Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...That's what this network needs-a little guts." Thus speaks a character in The Commentator, a TV script about a newscaster who runs afoul of his employers by editorializing. The network is a fictitious company called Amalgamated Broadcasting, but there are only three TV networks in the U.S., and perhaps it was unrealistic to expect any of them to broadcast such lines or dramatize such a situation. Last week CBS, which had canceled a broadcast by its own Analyst Eric Sevareid for editorializing (TIME, Feb. 25), canceled the scheduled performance of The Commentator on next week...
...just not good enough," insisted a CBS executive. "We never discussed the script from the point of view of its subject matter. Our decision was based simply on our feeling that it wasn't a successful script. We just couldn't lick some of the creative problems." Retorted the author, John Secondari, head of ABC's Washington news bureau and himself a commentator: "I absolutely believe that it is a matter of CBS policy, not a question of dramatic merit...
Secondari, an experienced novelist (Coins in the Fountain), wrote no Emmy winner in The Commentator, but the script is better than many and unique in coming to grips with a problem of backstage TV at the topmost level. Secondari's commentator creates a crisis by blasting a demagogic Congressman. The network backs him up (as CBS backed up Edward R. Murrow in his celebrated 1954 editorial against Joe McCarthy). But in the end-after speeches deriding the network board of directors as "careful coupon clippers'' and the advertising agencies as "prudent dispensers of panaceas and happy endings...
...Katharine Cornell posed grandly before the camera in an "eggplant-colored chiffon velvet hostess gown" by Valentina and said to Charles Boyer: "Say something thrilling, Karoly. Something profound." That was quite an order for even so formidable a talent as Boyer's, considering the staggering handicaps of the script. In his 90-minute TV adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play, Radio Writer Morton (The Eternal Light] Wishengrad shed little light on the character of the Nobel Prizewinning medical scientist who has a hard time realizing that "intelligence is impotent to cope with the brute of reality." The reality...
...Thompson is amusing, too, though she can hardly take over the screen as she does a nightclub; and the Paris backgrounds are nice to look at. The real trouble is that crazy mixed-up script. By the time Hepburn and Astaire drift off in a cloud of doves, the spectator may find himself wishing that one of them was a pigeon-the kind that delivers the message...