Post by David JohnstonPost by J. ClarkeOn Mon, 26 Mar 2018 04:28:50 +0300, Juho Julkunen
Post by Juho Julkunen@gmail.com says...
Post by J. ClarkePost by Dorothy J Heydt(Cf. a lot of early episodes of Doctor Who, which were recorded
over because tapes cost money.)
The benefits of socialized television.
Tapes cost money for private broadcasters, too.
But private broadcasters aren't subject to government austerity
programs.
And of course being private corporations they have no interest in saving
money.
Almost all of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jack Paar and the first ten
years (1962â1972) hosted by Johnny Carson were taped over by the network
and no longer exist. The videotape was being used repeatedly, hence the
reason that Carson's Tonight Show picture looked muddy during broadcast
in the late 1960s. Selected sequences from the 1962â1972 era survive and
were often replayed by Carson himself (particularly in the months
preceding his retirement in 1992) and have been released to home video.
Some Paar episodes also survive and have also been released to home
videoâin this case, DVD.
Similarly, NBC reused the tapes of ventriloquist Shari Lewis's 1960-1963
Saturday morning children's program The Shari Lewis Show, to record
coverage of the 1964 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
Lewis said in an interview decades later that to her, this was a shame,
since the shows were beautifully done as a showcase of NBC's early color
broadcast work.
Most US daytime soap opera episodes broadcast before 1978 have been
Soaps produced by Procter & Gamble Productions, including Search for
Tomorrow, Guiding Light, As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, and
Another World began preserving their episodes in 1978. A few scattered
episodes, mostly black and white kinescopes, of these series exist from
the 1950s, 1960s, and early to mid-1970s. The CBS soaps Love of Life and
The Secret Storm, as well as several short-lived shows, suffered the
same fate.
ABC's One Life to Live and All My Children were originally owned by
their creator, Agnes Nixon, who chose to archive all episodes. However,
early episodes of AMC were only saved as black-and-white kinescopes
despite being produced and telecast in color. ABC purchased the shows in
late 1974; different sources report that Nixon's archive was either lost
in a fire or erased. A few black-and-white kinescopes of both series'
early years exist, as well as a few color episodes. ABC began full
archiving of these soaps at Nixon's insistence when they expanded from
30 minutes to an hourâAMC in 1977, and OLTL in 1978.
Most 1963â1970 episodes of ABC's longest-running General Hospital
survive because the series was then owned by Selmur Productions. Few
episodes from 1970 to 1977 were saved. Ryan's Hope premiered in 1975,
several years before ABC began saving all of its daytime programming,
but exists in its entirety as it was originally owned by Labine-Mayer
Productions.
Dark Shadows, created by Dan Curtis, which ran from 1966 to 1971, has
the distinction of being one of the few soap operas to have nearly all
of its original episodes preserved. As a result of kinescope, many
earlier episodes of which the master film was lost are still available.
However, episode #1219 was lost but reconstructed with an audio
recording for home video release.
Two long-running soaps have full archives: Days of Our Lives, which
premiered in 1965, and The Young and the Restless, which premiered in
1973. Both series were originally distributed by Screen Gems.
Interesting article on how Desi Arnaz invented syndication:
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/what-desi-wrought
But if the basic creative decisions had been made, the
business ones had not. CBS wanted the series done live in
New York. The East Coast was where the audience was, and
if the show was done in Hollywood, the East Coast would
have to see blurry kinescopes. Lucy and Desi wanted to stay
in Hollywood, so Desi negotiated. He suggested using their
production company, Desilu, to film the show ahead of time.
This solved the quality problem but would considerably
increase the production costs, originally budgeted at what
now seems a minuscule $19,500 an episode. Desi, picking a
figure out of thin air, guessed that the increase would
amount to $5,000.
After much hemming and hawing, Philip Morris and CBS agreed
to come up with an additional $2,000 each. But Lucy and
Desi, who were to be paid $2,500 each and own half the show,
would have to take a thousand-dollar salary cut between
them on each of the first thirty-nine episodes to make up
the difference.
Arnaz made a counteroffer. He and Lucy would take the salary
cut, provided CBS gave them sole ownership. Since in 1951
most television shows were done live and preserved only on
kinescopes, yesterdays TV shows, CBS thought, were worth
about the same as yesterdays newspapers. So CBS readily
agreed. The suits figured they weren't giving up much.
But Arnaz knew that he and Lucy weren't giving up much either.
In our income tax bracket, he explained, we might have ended
up with about $5,000 of the $39,000 we were losing [in
salary cuts]. So in effect, we were buying the other half
of the series for $5,000.
That, of course, turned out to be the bargain of the century.
Because I Love Lucy was filmed, not performed live, for the
first time in television, there was something worth selling
after the original broadcast was over, and because I Love
Lucy turned into one of the biggest hits in the history of
show business, there was no lack of offers to buy.
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