Variety (November 1957)

Wednesday, November 13 r 1957 PG&dVft RADIO-TELEVISION ss ‘BETTER TO FIX IT THAN NIX IT’ TV’s‘11th Hour’Must Go Hubbell Robinson Jr., CBS-TVt exec v.p. on programming, see* as the most valuable lesson for next season the need for earlier program decisions by the agencies and sponsors. “This was one of our big troubles on the ‘Eve Arden Show.’ The decision was made so late that we really didn’t have the time to prepare it the way we should. There’s a distinct relationship between the time a show has to be prepared in and the final quality that shows up on the air.’’ He feels that the ideal solution is for the webs to come up with good properties that the agencies.and sponsors won’t have to hesitate on In making decisions. But realistically, he also hopes some of the bitter lessons learned by this season’s late buyers will have their impact next year.” He also sees as a “breath of fresh air” the recent observations of Cunningham & Walsh topper Jack Cunningham before the Assn, of National Advertisers, “The worst thing about this business is fear, fear of trying something new and adventurous because they are afraid it might not work. I think Cunningham’s remarks needed spying, and I hope they have some effect where, it’s needed.” : . A Patron Saint for Video? Rome’s Sacred Congregation of Rites Studying Proposal to Name St. Claire of Assisi A proposal, fostered in Rome by the Franciscan General Curia, to name St. Clare-of Assisi as the pa¬ tron saint of television—on the basis of a miracle which occurred 70 Q years ago—is now before the Sacred Congregation of Rites for study. The.National Catholic Wel¬ fare Conference News Service, in a lengthy story from Rome, report-, ed that the concept of St. Clare as an appropriate saint for television was launched by Bishop Guiseppe Placido Nieolini of ;Assisi, toward the end of 1953, the year in which the eighth century of St. Clare’s death was commemorated. Described as “something of a revolutionary” id her own right, “the brilliant, uncompromising and tireless founder of the Poor .Clares (an order of Sisters) has been con¬ sidered' by many to be. a fitting -protectress for the world’s most revolutionary medium,” the NCWC report stated. n ~ . The motif for naming her as a “universal patron" of video was .an episode in St. Clare’s life, as re¬ lated by her biographer, Thomas de Celano, and confirmed by three testimonial witnesses during the process for her canonization. On Christmas Eve, 1252, a year before her death, St. Clare lay in bed in the convent of San Damiano in A% sisi. Unable to. attend Midnight Mass in the Basilica of St. Francis (about a mile and'a half away), she said “Oh, my Lord, behold me left alpne in this place with You.” According to the testimony of one, of her sisters, St. Clare imme¬ diately began to hear the organ music of the friars in the distant church. Next, she saw the Christ¬ mas creche within the church; finally, she viewed the entire cere¬ mony of the Mass unfolding before her. . Bishop Nieolini voiced his idea - of St. Clare as an ideal patron for television, in an address op the Italian radio. “Agreement and re¬ quests that St. Clare be made of¬ ficial patron saint poured in from many sections of Europe,” accord¬ ing to'NCWC Service. The Con¬ gregation of Rites examines and passes upon such requests before submitting them to the Pope for decree. Pfeiy Burns, Vetp Smith Safe in Saturday Crash Of RCA ‘Executive’ Plane •The RCA Executive plane, a Douglas DC-3, virtually is com¬ pletely wrecked as result of a crash on Saturday (9) near Westchester County, N. Y., airport. . -John L. Burns, RCA prCxy, and Theodore A. Smith, exec v.p. of RCA in charge of Industrial elec¬ tronics, who were in the plane when -the mishap occurred, • es¬ caped injury. George I. Lender- man, chief pilot for RCA, and cor pilot Robert E,- McEntee were •treated at Greenwich, Conn., Hos¬ pital for cuts hr the face. The plane was corning in for a landing- at the airport when a strong gust of wind drove it 0&- course, forcing the pilot to belly- land-at a nearby, highway. VVi ■■*4 ibe preheat ieyefr-let Deejayette With Accent Hollywood, Nov. 12.* New-type deejay, femme 'with middle-European accent, bows on Kpi with weekly show. StreSs will be on “continental” music and chatter on “Margo with Music” program, headed by Lithuanian- German emigrant Margo Kaldma. She comes to KFI from Buffalo, where she had a German-language show on two stations there.. “Kraft TV Sole N.Y. Dramatic Hour By “Kraft Television Theatre” is rounding out the full cycle. At one! time the only regular weekly hour) dramatic show on the air in New York, “Kraft” reverts to that status in January. Stanley Quinn, who at the start was the regular “Kraft” producer but subsequently moved on to the Coast to do “Lux Video Theatre” for J. Walter Thompson, is returning to become the regular “Kraft” co-producer with Maury Holland, And Fielder Cook, who directed many of the show’s top (Continued on page 54) FUSE’ VIEW OF TV By BOB CHANDLER If the new television season hasn’t had an “explosion” like that which “Playhouse 90" created last year, it does have a “longer fuse” and certainly can’t be writ¬ ten off on the basis of the first few shows In each series. That’s the “no panic” stand taken by CBS-TV’s exec v.p. in charge of program¬ ming, Hubbell Robinson Jr. Robinson candidly concedes that there have been a few new shows this season that have been “dreadful — they should never have gotten on the air.” But - he maintains, first of all, that with the combined program¬ ming of all three networks, “I chal¬ lenge anybody to find one night where he can’t find at (east two hours of good entertainment,” and secondly, there isn’t a show on the air that can’t be improved. “Sure, , there are programs that have disappointed us, that didn’t turn out’ the way we expected. But you can’t -count out a show on. the basis of its first few programs. We’re aware of the faults and we know our job is to improve them. That’s why we change producers, or install a new director, or new writers. “t remember one case vividly— *1 Love Lucy.’ The first show was universally panned. The critics called it ‘amateurish, unreal, con¬ trived’ and everything in the book —I even saved the clippings. If we had gone by the critics, it wouldn’t have, lasted past the first 13-week cycle. But we worked to improve it, and it turned out to be a pretty fair show.” Getting down to specifics, Robin¬ son points to the “Eye Arden Show" as ah example of the job the network has to do on Its program¬ ming. A1 Lewis, who produced and co-wrote “Our Miss Brooks" for: years, was unavailable for the show at the start. Now CBS has been able to bring in Lewis as producer, has called a 10-day hiatus on shoot¬ ing and is reworking the entire premise and theme of the show to see where it went wrong. Another example Is “The Big Record,” which Robinson admits “hasn’t come off as well in the first few, weeks as we envisioned it. We think the idea Is sound, and we’ve - (Continued on page 52) ‘LflUIEl Agencies, Sponsors Now Find They Can Deliver Just as Good a Rating With a Low-Budget Program Entry ‘Amerika’ 00.’* Web* Washington, Nov. 12. A six-page spread on Amer¬ ican television—two pages to ’ each national network—is fea¬ tured in the current issue of “Amerika Hlustrated,” the monthly picture magazine pub¬ lished by the U. S. Information Agency for sale in Russia. The large pages, about the size of Life, are almost entire¬ ly devoted to pictures, with a small amount of text and cap¬ tions. This is the second pic¬ torial report on tv In “Amerika." Guy Mitchells TV Alteration; Inked Guests Paid Off Hollywood, Nov. 12. Format of Guy Mitchell’s ABC- TV show has been completely re¬ vamped, with guestars eliminated in favor of a straight musical pro¬ gram. Consequently, guests al¬ ready inked are being cancelled out and paid off about $20,000. Settlement of pacts with Gloria De Haven, Peggy King! Dorothy Shay, Jeannie Carson and Eydie Goime was disclosed today (Tues.) by Eddie Joy, Mitchell’s manager and exec producer of teleseries. “Our show got off to a bad start," Joy said. “Originally we were to have originated from New York, and-when they made the change (to the . Coast) we had to change writ¬ ers and ghests. We made the same mistake everybody did, with a smattering of comedy, music— everything. From now on music will be the most important part of the. show. W'e plan to have one regular femme singer on the show to work with Guy, maybe Dolores Hawkins.” Stanton to Gov’t: Leave Us Alone Or Strategic News’ Will Suffer Miami Beach, Nov. 12. Frank Stanton, CBS president, warned that any attempt to “chip away at the basic economics” of the networks will constitute “the blindest folly” In a missile age when the “need for speed” in the dissemination of information will impose a major responsibility on broadcasters. Addressing the fourth annual convention of the Radio-Television News Directors Assn., from whom he received the second Paul W. White Memorial Award, Stanton said that attempts by Government and others to impair the economic health of the networks would weak¬ en the networks’ news operations. “In the ICBM age,” when “we may have only minutes” to inform the public and enable It to respond “in a groundswell of public opinion that forms the basis for a program of decisive action,” the networks face “ah Immense job” and * re¬ sponsibility we cannot ignore.” At the very-same time, Stanton said, “network broadcasting is fac¬ ing the serious" risk of precipitous actions that strike at the roots of its vitality. The cumulative effect of thf recommendations of the Bar- row Report—whatever their in¬ tent-—could-So weaken networking that it would, be economically Im¬ possible -• to sustain.. informational alone respond with better organi¬ zation and faster technical facili¬ ties to the new demands of a mis¬ sile age. -• “To run this risk seems to me the blindest folly, ’Mathematical Legerdemain’ “All of this must be made abundantly clear to the American people. Chip away at the basic economics of the commercial net¬ works of free television, and no mathematical legerdemain is going to make multi-million dollar news services possible. They own the airways. It is their future that is at stake. The risk is theirs.” Stanton summarized the problem facing broadcasters by stating that "the realities of our time are put¬ ting an extreme strain on our democratic institutions. We are up to bur necks in the dilemma of adjusting those institutions to meet the threat of' dictatorship that has demonstrated it can move with speed and skill and boldness. The crux of that dilemnla lies, to a great extent, in the gap between their, inherently rapid decision¬ making process and our inherently slow one. We must narrow that' gap. We can begin to do it only { by strengthening and accelerating the first step—informing more peo¬ ple, faster, more effectively, more fully—day in and day out. ^ 4 "This * treqpiretfc a *t * newa-dUr seminating medium of technical speed, of expressive power, and of arresting immediacy. As the in¬ strument for this purpose, we have no proved alternative to the pres¬ ent broadcasting structure, built up over more than a quarter of a cen¬ tury. We have demonstrable evi¬ dence of its ability and effective¬ ness.” Describing broadcasting’s new responsibilities, Stanton said, “We are going to have to take a second look at our old notions of what con¬ stitutes adequate information for the people: The burden of this re¬ sponsibility rests on us in this room and our colleagues in radio and television all over the U. S. “I do not mean to underrate the value of the printed word. . The form and schedule and techniques of the traditional free press make it a vigorous guarantor of a work¬ able democracy, “But the new demands—the need' for speed, the need for teaching all the people simultaneously, the need for complete, revealing and instantaneous pictures of events and their background—these de¬ mands are put squarely up to us in broadcasting.” Cite* ‘Perilous Time’ He warned: “I believe that if we tamper now with the system have evolved to use those oppor- ^(Continued, pn pag# 52) Hollywood, Nov. 12. If the Madison Ave. agency boy* who comprise a goodly segment of the Bevhills hotel traffic these days, have their way about It— and they’re determined that they will—the prices of shows will come down next season. No longer, they say, does it make sense to. allocate $40,000 to $50,0)00 per pro¬ gram installment,, because, under the new three-network dividing of the audience neither the rating nor the sharp-of-audience, justifies any such extravagance. For one thing, there’s no *such thing any more as a runaway rat¬ ing on regularly scheduled shows (with perhaps the lone exception, of CBS-TV's Saturday night “Gun- smoke”). A study of the recent batch of Nielsens and Trendex, furthermore reveals that, In many prime nighttime segments, only- three or four rating points at the most separate the three-network competing^ entries. The top rat¬ ing for fhat period could, as like¬ ly as not, he an entry in the $20,- 0OO-$25,OOO category (as in the case of the Wednesday night “I’ve Got A Secret”), with a $50,000 budgeted competing entry (In this instance “Kraft Television Thea¬ tre”) trailing. The agency sleuth* say, under the three-big-network* competition, similar low-cost pro¬ gram payoffs are happening every night of the week. Vidplxer* Worried If the agency-client reps persist in their demands for a shaving of programs costs, it poses a serious problem for the producers of half- hour filmed entries. They’re wor¬ ried on two counts: First of all, the lowest-budgeted shows de¬ livering a rating commensurate with high-cost programs are those In the panel-quiz category, most of which originate live from the east. If the present track record is maintained, they envision a marked sponsor upswing in this direction, threatening their plans for ‘58-*59. Secondly, the economics of tv films are such that It isn’t possible [to deliver a good 30-minute film entry under $40,000. If the spon¬ sors cherish the hope of whittling down vidnfx costs, says the pro¬ ducers, they’re harking up the wrong tree. But any way they look at it the omens are ominous.' High-cost-of-programming isn’t the only beef being registered by the agencies these days. Actually they’re even more concerned over that $65,000 rap for a prime 30 minutes of time. But since there’s little they can do about it (without creating a revolution within the networks), they figure they’d bet¬ ter direct their guns at salvaging coin on program costs. Red Buttons Has a Mind About Material, So Exits Sun’s (10) ‘Chevy Show’ ’ Hollywood, Nov. 12. Because of what he described as “very, very inferior material,” Red Buttons jon Thursday bowed off the Tony Martin “Chevy Show” on NBC-TV Sunday (10). ‘T didn’t like what was written for me. I have too much to lose at this point in my career. The material didn’t come up to stand¬ ard, I told NBC how I felt about it and that I wanted out, and they agreed. I was to-have done a com¬ edy sketch, but it was very, very- had. I don’t like coming all the way from New York only to cancel out, but money isn’t everything, and I like to keep some kind of a standard,” the comedian said. Buttons will not be paid for the cancelled date, but the network is taking care of expenses for his jaunt to the Coast. Mary Kaye Trio was set to replace Buttons, with the comedlc bit tossed out. Button* guestars with Perry Como Dec. 7 and Ed Sullivan Dec. 33 .-, * -