Broadcasting Telecasting (Oct-Dec 1957)

PLAYBACK QUOTES WORTH REPEATING | RADIO'S STERLING QUALITIES I; Stephen B. Lubunski, vice president in || charge of programming, American BroadII casting Network, told the Providence Ad|| vertising Club that it is difficult to make || a bad buy in radio and virtually impossible to make a bad buy in network radio. 11 He made these points about radio to ad|| vertisers and agencies seeking effective || advertising at a reasonable cost: II ' We think that network radio offers || you some possible answers. Radio is the || only medium which effectively combines entertainment, communication, information and advertising all at once. It offers showmanship in entertainment plus salesI! rnanship by personalities. It offers you copy control and the kind of careful integration of commercials into the body || of radio shows which makes your ad|| vertising more effective. Radio has the quality of multi-access — §J the ability to reach into every room in the house, into the automobiles, and everywhere else outside of the home. || Radio is ambiactive — it allows listeners to continue doing the things they have to do or want to do while listening to the radio. Radio is the ideal medium for reaching 170 million people through 140 million radio sets — the largest poll tential circulation you can buy in ad1| vertising. No other advertising medium || has anything like radio's power to saturate, its ability to persuade and its exll traordinary capacity to reach people || everywhere and in every conceivable gl; activity. | WHAT'S FUNNY ABOUT TV FUN? || " Critic-writer John Lardner, in the Nov. || 2 New Yorker magazine, examines the whys and wherefores of good humor as expressed on the air and finds it little better than "synthetic fun." In a number of recent television shows, || the dominant note has been one of good §| humor without visible or audible cause. 11 The performers in these shows — Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby, Perry • Como and Louis Armstrong, among others — have worked long and hard to |§ establish the point that comedy on credit, II the mere display of cheerfulness or gaiety, || is a satisfactory substitute for comedy itself. Heard comedy, they seem to sug|| gest, is droll; that unheard and accounted for is just as funny It's a tenuous propo11 sition, at best. In practice, comedy on credit, or synthetic fun, is bound, I think, to embarrass and frustrate the spectator || who was brought up on the product of || outright professional comedians. Gay or not (and much of the best of it is sad or §| dour or wolfish), real comedy has a sound metallic base. It accounts for itself. It's true that we're living at a time of II crisis for comedy in television. The air Page 138 • November 18, 1957 has been almost completely purged of trained comedians, on commercial grounds. . . . Live entertainment in the costly evening hours has fallen largely into the hands of "personalities" like Mr. Sinatra, Miss Shore, and the others . . . ("Personality" seems to be a slang word in the trade for a singer who goes on performing between songs). The personality, or singer, is asked to manage the entire gamut of crowd-pleasing, from music to clowning. The fun he or she produces turn out invariably to be synthetic fun — the comedy of the baffling wink, the groundless giggle, the esoteric gesture, the private joke or allusion in a language that appears to be rooted in jazz dialect or Athapascan, or both. . . . What's disturbing about this state of affairs is that the taste for complete comedy (which at its best involves not only a comic point but an opportunity for satire and comic criticism) is in some danger of being bred out of our species entirely, like the taste of natural orange juice. The sham comedy of the singer-personality has several subdivisions. One is nonchalance, a time-honored substitute for wit. Nonchalance on television ranges from the easy, polished, almost ingrained equanimity of Mr. Crosby, which seems to arise logically from his character, to the utter sang-froid of Mr. Como, who is nonchalant in a purer, more literal sense, like a damp match. In Miss Shore, who now sometimes practices it for humorous purposes, nonchalance is a little out of place, as it might be in any normally vivacious and straightforward woman. Mr. Sinatra, a somewhat adaptive performer (though an excellent singer), is fine at nonchalance when he is working with an expert like Mr. Crosby. At other times, he handles the mood uncertainly; he is probably not a natural-born understater. There's a tendency among personalities who are inexpert at composure to "break up," as the current jargon goes — to laugh, sometimes from nervousness, sometimes deliberately and wishfully, with no provocation whatsoever. . . . GLOOMY OUTLOOK FOR FILM Edwin Silverman, president of Chicago's Essaness Theatre Corp., thinks banking interest are forcing film executives to sell backlogs to tv at too meager a price. He warns that this could collapse the movie industry as it exists today and subsequently put tv in the impossible position of having to bear high film production costs by itself. Mr. Silverman's remarks, in part, to the Essaness board: After careful analysis of the impact of the release of major motion pictures to television, it is an inescapable conclusion that unless the distributing companies refrain from short-sightedly making additional important pictures available to tv, the theatre business as we know it will disappear. It is possible that 10,000 theatres may close during the next year. The liquidating influence of banking interests has caused veteran film execu if tives to act against their best judgment in selling their backlogs to television for meager sums. | Ironically, if theatres perish, future quality motion pictures will not be available to television because tv cannot | absorb the heavy production costs that accompany the making of quality movies. ... |j Television, as it is now constituted, cannot match movie theatres in covering 1 the enormous costs of making fine films. | Producers and distributors of quality movies must realize they cannot have 1 their cake and eat it too, unless and until 1 pay television comes along. SUN OR SHADOWS AHEAD? The biggest business boom in history, % to start around 1962 is predicted by Arch N. Booth, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce of the U. S. Speaking Thursday before the Insurance Federation of New York, Mr. |: Booth warned that governmental restrictions on private enterprise can endanger this bright outlook. A portion of his talk l| follows || The business boom which America § has been enjoying for the past ten years, the experts tell us, is slowing down. But || no widespread slump is in sight. For the five-year period ahead — be || tween now and 1 962 — the economists see a steady growth of the economy. And, then — beginning about 1962 — this country will experience the greatest business boom in its history. The business future is bright, indeed || — they tell us. || But things will not be that easy. There are hazards in the way. For example, there are hazards which i; business faces on the legislative front. ... The future of business will be shaped || by the decisions that are made in the || legislative halls and the administrative || offices of Washington. If we are to enjoy good business in this country in the months and years ahead, then we must have a philosophy back of our national policies and national laws || that is conducive to good business — and not a philosophy that frowns on free enterprise and considers it an evil. . . . The whole future of private business could be changed by laws passed in one single session of Congress. And there is plenty of evidence to show that it definitely would be, if the business || community were thoroughly well organized, alert to what is happening and vigorously on the job. |§ &s ••.'::-:-..-.V.:V.:v.:-.:: :'/V • .-• . .7 • . Broadcasting