Headed For ‘Tonight’ Show And 30 Rockefeller Plaza!

It’s 5 AM in Boston, and and I’m leaving on Amtrak for Penn Station in NYC now. Dennis Degan will be joining me for the taping this afternoon at 4, but as soon as i get to the city, I have a “special mission” which I will report on later “Tonight”. Wahooooooooo!

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Eyes Of A Generation…On Tour

By noon today, I hope to be standing in The Museum Of Broadcast Technology in Woonsocket, RI with my good friend Paul Beck. I’ll be taking as many pictures along the way as I possibly can, however my usual early morning posting schedule may be out the window for a few days.

I’ll show up when I can with what I have, so keep and eye out and remember…visit the page itself. Some of these posts will probably be albums and you can see everything better here. Remind your non Facebook friends that they can see everything on this page at the main site’s “Live Stream” tab. Be good and I’ll see you soon! Bobby Ellerbee

http://www.eyesofageneration.com/live-stream.php

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Eyes Of A Generation…On Tour…One Week From Today

Next Sunday morning, I’ll get a top to bottom tour of NBC. My tour guides will be Dennis Degan of ‘Today’ and Joel Spector, who began with NBC in 1965. Joel is still the chief audio engineer on the ‘Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade’ and has been doing the show for around twenty five years. Although he “retired” a few years back while working on SNL, he gets called in frequently to work shows like the ‘NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams’.

Accompanying me will be my tour guide from Thursday and Friday at CBS, Gady Reinhold, who’s been with CBS since 1966. Who better to show you the CBS Broadcast Center and Studio 50?

Joel and Gady were neighbors, and both loved television. As teenagers, they made it their mission to visit all the shows and studios in the 50s. Both are walking encyclopedias, but add Dennis to the mix, and this will be one of the most interesting tours anyone could ever imagine, much less have the experience of taking.

Since my first interest in television at around age 11, 30 Rockefeller Plaza has been my “somewhere over the rainbow”. My first friend in network television was Mrs. Kathryn S. Cole. She was head of the NBC Viewer Relations Department. Starting in 1961, I would write to her once a month and ask for pictures of the studio and she never disappointed me!

Thick packs of 8×10 glossy’s would appear in my mail box, inside the blue grey envelope with the NBC snake logo on the outside. I was ecstatic and would pour over them for hours on end. I think the last time I wrote to Mrs. Cole was around 1965.

I wish I still had ALL of what she sent, but below are three of about a dozen photos I still have and cherish. On the left is a photo that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever visited the main web site at http://www.eyesofageneration.com/home.php

That’s Perry Como at The Ziegfeld Theater in 1962. In the middle is John Davidson and Bert Lahr, taping “The Fantastics” for ‘The Hallmark Hall Of Fame’, which was done at the Brooklyn studios in 1964. On the right is a rehearsal photo from a 1963 ‘Andy Williams Show’ at NBC Burbank.

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This Looks Interesting…Anyone Know How This Turned Out?

Canon must be proud to know that their lenses are “Letterman Proof”. As we all know, Dave has been known to rough house with them and his friend, Craig Ferguson, has learned from the master.

William French, our friend in San Francisco, sent this overnight. I don’t know what’s happening here, but with a prop lens shroud over the real one, you know that a physical gag is only seconds away.

A note said this was from a Letterman episode taped 4/24/14. I can’t find the clip…anyone have it? 4/24 would have been Thursday, and both the Thursday and Friday shows are taped that day, so this could be from either show.

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NBC’s “Radio Ear”…The First IFB or Ear Prompter

To help radio crews and floor reporters cover the 1944 political conventions (both held in Chicago), NBC came up with the “radio ear”…a one way voice link from control.

The television people in Studio 3H saw this and thought it would be a good way to make floor directors a bit more flexible since they would no longer have to use a cabled headset. They tried it for a while and then it just kind of petered out for some reason. It would take over 20 years for IFBs to return to the air with television’s coverage of the US space missions.

Below are three versions of the receiver, two headset models with aerials and one as an ear bud with battery packs. The photos were taken in NBC Studio 3H. The lady is a young Cloris Leachman and the bathing suit photo is to demonstrate how hidable the unit it.

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Television’s First News Man…Lowell Thomas

Although Lowell Thomas’s news programs were heard and seen on NBC radio and television, Thomas did not actually work for NBC…he worked for Sunoco, the sponsor of his shows.

Details on television’s first news program are few, and far between, but as best I can tell, Thomas hosted the first-ever television-news broadcast in 1939 on NBC’s W2XBS. I think this was a stand alone broadcast and not a simulcast, and perhaps was only done for one week as a trial run.

Television’s first ever regularly scheduled television news broadcast, which was a simulcast of his radio broadcast, began on February 21, 1940, on NBC Television. While W2XBS New York carried every TV/radio simulcast, it is not known if the two other stations capable of being fed programs by W2XBS, W2XB Schenectady and/or W3XE Philadelphia carried all or some of the simulcasts.

That February 21 telecast was on a Wednesday, and it is possible that the Thomas simulcasts were were only done once a week as midweek summary type shows for television. It is reported that his Wednesday NBC radio shows were summary style shows too.

It is not known when the ‘Sunoco News With Lowell Thomas’ television show ended. Some accounts say it was “brief”, while other sources report that it ended with the outbreak of WW II . Generally, we in the US think of that as December 7, 1941 with the Pearl Harbor bombing, but the war in Europe was already heating up. The start of the war is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later.

I suspect that the show, with it’s limited viewership, ended in September so that Thomas could devote more time to his radio reporting duties. He is said not to have liked television as it kept him too tied down as he had to be in the studio every day. His radio show did a lot of traveling and he liked that.

In the Summer of 1940, Thomas anchored the first live telecast of a political convention, the 1940 Republican National Convention, which was fed from Philadelphia to W2XBS and on to W2XB. Reportedly, Thomas wasn’t in Philadelphia, but was instead anchoring the broadcast from a New York studio and merely identifying speakers who were about to or who had just addressed the convention.

It would take television till 1948 to present a regularly scheduled evening news show on the network level…that show was the ‘CBS Television News With Douglas Edwards’.

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Am I On The Right Floor? My Ears Tell Me No!

I love ‘Mad Men’, BUT…when I watch, for example, a couple of men or women walk along the “office” floors, I don’t hear a concrete skyscraper floor…I hear a wooden stage floor and the illusion is broken.

Same thing the other day on ‘NCIS’ in a scene set in a big hospital.
Most of you reading this know what I mean because you’ve been on film sets at one time or another. Unlike live television and soap opera sets, film sets are built on raised wooden floors for construction purposes and hiding cables. The sound of actors footsteps on a raised wooden floor is much different than that of walking on a hard floor.

This past Easter Sunday, I was watching ‘The Ten Commandments’ with Charlton Heston. When he was brought before the Pharaoh in chains, the accompanying sound effect add on was jingle bells…not chains. Suddenly I was back in my recliner and not in Egypt.

I don’t often climb on my soap box and will climb down now, but I’ll close with a request for the sound designers to pay more attention. 99.9% of those watching never notice these kinds of things, but for industry people trying to enjoy a television performance, this is one of the things that eject us from the theater of innocent illusion and put us back in the real world.

What are some of the other things like this that throw you off?

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Mel Allen…Columbia University Football, 1946

In 1946, CBS Television began telecasting the home games at Columbia University. CBS Radio sportscaster, and the then voice of the NY Yankees, Mel Allen was chosen to be the host. This photo was taken at Columbia’s Baker Filed on October 5, 1946. A few days later, he would be calling his first World Series game.

The camera is an RCA Orthicon model with a CBS custom made gun sight viewfinder. Although the camera did have a ground glass optical VF, like the Iconoscope cameras, this VF alternative saved the day as seeing the camera viewfinder in bright light was hard, but with long shots like this and a fixed focal length lens, framing was more important.

Allen started his career as the public address announcer for Alabama Crimson Tide football games. In 1933, when the sports director of Birmingham’s radio station WBRC asked Alabama coach Frank Thomas to recommend a new play-by-play announcer, he suggested Allen. His first broadcast was Alabama’s home opener that year, against the Tulane Green Wave.

Allen graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1937. Shortly after graduating, Allen took a train to New York City for a week’s vacation. While in New York, just as a lark, he auditioned for a staff announcer’s position at the CBS Radio Network.

CBS executives already knew of Allen; the network’s top sportscaster, Ted Husing, had heard many of his Crimson Tide broadcasts. He was hired at $45 a week. The rest, as they say “is history”.

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Instant Replay…New Information + The Birth Of A & B Roll News

A week or so back, I did a story on the early days of live news on CBS. I had thought that the ‘CBS Television News With Douglas Edwards’ had always come from the Grand Central Studios, but it didn’t. It did move there some time in the mid 50s, but here’s the story of the earliest days of the show.

In re reading “This Is CBS”, by Robert Slater, he quotes CBS Television’s first news president Sig Mickelson on the 1951 push to make news a more dynamic part of the programing. “The TV news department was located in a corner office of the radio news department at 485 Madison Avenue. The studio was eight blocks away in Liederkranz Hall.”

By the time the 1952 Presidential election rolled around, at least the CBS Television News department had moved, but not the studio…yet. Here is another quote: “Television news occupied a crowded space on 42nd Street over Grand Central Station. The broadcast studio was thirteen blocks away at Liederkranz Hall. This required the staff to hustle into a cab every night at 7:20 trying to rush last minute film and scripts to Edwards before the start of the news. This did not always work out, especially on rainy days.”

It was at Liederkrantz Hall that news legend Don Hewitt came up with the idea of using dual projectors and in essence gave us the A and B roll concept of news footage. Back then, boring “talking head” news footage was the norm, but to add a bit of extra texture, Hewitt hit on the idea of inserting related images using a second projector. This was done on the fly…punched live on the air. One machine ran the “head” with sound, the other projector was loaded with film of related images and ran with no audio.

It was while previewing Senator Robert Taft’s long and boring speech on a swollen federal budget, that the idea occurred to Hewitt. Who says politicians aren’t an inspiration?!? Enjoy and Share.

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Sports Graphics…Back In The Day

Long before there were digital graphics gizmos, there were analog graphics gizmos. This piece of hardware was used at WHDH in Boston for Celtic’s basketball in 1964.

In ’64, colorcasting was trying to break out, but networks and stations that originated major sports broadcasts, would always take along a black and white camera to shoot either flip cards, or mechanical graphic boxes like this that would be super imposed over the field of play shots.

ABC Sports always had a TK60 along in their color trucks and at times, would use the utility truck as the “graphics studio” with lights, the TK60 and the flip cards set up in the truck’s cargo area. My how times have changed! Thanks to Maureen Carney for the photo.

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Remember The Letterman-Gumble Feud? Here’s Where It Started!

In May of 1985, ‘Today’ Executive Producer Steve Friedman and NBC President Larry Grossman announced that the famous morning show would present a live, one hour ‘Today Primetime’ special in August.

What no one on the ‘Today’ staff knew was that Friedman had also invited David Letterman to “interact” with the live show. “Interact” he did, and this video captures the moment. I don’t know if this clip was part of the ‘Today’ show live feed, or, if it was taped by Letterman for use on his show, but this kicked off a three year feud with ‘Today’ host Bryant Gumble.

According to this 1989 story in the “Spokane Chronicle”, Gumble was outraged and “huffy” demanding an apology from Dave, which never came. The more Bryant huffed, the more jokes from Dave.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1345&dat=19881020&id=x0JYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2_kDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5424,584093

The feud finally ended May 13, 1989 when Gumbal made an appearance on ‘Late Night’…a video clip I would love to see!

Although, in the article, Jane Pauley describes the event as an interruption of her interview with ‘Miami Vice’ stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, what we see here is a set with Gene Shalit, Gumble and Pauley. Perhaps there was a second “interaction”?

Enjoy and share!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3R8aoPyGyc

David Letterman interrupts the Today Show Please visit CBS.com for more great Letterman clips.

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Vin Scully…65 Season With The Dodgers, From Brooklyn To LA

His 65 seasons with the Dodgers (1950–present) is the longest tenure of any broadcaster with a single team in professional sports history, and he is second by one year to only Tommy Lasorda in terms of number of years with the Dodgers organization in any capacity.

In 1950, Scully joined Red Barber and Connie Desmond in the Brooklyn Dodgers radio and television booths which were carried on WOR. When Barber got into a salary dispute with World Series sponsor Gillette in 1953, Scully took Barber’s spot for the 1953 World Series. At the age of 25, Scully became the youngest man to broadcast a World Series game (a record that stands to this day). Barber left the Dodgers after the 1953 season to work for the New York Yankees.

Sculley worked for CBS from 1975-’82 calling NFL, PGA and tennis games. From ’83-’89 he worked for NBC television as their lead baseball broadcaster. Besides calling the Saturday Game of the Week for NBC, Scully called three World Series (1984, 1986, and 1988), four National League Championship Series (1983, 1985, 1987, and 1989), and four All-Star Games (1983, 1985, 1987, and 1989). Scully also reworked his Dodgers schedule during this period, broadcasting home games on the radio, and road games for the Dodgers television network, with Fridays and Saturdays off so he could work for NBC.

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