Lucy and Desi also invented the rerun. all TV shows were live , and as part of their compensation, Lucy and Desi were given the rights to any future rebroadcasts, they bought film cameras and recorded the shows.
Your remarks bring to mind a tragic situation that occurred maybe thirty/forty years ago. The Milton Berle “Texaco Star Theater,” (Tuesday evenings, 7 to 8 as I recall) was a very popular program. Someone (Berle?) had the sense to have every program filmed. The film sat in cans in a NBC storage room for a long time until some ambitious executive type decided he needed the space for something else. He ordered the film to be disposed of by way of the trash. And so it was. It was the very early fifties when NBC inked a 30 year contract with ‘Uncle Milty’ to the tune of 200,000 smackers a year. Berle had come out of vaudeville, and the Texaco program was nothing more than televised vaudeville...or variety show if you please. In fact many of the early television stars came out of vaudeville. Think Jimmy Durante, and Red Skelton. Also we had Burns and Allen and Jack Benny, to name a few. As you point out this stuff was all live. No second or third take. The spontaneous ad-libbing that necessarily followed on occasion then was often funnier than the script.
I kid you not, I saw part of this movie last night. 'The long, long trailer', 1954. They were pulling it up and down mountain roads but you could tell it was a Hollywood set.
Lucy and Desi also invented the rerun.
ReplyDeleteall TV shows were live , and as part of their compensation, Lucy and Desi were given the rights to any future rebroadcasts, they bought film cameras and recorded the shows.
Wow, I didn't know that! SMART!
DeleteYour remarks bring to mind a tragic situation that occurred maybe thirty/forty years ago. The Milton Berle “Texaco Star Theater,” (Tuesday evenings, 7 to 8 as I recall) was a very popular program. Someone (Berle?) had the sense to have every program filmed. The film sat in cans in a NBC storage room for a long time until some ambitious executive type decided he needed the space for something else. He ordered the film to be disposed of by way of the trash. And so it was. It was the very early fifties when NBC inked a 30 year contract with ‘Uncle Milty’ to the tune of 200,000 smackers a year. Berle had come out of vaudeville, and the Texaco program was nothing more than televised vaudeville...or variety show if you please. In fact many of the early television stars came out of vaudeville. Think Jimmy Durante, and Red Skelton. Also we had Burns and Allen and Jack Benny, to name a few. As you point out this stuff was all live. No second or third take. The spontaneous ad-libbing that necessarily followed on occasion then was often funnier than the script.
DeleteI kid you not, I saw part of this movie last night. 'The long, long trailer', 1954. They were pulling it up and down mountain roads but you could tell it was a Hollywood set.
ReplyDeleteI know part of it was filmed on Whitney Portals Road, the road that goes up to Mount Whitney in California
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