The Original Beauty Of The Ed Sullivan Theater…Rare Images From 1927

More of the history of the venue is in the original article below. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

Rare Ed Sullivan Theater Photos…1927

I love it that these rare photos are now pouring in! Take a look!

This is the theater as is looked when it was built. It opened in 1927 as The Hammerstein Theater and was designed by architect Herbert Krapp who designed about a dozen of NYC’s most famous theaters. Due to the depression, the theater closed in 1931.

It was taken over by Broadway Billy Rose and became a night club with all the theater seating removed and replaced by tables. In 1936, CBS took a long term lease on the building and converted it to CBS Radio Theater 3 (one of five in NYC). The first radio show from here was “The Major Bowes Amateur Hour”.

In early 1950, the theater was converted to television and became CBS Studio 50. The first broadcast was “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” show. Godfrey’s talent show had been on CBS radio for over a year and originated here before the TV conversion. Thanks to Simon Crawshaw and Nick Van Hoogstratten for the rare photos. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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October 23, 1956…Videotape Debut Network TV: Setting The Record Straight

Most people think the November 30, 1956 time delayed broadcast of “CBS News With Douglas Edwards” was the first use of videotape on network television. That is not correct, but it was the first use of tape as a time-shifter, in that the east coast broadcast was videotaped at Television City for rebroadcast two hours later to the mountain and west coast time zones.

As for the first known network use of videotape, that happened 60 years ago today at NBC. At the time, “The Jonathan Winters Show” was 4 weeks old. The 15 minute variety show ran from 7:30-7:45 Tuesday nights, just before “The Camel News Caravan” with John Cameron Swayze, replacing one of the two weekly Diana Shore shows that had for years, aired in that slot on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

On October 23, 1956, the NBC engineers in New York wanted to see if the viewing public could tell the difference between a videotape and the live portion of the show. Jonathan’s musical guest that night was Dorothy Collins, of “Your Hit Parade” fame. She had a new record out called “The Italian Theme” and her performance, with dancers and backup singers, was recorded earlier in the day. During the live show, Winters introduced her, as if she was there, and the tape rolled seamlessly. In case there was a problem, NBC had extra operators on duty that night in New York, and to their great relief and amazement, no one called or noticed. With that quiet event, videotape had passed the final acceptance test.

Remember, this is only six months after Ampex introduced videotape at the 1956 NAB in April. In the book “A Companion To American Technology”, Carroll Pursell reports that a month later, in November of ’56, Winters used videotape to play two characters in the same sketch. Unfortunately, there is no kinescope or tape of this historic event either, and about all that’s available from Jonathan’s 1956 show is this single program. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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October 22, 1939…The First Ever Pro Football Telecast

77 years ago today, the relationship between professional football and television began when NBC earned a spot in history by televising a pro football game. Only 22 days before, NBC had televised the first ever college game on September 30th.

A crowd of 13,050 were on hand at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field on that now-historic day when the Philadelphia Eagles fell to Brooklyn’s Dodgers 23-14. Yes, there was a Brooklyn Dodgers football team, from 1930 to 1943.

Five hundred-or-so fortunate New Yorkers who owned television sets witnessed the game in the comfort of their own homes, over NBC’s experimental station W2XBS. Many others saw the telecast on monitors while visiting the RCA Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York where it was scheduled as a special event.

According to Allen “Skip” Walz, the NBC play-by-play announcer (pictured above), only eight people were needed for the telecast. Walz had none of the visual aids…monitors, screens or spotters used today, and there were just two cameras. One was located in the box seats on the 40-yard line and the other was in the stadium’s mezzanine section.

“I’d sit with my chin on the rail in the mezzanine, and the camera was over my shoulder,” remembered Walz. “I did my own spotting, and when the play moved up and down the field, on punts or kickoffs, I’d point to tell the cameraman what I’d be talking about.”

The television log records of that day say that the game began at 2:30 p.m. and ran for exactly two hours, thirty-three minutes. By comparison today’s games run almost three full hours. Of course there were no commercial interruptions during the 1939 game. There were, however, interruptions of another sort.

“It was a cloudy day, when the sun crept behind the stadium there wasn’t always enough light for the cameras,” according to Walz. “The picture would get darker and darker, and eventually it would go completely blank, and I would begin to call the game in the style I used for radio broadcasts.” Enjoy and Share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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October 22, 1962…In The Oval Office For The Cuban Missile Crisis

As Told By The Guy In The Red Circle, A MUST READ STORY! From the October 21, 2012 edition of The Savannah Morning News, here is the story in his own words.

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Barry Ostrow was front and center for the Cuban Missile Crisis Speech! This is the fascinating story of that fateful day…October 22, 1962. Just out of college, he was a brand new hire at WTOP and has a great story to tell! Enjoy and share. -Bobby Ellerbee

My number was up. Some five months after graduation from Ithaca College, my friends and neighbors on the draft board in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., had decided it was time for me to take my pre-induction Army physical. The day designated for my exam at Fort Holabird, Md. – Oct. 22, 1962 – would prove to be not only an emotional personal experience for me but also for the entire nation.

I had been working in Washington, D.C., since June as part of the “management training” program at WTOP-TV, a CBS affiliate, and the CBS News Bureau was located in WTOP’s Broadcast House off Wisconsin Avenue in northwest Washington.

It was a heady time for a young TV production graduate. I was making a whopping $50 a week, but working on loan to CBS more than made up for my penury. From the beginning I served as a floor director for a who’s who of nationally known journalists – Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, Roger Mudd, George Herman, Robert Pierpoint, Marvin Kalb, and bureau chief George Schoenbrun.

On the local news team was an unknown, brash reporter named Sam Donaldson.

Some highlights leading up to Oct. 22 included crewing the expansion of the “CBS Evening News” from 15 minutes to a half hour, an Oval Office taping and news conferences by President John F. Kennedy, and briefly meeting Edward R. Murrow.

On Oct. 21, I was working on the Sunday morning interview show, “Washington Conversation.” The CBS newsroom was buzzing with talk of “something big” going on. Most thought it had to do with the Berlin Wall. The president’s cabinet and the nation’s military leaders reportedly had been spotted entering and leaving the White House, but no one suspected that the brewing crisis was just 90 miles off the tip of Florida.

The next day I rendezvoused with a military bus heading to Fort Holabird, an hour away outside Baltimore. After a morning of filling out forms and some preliminary poking and prodding, our group lined up on the wooden floor of a spare, barracks-like room dressed only in our shorts. As we awaited our next humiliation, a soldier called out, “Is there a Barry Ostrow from CBS in the room?”

As perhaps 30 people looked on, the soldier handed me a telephone. They listened intently to my side of the conversation:

“The White House? How am I supposed to get to the White House? I’m standing here an hour away and half naked in the middle of my draft physical.”

At this point, those in the room began chanting, “Go. Go. Go.”

An Army recruiting officer helped. Within a few minutes, I was in his car speeding down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. En route, he did his best to convince me that if there was a balloon about to go up, it would be in my best interest to sign up with him on the spot.

The recruiter took me to my apartment on Connecticut Avenue just south of the National Zoo, waited while I changed into a suit and drove me to Broadcast House where he left me with his business card.

I picked up my gear – headphones and a small makeup kit – and hurried out to Wisconsin Avenue to flag down a cab. I always carried the kit with me even though Kennedy was always tanned and freshly shaved. I never had to use it on him. Many politicians, such as Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen, always appreciated a little help with their appearance.

It was now about 3 p.m., and the D.C. rush hour hadn’t begun. A cab picked me up, and a lawyer in the back seat was willing to share a ride downtown. When we arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., I reached into my jacket for my wallet and discovered I had left it in my apartment.

My co-rider shrugged off the debt, maybe $3, saying, “I think I can trust someone going to the White House.”

He gave me his business card and probably was surprised when a check arrived at his office a couple of weeks later.

Before Dallas in November 1963, it was relatively easy to enter the White House. At a pre-designated gate, the security person had only to check my I.D. against an index card in a small box of approved media credentials. I don’t recall any metal detectors or pat downs.

I caught up with the late Bob Camfiord, the television pool director, outside CBS’ big white remote truck parked near the Rose Garden. Rumors were flying, but no one knew for sure why we were there other than the president would address the nation at 7 p.m.

About 5 p.m., I was ushered down the narrow West Wing hallway outside the office of Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary, and into the Oval Office. This wasn’t my first rodeo, but it was always a thrill each time I entered this iconic room. The white curved walls. The blue rug with the presidential seal. The facing white couches and, between them, JFK’s rocking chair.

I sat behind the president’s Resolute desk standing in for him while Camfiord, out in the truck, conducted camera, sound and light checks.

At about 6 p.m. embargoed copies of the president’s speech began to circulate in the West Wing. The topic was not Berlin, but Cuba and the discovery of Soviet missile bases under construction there. Soon those missiles would be operational and pointed at Washington and other U.S. locations only minutes away.

America’s second-youngest president was about to face off with the bellicose Nikita Khrushchev. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction could be tested over a small Caribbean island.

While the imminent prospect of a nuclear war was frightening and heightened by the thought that we were all standing at Ground Zero, there was calmness in the room. Each of us was involved with our immediate responsibilities.

We were not yet privy to the tension that had been building since the missile installations were discovered on Oct. 14 during a U-2 surveillance flight.

The Oval Office began to fill up. In addition to the CBS pool technicians, there were administration officials, at least three news film cameramen and five still photographers.

Shortly before 7 p.m., the president emerged through one of the doors almost hidden in the curve of the office walls. Usually relaxed and casual with the media, this night he appeared tense. I was in my usual position, attached to the camera by my earphones and crouched under the lens directly in front of the president.

At Camfiord’s direction, I raised my arm at 5 seconds before the speech and gave the president a verbal warning. Moments later I pointed in his direction and he began to speak.

Later, in the remote truck, I used the network’s dedicated landline to New York to call my parents. Like so many Americans, especially those in or near major East Coast cities, they were deeply concerned. My mother kept urging me to return home from Washington, but I reminded her that if the missiles should begin to fly, there would be no refuge.

I wish now that I had kept a diary of the ensuing six days of the crisis when the three networks broadcast daily from the White House, the U.S. Department of State, the Pentagon and the headquarters of the Organization of American States.

I remember it as a time of dark remote truck interiors, dark control rooms and dark television studios.

To cover official Washington, CBS brought in Bobby Vitarelli (later, director of the “CBS Evening News”) from New York to work with Camfiord.

They also pressed WTOP-TV’s senior directors Clark Pangle, Bill Linden and Eddie Colbert into service. Remote trucks were at a premium, and I remember Colbert standing outside a station wagon on the White House grounds looking inside at a bank of monitors and directing a stand-up report.

The technicians worked around the clock, sleeping – when they could – on cots at Broadcast House. Working at “golden time pay,” they made thousands of additional dollars that week. Those of us further down the totem pole filled in working as assistant directors and directors.

I readied a lot of film to be rolled and directed a few one-camera cut-ins in the studio with talent like Schoenbrun, Mudd and Kalb. With all of the CBS overtime, I made my first thousand-dollar payday.

As the nation and the world held its collective breath, the crisis played out. Khrushchev blustered, Adlai Stevenson admirably stated the U.S. case in the United Nations, and Kennedy resolutely pursued the naval blockade of Cuba and offered to remove (aging) missiles from Turkey.

And then it was over.

In March 1963, I finally completed my physical at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, and by August I was in the Fort Carson, Colo., public information office producing mini film documentaries about the base for television stations in Denver and Colorado Springs.

That’s where I heard about the assassination in Dallas, 13 months to the day after Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis speech. The world, of course, was in shock. For me, Nov. 22, 1963, held a particularly personal emotional impact. As I watched the nation grieve, my thoughts were, “I knew him.”

In the ensuing decades, I’ve had many great experiences from the birth of my children and grandchild, to meeting other presidents, to the good fortune of seeing much of the world. But if I had to pick one outstanding time in my life, it would have to be the events of October 1962.

ABOUT BARRY J. OSTROW

Barry J. Ostrow began his career in communications at WTOP-TV where he was on the television production staff working primarily with CBS News. Following Army service with the Armed Forces Korea Network, he worked as a director at WETA-TV in Washington, D.C., and WBZ-TV in Boston.

Later he worked as department head for biomedical communications at Bell & Howell and television division manager for Scientific Communications, both in Chicago. In the cable television industry, he guided television production in the northeast region of TelePrompTer out of Hartsdale, N.Y.

Ostrow spent 31 years guiding communications programs in educational settings, including Richmond, Va., Lee County, Fla., and Savannah-Chatham public schools, South College and Armstrong Atlantic State University.

Since his retirement in January 2010, he has been a freelance writer and continues his passion for international travel.

http://savannahnow.com/news/2012-10-21/savannah-man-cued-jfk-cuban-missile-crisis-speech#.UUL90hzvsuB

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How Colbert Does “Live” Interviews With Cartoon Hillary & Donald

New technologies to create live animations are gaining attention this year with the use of Adobe’s Character Animator. The new program can shorten the time to create animations from weeks to hours, by allowing animation puppets to immediately mimic the movements of someone’s lips, shoulders and eyes using a face-tracking camera. Here is the story. -Bobby Ellerbee

https://www.cnet.com/news/cartoon-donald-trump-late-show-stephen-colbert/

How Cartoon Donald Trump comes to life on ‘The Late Show’

Live cartoons of Trump and Clinton could be just the beginning of real-time animations.

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“SNL” Production Designer Eugene Lee…There Since Day 1

As sure as “Saturday Night Live” is television’s most unique production, Eugene Lee is television’s most experienced designer. No one has imagined more sets and scenery than this man, who at 77, is still going strong. Here is part of his amazing story. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

http://deadline.com/2016/08/saturday-night-live-eugene-lee-production-designer-emmy-interview-1201802593/

‘Saturday Night Live’ Production Designer Eugene Lee On His 40 Years With The Sketch Series

Approached by a Canadian television producer for a variety sketch series back in the early 1970s, production designer Eugene Lee couldn’t have realized then that he’d stumbled on the job of a lifet…

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October 1955…Sid Caesar, With One Of Live TV’s Most Famous “Saves”

Sid Caesar made television history on “Caesar’s Hour” with this improvised bit of comic genius, which has become one of the most famous “saves” in the history of live television.

During this 13 minute sketch of “Gallipacci” (a take off on the famous opera Pagliacci), Sid was supposed to paint a teardrop on his cheek, but then, the mascara pencil broke (at 8:30 in) at the beginning of his nonsense rendition of “Just One of Those Things”.

Not breaking his stride, Sid proceeds to pick up one of Nanette’s lip brushes and paints an unscripted tic-tac-toe board on his face. This aired October 10, 1955, live from The Century Theater.

Some unverified sources report that ‘Cirque du Soleil’ has credited Sid Caesar as the origin of the made up gibberish the show’s performers use as a way to make any nationality at home with the narration and performance of their presentations.

Caesar was the master of this, and as you’ll see, Nanette Fabray (who took over for Coca), Carl Reiner and Howard Morris have studied hard at their masters knee. This is cued to start a minute before the “save”, but I think you’ll enjoy watching the whole thing from the start, as the made up lyrics are sung to the comically paired with melodies we all know. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

October 18, 1964…Hallmark Brings “The Fantasticks” To Television

At the link above is a kinescope of the famous Broadway play, that was the October 18, 1964 presentation of “The Hallmark Hall Of Fame”. Below, the photo shows John Davidson speaking to his father, who is played by Bert Lahr.

This was done live to tape at NBC Brooklyn, but only the kinescope work copy remains. The way tape was edited at the networks then, required a kinescope copy of the raw footage, which was then edited as a master of how to manually edit the tape. The odd look was common in kinescopes of color productions, which black and white film didn’t handle well.

‘The Hallmark Hall of Fame’ debuted on Christmas Eve 1951, with the world premiere of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” on NBC TV. Until 1955, the production schedule was near frantic with an average of 40 new presentations a year. In 1954, the show began color broadcasts and in 1956, it went to a bi monthly format with six or seven shows a year.

The Hallmark anthology series was one of the highest rated and most awarded in television history. For nearly three decades the series was broadcast by NBC, but the network cancelled it in late 1978 due to declining ratings. Since then, the series has been televised occasionally by CBS from 1979 to 1989, then on ABC from 1989 to 1995, then CBS again from 1995 until 2011, when that network cancelled the series due to low ratings. As of 2014, the series has earned 80 Emmys, 9 Golden Globes, 11 Peabody Awards and many others. -Bobby Ellerbee

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October 15, 1973…”Tomorrow” Debuted On NBC

The only way to remember this great show is to remember what made it great…Tom Snyder. On the event of his death in 2007, here are remembrances from Brian Williams, Jay Leno and David Letterman. Incidentally, Letterman’s NBC show replaced “Tomorrow”.

“Tomorrow” followed “Tonight” With Johnny Carson and started as a 60-minute series which aired only four nights a week, Monday through Thursday, in order to accommodate the weekly shows ‘Midnight Special’ (1973–81) and SCTV (1981–82) in that time slot on Fridays.

It was originally broadcast from the NBC studios in Burbank, but relocated to New York in December 1974 when Snyder took on additional anchor duties for NBC News and the network’s flagship station, WNBC-TV.

In June 1977, the show returned to Burbank until 1979, when Snyder once again began originating from 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

On September 16, 1980, when “Tonight” was shortened to 60 minutes, “Tomorrow” was scheduled at 12:30 Eastern and lengthened to a 90 minute format that lasted until its cancellation 16 months later. In February 1982, NBC replaced “Tomorrow Coast-To-Coast” with “Late Night With David Letterman”. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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