led the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers.[2] The “Edison Trust,” as it was nicknamed, was made up of Edison, Biograph, Essanay Studios, Kalem Company, George Kleine Productions, Lubin Studios, Georges Méliès, Pathé, Selig Studios, and Vitagraph Studios, and dominated distribution through the General Film Company. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915, and were dissolved.

The breakup of the Trust by federal courts under monopoly laws, and the loss of European markets during World War I, hurt Edison financially. Edison sold its film business, including the Bronx studio, on March 30, 1918 to the Lincoln & Parker Film Company of Massachusetts.

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Two Points Of Interest…

Before it was renamed ‘Kukla, Fran And Ollie’ in October of 1948 when it moved to WNBQ and NBC, the show was called ‘Junior Jamboree’ and debuted on Chicago’s WBKB in November of ’47. Although WBKB was able to buy the new RCA TK30 IO cameras, it could not afford new pedestals and put the cameras on their two home made dollies that used a barber’s chair for the base. The dollies were built during WWII and had formerly supported Dumont Iconoscope cameras.

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CBS Uses Thomson Cameras…1985 NCAA Championships

Yesterday, veteran cameraman Kevin Vahey mentioned in a note his surprise to see CBS using Thomson cameras on a remote in 1977 in Los Angeles. Kevin wondered if that was just an LA truck or if there was more to it. I think there was more to it and this video from 1985 is part of the reason. I think CBS did a lot of trials after the Norelco cameras began to age and the mobile units were good places to test new cameras. This video is was shot in Louisville Kentucky.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf1F_YLtp4c

From CBS, the sports segment of a film for affiliates showing behind the scenes of the CBS Television Network. You see the heads of the divisions, talent and…

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America’s Camera Collections

My friend Richard Wirth recently published this article “Vintage Video Collections” that shines a light on the custodians of what’s left of the vintage television equipment, and where it is now. Enjoy!
http://provideocoalition.com/pvcexclusive/story/the-collections

Vintage Video Collections

In 1953, color television became a reality in the US.  At the time, the cameras weighed over 300 pounds and were referred to as “coffins” because they were so huge.

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Look Ma…No Viewfinders!

The RCA TK30s became available in late 1946, but there was some element used in building the viewfinders that was in very short supply. The networks got viewfinders, but the local stations had to wait. The problem went away after about six months, but local stations that bought them had do make do for a while. Shown here is a 1946 Christmas parade in St. Louis, covered by KSD TV. The good news was that there were very few sets in use at the time. The only way to make this work was to put a monitor near the cameras and have the director talk the cameramen into the right shots.

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Small World…

As it turns out, this is one of my RCA TK60s. I just found this photo in a 1960s RCA Broadcast News…it was shot at WCVE TV which is Richmond, Virginia’s PBS station. They had two TK60s and I have them both in my collection now.

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One Of My Favorite Cameras

This is the Marconi Mark IV. It’s standard tube was the 4.5″ Image Orthicon and this could have been the first camera to make use of the 4.5″ IO as the 1958 RCA TK14 used the 3″ and it was not till 1960 that the TK12 aka TK60 debuted with a 4.5″ IO. The camera debuted in 1958 and by 1960 had began to show up in the US. CBS used them at Television City and in Studio 50 (Ed Sullivan Theater) in New York. I think CBS also had some on network mobile units. WAGA and the PBS station in Atlanta had them and so did a big mobile production company based in Washington DC.

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The Baughman Pedestal

This little mobile pedestal was a real work horse from the 1950s till the 80s. Originally made by Baughman, Houston Fearless copied it as did other camera support makers including ITC. There was a hydraulic version and this one, the manual crank version for height adjustment. This is my RCA TK11/31 mounted on a manual crank Baughman pedestal. They were so strong, you could even mount TK42s on them which weighed almost 300 pounds.

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Now You Know Why…

Ever wonder why Johnny Carson sometime looked like he was talking to a balcony audience? Well, take a good look at Studio 1 in Burbank and you’ll understand. Although there is no balcony, the audience seating is very high and at a pretty steep incline…like stadium seating and the people in the back are waaay up there. Thanks to Martin Perry for the photo.

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Per Episode Production Cost Of One Hour Shows

The 1970s was the first full decade of all color programming for all networks. These figures are quite tame compared to today’s costs! Click to enlarge for the whole list.

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‘I Love Lucy’

From the set, here is a look at what Lucy, Rickey, Fred and Ethyl saw when they filmed. In the white shirt between the boom and camera, Desi Arnaz visits with the audience before he does the warm up, which he usually did for each show. The third man to the right of the camera in the dark shirt is Director of Photography Karl Freund.

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