MEET TELEVISION’S FIRST FEMALE DIRECTOR! FRANCIS BUSS BUCH

On January 25, 2023 - TV History
 
She was born, Frances Buss and in marriage, became Francis Buch, but before she married, Francis Buss was a pioneer of network TV, that passed away in 2010 at the age of 92.
 
She was presented with an opportunity, especially as a woman, at a time when broadcasting was definitely a man’s world. She seized it and had no problem getting in there and mixing it up with the guys. It was that boldness as a woman that led to her success.
 
While taking acting classes, performing off-Broadway and modeling in New York City, Buss joined CBS for a temporary job as a receptionist in July 1941 and was soon asked to be in front of the camera for various then-black-and-white programs.
 
Buss joined CBS Television – the fledgling video arm of the Columbia Broadcasting System – just two weeks after the Federal Communications Commission allowed commercial TV broadcasts.
 
“I guess I had seen TV at the World’s Fair. But I had no idea this existed in New York. CBS was a radio network,” Buss, said in a 2008 interview. “It was fascinating. Nobody knew what was going to happen with this new medium.” She appeared on TV’s first game show, “The CBS Television Quiz,” as a scorekeeper. Her credits also include TV news coverage of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
 
When networks had to suspend live broadcasting in 1942, Buss got a job directing and producing U.S. Navy training films in Florida, where she met her husband, Bill Buch. The two married in 1949. She rejoined CBS in 1944, and by 1945, CBS promoted her to be TV’s first female director. “Everything we did was live,” she said in 2008. “If you did something stupid, it was out there for everyone to see. I suppose I was nervous until I discovered I could do it.”
 
Buch was soon directing and producing a variety of telecasts, from Brooklyn Dodgers games to musicals to crime dramas, according to The Paley Center for Media, which inducted her into the “She Made It” class of 2007. The group credits her for helping establish programming templates and much of “television’s unique visual language.”
 
Buch directed the first color TV program, “Premiere,” in 1951 after CBS won government approval for its color system. She also directed the first television talk show “Mike and Buff,” starring Mike Wallace and his then-wife, Buff Cobb, from 1951 to 1953.
 
“Frannie Buss was a pioneer in broadcast television and a fine person,” Wallace told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. The 91-year-old journalist praised Buch’s professionalism in the male-dominated days of early television. “It was macho, but she was very capable, knew what she was about and was highly regarded by the people who worked with her,” he said.
 
She resigned in 1954, to be a full-time homemaker. “I was a little tired of it,” she said in 2008. “I had an entirely different life. But I had no regrets.”