Step back to early TV with ‘Studio One’
Star Beacon for Sept. 11, 2009
OK, bear with me for a short history lesson, then a review.
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The industrial revolution of 100 years ago resulted in fewer people working on farms. It meant a bit more leisure time. Unfortunately, technology hadn't gotten caught up yet. During evening hours, you could play games, read, but there was no TV, no radio and movies were still pretty much a novelty. They would show them on the wall at night in the drug store after it closed.
As a result, there were many traveling shows, operas, lectures, plays that would travel from city to city. Even small cities.
Once radio entertainment, which included comedies and dramas, became mainstream in the late 1920s, traveling shows became less in demand. Also, you had movie theaters opening, sometimes large and ornate with huge pipe organs to produce the soundtrack to silent films.
Ah, but after World War II, a new novelty was produced, which again brought us programs, operas and plays, right in our own homes.
It came on a tiny, fuzzy, 10-inch display and they called it television.
Imagine sitting at home in 1949 and watching a play with professional actors right in your own home. It must have been an unbelievable experience.
“Studio One,” sponsored by Westinghouse, was one such experience. It aired from 1948 to 1958 and was produced live. A huge studio included many obvious cardboard backdrops and everything was live.
“Studio One” episodes are available on DVD and if you have Netflix, proves to be an interesting history lesson on early television.
Television may have been technically pretty crude back then, but it was much more highbrow. The latest plays, the classics, would come into your living room, including “Wuthering Heights,” “Julius Caesar” and newer stuff, like “Twelve Angry Men.” This latter play, by the way, was thought to be lost but was discovered by a researcher for The History Channel in 2003.
The only way to preserve these programs back then was to point a film camera at a TV monitor as the live broadcast went out and record the proceedings. Even then, narrow-thinking individuals later ordered some of this film destroyed because they were taking up too much room.
Big movie stars of the time couldn't be seen on TV, so it was up to largely unknowns to play the parts. You may have heard of some of them: Jack Lemmon, William Shatner, Ed Asner, James Dean, Warren Oates, Charleton Heston, Lee Remick and so many more.
Shatner, in one of the extras, describes the huge cameras used with the silent, whirring fans needed to keep them cool.
What the people involved did was pretty extraordinary. There was no stopping, no retakes. If you made a mistake, you went on. In “The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners,” children in a classroom invite their parents one evening for what inevitably shocks them, a mock trial in which they charge a janitor with contributing to the death of a child from a faulty fire escape.
The play is interesting, not outstanding. In one scene, a boy who looked maybe 10 is on the stand and is asked to describe an incident leading to the death. There is a flashback.
In a movie, the flashback scene may be filmed days or weeks later or before the courtroom and repeated as necessary until perfect. This is live television. This boy had to jump from the chair and run to another set, change clothes and be in the flashback scene. And remember, there is a minefield of wires and cords about the stage. In one of the extras, actor Johnathan Harris describes how he was in one scene and when it switched to the next scene, was in that one too. There were no breaks. He was in a different shirt and tie. Harris, best known as the ornery Dr. Smith in “Lost in Space,” was there, but admits, “I don't know how they did it.” Sometimes the technology of the day made you concentrate on the plot less. When a woman was working in a prop kitchen, I wondered if she could get water from the faucet. At one point, she indeed did. Maybe the highlight of the whole process was the Westinghouse commercials. They are a hoot. Betty Furness, who was an actress in a “Studio One” episode, filled in on a commercial when the regular person failed to show. She did such a good job, she was hired as the permanent Westinghouse spokeswoman. We see her discuss the marvels of Westinghouse frost-free refrigerators, stoves with sensors that would make certain nothing on the stove boiled over (what happened to those?), clothes washers she called “Laundromats” and fancy, 21-inch televisions that required only one dial to tune stations. Plus, if color TV ever becomes available, a black-and-white Westinghouse could be converted (that never happened.) And “Studio One” had great writers, including Rod Serling, later of “Twilight Zone” fame. You can tell cast and staff strived for excellence within the means of its time when producing “Studio One.” It is worth a nostalgic look back.
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