Follow Up: Jerry Lewis and Video Assist

A few days ago, I posted a photo of Lewis with a Dumont Electronicam and told some of the story of his work in developing video assist for movies. Here is the whole story from an article I wrote a while back complete with some interesting photos with details on the picture pages.

Mr. Lewis with a 35mm version of the Dumont Electrocam. This meeting got him very interested in meshing film and video in a new way. This may have been a trial run of the first video assist platform he created.

Here is the camera system again on at the Fountain Blue in Miami during the filming of ‘The Bell Boy’.

On the set of ‘The Ladies Man’, Lewis is behind the cameras…both of them, the Mitchell and the video camera. I think this may be a custom built RCA unit.

This is a montage of ‘Jerry’s Noisy Toy’ as the crew called it. Here you can see all the elements of it.

In a way, he really is ‘The Nutty Professor’. After the Martin & Lewis breakup, Jerry began to get more involved in movie making and television and his first TV directing experience was on an episode of ‘Ben Casey, MD’ that he also appered in. In 1960, he wrote directed and starred in ‘The Bell Boy’ and that’s where the video assist process started. Jerry had console built to house a couple of audio tape recorders, a turntable and a Sony video tape recorder. Along the same lines as the Dumont Electrocam from the 50’s, Lewis mounted a video camera on the film camera and the rest, as they say is history.

Source