Swing (Jan-Dec 1953)

APPLE-POLISHING, BACK-STABBING AND OTHER SPORTS 93 "We did it in '27 and we'll do it again, sir, if we ever get Osymanowsky off the sick list." Mead offers a full course in how to iget a reputation as a hard worker while doing as little as possible. One dodge: drop in at the office on a Saturday a half hour before the boss drops in to pick up his golf clubs. Tousle your hair. Litter the desk with empty paper coffee cartons and fill the ashtrays with hundreds of cigarette butts: "Oh, working this morning, Finch?" "Is it morning already, sir?" "Great Scott, been here all night?" And so forth. The whole book is a sorry, though hilarious, course in lying, conniving, legal theft, character assassination (of rivals), and assorted skullduggery which brings Machiavelli up to date. In fact, so heinous (though widely practiced) are Mr. Mead's methods of success that Simon S* Schuster were a little nervous about publishing the book, fearing that their imprint might be mistaken for endorsement of these practices (which it isn't). Well, just one more, then. Mead suggests that it's wise to act like a commuter, even if you aren't one. If, for example, you show up hours late: "Damned Long Island Railroad!" "Oh, train late again, Finch?" "Almost two hours." "Funny. Mine was on time." "But we're on the spur you know. Always a bottleneck." And, if you want to slip out early: "Have to run, J.B." "Now? It's only three-thirty." "Trestle. Blazing like hell this morning. Lucky if I get home at all." Soap Opera in Three Dimensions TELEVISED soap opera is still relatively an infant. But it's coming up fast and may eventually devour the afternoon air as it did radio's. First of the genre was "The First Hundred Years," which proved to be a wildly optimistic title. It lasted only 22 months. It was sponsored by Proctor y Gamble which also sponsors another TV soap called "The Guiding Light," the first and only radio soap to embrace tele vision. One day a P & G executive noticed that "The First Hundred Years" cost $12,000 a week to "Guiding Light's" $8,000. That ended "The First Hundred Years." Cost is the great bugaboo of the TV soaps as it was the great and virtually only virtue of the radio soaps. Recognizing this, Pat Weaver, NBC's vice-president, bent his mighty brain to the task and came up with what may be a solution. NBC has come up with a block of four soaps set back to back called "Hometown." There will be four separate stories all set in the same town and sometimes the characters will wander from one soap to another. NBC will build a whole village in its Brooklyn studios. The town will be the background for the separate woes of the town surgeon, an elderly couple who run the grocery store, a lady personnel manager of a local plant and the town seamstress. The permanent settings shared by four shows will cut costs, it's estimated, by 80 per cent. At present, NBC-TV has only one soap opera, "Hawkins Falls." CBS-TV has three, "Guiding Light," "Love of Life" and "Search for Tomorrow." Where the general outlines and hysterical atmosphere of the stories haven't changed an awful lot from radio days, the technical problems are vastly more complex. Radio soap opera acting, for example, used to be one of the cushiest little rackets on earth. The actors stood in front of a microphone, script in hand, and emoted vocally — which for the veterans was no work at all. Television soap acting is almost as tough as radio soap was easy. The actors have to remember their lines through all the noise and confusion of which there is a great deal and in spite of the continual interruptions for camera direction and boom direction. They are usually forced to act in terribly close quarters cause there isn't much space and the settings are fragmentary. They do it five times a week and almost never blow lines. Rehearsal for "Love of Life," a typical one, starts at 9 a.m. and continues till 11:45. At 12:15 they're on the air for the fifteen minute show. Rehearsals for the next day's show start at 1 : 30 and continue for a couple of hours. After that the actors