American television directory (1946)

IS TODAY'S TELEVISION HERE TO STAY? (Continued from page 1SI Potemkin are trained on a town. The guns fire on a palace; there is a tre¬ mendous explosion, gates are blown off the place, people run in terror down a great stairway. The picture was made, of course, many years after the actual Potemkin incident. And this is the way it was made: A long shot of the ships was made in the harbour of Odessa, with well-recog¬ nizable features of the city. The shot of the guns being trained on the town was taken from old newsreel shots made years before. The steps down which the people ran were partly actual steps in Odessa and partly scenery in the Leningrad studios. The long shot of the palace was made from the harbour in Odessa. The guns firing came from another newsreel shot. The close shot of the gate before it was blown up was made on location in Moscow. The ex¬ plosion was done in a Leningrad studio. Thus we have a completely comprehen¬ sible, exciting, emphatic, orderly story — created, through the phenomenon of editing, from wholly unrelated parts. Limitations of Live Erocdcsscj An ordinary “live” broadcast in a “live” studio requires too many things that can be weldc 1 together cnly through editing. It is obviously impos¬ sible to include anything but the most elementary editing in a “live” set: i; follows as a corollary, that “live” broad¬ casting can never tell a story in the best possible manner. In a “live” te’evisicn broadcast, every person concerned with the chow — he actors, the director, the technical men, the gi ipr, camera men, juicers, prop men — everyone must know the scrip; from start to finish, and know it per¬ fectly. The director, following his sc Apt, must watch action in the studio as wo1! as his video pane’s; the actors must know where to be every seernd and what to do; prep men, cab’cmcn, cam¬ eramen, grips, jostle each other all over the p ■ ace — an 1 no word must bo spoken that is not to be broadcast. The whole procedure is a nightmare c.ma true. Obviously this type of procedure is full cf all sorts of holes. One single leftfooted persm can cause catastrophe. In a broadcast that I saw not so long ago, the director get a little excited, and cried, “Give me camera No. 3.” Camera No. 5 — as ho should have seen frem his No. 3 video screen, was idly standing there, aimed at a c .v.p’.c rf grips wres¬ tling with a. large slab of scenery. The conti ibutimi cf Camera No. 3 did not appreciably improve the dramatic effect of the performance. Such mhha.os "re not rndv p""sible, but probah'o, in “live” television broad¬ casting. There is a mental fatigue fac¬ tor on the part of the director, for example. He really has to be Superman to operate this thing and do no more than come out even. In front of him are video panels showing the field of each of the cameras; there is another one showing what is on the motion picture projector. (They must have motion pic¬ tures and slides even in “live” broad¬ casting.) And then, to top everything, there is a master video screen which shows what is actually going out over the air. A director needs a minimum of eight pairs of eyes merely to see what is going on. And his attempts at editing are controlled by what he can see. He can only cut to what he sees, and if he can’t see what he wants, he can’t edit at all. And, we must make clear, editing is the principal — the most important — ingredient of any motion picture! New Aspect Needed There are many excuses for this state of affairs. The most obvious is the fact that the people who are doing the tele¬ vision now are radio people with little or no experience with motion pictures. They are folk who look back on an ex¬ perience in radio, unsullied by any seri¬ ous contact with any of the other arts. One of the things most wrong about present-day “live” television is the radio thinking applied to it. While this me¬ dium partakes of radio, trying to operate it by radio methods is wrong: and radio people — that is, people who persist in approaching its production problems as they approach radio production prob¬ lems — are doomed to failure. Remember when sound came into silent pictures? The directors and pro¬ ducers who had worked over a long period of time and had themselves devcl ped the science of cinematics were suddenly elbowed aside by a race of know-it-all sound technicians. Even the sainted DeMillewas gently pushed aside along with the rest. “That can’t be done!” was the order of the day. The noise-catchers put the cameras in big “iceboxes” with a glass in front and sai 1, “You can’t move the camera!” At the time sound came in, the mov¬ ing camera technique was at the height of its development. The tremendous im¬ pact that the use of the moving camera had brought to cinematics was instantly stultified. The average scene length v/ont from 12% seconds to nearly 2% minutes. There was no camera move¬ ment. Actors sat or stood and looked at each other. And talked. And did very little moving. That was all that could be done. New Technique: New Freedom But at last the people who had made motion pictures decided that this was a very bad state of affairs indeed, and said to the sound men, “Why must we keep our cameras in those iceboxes?” “Because they make noises that are picked up by our microphones,” replied the sound people. “But can’t we take the cameras out and put something over them so they don’t make noise?” And to their astonishment, the sound technicians replied, “Sure, we never thought of that.” So today the cameras used in Hollywood look almost exactly like the cameras we used before sound came in. They have the freedom they used to have. They have new freedoms, even. And the improvement in sound recording has been enormous. They are back on the straight road that nobody saw back in 1927, ’28, and ’29, because they tried all the roads before they dis¬ covered which was the right one. Television Is Not Radio What we need to do in television is to apply the same kind of reasoning. Radio people who remain “radio” can never solve these new problems. It takes a new type of enlightened radio people — openminded thoughtful people. We must avoid all these side roads — all this doing it the hard way, and look for the one straight road that cuts straight through all the detours — the road on which television permanently will go ahead. In the main, television thinking has been of the “gee-whiz” type; the fas¬ cinating jargon is easily learned. There has been little genuine, well-grounded research or experiment. And there has been practically no attempt to study the basic medium, motion pictures. But motion pictures per se, are not tele¬ vision fare. The television motion pic¬ ture is very highly specialized. You can’t jump into it merely by going to Hollywood and hiring a motion picture unit to make a picture for you to use on television. There is a whole great big wide world of experimentation that must be done. Let Us Look at Costs The principal objection to the use of motion pictures, according to the oppo¬ sition, is cost. People will tell you that Hollywood motion pictures cost $4000 a minute to make. They do — and more. But there is a simple answer to that — we do not need to make Hollywood movies. If we are going to do a dramatic show in radio, we don’t build a theater. We don’t buy backdrops, asbestos curtains, footlights. We adapt our problem to the medium. We short-cut. We edit. We utilize the conventions of the medium, take advantage of its limitations. We use effects — and we end up with as perfect a version of our show as our individual competence per¬ mits. The same short-cuts are available in motion pictures. And in addition, mo¬ tion pictures provide the priceless in¬ gredient — editing. Now, it is perfectly easy to say, “Why hasn’t that been done?” There is an equally simple answer. It is because a lot of inexperienced people have leaped into the saddle and galloped off in every direction. It is just possible that one of those directions may be the right one; so far, however, there has been nothing to prove that. There is an understandable urge to play with this new toy, to go on the air and be glamorous — and broad¬ cast all the mistakes that you are ca¬ pable of. That is precisely what is hap¬ pening. Every time these “live” people go on the air they set television back another ten years. That state of affairs 116