The Paper Roll Teleprompters…A Funny Story
The Paper Roll Teleprompters…A Funny Story
I would love to hear your funny teleprompter stories, and I know there are a lot, but here’s the best one I’ve heard and it happened in Atlanta at WSB TV.
Back in the 50s and early 60s, a lot of local spot were still done live and stations had to keep talent and techs on studio duty, and they had to be ready to go on time. A veteran director at WSB, Roger Marx, told me that one of the announcers he worked with was really bad about walking into the studio just seconds before air with no run through. He asked him time and again to be early for at least one pass, but no amount of pleading worked, so….
One afternoon, it was a minute till air and this announcer was not on the set but, as usual, strolled in with only ten seconds till air. When the cue came, the prompter rolled the copy and Mr. Tardy was at a loss for words. To teach him a lesson, they had loaded the paper roll upside down. He was never late again! Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee
When Notre Dame legend Frank Leahy joined the Channel 2 News (Chicago) Team, it was considered a coupe. But, at his age, he was, sadly, almost blind. He couldn’t see the Teleprompter, so many different systems were tried so he could read the prompter. All systems failed, so his genius on football analysis was largely lost.
Were any of these machines also used as credits scrollers? Or were those different beasts?
Mine were on posters
I was live on the air in 1990. The TelePrompTer paper ripped, as I tried to read from the script in my hands I dropped them and then was completely lost and all I could do was laugh and laugh and laugh.
Despite having no experience running a TelePrompTer, the production manager of a top-10 market station pressed me into service in that role only a few moments before the start of the 5:30 P.M. newscast. (I later found out he or his secretary made a scheduling error, and a qualified person was not assigned to the shift that evening.) This incident occurred during the era when paper scripts were fed beneath a black-and-white TV camera that was mounted on a stand. The pages were taped together and fed through a motorized tractor. The A.D. was too busy preparing for the broadcast to give me more than a minute of instruction. The first segment of the newscast went reasonably okay — but then came script reordering, additions and deletions, which meant pages had to be separated and rearranged on the fly. A period of chaos ensued as a coworker and I attempted to make the changes to the paper feed. Pages began to curl and twist sideways. In our attempts to recover, our hands blocked portions of the pages, causing the anchorman to stumble and then choose to read his copy from a backup script on the desk. He was cordial about the mishap, but I was horrified.
For a two camera shoot, you needed two copies of the script. So there was carbon paper between two sheets of the edge perfed paper the prompters used. My PA typed up the script with the carbon paper the wrong way, so there was a good copy (with a reversed copy on its back) and a blank. So she retyped another copy of the script. But in doing so, made different choices of where to do carriage returns etc so the two originals weren’t in sync. So when the talent did a camera change, there would be different words at the point he was reading. Lots of fun. Complicated by the fact that this talent (still a good friend who won’t be named) had a history of half memorizing scripts (he’d start on the card or the prompter then go to memory while he did some bit of business then go back to the prompter. Except he’d re-word the script and be fouled up when he tried to pick up reading.
I seem to recall the two-dowel model. Or I could be remembering wrong.
Oh, I’ve heard about crew members setting them on fire, burning up from the bottom while talent panics.
At KTLA in the 60’s we used a paper teleprompter on our prime time news cast. The typed roll of script was attached to the Zoomar lens of a TK-41 by a wire over the lens attached to a wooden dowel. Much like a roll of TP. The roll sat in a cardboard box under the lens and was manually pulled by a stagehand. Always seem to work.
At KTLA, a dowel was mounted under the lens of an TV-41. A stage hand fed the script manually. One of the anchors would read over it before the newscast and make markings.
Somewhat funny story…back at my last station, it was Election Night, mostly hitting live shot locations and anchors being updated in their IFBs of races. I was on the Teleprompter. This fed not only scripts but also the Closed Captioning. That night, the script was mostly empty, obviously, except that the 11pm Producer filled it with copy, that had the anchors name, then the words “blah blah blah” repeated over and over through the whole broadcast. The Producer did not know there were keystrokes to use so it would not appear on the air, and I had no way to call her via intercom to stop it, or to stop it myself. The whole broadcast was l like that.
I don’t have a funny story but recall that in the 50s and 60s,St.Louis’s station KSD-TV utilized a handheld teleprompter. A stagehand held it above the taking lens of one of the station’s TK30 cameras. It was lighted and I believe it was plugged into electrical outlet on the camera. The stagehand turned a hand crank that advanced the script as the talent read the words.