NAEB Newsletter (Sept 1957)

TV PUT END TO "STARVING WRITER" ERA: McCLEERY There is no such thing as a “starving” writer today, unless he is a lazy writer or no writer at all, accord¬ ing to Albert McCleery, executive producer of NBC’s Matinee Theater. Good writers, he feels, can sell to TV regularly. While addressing students, educators and professional TV people at the seventh annual Summer Television Workshop at Michigan State University, McCleery enumerated the changes brought about in the American theater by TV. He credited TV with having produced the first truly “American” theater which, he held, during the pre-TV era was actually “a New York theater — an overflow and outgrowth of European theater.” “It was not until about seven years ago, with the opening of Kraft Theater, Studio One and' some of the other pioneer dramatic TV shows,” McCleery said, “that we could begin to use American writers on American themes with an instant audience of 10 million people.” Calling the close-up the “one thing which modern drama has brought us which the Greeks didn’t do as well or better,” McCleery welcomed the mech¬ anical possibility to “make use of the eyes as the window of the soul.” “What television has to decide now, he said, is what kind of cultural force it intends to be, how it intends to deal with man’s leisure time.” Viewers who brag they do not watch commercials, he said, are treading on dangerous ground. “When advertisers think you aren’t watching commercials,” he warned, “then you will have government TV and you will pay for it in another way — through taxes. Television is never free.” McCleery, one of the industry’s top producer’s, is a staunch advocate of abandoning lavish TV pro¬ duction settings. His own Cameo Theater present¬ ations have pioneered the use of what he terms “selective realism and symbolic settings” to set the mood for a scene. DEATH OF BOY, 6, BLAMED ON FAULTY TV SET Cook County (Ill.) Coroner Walter T. McCarron has ruled the July 14 electrocution death of Howard Erenstein, a 6-year-old boy from Skokie, Ill., as an accident caused by contact with a faulty TV set. The verdict was based on a lengthy report by a blue ribbon jury of electronics experts which found the set involved — a GE portable — defective. The defect, it is believed, resulted from faulty fact¬ ory assembly of the set. Prior to the experts’ report, GE Engineer Mertis E. Jones testified that the set was not dangerous “until it had been dropped and damaged.” In connection with their findings, the experts recommended that safety codes and practices of the portable appliance industry be strengthened. NOMINATIONS WANTED The Rev. Joseph M. McKee of Faribault, Minn., invites Newsletter readers to submit nominations of persons “who merit recognition for some contribu¬ tion toward the advancement of secondary educa¬ tion.” The nominations are to determine 100 winners of awards to be made in connection with the June, 1958, observance of Shattuck School’s (Faribault) centennial. All persons living in the United States or terri¬ tories, except those having connection with Shattuck, are eligible for the awards. Nominations may be made by sending the name and address of the nominator and of the nominee with a brief statement why he, or she, was chosen to: The Centennial Office, Shattuck School, Faribault, Minn. AUSTRALIA'S DUAL BROADCASTING SYSTEM Twenty-five years of peaceful commercial and governmental broadcasting co-existence in Australia have convinced C. W. Davidson, postmaster general of the Dominion, that “no other system is as fair to the public or as efficient as our own.” In an article, which appeared in the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Weekly, July 7, Davidson explains the advantages arising from this unique blending of socialized and laissez-faire broadcasting. Government stations, he holds, because of their independence from advertising, can broadcast both “high class” and popular programs. Without these programs, he believes, musical and educational standards would suffer. As an essential function of governmental broad¬ casting, David lists the presentation of parliamentary debates, shunned by commercial stations because of their limited popularity. On the other hand, Davidson thinks that govern¬ mental broadcasting is limited in that it must main¬ tain a balance in its comments on public issues — a restriction which does not apply to commercial sta- SEPTEMBER, 1957 3