Word: wolper
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three largest producers of documentary films for television are NBC, CBS and David Wolper. At 34, Wolper is the youngest, and often the most vigorous, of the three. His offices on Hollywood's Sunset Strip have grown in the past 42 months from a five-man luck-it shop to a 200-employee corporation with bright white neo-Palladian faqade and 40 cutting rooms-some of which are already crammed with the 8,000,000 ft. of film that Wolper is condensing into The Making of the President 1960, a two-part version of Teddy White's admiring...
...secret of all these capital gains is not something magically creative in David Wolper's particular genius, but rather a thoroughgoing capacity for careful research and intelligent selection that has resulted in some of the better moments of television. Excellent fiction may be the highest matter that TV can offer, but so much TV fiction is so blatantly phony that a crisply edited set of authentic film clips about anything from a war to a horse race somehow seems stunningly original...
Dusty Films. Wolper's recent Dday, for example, was a one-hour compilation of film material made by cameramen on both sides. It contained shots of awful immediacy. A soldier comes out of the breakers onto Omaha Beach. He is hit by a bullet, sits down slowly with his legs apart, like a child about to build a castle of sand, then falls backwards to die. An other shot showed Ike sitting on the running board of an old car in North Africa, chomping on a sandwich, while Franklin Roosevelt sat on the seat above him, also eating...
...Wolper chronicles great men in a widely syndicated TV program called Biography and unusual occupations in another excellent series called The Story of (a jockey, an artist, etc.). For contemporary subjects, he likes to use natural light and hand-held cameras in a simple and highly mobile technique. When hunting film clips, he will go to any amount of trouble to find the rare touches that make his documentaries distinctive. His award-winning Hollywood: The Golden Years contained dusty Swedish films of young Greta Garbo doing movie-house commercials for a Stockholm bakery...
Instant Leaders. Wolper entered show business soon after World War II, when-a light-year or so ahead of anyone else-he and a few partners saw the gold pile that could be made by acquiring rights to old motion pictures and selling them to TV. He was largely responsible for the late shows, late late shows, and late late late shows in dozens of cities...