Remembering Phil Hymes

Last week we lost another longtime NBC crewmember. Phil Hymes, a lighting director whose NBC career began in 1951 and spanned decades, with a credits list including everything from Your Hit Parade and The Bell Telephone Hour to Late Night with Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, passed away last week at age 96.

In reading the obits for Phil Hymes you find phrases like “the best” and “creative” (mixed in, of course, with comments about how opinionated he could be – “brutally honest,” Fallon said, and that’s a recurring theme. Yes Please by Amy Poehler includes one such story of Phil being extremely candid). But as you read, you’re also struck by the span of the man’s career, how much he saw, and how many shows he worked on. Some of them didn’t last, some of them are forgotten, but some have endured. His most famous work was helping light Saturday Night Live, and as I work my way through the DVDs of the first five seasons, more often than not I see Phil Hymes among the familiar names on the credit scroll at the end of each episode.

And one of Phil’s first jobs at NBC? Lighting Today. That’s right, he would have been responsible for making Garroway and company look good from the very earliest days of Pat Weaver’s morning experiment. I don’t even want to know what had to go into figuring out how to make the interior of the RCA Exhibition Hall look so presentable on television (especially in those early days), but he somehow helped get it done.

People like Phil Hymes – and I’ve said things like this over and over, but I do so because it’s a point that cannot be overstated – are the people who helped carve a medium from the wilderness. They arrived as television was on the way up; they helped figure out how to make it work; and so much of how it’s now done, they wrote the book on. So many of them stuck around for so long, leaving their mark on generation after generation of programs. Along the way, they not only became part of the institutional history, but they retained so much of what they did and what they witnessed. Every television industry veteran with whom I’ve had a conversation…oh, the stories they can tell, the bygone eras they bring back to vivid (and sometimes hilarious) life, and what understanding they can help you reach about how it really was and how things worked back then. And every time we lose another one, we lose their stories, their perspectives, and so much more.

It’s inevitable that we will lose these people. But it also makes me thankful for initiatives like the Television Academy’s interview project, for the work of people like Stephen Bowie and Kliph Nesteroff, and all the others who work with industry veterans to record their memories and stories and perspectives. But it also makes me think about all those who vanished before we could get their contributions down for the record. And it again makes me think I need to do more than I have to help this cause.

Phil Hymes was a giant. And now, here’s hoping that what Lorne Michaels said has come true: “If God has him now, despite all the arguing, heaven will be much better lit.”