The editors approve heartily of Minow's call for more choice in programming, and hope that this extends to ABC getting affiliates in more well-populated areas to compete with CBS and NBC—"with the assumption that ABC's programming. . . will achieve at least basic balance." And they urge him to visit Hollywood "and make it clear to producers there that diversity of programming cannot be achieved without their co-operation. Indeed, isn't it time for Hollywood to abandon its defensive attitude—'We just manufacture to New York's specifications'—and assume more leadership?"
I doubt that anyone looking at the state of television over the last 60 years would say that Minow's (and the editors') hopes have been fulfilled. Despite talk of television's new golden age of prestige programming, I think the medium has, for the most part, failed to fulfill its initial promise. But, hey—a fella can dream, can't he?
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One of the most interesting Teletypes we've seen in quite a while begins with this note that a previous movie commitment will probably prevent Marilyn Monroe from doing an NBC adaptation of Somerset Maugham's play "Rain," costarring Frederic March, directed by Oscar winner George Roy Hill and adapted by Rod Serling.
Now, a little online research suggests there might have been a
little bit more to it than that; everything from conflicts between Hill and Monroe's acting coach Lee Strasberg to Monroe's supposed mental unstability
have been cited as complications that eventually scuttled the production. The thought continues to intrigue, though; Keith Badman, author of
The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story suggested that "Rain" "would have shown Monroe’s capabilities as a serious actress."
The real reason this bit attracted my interest, however, is that we've become so accustomed to thinking of Marilyn Monroe in the past tense—a legend, someone who lived and died tragically—that it's sometimes jarring to read an article in which Monroe appears in the present tense, alive and well, with a television project in the works. I don't know, perhaps that just makes me old. I was alive when Monroe lived, and when she died, although her name meant nothing to me at the time. But think about it: if you read an article discussing a very famous someone, very much alive at the time, whom you knew only as one who had lived and died long before your own lifetime, wouldn't that attract your attention as well?
On a somewhat cheerier note, there's also ABC's plan for a future
Wide World of Sports episode featuring "an experimental baseball game" incorporating many of the suggestions made over the years by baseball maverick Bill Veeck. Veeck was one of baseball's great characters, former owner of the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns, and, at the time of this issue, the present owner of the Chicago White Sox, a team which he will once again own in the 1970s. In his autobiography
Veeck—
As in Wreck, he had written of how baseball was being bogged down by its slow pace: "There would be nothing wrong with the now standard three-hour game if we were presenting two-and-a-half hours of action. We aren't."*
*
He wrote this in 1962. You could write the same thing, word for word, today.
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| Veeck planned to let fans vote on team's next move. |
Among the ideas Veeck has proposed: widening the plate by 25%, thus making the strike zone larger; changing the definition of a walk from four balls to three, and a strikeout from three strikes to two; reducing the time between pitches and between innings; and making the intentional walk automatic, i.e. rather than throwing four pitches wide of the plate, just tell the batter to take his base.*
*
Veeck also advocated interleague play. Oh well, we can't always be right.
In his book, Veeck mentions his plans for the
Wide World telecast, which would have been an exhibition game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the White Sox. "It was only because of my physical condition," he writes, "that the game wasn't played. Better not to do it at all, I decided, than to go ahead and do a lousy job." Too bad; I would have enjoyed seeing how it came out.
You want more from the Teletype? Okay" here's a note on "the new CBS comedy series"
Double Trouble, with Dick Van Dyke and Morey Amsterdam already signed up, and adding Rose Marie to the cast. The series they're talking about, of course, is
The Dick Van Dyke Show. I wonder when Mary Tyler Moore comes on the scene? Ah, but I know someone out there has the answer.
Another item: "Who Killed Julie Greer?", the opening episode of Dick Powell's new anthology series, is being filmed. That episode, starring Powell and featuring appearances by Ronald Reagan, Mickey Rooney, Ralph Bellamy and others, will serve as a pilot for one of my favorite shows of the '60s:
Burke's Law. Powell, of course, also played private detective Richard Diamond on the radio; when the show came to television, the lead was taken over by David Janssen, who had, at his answering service, a sultry contact named Sam. The actress playing Sam? Come on, you know the answer.
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The week's sports highlight comes on
Saturday, as Kentucky Derby winner Carry Back addes to his collection with victory in the second jewel of the Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes (3:30 p.m. CT, cbs). The horse will be a heavy favorite to take that Crown, but he'll falter in the Belmont in three weeks' time (possibly due to an injury) and finishes a distant seventh.
On Sunday, Ed Sullivan takes his show to Las Vegas (7:00 p.m., CBS), where his show comes from the Stardust, and his guests are a mixture of headliners and Vegas lounge acts: Jerry Lewis, Phil Harris, the Kim Sisters, singer Sandy Stewart, Freddy Bell and the Bellboys, comic magician Mac Ronay, juggler Rudy Cardenas, and aerilists Michele and Michael, who perform while suspended from a helicopter. Later, on ABC's documentary series Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (9:30 p.m., ABC), we come to Yalta, 1945: the fateful meeting between Churchill, Stalin, and the dying FDR in which they plan for the future of Europe and the structure of the United Nations.
We were talking about Dick Powell a few paragraphs ago, and on Monday, Mrs. Dick Powell, also known as June Allyson, presents a story with a twist on her eponomyous dramatic anthology series (9:30 p.m., CBS). It seems that Howard Moon (Lew Ayres), a conviced thief, is being released from prison, with the best of intentions of living on the straight and narrow. Of course, we always know how vows like that turn out. But the surprise here? It's his wife who wants him to return to his thieving ways.
Sometimes the handwriting is on the wall, and you can certainly see in in Tuesday's NBC White Paper on "Railroads: End of the Line?" (9:00 p.m.) Host Chet Huntley takes a look at the plight of the nation's railroad system, including the decline in passenger travel (due to both the increasing popularity of air travel and the interstate road system) which eventually results in the formation of Amtrak. I can remember back in 1963 when my family took Great Northern's Empire Builder from the Twin Cities to Montana; it was a great way to see the country, and while I'm no fan of government bailouts, it is a shame that passenger service has become such a thing of the past. I know; I could take Amtrak even today, but I'd be about as likely to do that as I would be to fly, which I haven't done since 2019 and have no plans to restart. (And why should I? We're retired; we can take as long as we want to drive somewhere!)
I don't often find myself perusing the daytime listings to see what's on KTCA, the educational station in the Twin Cities, but I'm making a grim exception on
Wednesday for
Survival Preparedness (12:30 p.m.), which, from the looks of it, may well be a regular program. Today's topic: "Distribution of Fallout." Nuclear fallout, that is. Well, I did warn you that it was a grim program. For something much happier, Perry Como has taken his
Kraft Music Hall on the road again, and tonight, cast and crew find themselves in Chicago at McCormick Place Auditorium, where Perry welcomes guests Martha Raye, George Gobel, Paul Lynde, and Johnny Puleo. (8:00 p.m., NBC)
Thursday's highlight is a rerun of The Ford Show (8:30 p.m., NBC) featuring the 1959 broadcast of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Mikado, with host Tennessee Ernie Ford playing both the title character and Ko-Ko. "Obviously, we'd never done anything like this before," Ernie would later say. "It was an experiment we all knew could blow up in our faces. . . we were fooling with our own success [the show was the highest-rated half-hour variety show on the air at the time] and we knew we could hurt ourselves." Ford even went to the trouble of covering every dollar over The Ford Show's usual expenses. Still, there was apprehension—until the show started. Ford and his supporting singers, The Top 20, were more than up to the task (Ford himself had sung the role in music school), and the success would lead the show to attempt another Gilbert and Sullivan operetta the following year, H.M.S. Pinafore, with similar success.
I'm going to return to the field of sports for Friday's highlight, which comes to us from Washington, D.C., where the Minnesota Twins, who moved from Washington to Minnesota to start this season, take on the team that replaced them, the expansion Washington Senators. (6:00 p.m., WTCN) The Twins, when they played in Washington, were also known as the Senators, which would make this confusing enough. But while the Senators' new stadium (D.C. Stadium, later renamed after Robert F. Kennedy) is being constructed, they're playing their home games in old Griffith Stadium, named after Clark Griffith, former owner of the original Senators, now the Twins, who are owned by Griffith's nephew, Calvin. So in other words, the team that used to be called the Washington Senators is playing the team now called the Washington Senators, in a stadium named after the uncle of the man who now owns the team called the Minnesota Twins, but used to be the Washington Senators. Got all that?
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And now on to everybody's favorite summer replacement host, Andy Williams. Now, we all know
The Andy Williams Show as one of television's favorite variety shows, hosted by one of America's most loved entertainers, but that's all in the future. At the moment, Andy's still "waiting for a regular show," despite considerable success over the last two summers filling in, first, for Pat Boone, and then the next year for Garry Moore. Combined with his regular appearances as a guest on other variety shows and his frequent specials (including this Sunday, when he hosts
The Chevy Show with guests Gogi Grant, Jonathan Winters, and future wife Claudine Longet), and he's primed for the big time. Says the author of this unbylined profile, "the fact that he was still performing in a night club and not singing regularly in television was still one of the medium's mysteries."
What's the story? Well, at the outset, Andy declined the projects that were being pitched to him, shows that would have been scheduled against ratings giants such as
Gunsmoke. "I had enough offers," he says. "Why not wait?" Maybe it's not a sure thing that Williams will be a smash when the right offer does come along, but it's a pretty good bet; Steve Allen says, "I know of no one with higher standards or better musical taste," while Bing Crosby calls him "a fine singer whose scope is limitless. . . and an appealing person with a great deal of integrity." Jack Benny, of course, is a little more cautious: he doesn't think Williams is "the greatest thing since Seven-Up," but adds that he's maybe the
next best.
In any event, when Andy does make the move the next year, he's pretty much the hit that everyone expects. Bing Crosby's words are true, and remain so for as long as Andy Williams is on TV.
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| Gilbert Seldes |
An interesting review of Bob Hope's latest TV appearances by Gilbert Seldes, himself an interesting man. Seldes was one of the large figures in cultural criticism. As I've mentioned in the past, Gil Seldes wrote one of the influential books of the earlier part of the century,
The Seven Lively Arts. As editor of
The Dial magazine, he published one of the greatest poems of the Twentieth Century, T.S. Eliot's
The Waste Land. He was one of the early advocates of television as a cultural institution in its own right, worthy of review and criticism, and eventually made it to TV, where, as Director of Television Programming for CBS, one of his progeny was the all-time dramatic anthology
Studio One.
But just as we weren't here to talk about Walter Brennan, we're not here to talk about Gil Seldes; rather, it's Bob Hope who's our subject. Seldes likes Hope, "a good comic actor who has been turned into a comedian, which is a different thing altogether." And this, for Seldes, is the problem with Hope on television: that Hope is capable of more than he's showing. "The shows in which he appears have no special atmosphere or quality; except that Hope is in them, they are like a sampler of half a dozen other variety shows."
I've read this kind of criticism of Hope before. His early humor, particularly in his radio days, was sharp, edgy and occasionally suggestive—even, to some, blue. On television, however, he's fallen into a rut, "the old reliable who is always doing the same old things." Seldes doesn't use the word
lazy, but others have. At some point Hope saw the laughs he could get with a golf club, a few wisecracks, and some attractive actresses standing on either side of him, and after that he stopped trying to do anything new. And while it makes for a successful career, it doesn't necessarily mean fulfilling what you're capable of.
There are always moments, as Seldes says; "A reference to the 1920's when Al Capone was playing The Untouchables live, or the mad idea tha tthe Moscow edition of TV Guide lists President Kennedy's appearance as The Millionaire—these have the sudden shock value of quick wit." Seldes says the best thing Hope's done this year was his Project 20 Will Rogers documentary voiceover, because it was something different, which he did "with confidence and modesty and skill. It reminded you that he really has talent, even if no one (and that includes himself) bothers to use it." Seldes, who confesses to a soft spot for Hope, concludes that Hope "has the talent. It needs only to be shown."
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One more to round out the week, and that's Walt Disney's plan to take his long-running show from ABC to NBC. At one time the struggling network, which helped finance Disneyland, was just grateful to have him on their lineup. He provided not only credibility, but ratings. But now, he complains, "I no longer had the freedom of action I enjoyed in those first three years." The network, pleased with the success of his
Davy Crockett series, "kept insisting that I do more and more Westerns." One of the stories they rejected, he complains, was
The Shaggy Dog. In the light of ABC's turndown, he made a theater movie out of it "and it grossed $9,000,000." In case you're wondering, that was a lot of money back then.
When ABC axed Disney's
Mickey Mouse Club, it was the last straw. He's been approached by NBC to come on over when his ABC contract expires later this year, and he has jumped at the chance. Says a friend, "I never saw such an overnight change in a man." The freedom from ABC, not to mention the prospect of working in
color, has so energized him that he's started working on programs "that can't possibly be shown until 1963." One idea after another keeps coming from him, making him positively giddy. "Oh boy! Color—and no Westerns. I can do whatever I want. Do you hear me? I can do whatever I want."
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