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RADIO INTERVIEW
TITLE: L.A. THEATRE WORKS INTERVIEW
SUBJECT: The play “The Ruby Sunrise” / Early Television History
SPEAKERS:
Susan Albert Loewenberg, Producing Director, L.A. Theatre Works
Karen L. Herman, Director of the Archive of American Television at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation
Phil Savenick, Writer/Producer, television history expert
CATEGORY: Transcript
Transcripts by: Sasha Stone
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
I’m joined now by two people who couldn’t be more qualified to talk about the invention and early days of television. The inspiration for the play we’ve just heard, “The Ruby Sunrise.” Karen Herman, who’s Director of the Archive of American Television, has been in charge of the ongoing project to preserve the history of American television by videotaping comprehensive interviews with television’s pioneers and legends, as well as modern day performers, directors, producers and technicians. Welcome Karen.
KAREN HERMAN
Well, it’s nice to be here.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And I’m right in thinking that there is an interview with one of our actors who is in “The Ruby Sunrise,” Henry Winkler.
KAREN HERMAN
There certainly is, and it’s a wonderful interview.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
You know this is an incredible project and is accessible to anyone worldwide. Is that right?
KAREN HERMAN
Yeah, it’s online. It can be accessed through our website, emmysfoundation.org/archive and we have about 250 of the interviews, full interviews, online at this point and we keep adding more.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And I believe we’re going to be hearing some extracts—backup--and I believe we’re going to be hearing some extracts from some of these pioneers.
KAREN HERMAN
Absolutely.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And sitting to my right is writer/producer Phil Savenick, the Emmy nominated creator of numerous documentaries and compilation shows dealing with television and its history. I can only mention a few, anniversary celebrations for the major networks and HBO, M*A*S*H: Our Finest Hour, The Best of Disney’s Fifty Years of Magic, and editing clips—pickup—and editing clips segments for the Academy Awards, and our producer’s favorite, HBO’s Monty Python Reunion Tribute. You pioneered the use of extra features for movies, first on laser disc and then on DVD and your passionate interest in the history of television extends to, what I hear, is an amazing collection in your house.
PHIL SAVENICK
I have a collection of vintage televisions from the Forties through the Nineties, pretty much, and as I like to say if I wanted to collect Renoir paintings how many could I afford? If I like black and white television sets, pretty much, the sky’s the limit.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
But the big question is what does your wife think about this?
PHIL SAVENICK
Everybody seems to put up with my vidiot habit. I’m part of that generation that grew up with television, so pretty much my vision of the world was formed and forged by those early images.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And how many televisions do you have?
PHIL SAVENICK
I may have about 40. But at any given time I only watch one.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well, of course we have to begin with Philo Farnsworth, whose story was a direct inspiration of our play and is partly integrated into it. What really happened?
PHIL SAVENICK
Can I take this one, since he is my personal hero?
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Sure.
PHIL SAVENICK
The story of Philo Farnsworth, which is roughly Ruby’s story, sort of adapted, is one of the most amazing American ingenuity stories ever. You have to imagine a 14 year-old boy. He goes to the attic of this farmhouse they’ve just moved into and he finds old radio magazines. There is no running water. There is no telephone. There is no indoor electricity or plumbing.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Now where are they? Are they in Utah?
PHIL SAVENICK
He was born in Utah but he found the magazines and had his discovery in Idaho where they worked for the summer, harvesting sugar beets. So he reads these electronic radio magazines by a kerosene lamp at night. And during the day he’s plowing a field. And the horse goes from one end of the field to the other, and then turns around and comes back. At 14, he suddenly jumps up and says, ‘you know, I bet I could train electrons to send pictures through the air doing the same thing this horse is doing. Like reading a book. You go from one side back to the other.’
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
How did he know what electrons were at the age of 14?
PHIL SAVENICK
Because he’d found these radio magazines in the attic. And in those days, if you wanted a radio receiver you pretty much had to make your own. You bought the tubes and you had the earphones, and it was very primitive in the same way the early televisions all the way up through the end of World War II were pretty much kits that you made yourself.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
What kind of child was he that he had such an incredibly fertile imagination and such a logical mind?
PHIL SAVENICK
He was obviously very precocious and very smart. This idea he had for sending electronic television pretty much came. He wasn’t even a freshman in high school. So when he got to high school and he wanted to take chemistry and he wanted to take all of these advance classes, they wouldn’t let him in. So he drew this diagram for one of his teachers, how he envisioned electronic television would work. And the teacher said, ‘well, I don’t understand this but I think you should try to do it. I’ll help any way I can. I’ll work with you after school to get you up to senior level.’ And he didn’t that see that teacher again for another fifteen years, but when he was involved in the patent hearings with RCA over who invented television and RCA had their teams of lawyers trying to crush this poor little guy, his high school chemistry teacher showed up with the drawing Philo had done at 14. And said, ‘well, it really is his idea.’ And they said ‘a 14 year-old boy could never have had this vision.’ And he said, ‘Here’s the drawing. This is the truth.’ So this little boy just had this vision.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Absolutely amazing. I think we have a clip from you of his wife Elma talking about how all of this happened.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well Elma Farnsworth, was known as Pem. She could in a way be construed like the character in the radio play; she really was the mother of television. She was the first person ever to appear on television. He needed someone to point the camera at. She did all of his technical drawings of the tubes and the configurations and everything. So to a very great degree, there was a father of television, Philo Farnsworth, and the mother of television, Elma. And I think this is a clip of her.
ELMA FARNSWORTH (RECORDED ARCHIVAL CLIP)
He was thinking very deeply, in fact at that time Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was just getting a lot of negative publicity and leading scientists in this country said it’s not true. I mean it’s on false ground. Philo didn’t know that it wasn’t right, it sounded real good to him. So he committed this to memory and it was his approach that he got around a lot of the preconceived ideas that allowed him to get where he went. Einstein said that he did his inventions and his really productive work when he was a youth and it took him the rest of his life to teach it to people. So he was really about as excited to talk to Phil, as Phil was to talk to him. They never met except over the telephone and Professor Einstein made him promise to formalize his math and publish it. Well, this was harder to do then as Phil said Einstein took the rest of his life to do this.
KAREN HERMAN
She was working in the lab with him, I mean, she was close to him the entire time and I also think she’s the one that really tried to keep the memory of him alive and really tried to make sure that he was considered the inventor of electronic television in the history books because otherwise it’s very possible that it could have been erased.
PHIL SAVENICK
The story of their honeymoon was—they’re on their honeymoon and he leaves for a business meeting and he doesn’t come back and she’s heartbroken and she’s crying, and he finally comes back and he says, ‘I have to be honest with you. There’s another woman and her name is television.’
And he said ‘if you want to spend any time with me at all you better come in the lab with me.’
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well let’s go back a little bit. How did he meet this remarkable person? At what point in his life did he meet her?
PHIL SAVENICK
She was sixteen and he was in college and she was a friend of his sister. And as time went on they played musical instruments together and a love developed. And she really believed in his vision; she believed he was a genius; unfortunately like many entrepreneurs, like Tucker among them, and a few that the viewers will remember, he did die drunk and penniless. Completely broken man. Sort of crushed by corporate America, so it didn’t have that happy ending, but their love was truly an amazing thing.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well it also sounds, slightly different obviously from the story, because Henry in the story of “The Ruby Sunrise” is quite conflicted. I mean, he feels, he’s not quite able to accept and buy into what this woman he loves is doing, and of course Elma, from what you’re telling me, was absolutely there for him; she was completely supportive. It’s very interesting that there’s a different take on it, and I’m just wondering—I’m thinking about what was going on in the playwright’s—in Rinna Groff’s mind when she introduced that element. Is it because she was dealing with a woman who had to have a man who was supportive of her? And in the real story it was a man with the sort of classic supportive woman. It’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition.
KAREN HERMAN
When you listen to the interview with Elma Farnsworth, you’ll see that when she talks about what Philo said, it’s very poetic. He really could speak in a way, in terms of the universe and space and science in a way that really appealed to her. And I think that really drew her in quickly.
PHIL SAVENICK
I was very interested in Mrs. Farnsworth and so I went to the web, to google, and saw the interview with her, it’s about two and a half hours long, and I was just transfixed by this matter of fact story – they knew they were changing the world. And he was a very charismatic man, and you know at 22, at 23, he was raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors. This obviously was a very special man.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
What was the state of television scientifically before Farnsworth? What did he do that was different?
PHIL SAVENICK
Yeah, depending on what invention you pick, and what year you’d like to pick, television was invented many times. There was a man named Nipkow in Germany who felt that the basis of television was a revolving mechanical wheel, very much like a zoetrope. His theories weren’t really proved until after his death, but at the time of Farnsworth and Ruby, television was thought to be this mechanical device. Farnsworth, when he read about it in these early television magazines, immediately said, ‘It’s not going to work. So his approach was television is going to be an electronic medium, not a mechanical medium. Get rid of all the machines. And that was his contribution. In the interview that she did for the archive, she talked about how influenced Farnsworth was by Einstein and the Theory of Relativity, that suddenly there were no boundaries, there were no rules. He was part of that generation that suddenly found everything to be relative. And he, later in life, had a relationship, at least on the phone, with Einstein.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Did he have a PhD in physics?
KAREN HERMAN
No, he basically worked the minute he had the idea and that was his goal.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So he finished college.
PHIL SAVENICK
He went to BYU and he worked on his projects there.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And then started forming a company and raising money.
KAREN HERMAN
He started forming a company very early. He was in his early twenties when the company was formed and in fact that was one of the things that led to his downfall is that the investors that eventually he did get were so adamant about getting it quickly and doing it cheaply that it really wore him down.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Did he get all the proper patents at the proper time or was that one of the reasons that he was so vulnerable.
PHIL SAVENICK
That’s a subject for a whole other radio drama. Basically RCA did not have the idea of how to make a television camera. The receiver and broadcasting and all of that they were very good at.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Now, in terms of the receiver and the broadcaster, were they developing it at the same time.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well that was along the lines of radio so that was sort of in their genre that they made bigger advances. But the idea for the image dissector was really Farnsworth’s.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Explain to our listening audience what you mean by image dissector.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well nowadays we have a scanner so people understand a light goes from one side to the other and back and defines whatever image it sees. That was this 14 year-old’s idea. When he filed a patent in the ‘20s, and when RCA decided that they couldn’t buy the patent, they decide to steal it. They sent this man Vladimir Zworykin to Farnsworth’s lab under the guise of being and investor or a comrade in the discovery of this new medium, and then that night Zworykin sent back a thousand word telegram describing everything he saw. So, when Zworykin and RCA filed their patents, Farnsworth sued saying ‘this is a violation of mine’ and it went to court. RCA feeling, ‘we have a team of lawyers we call on all the time, we’ll just crush this guy.’
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Now, how old was he at this time?
PHIL SAVENICK
I would say less than thirty?
PHIL SAVENICK
So he faces this giant RCA legal department and that’s when his high school teacher comes up with this drawing, and he wins the case, which means that every television sold he will get a royalty on his tubes.
KAREN HERMAN
This was something that so outside of the realm of RCA. They wanted to own all of the technology, all of the patents, so for them to have to pay to use another technology that they needed so badly was really something that hurt them deeply and was so incredibly rare.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And so then what happened? Because now it looks like everything is coming up roses for Farnsworth.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, unfortunately, there was a little thing called World War II, and what that meant was all of the television factories and technology were closed down and taken over by the government and turned into radar factories and turned into sonar. Now, Farnsworth did have a contract with the Air Force, I believe, and he did put cameras in airplanes, TV cameras, so that Bombardiers could see strategic bombing, very much the way we do today, but by the time the war was over, and everybody refitted for, commercial and civilian uses of electronics, and they began to make TVs, the seventeen years of his patent had run overdue.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Had expired?
PHIL SAVENICK
By the time World War II ended, and they went into full production of televisions, his patents had expired. Now RCA didn’t have to pay him anything.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
I see.
PHIL SAVENICK
So he went in partnership with Kaypart and Philco and a few others and he struggled for a while but basically he was crushed. And his children say that later in life they weren’t allowed to have a television, even in their house.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And when did he start drinking?
PHIL SAVENICK
The early television tubes were all vacuum tubes that were blown the way that the Murano glass was blown, and they were rather ornate, intricate, almost artistic electronic devices. But there were lots of chemicals, fire, gasses, and he had a devastating lab explosion. Everything he had, everything he worked on was destroyed.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And this is at what point? This is during the war or after?
PHIL SAVENICK
This is probably in the early Fifties.
PHIL SAVENICK
Now, television is taking off and all of his work.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Right.
PHIL SAVENICK
And he then decides he’s going to create a mobile nuclear fusion or nuclear fission. He believes that every car should have its own nuclear engine, and the later part of his life is spent trying to develop nuclear energy for personal use.
KAREN HERMAN
He was really a thinker. One of the things that is sort of left to the wayside is that about the same time, around 1939, he’s the one that introduced the baby incubator to the world. He was constantly thinking of other things and ways to help humanity, aside from television.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well did he not have a patent on that?
PHIL SAVENICK
He had hundreds of patents.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So how, with all of these hundreds of patents, how did he manage to die penniless?
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, because none of them were being manufactured. Nobody was using his patents. He had been forgotten. He appeared on “To Tell The Truth” or one of those game shows and nobody knew who he was.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Explain something to me, how can a patent on something like television, expire in seventeen years, leaving the original inventor without royalties? In copyright law, copyright goes on for seventy-five years after the death of the author and it keeps getting extended.
KAREN HERMAN
But also remember too though that as television, the technology grew so rapidly that there were other ways, also, to use the technology, so the patent didn’t necessarily apply. Seventeen years later you were talking about color television now, you were talking about other types of ways to broadcast, so that also plays into it.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So was one of his problems that he was a fabulously creative person who didn’t have very good business sense? Could you characterize him as that? Or do you think he was a victim of this huge corporate conglomerate that was absolutely determined to wipe him out.
KAREN HERMAN
I think it’s one from column A and one from column B in a way because he didn’t see the programming that we have today; he really was about making the world a better place, about how can you have a war on television in the home, and anyone saying this was acceptable. I think that was a big part of it, is he, unlike RCA and David Sarnoff, who was the founder of RCA, he didn’t have that vision of the programming and entertaining and making it something that everybody would want in their homes in that sense.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
You’re intriguing me by something you just said. Did Rinna Groff actually take that sentiment that she puts into the mouth of Ruby in the play? How could there be wars if people could actually see what’s happening in their living room. Is that something he actually said?
KAREN HERMAN
I don’t know if he said it word for word but that was certainly his intention. His intention was all about making humanity better, closing the world in so that people could see other cultures and see how alike everyone really is, at its basic form. So I think, in that sense, if he didn’t say those words, word for word, she certainly took that sentiment from him in that sense.
PHIL SAVENICK
And also the poignancy of Ruby, the forgotten heroine, the person who had the vision but not the ability or the luck or the opportunity to actually see that come to life, or in Philo Farnsworth’s case, he did see his dream come to life but then he was horrified by what they’d done to it.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
There’s a wonderful passage in the book that Elma wrote about her husband called “Distant Vision,” which spoke very strongly to the author of the play “The Ruby Sunrise,” which I think tells us a lot about him. Elma says, ‘He told me he had dreamed up a way to send pictures through the air along with the sound of radio. He was going to train something called an electron to do the job. I asked him what an electron was? He said it was a tiny particle of matter that was the glue that held all matter together, even the rock on which we sat. As he talked, I became uneasy to think of my world of solid rocks, mountains and even metal, being made up of atoms whose nuclei were surrounded by dancing electrons. That day, Phil changed my entire concept of the world around me.’ He seems to have been that kind of person. Karen, tell us about the RCA engineers we’re going to hear in a moment, Les Flory and Loren Jones [note: these interviews are not yet available online].
KAREN HERMAN
They were both electronic engineers for the RCA laboratory, so they were there working on the original electronic television at RCA.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
At what point in time?
KAREN HERMAN
They were basically there from the beginning, I’d say 1920s and moving forward. At the time that we did the interviews, 1996 and 1997, which was when the archive was first started, the two individuals were the last survivors of the RCA lab, so we’re very lucky to have them in our collection.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Phil, can you describe one of your very early vintage televisions? What they look like and how they perform?
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, when television was first commercially available, they were very expensive. A television set could cost three to five hundred dollars. Now in the late 40s that was thousands, which was why basically one family in the neighborhood would have a television and everyone else in the neighborhood would come over. So television viewing became an event, a communal event. It was a big deal. They also didn’t program that many shows. For Milton Berle to be on Tuesday night, it was almost test pattern until he showed up. So these early shows were a big deal. Back in the days of Ruby, back in the days of Philo Farnsworth, there were maybe only twelve receivers that could even get their picture. Or as Elma tells in her archive interview, they got a letter from someone who said he was receiving their show on his gold tooth. He was getting their television—not the picture obviously but the sound. So it was very primitive. So when television—in order to popularize it, they had to find a way of bringing the cost down and getting more of them out there. So probably my favorite set, it was made by pilot radio and it was the first TV that was under $100. It was $99.99 in 1949. But the picture is only two inches big. That’s how they were able to do it. So this is the set that all the mothers said, ‘don’t sit so close you’ll go blind.’ Cause in order to see it you pretty much had to put your nose right on the tube.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And of course now we’re back to it with cell phones.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well they went from tiny to gigantic and now they’re back to tiny again.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So this is 1949, they’ve produced a television that’s under $100 and what can you see on this television? Which programs? Was “Howdy Doody” on yet?
PHIL SAVENICK
“Howdy Doody,” and there’s a wonderful interview in the archive with "Buffalo" Bob Smith, from Howdy Doody. The listeners of your show, if there are favorites that they had as a kid, this is completely uncensored, it’s the raw footage of the interview. Coughs and giggles and everything. “Dick Van Dyke” and “Andy Griffith” and “Buffalo Bob Smith” and all the pioneers. Well, you’ll remember more.
KAREN HERMAN
Well thanks. What a nice plug.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, television has changed nowadays in that the idea of a television schedule no longer exists. We can watch what we want, when we want using iPods, phones, computer, and so to be able to sit at the computer and spend a couple of hours with Elma Farnsworth, listening to her stories, it was just a delight and such a treat, so I want to thank Karen on the air for having such a thing.
KAREN HERMAN
Oh well, thank you.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
At what point was television actually programming at first, twelve hours a day and then twenty-four hours a day. What was the timeline on that?
PHIL SAVENICK
Very late.
KAREN HERMAN
Most of them certainly didn’t go to twenty-four hours until, I would say, the Fifties, maybe even the Eighties.
PHIL SAVENICK
The first event that allowed them to run television all day, interestingly enough, was the Army McCarthy hearings, because that way they got a lot of free programming. They just set up their cameras. So that was the late—1950’s. I think that was the beginning of daytime programming when they had something they could stick on. After that soap operas started and game shows but it was very much like the beginning of the Fox network or the CW network where they had two or three shows on a night.
KAREN HERMAN
Then you’d have some programming during the day that was specific to local. You’d have these local people going on. Even in Los Angeles. Betty White used to have a show, and they’d be on for five hours at a time, doing anything they could think of, variety, going to man-on-the-street, anything. These people were was all live and very unscripted. The cameras were gigantic. They’re nothing like the handheld that you have today. So it was a very different experience.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Was it always an advertiser-driven medium? Was that always the business model?
KAREN HERMAN
Yeah, it was based on radio.
KAREN HERMAN
Then what happened was is that the sponsors were actually the ones that were in charge of the production of the show, so that made it even more in the hands of the advertisers. It’s kind of referenced in the play as well. If someone said another brand of cigarettes and the sponsor was another brand, then of course, they would have to edit that out of the script.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So are you saying that the advertising agencies actually dreamed up the shows?
KAREN HERMAN
Often times, yes.
PHIL SAVENICK
The content and the casting. That’s why the Blacklist, which is another element of show business that’s covered in this radio drama, that’s how that came to be. It wasn’t so much people saying ‘they will never work and here is a physical list.’ It was more the advertisers being afraid that these people would turn off their audiences. And it wasn’t that they were banned, they just weren’t chosen.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Karen, let’s talk a little bit about the actual experience of doing live programming. Not videotaped but whatever happened, happened. What was that experience like? I know you had an interview with Delbert Mann, one of the great directors of drama on television. Can you talk a little bit about it and about him and maybe we can hear a clip?
KAREN HERMAN
Sure, Mr. Mann was really one of the primary directors of television’s Golden Age. You’ve probably heard that term before and that’s really—that period of the live television and those amazing teleplays, “Marni” etc. He directed for Philco Playhouse, Omnibus, and Playhouse 90. All of the big shows, anthology shows at the time, so this is a clip that basically talks about the atmosphere on the set right before a show goes on, and it’s pretty intense.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well, I have a confession to make. I was a child actress and I was on those shows. I did Celanese Theater, I did US Steel Hour, I did Kraft. I remember I was so little that I was completely fearless. It didn’t really compute that I was actually going out there in front of thousands and maybe millions of people live. It was very exciting, and I remember going to a studio in Brooklyn. There were studios at that time—I remember going to Brooklyn, and filming some of these shows, so there you go.
PHIL SAVENICK
There are two themes in the play, really, about television. One is creating the instruments and the mechanism. And the other is what are you going to put on it? So Ruby’s daughter is really concerned with the programming, and what are we going to say and how are we going to use this. So very much there are these two currents running through the invention of television, the discovery of television. ‘Oh boy, we finally got it to work. Now, what are we going to put on it?’
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Exactly. Why do you think that there was such an incredible burst of creativity in some of the best minds in working in the fictional realm? Why were these people so attracted to television? Were they coming from the theater? Were they coming from the film industry? Were they coming from radio? Or was it sort of a combination of all these elements, I mean, where did this Sidney Lumen’s and the Alex Sigel’s and these sort of legendary television directors come from?
KAREN HERMAN
One of my theories, and I don’t know how much sway it holds, but I think World War II had a lot to do with it because here are all these guys coming out of the military after seeing horrific things, having a lot of adrenaline in them and they were able to take that adrenaline and put it into something like live television. Where they were really in the moment, just like they had been in World War II. I think that’s a big part of it. There was an energy there that you rarely see, particularly in those early years. A lot of people and a lot of people we interviewed, they did have a wartime experience, so I do think that does play into it.
PHIL SAVENICK
Also broadcasting in those days was the antithesis of what it is today.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
In what sense?
PHIL SAVENICK
In the sense that you went in on Monday and you had to put on two hours by Friday. In the case of the Tonight Show two hours live a night. So there was a deadline structure, where necessity became the mother of invention. They did the entire sinking of the Titanic in live television.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
That sounds like a lot of water in a studio. How did they do it?
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, they had the stage on an elevator so it would just be sinking and people would be running the decks and they would be throwing water in on one part of the stage and people on the other and camera one here and camera two there and move that, and the booms and the mics. It was this performance by the technicians as well. But it was the idea that we have nothing to lose because we have nothing. We have to have something on the air. We have a deadline. You want to write a play in a week. Nowadays I don’t think anything is done in a week, and I don’t think anything is done with one voice. You know in those days there was a producer and a director and a writer. Now there are a hundred and fifteen producers, development executives, studio bosses, network people and everybody get to put in an opinion. You can’t do that in five days. You can’t do that live you can’t have that flexibility. So I think it was just a very exciting time. The people were young; they were willing to work hard. They weren’t daunted at all by the challenges.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
It’s still a young person’s medium. I mean I think one of the things that Hollywood writers will tell you; it’s almost like being a ballet dancer, to some extent. In many instances, writers will tell you, you have a really short career because they’re always looking for the younger, newer person. There are people who have endured, but there are a lot of writers out there that say ‘I can’t get arrested. I’m fifty years old. They don’t want me anymore.’
PHIL SAVENICK
I don’t want to disagree with you but good is still good. For the listeners out there, yes, it’s a very hard business to get into, but if you have talent, you have something to say, it doesn’t matter what age, race, anything. Still, the cream rises to the top. The problem is, there are hundreds of thousands of lousy screenplays but if, you know, you have the goods, people should still continue to write.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Let’s go back to some of the historical events around television. At what point did they begin thinking about color television and how did that technology develop?
KAREN HERMAN
That was pretty early, actually. Basically from the moment television was invented color television wasn’t far behind. In fact, even the first producer of syndicated content, Frederick Ziv, when he was creating “Sea Hunt” and those kinds of shows for syndication. He filmed them in color knowing that eventually the medium would follow.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
What is the essential technological trick to converting black and white into color on television?
KAREN HERMAN
Well it’s not really a conversion so much as it’s a different system in terms of dividing the colors into the spectrum.
PHIL SAVENICK
Green, red and blue and a combination of that green, red and blue will make any color. Black and white is basically on or off. It’s black or it’s white and some variation thereof.
PHIL SAVENICK
Color television began in the early Fifties. There weren’t many sets and they had a big learning curve. For example, you couldn’t have something that was red next to something that was blue because people with black and white sets, they both came out black. So there was a compatibility situation they really had to figure out. One of the reasons the first big change in our television signal is just coming now in 2009 when we’re going digital is because those original sets that were made in the Forties were 525 lines. When color came in they couldn’t improve it because it had to play on the black and white sets. For the past fifty years we’ve been conforming to a standard that goes back to the Forties. Now, for the first time, we’re going up to 1080 and a lot of other resolutions, but its been a long time coming, this change.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So for those of us who are not very technical when you’re talking about lines and numbers of lines and resolutions, can you sort of work us through that and how that translates into a picture in your home.
PHIL SAVENICK
Okay, the simplest way of describing how a television works. Its like reading a book, where your eyes go to the end of one line and then they start the next line and they go to the end of that line and you go all the way down the page. Television starts again at the top of the page. It does that 30 times a second. And your eyes see all of these images and tie them together as if there was movement.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And how is digital different?
PHIL SAVENICK
Digital television is different from analog in that all of the components that make up the signal are really different. There’s just a lot more information on the frame. So the more information you have, the larger you can look at it, the more quality you will see when you look at it. The more different things they can send through in terms of captions and all these other things. So it’s the first real advance in television. A Significant, fundamental advance in almost half a century.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Talk to us a little bit about videotaping. When did television go from being a filmed medium to being a videotaped medium? I remember the word kinescope that shows were done through kinescope. Now things are recorded digitally. How did we get from kinescope to digital?
KAREN HERMAN
Well a kinescope was basically you would film a TV screen. And that was a kinescope. It wasn’t a separate process. So the picture was not as clear as it would normally be and there was really no other way to do it. What happened when videotape technology came in, they started working on it in the late Forties, early Fifties but it didn’t come into major use until the Sixties. That technology then allowed a lot of things like the instant replay. It allowed people to record on videotape, be able to see monitors, things like that. Another thing was, the editing of videotape was very difficult when it started. It had to be manually spliced with powders and all sorts of crazy things, so it wasn’t an easy thing to work with. So a lot of people stayed away from videotape early on. So most of the television from the Fifties and Sixties were still done on film. And then videotape really came in the Seventies, like “All in the Family” recorded live on videotape and a few other programs did. And now it’s pretty standard.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And they were using three cameras to do the video at that time?
KAREN HERMAN
It doesn’t matter how many cameras.
PHIL SAVENICK
Let me sort of retell that in a slightly different way.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
We’re going give it another go.
PHIL SAVENICK
Early television was a live media. They went in the studio, they said, they sang, they danced, and they went home. It was over. What happened was, there was a time difference between the east coast and the west coast.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Let me ask you one question. Did they use the kinescope to record these shows from the television so they’d have a record of it?
PHIL SAVENICK
There was a time difference between the east coast and the west coast, so therefore if a show went on at 9 o’clock in the east that was midnight in the west. So what they would do is, when it was airing live in the east they would point a movie camera at the television set and make what they call a kinescope. They would then send the kinescope to the west coast and they would see the show that was on the week before a week later. When, God love ‘em, Desi Arnaz started making “I Love Lucy.” They wanted him to do it in New York and make kinescopes. And he said, ‘well no, we live in LA and we’ll shoot it on film. That way, we can send out the prints to everybody at the same time.’ There isn’t a delay, and they said ‘well, no, it’s more expensive. We’re not going to spend the extra 50 dollars a week to shoot on film. He said, ‘Tell you what. I’ll chip in the extra 50 dollars a week but I’ll own the prints when we’re done’
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Ah, he was a businessman.
PHIL SAVENICK
CBS said ‘fine.’ Syndication was born. That’s why we say "God bless Desi". And from that time on, shows were shot on film, everybody got first generation, everybody got them the same day. When videotape came in, in the early days, it was very hard to edit. So it was great for a live show, it was great for a show where you could switch in the booth between cameras but anything that required postproduction, you literally had to use a razor blade and powder and glue. And when they did the show “Laugh-In” with hundreds of edits, it made them all completely insane. So at that point they developed an electronic editing system that we basically still use today.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
When you say they filmed the show and then got it to everybody. How did they get it instantly from the west coast to the east coast?
PHIL SAVENICK
It wasn’t instantly. It was two weeks later.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So there was a two-week delay.
PHIL SAVENICK
Right, so that way they could go to the lab and they could make prints and everybody could get an original print. Now, things were still aired. But the east coast aired and the west coast aired and central aired. So they would each have their own prints to run and that way they could cut the commercials in them. In the early days, the performers would have to do the commercials live on the air. They’d step off one scene and then grab a cigarette and sell a carton of smokes and then pop back into the scene. “Howdy Doody” used to sell cupcakes and sugar snacks and all of this. The FCC finally said, ‘you know it isn’t fair. Cause kids don’t know it’s a commercial. If Howdy Doody wants to east chocolate bars, they don’t know that’s propaganda.’ So the rules have changed now.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Interesting.
KAREN HERMAN
It’s really interesting in news because if you’re filming something and you want to get it up right away they had to come up with all sorts of crazy ways to perhaps develop the film on the plane on the way to New York so then it could be run straight to the studio. There were actually dark rooms in airplanes and busses, anywhere they could put them, so that the film would still have timeliness.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
I would like to go back to the issue of the Blacklist. Phil, you were telling us that the first, one of the first impulses to have daytime programming, and more programming, the opportunity came with the availability of the hearings, and that that was really one of the major changes in the way television was being used. The play also touches, of course, on the issue of the Blacklist. How as television impacted by not only airing the hearings, but the Blacklist itself.
PHIL SAVENICK
Well for those viewers too young to have lived through it, basically it was a matter of patriotic loyalty, and there was a feeling that the communists were a real threat and that creative people who were fostering the ideas of socialism and communal living and a lot of ideas that were very popular with the peace movement, it was actually an unpatriotic, anti-American activity. And the Congress formed a committee for un-American activities and they started bringing in writers, actors, directors, to try to see if they were having an influence on the public, and if they were creating propaganda rather than entertainment. And the crux of the issue for a lot of the writers especially, cause they were idealists, was in America you can say anything you want, you can believe anything you want. It isn’t that we want to tell you whether we were or we weren’t communists, you have no right to ask. Those ten were jailed for contempt of congress. So there were a couple of currents. There were some people who were communists who were working. Were they making propaganda? The Russians were our friends up until 1946. They were our allies in the war. So a lot of these people were sort of caught in a catch-22 of – these were our friends, our allies—in some cases, the studios even sent us to Russia to help them make movies. Now we come back and we’re anti-American.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
To what extent was the fact that these hearings were broadcast in everybody’s living room, to what extent to you think—and you could see people’s faces; you weren’t just hearing it on the radio. So to what extent do you think the fact of television, the televising of what was going on, helped to end the Blacklist?
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, the single most important event in the ending of the Blacklist and the ending of the Red Scare of the Fifties was a man named Edward R. Murrow. He took them on very publicly; he took them on this new medium called television. He took them on by taking Senator McCarthy’s words and editing them in such a way that you saw the man and him expressing himself in his own words.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Which George Clooney did so beautifully in “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
PHIL SAVENICK
So the idea was, he hung the guy with his own words. It wasn’t propaganda or opinion or a point of view – although certainly that was involved – it was more, ‘here are the facts for you see. Given this context, you can only draw one conclusion.’
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
It’s interesting, I was thinking about our earlier discussion, what Farnsworth spoke about in terms of his vision and Rinna Groff puts into the mouth of Ruby when she talks about the fact that, how could there be war when the images of war are right there in your living room for you to see. I mean, that idealistic notion that once we all saw it we could no longer bear it. There seems to be, hopefully, some kind of relevance to what we’re talking about right now with Murrow. He put it in your living room. He put it out there for the American people in their living rooms and so to what extent did television enable us as a community, as a country, to see it and make our own judgments?
PHIL SAVENICK
When television first started broadcasting war, the first war that they showed really was the Vietnam War. It sensitized America to the horrors of war and it mobilized them to try to stop it. The most recent war has desensitized the public and no one is mobilized because it’s just another entertainment that comes through on a hundred channels. The positioning, the propaganda, and the spin – it isn’t really presenting reality anymore.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Do you think it’s also the fact that there’s so much of it. We have so much information. There’s this information overload, which of course has spilled over into television, in fact, which television probably created. We’ve got 500 channels? 24 hours a day? To call it niche programming is an understatement.
KAREN HERMAN
That’s a really big part of it because when you look back at, say, the Vietnam war, what really turned the tides is when Walter Cronkite spoke up against it, when he saw what was going on and spoke up against it and actually when President Johnson saw that broadcast he decided not to run and that was a major—that showed the power of television and part of that was because there were only three networks. They were watching one of three newscasts and so everybody heard, you know, Walter Cronkite saying what he was saying. Now it’s so fragmented you don’t have the basis that you had back then, so people are seeing and hearing a lot of different things from a lot of different people and their isn’t a consensus out there the way there was back in the Sixties.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Karen, what have been some of the surprises and discoveries you’ve made as you worked on the oral history project.
KAREN HERMAN
Oh my gosh, there are so many. I’ve been involved with over 400 of the 500 interviews in the collection so I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot. The interesting thing is that when I look back at it how cyclical is really is. When we were doing those early years of television, everyone’s talking about all the craziness, and technological goofs and things like that – when you look at it now at the multi-platform that we have now and the birth of the Internet. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s coming up with the right business models. How the advertisers are in control. How people aren’t really sure what these new programs are going to be doing. It’s all the same. It’s the more things change the more things stay the same. I think that anyone who looks at the interviews in our archive from those early years can learn so much about developing programming and platforms for the new medium because it’s not that different.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
I think the thing that probably never changes is creativity. When you actually come across a person or a group of people who have somehow create something that just rises to the top, that’s fantastic programming. I’m going to ask both of you what’s your favorite all time program or series of programs. Phil?
PHIL SAVENICK
I believe that I was very influence by the family situation comedies of the Sixties. I believe that it created an ideal that I shot towards. I think there they were probably completely unrealistic but I would have much preferred Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as my parents, or whatever the equivalent was. I can’t really watch television anymore because it really has just become a propaganda outlet for corporate America. Whatever programming is there is just a thin slice between the hard sell.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
So that you’re saying shows like “The Sopranos” or “The West Wing” or “Seinfeld” don’t do it for you?
PHIL SAVENICK
They’re really well done. I’ve watched them and enjoyed them, but it isn’t favored the way it used to be. When you were growing up as a kid, these were your people, your family, and your brothers. There was a different attachment than there really is today. You know, a reality show or a quiz or a race you don’t really develop an affection for the characters the way they used to and with a show like “CSI” or “NCI”, you know, these are bodies, these are autopsies. There isn’t that kind of identification. When we were growing up the Mickey Mouse Club. There was a very one-on-one relationship between the viewer and the television, which there really isn’t now.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Karen?
KAREN HERMAN
There’s much more cynicism now. And also, you see a lot of reverberations of the things that the writers and the creators watched as kids coming back in its new form now.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
For example?
KAREN HERMAN
What’s an example? There’s just so many. “The Simpsons.” You see constant references. “The Family Guy” the same way, you see constant references to television from Seth McFarland’s years growing up, things like that. You see a lot more of the recursiveness than you did on some of those earlier shows that didn’t have that to fall back on, which I think is really interesting.
PHIL SAVENICK
Also, because of political correctness, the things that were the staple of television early are now completely forbidden.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
For example?
PHIL SAVENICK
Well, you could pick on the way somebody looked; you could pick on their accent. Not pick on, but you could make fun of somebody’s accent, you could make fun of the way somebody looked or talked or behaved, their shape. You could have somebody that was dumber and you could do things at his expense or his or her expense. Nowadays, with political correctness, you cannot do that. However, in the old days you could not discuss anything sexual, anything doing with politics or religion. Well, now that’s all that’s left because if you can’t deal with anyone’s personal characteristics or personality you really are left with religion, politics or sex. So there’s been a complete flop.
KAREN HERMAN
And Paris Hilton.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And of course now we have the FCC coming back and being very, very restrictive about the kinds of words you can say on television, I mean, it’s almost going back to the censorship days of the Forties and Fifties, when the censorship office would make you go through the script and take things out, couldn’t even put them in the script. And some of those things, looking back on it, feel kind of silly. I think you couldn’t say the word ‘mistress’ on TV. Now there are other words you can’t say on television. It is a very democratic medium in some ways and it has all of the sturm and drang around what happens in a medium like this in a democratic society. Everybody’s got an opinion.
KAREN HERMAN
Yeah, and now they can broadcast it. It’s a user-generated medium as well. So it’s changing in that sense too. I think a lot of those people are going to rise to the top and create some really incredible television that we’ve never seen before.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Do you think that network television is here to stay?
PHIL SAVENICK
I don’t think the networks will survive the new accessibility of media. On your handheld devices, at your computer, at your will, you know. When television started they were into broadcasting. You reached as many viewers as possible. Now it’s narrowcasting. You reach very few viewers but they are your audience. I think it’s changed enough that it may survive but it will definitely change.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Karen?
KAREN HERMAN
Yeah, I think it will survive. I think that there’s still a lot of people that, you know, on Friday morning want to talk about “The Office” at the water cooler. I think there is that bonding that still exists and that the networks, if they’re smart about it, can keep. And I think they’re working on it by allowing their programs to be downloaded digitally for free as though you could watch them, and also TIVO itself. The DVR technology is something too where you still are looking for quality programming, so it’s going to be more of a rush to make sure that the viewer is programming your show in, as opposed to just turning it on and watching whatever is appearing. It’s a different way of looking at television but I do think the networks still have a place in it.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Is there something we have not covered about the science of television that you would like to explain?
PHIL SAVENICK
I just wanted to say that I think there are still Ruby Sunrises and Philo T. Farnsworths out there. There are young people with lots of vision and lots of energy. They’re working on the Internet. The guy who developed You Tube has completely changed the way we look at media. I think some of those people are today’s version of dynamic young visionaries.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Is there anything about the science of television that we haven’t talked about that you would like to explain to us?
PHIL SAVENICK
The science of television is a fascinating subject and I think the play that we just heard really deals with the invention and the visions and all of the technical and mechanical things but then it comes down to the point where, now that you’ve created it what are you going to put on it? And I think that’s the most interesting thing and that’s going to continue for years and that everyone will contribute to. What do you have to say now that we have the media, now that we have the ability to say it, what do you have to say?
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
And on that note, thank you both very much. It was really a pleasure to talk to you, Karen and Phil.
PHIL SAVENICK
Just before I go I wanted to give you a small present. It turns out that there actually is a patron saint of television. In 1957, Pope Pius decided that television required that someone watch out after it so he plucked Saint Claire of Assisi, she was already the patron saint of embroiders and people with sore eyes and he figured that made her the perfect choice. She watches out after television and I’m giving you your own glow-in-the-dark statue of St. Claire.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Phil, I’m just overwhelmed. I will describe for our listeners this rather saintly looking saint clad in white, holding what appears to be a golden microphone with a cross on top of it. She’s looking very beatific. Claire was born July 11th, 1194 in Assisi. Well, I’m overwhelmed, and I intend to keep this on my desk to remind me about the holiness of television. Thank you both.
KAREN HERMAN
You had asked about my favorite shows. I grew up in the Seventies, so my favorite shows were the Norman Lear shows. And I think that also says a lot about television because he brought a sense of social consciousness to the television of the Seventies, which I completely absorbed. That’s where I learned a lot about—that gave me a lot of my own values, a lot of my own ethics and I really saw pieces of the United States I never would have seen otherwise growing up in suburban Cleveland, so I think that there is a place for that and I think what “Ruby Sunrise” was talking about also indicates that there is a way to open people’s minds through television and mine certainly was. I think that’s really important to know, and I think that that play is just fantastic and the historical relevance as well as the research that she put into writing that play is really marvelous.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Phil you brought a magazine into the studio, can you describe it for us?
PHIL SAVENICK
Yes, I brought a television news magazine from 1931, so that is about the era that we’re talking about, and in it describes the mechanical television, the one that Ruby and Philo Farnsworth saw this article and decided that this would never work, we’re going make our own. Not only had they not invented the word television, everybody called it by a different name. They didn’t have a name for what people who watched television would be called. So this particular magazine, as I said, 1931, had a contest for a new word of what would you call someone who watches television? Well, the winner was ‘visualist,’ replacing the word ‘lookers-in,’ but some of the runners-up are quite funny. ‘Radio-gazers,’ ‘vision-ites,’ ‘space-gazers,’ ‘seers,’ ‘opto-visors,’ ‘vis-scans,’ ‘visionese,’ ‘telefans,’ ‘televites,’ ‘photo-seekers,’ ‘telespies,’ ‘spectators,’ ‘teleconicus,’ which is rather a funny one, and the one that eventually won, which is ‘viewers’ finished about 50th on the list.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well that shows you that simplicity is always the best choice. But who actually invented the word ‘television.’ Do we know?
KAREN HERMAN
That goes back really far but I don’t know if there is an actual—the first usage is back in the 1800s, I believe, is that correct? I don’t know who invented it though.
KAREN HERMAN
Well television it’s a Latin and Greek, ‘tele’ meaning far and ‘vision’ meaning to see.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Yes, exactly, which Ruby talks about in the play when she explains it to Henry, but I was just wondering how did it come into usage, into common usage, as the name of this medium?
KAREN HERMAN
It was there before television existed even. That was really what it was called.
PHIL SAVENICK
Obviously as early back as the Thirties, it was a word that was used and bantered around. Televist, televiewer, telespectator and televisitor.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Well it’s just interesting to speculate. So thank you so much.
KAREN HERMAN
Jane Wyatt, the actress that recently passed away, the interview that we did with her, in this clip she talks about the trials of working on live television.
JANE WYATT (RECORDED ARCHIVAL CLIP)
Live television. The excitement of live television is the curtain goes up the way it does in the theatre. My God, the whole set is so nervous and when they count down three, two, one and then your on. You’re on and if a gun doesn’t go off, it doesn’t go off and you’ve got to do something about it. It’s tremendous excitement and you do the whole plot, right straight through. But the problems are they would have the sets laid out like a train. You know, there would be one way down there and one way up there. One time I was playing a very long part and I was in a long evening dress at the very last set up here. Then I had to appear in a lawyer’s office in a suit in order to ask for a divorce. Well I had to run from up there. Jumping over the cables, dodging the cameras and two wardrobe ladies trying to get my clothes off. Down to where the other set was and I could hear that cue coming closer and closer before the days of velcro. So you had to button everything. Well, they could not get the zipper down in this fancy evening dress. So, I took it and ripped it apart and they almost fainted because it had been borrowed from Bergdorf Goodman and it had to go back. That was the end of that. You had to change your shoes; get into a suit, get the blouse buttoned and then walk in the office. By that time you were all riled up inside then the scene went wonderfully. Oh, it’s just great excitement. It really is.
KAREN HERMAN
The noted actress Angela Lansbury, we did her interview in 1998 and she talks about, again, the trials of working in live television where every mistake is on screen.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
I’ve been talking to Karen Herman, Director of the Archive of American Television at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and writer/producer Phil Savenick.
KAREN HERMAN
Can I say one more thing or did I lose my chance?
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
Yes.
KAREN HERMAN
In working at the Archive of American Television, I think it’s very important, one of the things that I learned the most is how collaborative the television world really is, that not one person makes a television show. It’s everybody from the creators to the technicians, the makeup people, the actors, everybody. And everybody serves a part and everybody gives you a piece of what you’re actually seeing on screen, and it’s very important to know that and if you start to look at our interviews and piece them together and see all of the different people that perhaps worked on one show, you can see how each one of their pasts, and everything that they learned up to that point was significant in what you’re seeing on the show right now.
SUSAN ALBERT LOEWENBERG
We’re done! Thank you guys, thank you so much. And I will treasure my statue.
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