Word: wnta
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...familiar in his home town (Vienna) into a highly successful TV act. His garrulous appearances on the Jack Paar show helped boost his current bestseller, Mine Enemy Grows Older, a book of amusing, scurrilous reminiscences. His often witty, sometimes vulgar, hour-long weekly talk show on Manhattan's WNTA-TV (says he: "I speak foully in public and private too") is the latest example of a growing TV trend-conversation...
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...
...explain the answer, the writers spent two lively, free-associating hours last week on Susskind's couch (WNTA-TV, Newark), a kind of group therapy that left them feeling sorry for themselves together instead of for each alone. Their main reasons for the decline of live TV drama: ¶ The public got bored with the sort of slice-of-life vignettes that Chayevsky and the other "agony boys" used to turn out every month. Eventually, the boys got bored themselves. "I didn't get tired of it," said J. P. (Days of Wine and Roses) Miller. "I just...
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...
...first day, WNTA had reaped a 10.6 A.R.B. rating, captured 17% of the TV audience, increased its number of viewers (over WATV) 4,200%. Wrote the New York Times's Jack Gould: "WNTA-TV has shaken up tired old New York television...