Sun, Nov 22 2009
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Published September 09, 2009 05:41 pm - WEEKENDER for Sept. 11, 2009: OK, bear with me for a short history lesson, then a review. Step back to early TV with ‘Studio One’ BOB LEBZELTER / VIDEO VIPER Star Beacon OK, bear with me for a short history lesson, then a review.
The industrial revolution of 100 years ago resulted in fewer people working on farms. It meant a bit more leisure time. Unfortunately, technology hadn't gotten caught up yet. During evening hours, you could play games, read, but there was no TV, no radio and movies were still pretty much a novelty. They would show them on the wall at night in the drug store after it closed. As a result, there were many traveling shows, operas, lectures, plays that would travel from city to city. Even small cities. Once radio entertainment, which included comedies and dramas, became mainstream in the late 1920s, traveling shows became less in demand. Also, you had movie theaters opening, sometimes large and ornate with huge pipe organs to produce the soundtrack to silent films. Ah, but after World War II, a new novelty was produced, which again brought us programs, operas and plays, right in our own homes. It came on a tiny, fuzzy, 10-inch display and they called it television. Imagine sitting at home in 1949 and watching a play with professional actors right in your own home. It must have been an unbelievable experience. “Studio One,” sponsored by Westinghouse, was one such experience. It aired from 1948 to 1958 and was produced live. A huge studio included many obvious cardboard backdrops and everything was live. “Studio One” episodes are available on DVD and if you have Netflix, proves to be an interesting history lesson on early television. Television may have been technically pretty crude back then, but it was much more highbrow. The latest plays, the classics, would come into your living room, including “Wuthering Heights,” “Julius Caesar” and newer stuff, like “Twelve Angry Men.” This latter play, by the way, was thought to be lost but was discovered by a researcher for The History Channel in 2003. The only way to preserve these programs back then was to point a film camera at a TV monitor as the live broadcast went out and record the proceedings. Even then, narrow-thinking individuals later ordered some of this film destroyed because they were taking up too much room. Big movie stars of the time couldn't be seen on TV, so it was up to largely unknowns to play the parts. You may have heard of some of them: Jack Lemmon, William Shatner, Ed Asner, James Dean, Warren Oates, Charleton Heston, Lee Remick and so many more. Shatner, in one of the extras, describes the huge cameras used with the silent, whirring fans needed to keep them cool. What the people involved did was pretty extraordinary. There was no stopping, no retakes. If you made a mistake, you went on. In “The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners,” children in a classroom invite their parents one evening for what inevitably shocks them, a mock trial in which they charge a janitor with contributing to the death of a child from a faulty fire escape. The play is interesting, not outstanding. In one scene, a boy who looked maybe 10 is on the stand and is asked to describe an incident leading to the death. There is a flashback. 
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