Variety (November 1954)

RADIO-TELEVISION Wednesday, November 24, 1954 WHAS Marathon Nets 160G for Handicapped American Federation of Televi--"- •ion & Radio Artists has reached agreement with the networks on terms of a. new two-year contract, only neW feature Of which is the pension and welfare fund to be es- tablished jointly by the networks and AFTRA. * All salary scales, in radio and. television will remain the same as under the old con- tract, and with the exception of ~ a few working conditions where payment is not involved, AFTRA cast aside all other. demands to secure the tv pension fund. Wording of the new contract, which is. retroactive to Nov. 16, is being worked out and will be sub- mitted today (Wed.) to the AFTRA board, according to exec secretary George Heller, Membership rati; fleation is expected within a cou- ple of weeks. On the employer side, terms have been agreed on, and formal ratification is merely a matter, of course. Sum total of the negotiations were to leave radio and transcriptions alone entirely* with noi changes, and in tv simply to establish the pension fund. Workings of the fund plan call for employer-only, contributions amounting to 5% of each artist’s gross v compensation. This w,as a compromise from the 10% origi- nally sought by AFTRA. Fund, Which is expected to net some- thing like $2,500,000 annually, Will be administered by a six-man board of trustees, with three representa- tives from industry and three from the uriion. Monies collected Will be held in escrow until the fund is formally set up. ABC-TV has decided to drop its plans for iring 26 Saturday after- noon winter and spring collegiate sports events, Web has declared its intention of airing the events following the close of the NCAA football season, and had indicated that .this was a condition of the deal under which it acquired the grid schedule. It was learned this week, however, that ABC’s contract with the NCAA gave it the option of dropping the events if it thought them unfeasible. Decision reportedly was moti- vated by difficulties in scheduling, cost of airing the events. and lack of sponsor interest, NCAA and the web had previously mentioned such possibilities as the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, the Skyline Inter- collegiate Rodeo, the Drake Relays, the Penn Relays and the Intercoi-. legiate Regatta. Some of these were technically impossible to pick up, others too expensive, and the total of available events didn’t make for 26 weeks’ worth. This, added to the fact that the network took a loss of about $1 ,000,000 on its football schedule, led the net to drop the projected winter-spring .schedule. Kaiser-Willys Joins Closed-Circuit Hoopla WBSC’s All-Sepia (Grid Bennettsville, S. C., Nov. 23. Broadcasting history was made last week in this area by WBSC, the 10,000-watter serv- ing this rural , area, with the broadcast fpr the first time of a football game between two Negro high schools, program, which aired Friday (19) after- noon, was sponsored by four clients, only one of them Negro. Game was between the local- Marlboro County Training & High School and Tomlinson High of Kingstree, S. C. Be- tween-halves. interview; fea- tured Milton Stubbs, senior class president of Marlboro. CBS Radio Goes About Its Biz Just Like the Old Days—Even Hiring Help At CBS these days and yester- day, the radio side - continues to receive as much promotion and inspiration from the top down as if it were the latest addition to the broadcasting sphere. Centralized in the activity are the various factotums of the network and spot sales divisions, with latter, via sales promotion manager Sherfil Taylor, currently fronting a bro- chure titled “Radio—a Continuing Success Story,” Which is pitching “the growth of radio during televi- sion’s most productive years’’ C47 to :54) , That this and other voluminous literature emanating from 485 Madison Ave. headquarters is. not mere “paper talk’’ is reflected in the fact that in the last couple of weeks there; have been a number of key appointments on both the web and spot fronts. Latest addi- tions to network sales posts un- der Dudley Faust include Lillian Selb, manager of costs, estimates and contracts, and John Callow and Jack Mann, account execs. Spot sales acquisitions -underi /Henry R. Flynn, general sales' manager, and Milton F. Allison, eastern chief, embrace John Mc- Corkle and Ralph Dennis as ac- count execs in N. Y. and Alice Santti, manager of contracts, and Michael Campbell, sales service manager nationally. In other Words, CBS Radio ain’t just boosting the medium—4t*s* hiring people for It. TONI, CARTER DROP j CBS RADIO ’CORLISS’ Toni Co. and Carter Products scrapped cosponsorship of CBS Radio's ’’Meet Corliss Archer’’ as of Monday (22). The web will fill the p.m. slot with “Mr. and Mrs, North” starting next wefk. That will mark a return of the Barbara Britton and Richard Den- ning starrer f to the longtime half- hour berthing, with “North” hav- ing been aired briefly as a quar- ter-hour 9:15 p.m, strip., Louisville, Nov. 24. WHAS anrd WHAS-TV 16-hour Crusade for Handicapped Children marathon collected a total of $160,- 000 in money and pledges Satur-. day (20) with hopes for $180,000 [ expected to roll in after the mara- thon ended at 2 p.m. Sunday (21). Entire fund-raising drive was car- ried on radio and tv, and funds collected will be used exclusively to. provide services over and above those already being carried on. The Crusade, which was aired on radio, and tv from : Memorial Auditorium, had the entertainment assist of Pat O’Brien, Don DeFore, Monica Lewis, Bill Hayes, Hal Le- Ro‘y, Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales, and the enffcre talent staff of WHAS and WHAS-TV. Phllly’s All-Star Pitch Philadelphia, Nov. 23. Warren Hull, Fran. Allison, Gabby Hayes and Maria Riva will headline the. 16-hour Cerebral Palsy Telethon which will be si- mulcast over the WFIL stations, starting at 10 p.m., Saturday night (27). Jack Steck, executive pro- gram director for WFIL and WFIL-TV, is staging the telethon which is sponsored by the Phila- delphia Inquirer Charities, Inc. The program will originate from Philadelphia’s Convention Hall, In addition to the Philadelphia tele- phone coverage, phone centers will be set up in Camden, N. J., Larig- horne, Pa., Wilmington, Del;, At- lantic City, Ni J., and Easton and Pottsville, Pa, TV PACKAGE DESIGNS ON,LETTER LEWIS SKED TV packager-personal manager Lester Lewis (Associates) has formed Video-Color ^ Inc., tintele group servihg current and new- to-the-medium sponsors. prime function will be to “stage manage” product presentation intended for hues, as well as to create package designs. Company will bq. staffed with de- partmental specialists, and among them now in the N. Y. house are Walter Dorwin Teague (Associ- ates), designers, and Video Vittles, consultants in preparation of food- for-tv. Being dickered are two tv scenic artists and a duo of elec- tronists with color mixing and studio lighting background. Frank Farrell’s Astor Shift From Sheraton With the takeover of the Hotel Astor, N.Y., by the Sheraton Chai , Frank Farrell will move the origi- nation point of his ABC afternoon strip from the Park Sheraton’s Mermaid Room to the Broadway Room of the Astor in a few weeks. N.Y. World-Telegram & Sun nitery columnist will also get a new slot for the music-and-interviews seg- ' ment. Reason for the new time is the confluence of interview segments in N.Y. at 1 p.m., with Tex & Jinx McCrary on WRCA and “iLuncheon at Sardi’s” on WOR. Farrell will move back into the 12:35-1 slot, bringing, with him three Betty Crockeir spots and two commercial newscasts. Kaiser-Willys joins the. growing list of automobile companies to hold closed-circuit television ..meet- ings to outline , sales plans or to unveil new lines. The Kaiser-Willys' session, handled by Box Office Television, will be piped to 21 cit- ies, with ..hotels' carrying the event in 18, tv studios i two, and a. the- atre in one (Rivoii in Toledo, auto company's homeoffice.). Originally it was planned to hold the majority of the get-togethers in theatres, but this was ruled out when it was discovered that , the auto company would not be able to display its new models oh the stages of the theatres. Few of the theatres' had facilities whereby they could fly the screens, Kaiser-Willys is the fifth auto company to make use of the closed- circuit medium. There may come a time when tuner-inners on WRCA-TV, N.Y., will be glad when the sound and. pictures Conk out. The “Please Stand By” legend has been tossed out the' window by NBC’S flagship in N.Y. Newly created are “goof” slides by Max Buck, promotion mastermind of the'web’s Gotham, outlets; No more hair-pulling by the technicians when a coaxial goof occurs to interrups video or audio. The slides have been prepared with a warm and humble approach running interference for what Is usually a minor national disaster. When the video scrams, a slide shows a Milquetoast character holding a flickering match, peering into, the darkness and whis- pering, “Who Put Out the Lights?” When the audio goes, the slide shows a gentle character using a huge hearing aid pressed against a tv set and the caption, ’’We’ve lost our voice.” In the- event—perish the thought!—of both audio and video, breakdown, it’s a double slide: first* a cartoon of a ruffled figure poking out of a tv screen, hand to chin, crying “Oops! Something’s happened.” Second, by .a cartoon showing a bereft engineer before a maze of electronic equipment, baffled but saying, “and we’re fixing it.” In other words, the “Stand By” pomp will be replaced by a romp, but as to what happens when even the slides can’t be transmitted . • « Hollywood,,Npv. 23. Happiest t>and in the land is at ABC. All the 19 tootlers under the wand of Rex Koury have to do for their *pay is to run over to the network- on Thursdays and pick up their checks. Since last week they’ve had nothing to do musically arid there’s nothing for the immediate future. The three radio shows they played—Reed Browning, Koury and “Relaying With Ronnie”—have been cancelled. Under the AFM agreement, ABC must maintain a 19-piece house orchestra. Tab to the network rriqs to. around -$3,000 a week. Muting of the instruments, however, has /cost ; casual jobs. Of arrangers and copyists; Unique situation at the network, both radio and tv, was created by a new system of bookkeeping installed by Robert O’Brien when he was executive veepee (sirice returning to United Para- mount theatres operation.) Under the arrangement the house band is charged against the company but whichever operation, radio or tv, uses the bandmen, the fees must be assumed by the employing medium. Since the heads of each operation must stay within their own budgets, with no extras for live, music, there is little desire to incur the added expense, Ergo,-neither radio nor ,tv has made any further requests for the house band. The. net’s video wing dispensed with live music weeks before,’ using only a small group for the Jack OwenS: show, v 9 ——■—— —; - : —* Makeup Artists, Hair Stylists May Strike Nets Hollywood, Nov. 23. Makeup Artists & Hair Stylists Local 706 is seeking IATSE sanc- tion to strike CBS and NBC follow- ing breakdown of negotiations for a wage increase. Union, accord- ing to local prexy Howard Smith and business agent Fred Phillips, is seeking to establish a wage com- mensurate with area scales for television work. Union at first asked an increase of 20%, finally dropping it to 9% as a final proposal after network producers asked a contract exten- sion for an extra year. Top increase offered by the webs was a 714% boost. WU Finds It’s Easier To Fly Evans to N. Y. Than Equipment to Chi Western Union, new alternate Week bankrolled on “Down You Go,” explained to Chi tradesters (interested in keeping Windy City broadcasting and telecasting at top_ stride) that the show had to move' to N, Y; or there’d be no sponsor-, ship for the DuMont exposure at all. / It all boiled down to whether it was less expensive to fly moderator and Chi professor Bergen Evans to N. Y. each week or fly—at much greater expense and difficulty — equipment for use in the show’s chief commercial each week from N. Y. to Chi. WU intends to dem- onstrate types of electronic tele- graph machinery, calling for pres- ence also of engineers and other technical experts from Eastern labs. The Lou Cowari-produced video paneler starts for WU on Dec. 8. With the exception of Evans the entire panel will be changed with the locale. The net, it’s understood, is contemplating a shift within a short time, from the Wednesday night time slot. Taylor Takes ’Land’ To NBC; Web’s Bowl Buys NBC Radio wrapped up sponsors this week on post-season football and other formats. Avco is down for the Cotton Bowl and Gillette takes the Rose Bowl. But these one-shots,, while not to be sniffed at, don’t compare in total coin to General Motors’ moveover to NBC in commentator Henry J. Taylor’s switch to that Web from his long- time ABC stanza (and prior to that, Mutual), “Your Land and Mine.” It’s a longterm deal that continues Taylor’s GM identification. Slot- ting is 8 to 8:15 p.m. Mondays, same time as his current ABC showcase, and It starts Dec. 13. Another piece of business for the Web is from Q-Tips, latching on to Mary Margaret McBride’s daytime capsule. Hollywood, Nov. 23. Admitting he once looked down on tv as an. “interloper” filled with a lot of “carnival men,” Bill' Grady, Metro casting director for 27 years and now casting chief for the Chrysler series, acknowledges he’s reversed that opinion completely, now that heV in television. He added, “I have a great deal of respect for tv, and I believe the motion picture industry is soften- ing in its attitude and developing a healthy respect for. the medium. Despite the fact major studios have nixed his bids for their pactees to appear on the live show, Grady is convinced eventually the majors will be producing vidfilms for tv, probably for a pay^as-youi- see subscription system, as advo- cated by Zenith prexy, E. F. Mc- Donald Jr. Grady’s experierice in tv has been that W.k. players’ reluctance to do .tv is gradually evaporating', with most of them now ready if a suitable script is provided. Some have offered to be on if their seg- ments were filmed, but to this the exec says “no—^that. would add $22,000 to the weekly budget.” Grady bemoans the fact. there isn’t enough time for preparation. He feels the tv operation could be streamlined considerably if vet pix creative artists Were brought into it. “Tv could get these experi- enced cutters, editors, unit man- agers arid assistant directors if they would pay for them, and they would make a tv operation much more efficient,” he said. Lack of story material Is one of the real (Continued on page 30) Finalized in Fla. Miami, Nov, 23. Storer Broadcasting Co. this week completed negotiations for acquisition of two south Florida UHF -stations—Ft. Lauderdale’s WFTL (23). now in operation, and recently licensed WMIE-TV (27) in Miami-^subject to ^approval of the FCC. - t When and if okay comes, plans call for combining the twb stations into a 1,000,000-watt. operation which will round out two Storer tv holdings permitted under the FCC "five plus two” ceiling. WFTL is already in operation, while WMIE holds a construction perrnit. An* nouecement of. the sale was made | by R. Hi Gore, head of the Ft. Lauderdale station, arid- E. D. Rivers for the Miariil group, in conjunction with buyer George E. Storer. Indie AM stations WPTC and WMIE owned by the sellers are not included in the transaction, for which no sale-figures were re- vealed. Storer, who moved bis home /offices to Miami Beach a year ago, disclosed that orders for the 1,000,- 000-watt transmitting equipment has been placed with RCA pending FCC approval, with first step imme- diate increase in power to 276,000w from the present 20,000 until com- pletion of a 1,000 foot tower. Norman E. Kersta, exec veepee of WTFL-TV, will remain in that post under the new setup.