Word: tvmen
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...which last week put on its 234th play. Many plays belong to Hollywood; others require involved copyright negotiations with estates, literary agents and assorted claimants. Some shows can be presented on live TV, but not on film or kinescope. Some were written by authors like Bernard Shaw who, to TVmen's dismay, frown on any cutting, editing or tampering with their lines...
...happy result of the script shortage, desperate TVmen have dipped gingerly into the classics and come up with productions-of Ibsen, and Rostand, Pirandello, Chekhov and Shakespeare. Studio One pioneered with adaptations of Turgenev's Smoke, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Sholom Ansky's The Dybbuk, and has also done a modern-dress Julius Caesar and a Grand Guignol version of Macbeth. Other shows dramatize news stories, historical anecdotes, biographies...
Critics at home & abroad have called U.S. television everything from pernicious (T. S. Eliot) to abysmal (Robert Hutchins). But last week U.S. TVmen could feel a little chirkier. Back in Britain after a short stay in Manhattan, TV Critic Leonard Mosley of the London Daily Express sat down and wrote them a soothing love letter...
...getting their pictures, TVmen were knocked about by MPs in Hawaii, trampled by crowds in San Francisco, manhandled by police in Washington. TV film was flown across the Pacific from Hawaii to the U.S., hurtled in a souped-up Mustang fighter from California to Omaha, the western terminus of the coaxial cable. After MacArthur reached Washington, film was flown back to the West Coast...
...newsreel cameramen were able to keep pace with the parade all along its route. TV's mobile units were tied to three strategic locations (Liberty Street & Broadway, Bowling Green, City Hall) by the umbilical cords of power lines plugged into convenient buildings. The MacArthur coverage showed that TVmen were learning to be more relaxed about their business. In the case of "stage waits," for instance, instead of filling them with pointless interviews, they let the camera look at street scenes, study the faces in the waiting crowds...