Word: cott
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Network and non-network stations all over the U.S. are producing talk shows, but none has done it with the insistence of WNTA, whose bustling, baldish supervisor, Ted Cott, seems to operate on the assumption that TV has already accomplished what its gloomiest prophets long ago predicted: killed the art of conversation on the other side of the picture tube...
...addition to Monologuist King, Cott fills his Newark studios with an impressive line-up of talkers. Producer David Susskind has no time limit at all on his Sunday-night round table, Open End (TIME, Nov. 24), and it usually rambles on for two hours. Mike Wallace, the waspish interviewer of a few seasons back, conducts half-hour sessions Monday through Friday. Bishop Fulton Sheen holds forth on Tuesdays, New Jersey's Governor on Sunday, Beauty Consultant Richard Willis Monday through Friday; Fannie Hurst's Showcase follows Willis. Henry Morgan snarls at his sponsors Friday evenings. Actor Martin...
...taping his talk shows, Cott hopes to feed them to the rest of the stations affiliated with the National Television Association (he has already sold Bishop Sheen to N.T.A.'s Minneapolis station). By next week Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee will be ready with a show: "Singing, dancing and lots of chitchat." And aging (59) Alex King, though his health is precarious, shows no signs of running down. "I'm under constant sedation for high blood pressure," says he. "Gandhi and St. Ignatius Loyola had high blood pressure too, and we all started with sinful lives...
First Wallop. To this amazing rise, many video junglemen react with unease (sample: "They're film people; they'll kill live TV"), but behind the criticisms there is also wholesome respect. WNTA programs are plotted by brash Ted Cott, 41, a moonfaced, high-pressure promoter and former vice president of (in order) WNEW, NBC, and Dumont...
...Cott's WNTA-TV began with a wallop. It offered quality films (The Snake Pit, Laura) three nights a week, showed them on a movie theater's continuous-program basis from 7:30 to 12:30, which let the viewer pick his time and go to bed early. In the afternoons Cott scheduled natural-science documentaries, highbrow interviews with such distinguished men as Poet Robert Frost and Dr. Jonas Salk, rebroadcasts of historic news telecasts, e.g., the famed Army-McCarthy hearings. And for its live ventures, WNTA introduced a weekly Art Ford's Jazz Party in which...