As television production was being carved from the wilderness, some things worked better than others. Live production was challenging enough in a regular studio with two or three cameras and simple switching from the nearby control room. Throw in additional elements – live remotes, telop cards, film chains, you name it – and the chances of things going wrong went up even more. On Today, one of the most ambitious and technically complicated programs on the air in the early 1950s, flubs were inevitable.
In the early days of Today, the program originated from the RCA Exhibition Hall1, across 49th Street from NBC’s facilities inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza. But while the program was directed from a control room downstairs from the studio floor, additional elements had to originate from inside 30 Rock. And one source of constant angst was the coordination of filmed pieces, which were ordered up from the control room and had to be inserted from inside the main facilities across the street.
In a 1954 Esquire article about Garroway and Today, writer Richard Gehman2 described the challenges of bringing it all together. Sometimes the wrong film came up (Gehman mentioned a morning when Garroway announced, “We take you now to Ambrose Lightship!” and instead a film of the Vienna State Opera appeared). Other times, the timing was off, since the film machine required five seconds to get going up to speed. Gehman noted that if the director didn’t give an on-time cue to the assistant director to tell the film technical director to “roll up” the film machine, viewers might see numbered leader film or an empty screen. “Considering the difficult timing involved,” Gehman wrote, “it is miraculous that such horrors do not appear more often.”
But other times, film goofs weren’t the fault of the control room. Today writer and managing editor Gerald Green3, interviewed by Jeff Kisseloff for the great oral history The Box, told of an ongoing frustration with Garroway and Jim Fleming that led to film problems. In their copy, on-camera talent say certain words that serve as a cue for the control room to roll a particular piece of prerecorded material – appropriately enough, this is called a “roll cue.” Green remembered that he had difficulty getting Garroway or Fleming to read their roll cues as prescribed – instead, they’d ad-lib and since the roll cue wasn’t given, no film would follow. After the program, when they would ask Green what happened to the film, he would reply, “Read your roll cue and you’ll get the film on time.”4
Green remembered that when he was managing editor, he’d watch Today from his home and watch Garroway or Fleming ad-lib, miss the roll cue, and then muse aloud that there was supposed to be film to go with this. Green would shout at his television, “Run it! Run the damn film!”5
All of which led to the evening Green was in the kitchen, and from the den he heard his young daughter yelling. He went in to see what was the matter. In the den, he saw his daughter watching Felix the Cat. Sure enough, she was yelling at the television: “Run it! Run the damn film!”6
- Originally a showroom for RCA’s products and technology, the Exhibition Hall at 40 West 49th Street was an unusual space that bounced from purpose to purpose until Christie’s auction house signed a 30-year lease in 1998 to turn it into its New York showroom. The building has been seriously renovated for its current role and is now styled as 20 Rockefeller Plaza, but the famous huge windows are still there.
- We’ll come back to this article in a future post, because it’s very interesting and would not be the last piece Richard Gehman would write about Dave Garroway. But worth noting here: it was while doing this article that Gehman came to know Estelle Parsons, and their subsequent marriage allowed her to leave NBC and start her acting career in earnest.
- Who later wrote, among others, The Last Angry Man and the Emmy-winning miniseries Holocaust.
- Since this is a family blog, we have redacted some language from the exact quote, but you’ll find the full version in Kisseloff’s book.
- Again, we’ve redacted this since the full quote involved a little blasphemy. We’d rather not have a lightning bolt take out the website or its authors. You can find the full version in The Box.
- See previous note.