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Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand in the live telecast of Marty in 1953. |
During the early years of television almost all network broadcasting was from New York. A significant portion of prime time programs were live dramas. They were anthology series, where each broadcast had different actors and an unrelated story. Because there was no coaxial cable to the West Coast for a live simultaneous broadcast, a movie camera with 16mm black and white film was placed in front of a monitor. The film was developed and then shipped to the west coast for broadcasting a week later. Unfortunately, many of these kinescopes are lost or have deteriorated beyond the possibility of restoration. The directors in this new medium usually had theater experience and no film experience. Actors from Broadway, Off Broadway and a large pool of aspiring actors provided an almost endless supply of talent. They became so successful that they were later able to go to Hollywood to direct or star in films, and bypass the rigid hierarchy of the studio system. There were some like the director, Elia Kazan who went directly from the theater to Hollywood. While not the immediate cause of the demise of the studio system, this influx from New York to Hollywood further weakened the studio and increased the power of the actors’ agent.
Counting only “Philco – Goodyear Televisionn Playhouse” and later “Goodyear Playhouse” Delbert Mann directed 108 live television anthology dramas for these two series. (1) No other director came close to this number. In his memoirs, he vividly describes his experience:
Live television combined the techniques of film and theatre in a new and special way. Use of cameras and microphones was comparable to film, but the rehearsal and playing of a script was much more closely related to theatre. A production was rehearsed, then played in continuity, without film's ability to stop and repeat over and over again. It was performed and transmitted live. The pressures generated by this potential for disaster were unbelievable. The errors were there for all to see. This was more than balanced, I believe, by the special nature of a live show. I am convinced that the pressure led the actors to a supercharge of energy and electricity (call it "panic") in which the audience participated. There was awareness on the part of every viewer that what was being seen was happening at that moment. Mistakes could and would be made. An actor who forgot a line was helpless and totally exposed until someone threw him a rescuing line and he could find himself, or until he could pull himself together enough to ad lib his way back into the scene. It was trapeze work without a net. Catastrophe of monumental proportions was never far away. The audience knew this. They gasped when it happened, empathized, and then breathed a sigh of relief when it was over. That sense of the individual viewer in the audience participating in the event is missing in television today and has been, I fear, forever lost. (2)
In the early years of live anthology series, television sets were expensive and not found in many homes. Movie tickets were more affordable. Mann describes how this economic factor influenced programming. “Television had a tremendous appeal in those primitive days. It was new and it was exciting. Actors became identifiable overnight, and were items of discussion the next day after a show. "Did you see so-and-so last night?" was heard often on the commuter trains into Manhattan. Programming was tailored for an audience that was upper and upper middle class, those who could afford this rather expensive luxury. They were essentially urban, theatrically oriented and experienced, reasonably sophisticated and rather homogeneous.”(3)
Arthur Penn directed live anthology series such as “Gulf Playhouse,” “The Philco – Goodyear Television Playhouse,” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” in the early 1950’s before he went to Hollywood to direct memorable films such as The Miracle Worker (1957), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), and Little Big Man (1970). He had similar comments about television broadcasting in the early post war years:
Here was television that was a relatively new medium, so that nobody was really terribly concerned (nobody being the advertising agencies or the sponsors).They weren't terribly concerned about what was going on the air because not enough people were watching it to make it economically worthwhile. So, for Philco on our program and Westinghouse on Studio One, it was kind of institutional advertising rather than really selling products because there weren’t enough people who had television sets during this period. So here we are, at least two big shows coming out of New York ... actually there were more, and there was Kraft, Robert Montgomery Presents ... so there were a bunch of dramas. There was a drama every night on television, one network or another. Philco had the unique opportunity, because it was on Sunday night, to have access to all the wonderful actors who were acting on Broadway. In those days Broadway was dark Sunday night, universally, and what we had were all these actors who were trapped in hit plays who wanted desperately to do something else to keep their lives from turning into a totally automatic life. So we had these spectacular, wonderful people like Kim Stanley, who I think was playing in Picnic, Henry Fonda... all those people were playing on Broadway, but Philco had access to them uniquely because we were a Sunday night show. (4)
The interaction between Broadway and television would continue with the variety shows. Ed Sullivan on his Toast of the Town, on October 18, 1953, showcased a scene from Tea House of the August Moon with John Forsythe, Paul Ford, and David Wayne. The actors were in their costumes and there was a facsimile of the Broadway set. The Ed Sullivan Show presented more musicals than dramas. On March 27, 1955 he featured performers who had been in the musical Oklahoma. John Raitt and Florence Henderson sang “People Will Say We're In Love.” Barbara Cook did "Many a New Day" with a dance ensemble. Celeste Holm, who originated the role of Ado Annie sang "I Cain't Say No." Sullivan’s Show was also on a Sunday night, giving him access to performers while their shows were still on a Broadway run. The Best of Broadway Musicals - Original Cast Performances from The Ed Sullivan Show was released on DVD in 2003. Recordings of the Ed Sullivan Show, available in archives such as the Paley Center for Media in New York and Beverly Hills, provide the only visual record for many performances of the cast in musicals of this era.
Arthur Penn, who started directing live television drama in 1953 with Gulf Playhouse, described his recollections about screen writers in Hollywood:
What I think that those of us who had worked in television brought was a respect for the writing. For the ability for a scene to stand on its own terms because the writing was good. And that was way out of the Hollywood tradition. In those days the writer was treated with contempt in Hollywood. When we came along, I think we came along with these good writers. We were joined at the hip with a whole generation of fine dramatic writers. (5)
This was not the first wave of writers to leave New York and go to Hollywood. When silent films were replaced with “talkies”, script writers were suddenly needed. How the screenwriter was credited gives an insight to how film and stage regarded the writer differently. For Broadway and Off Broadway dramas, the writer’s name usually appeared with the title on the marquee, the Playbill, and print advertising. The director would be listed towards the bottom of the posters and inside the Playbill, usually after the brief biographies of the actors. Live television dramas continued the practice of crediting the writer with the title. In films the screenwriter was buried deep in the opening credits. There was the exception for films adapted from a book by a well-known author and for musicals. Cimarron (1960) has the title card “Edna Ferber’s Cimarron.” Oklahoma (1955) opens with “Rodgers and Hammerstein Present Oklahoma.” However the screenwriters for Oklahoma are listed considerably later. For playwrights it could take quite a while to achieve such status. For the films A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly Last Summer (1959), Tennessee Williams is listed after all the actors in the opening credits. In The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), Vivien Leigh is credited first and then on the next title card is Williams’ name above the title. However in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), the titling is “Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Presents Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.” As Hollywood introduced wider screen formats to counter the competition from the narrow television set, the name of the new technology was showcased. In South Pacific (1958), immediately after the title, appeared “Produced in Todd AO”. Marilyn Monroe had her name appear before the title in Bus Stop (1956). But “20th Century Fox Presents a CinemaScope Picture”, with the word CinemaScope in large letters in its unique font style, came before Monroe’s name. The new technologies were featured in a number performed by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in the MGM musical Silk Stockings (1957). Charisse sings, “If you want to get the crowd to come around, you’ve got to have glorious Technicolor, breath taking CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound.” A strong reverberation is applied to the words “stereophonic sound” and also when Fred Astaire lets the piano cover slam shut. They lament how previous famous scenes are now not adequate and they continue to sing the various color processes and screen formats. The film was an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name, which was an adaptation of the MGM film Ninotchka (1939).
Delbert Mann described his experience with Paddy Chayefsky, the writer for Marty (TV 1953, film 1955):
Paddy Chayefsky and I worked well together. He was from the Bronx. I was from Tennessee. His stories were all about the Bronx, about his background, his mother, himself, his friends. I didn't really understand or dig all the jargon of the Bronxese, the male bonding situation that takes place on street corners there and all that "Marty" deals with. I needed Paddy, who was there at all the rehearsals, to fill me in on what the background and feeling was, and why somebody would say such a thing, and what the whole atmosphere of the situation was. So we worked very closely together. I did understand the human nature of the story, the relationships, the people aspect of it. Paddy was unique in being able to write of his own experience in his own lingo. It gives the effect of being realistic dialogue. It isn't at all. It's very stylized, but the feeling is that it is realistic.
Paddy had done about four or five shows with a New York background, and he was very fearful of getting labeled as the Jewish, Bronx writer, able to tell no other stories. Deliberately he changed the ethnic background of the story and picked Italian, just to get away from that label. Well, of course it was a fine choice because the relationships are exactly the same. The family situations are the same. The family aspirations are the ... Paddy was writing about a universal situation. So people in Kansas City could respond to it just as people in the Bronx did. (6)
Paddy insisted that I come along to direct it because he wanted somebody to help protect his baby against the Hollywood Philistines that would do him in. This was my first chance at a film. I came out here with Paddy. We went to work. We wanted to do just an expanded version of the television show. Harold [producer, Harold Hecht] wanted the same emotional reaction, the same kind of response, but he wanted a different picture. He did not want the same cast. He did not want the exact same story, just a repeat of the television show expanded to double the length, because he felt people would not pay to go to see it on a big screen, when they had just seen it on television for free a year before.”
Paddy being Paddy always had more input into his shows than any other writer. He always had the great good sense never, never, never to speak directly to the actor. An actor would ask him a question in rehearsal, and he'd say, "Ask Del," so that the director's relation with the actor was always very clear. But he would have a lot to say about how a scene was playing, how an actor was doing. We'd get together after a scene was done and talk about it. But it was between us. I depended a great deal on him, and certainly for Hollywood it was a revelation to have Paddy on the set of Marty. The production manager, the assistant director, the cameraman were rather bemused by this forceful person on the set making suggestions.”(7)
Sidney Lumet who directed Network (1976), a melodrama about television network news, also had Chayefsky on the set so he could make changes to the script after he heard the actors say the lines. In the commentary in the DVD released for the thirtieth anniversary of the film, Lumet recalls, “One of the things that Paddy did, knowing the field so well, having written for so much of it, is that he knew every television dramatic cliché and used every one of them in the discussions of television. He left nothing out.”(8)
Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty is a butcher in the Bronx who lives with his Italian immigrant mother. He is socially awkward and repeatedly describes himself as a “fat, ugly, little guy.” His mother, relatives and friends are constantly asking him why he isn’t married. One Saturday night he goes to the Waverly Ballroom and meets Clara, a school teacher who has been ditched by a blind date because she is a “dog.” They find comfort and relate to each other. Marty’s mother doesn’t want him to see her again because she doesn’t want to be alone. The next day Marty and his friends are back in the bar seated at a table discussing all the places they can go that night to find some “action.” They try persuading Marty not to call her because she looks fifty years old and is a “dog.” The telecast ends with Marty calling Clara and closing the phone booth door on his friend.
Nancy Marchand, who played Clara was six feet tall had prominent angular facial bones. She was taller than Marty, played by Rod Steiger. In the film version which is about 40 minutes longer than the telecast, Nancy Blair was shorter than Ernest Borgnine. She had the beauty that Nancy Marchand lacked. She definitely is not the dog as the other characters describe her. Her interaction with Marty is expanded by scenes in a coffee shop after the dance. She is very encouraging about Marty following his dream to buy the butcher shop from his boss who wants to move to California and be with his children. The scenes before and after the coffee shop were shot on location in the Bronx and provide a documentary realism of this vibrant working class area in the early post war years. The tracking shots of Marty and Clara walking at night in front of stores that provided the back lighting are not possible in a stage production.
The ballroom set for the television version was narrowly wedged between the sets for the bar and the butcher shop. There was only room for one camera. The dance sequence was shot in one long continuous take of about four minutes. The actors danced and then turned to the camera for their speaking parts or their reactions. Mann thought this was so successful that he repeated it in the movie. Other dancers periodically come between the couple and the camera to add realism. The “what you want to do tonight” scene is a long continuous take of Marty and his friend Angie in a bar bantering about all the places they can go that night. The bar set was also too small for more than one camera. It is a tight shot of the two actors sitting on the same side of a table with a newspaper unfolded between them. The little movement in the scene comes from posture changes in their heads and arms. In the movie that scene was also one continuous take, but the movement in the frame is from Marty turning the pages of the newspaper that is in front of him. Today long continuous takes of a conversation with a static camera are arguably nonexistent. But cutting to different angles can be anti-realistic. An observer watching two people at another table having a conversation sees them from only one direction. Reverse camera angles of 180 degrees were not used in live television drama because the second camera would be visible. The cameras were obliquely placed in a V pattern.
Delbert Mann felt that the early success he had directing Marty stereotyped him. “Through my film career which began with Marty–that was the first film that I ever did. I soon became typed as a small budget, black and white, shoot them in New York, kind of director–and struggled very hard to break away from those intimate kinds of stories, which were the first ones that I did for theatrical film.”(9)
New York stage and live television actors didn’t have the same fan status as many film stars had. Well known Hollywood stars lived in residential and secluded areas with very little pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, if there was a sidewalk. New York stage and live anthology television actors lived in apartment buildings or small hotels. If they lived on an uptown street, they had to walk to the avenue to get a taxi or subway. It wasn’t the life style of Norma Desmond and her chauffer Max Von Mayerling in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Rod Steiger described his experience the day after Marty aired. “The next day I took a walk down the street and truck drivers were yelling ‘Hi Ya Marty.’ And I went into a store, somebody said, “Marty. How are you?” Betsy Palmer, who played Marty’s cousin said, “People always stopped you on the street. The garbage man you always see a lot, [said] ‘Hey Betsy. I saw you on Television last night.’[And I answered.] “I’m glad. Did you like it?”(10)
No Time for Sergeants had an unusual life cycle. It was first a best-selling novel in 1954 and then adapted into a one hour live television play with Andy Griffith for the United States Steel Hour on March 15, 1955. Later that year it opened with Griffith on Broadway for almost a two year run. In 1958 it was released as a motion picture starring Griffith and most of the original Broadway cast. In 1964 it became a television series without Griffith and ran only one season. The film shows its stage roots in the scene where Griffith is frustrating the psychiatrist at the Processing Center. The two characters are loosely framed with a static camera with long continuous takes and just a few reaction shots. One of the monologues of Griffith talking to the audience, occurred in the film when he explains how they went to gunnery school and were assigned to obsolete aircraft. In the movie and Broadway version Don Knotts briefly appeared as the corporal who administers the manual dexterity test to Griffith. He becomes totally exasperated when Griffith bends the two sliding rings apart. The duo would appear together for eight seasons as Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show. However in the television series Griffith would be the straight man.
Jeffrey Hayden directed episodes of Philco Television Playhouse from 1954–1955 before going to Hollywood for a 40-plus year career directing episodic television. In an interview he compared the difference between casting in Hollywood and New York:
In the theater the director does cast for the most part his actors, and so when we came into live television, the same thing carried over. We had casting people helping us, and we had producers consulting with us, and when you work with someone like Fred Coe, as Delbert did and I did, naturally their input was greatly valued because they were in some cases some great producers, who could be very helpful. But the prerogative of casting the actor was with the director. When I came to California and started doing episodic television, the same was true because so many of us came from New York. There was a whole wave that moved West, and this was the nature of our work, you know, a director casts his actors. Well, over the years that has been somewhat eroded by the system, the system being that in episodic television you have a producer or as it happens a half dozen producers on any given series and they are mostly writers because of the nature of the medium. They're writer-producers, and they are on the show from the beginning of the season to the end of the season. They have more continuity than the director who comes in and does just one or two or three episodes in any given season. Of course, that has changed too. (11)
In the United States, the founder of method acting in might have been Lee Strasberg when he co-founded the Group Theater in New York City in 1931. But it was the director Elia Kazan, at the Actors Studio, that opened in 1947 in New York, who brought a generation of new actors trained in the “method” to Hollywood. Method actors identified with the character, search for psychological motives, and reproduced the character with their own emotions that were recalled from their own experiences. There was no one method. Each teacher had their own interpretation of the Stanislavski System. Kazan’s reputation as a Broadway director enabled him to bypass the studio based apprenticeship system and direct his first film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) that was adapted from the 1943 novel with the same name. Most of the film looks like a stage play shot from a camera in the center mezzanine except for some shots on the stairwell and a crane shot that pans around the tenement courtyard and ends on Peggy Ann Garner sitting on the fire escape. This stage look to Kazan’s films could still be seen in his social issues films Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Pinky (1949). His noir Panic in the Streets (1950) displays his acquired cinematic style with wide panning shots along streets and train tracks and a memorable chase scene along the New Orleans waterfront that is a long take with a 360 degree panning shot.
Lumet described how in Network (1976) he introduced William Holden to rehearsing a scene as it is done in the theater:
Holden did not have any theater background and had heard that I rehearsed, but he had never really done it before. And when I rehearsed it’s not just going over the script and talking about characters. I actually stage it like in the theater. He said it was one of the best times in his life, because all of a sudden he felt like a real actor and hadn’t been treated that way in the early part of his career. The sense of pleasure that you can get from contact with the people you’re going to be working with over a long period of time is reinforced completely by the rehearsal time. (13)
The post war dominance of New York television broadcasting was soon challenged. In November 1952, CBS Television City opened in Los Angeles. The premier of Playhouse 90, on October 4, 1956, opened with the announcer saying, “Live from Television City in Hollywood, Studio 90.” The “90” referenced the duration of the show. Previous live anthology feature dramas were an hour long. The viewer was now going to have an experience more like a stage drama. Producers and directors from New York, including Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, George Roy Hill, and Fred Coe went to do shows at Playhouse 90. Writers such as Ted Mosel and Horton Foote also worked at Playhouse 90. In the spring of 1956, Ampex Corporation demonstrated a magnetic tape system that had no apparent loss of quality from the live broadcast. By 1957, Playhouse 90 and other anthology series were taping. The audience probably didn’t care that the TV drama was not live. Nostalgic interviews and oral histories taken decades later discuss the excitement and stress on the actors who were performing live, and how they coped with mistakes, forgotten lines, or the performance that was running longer than the allotted time. They felt the audience thrived on this knowledge. The expression itself, “Golden Age of Television” influences these testimonies and tempts the celebrities to reminisce and exaggerate.
What’s not an exaggeration is the effect that the Westerns had on anthology drama shows. Gunsmoke first aired in September 1955. By 1959, there were about 40 Westerns, over 25 during prime time, and during one week a peak of eight were in the top ten. Anthology dramas were not the only casualties of the Westerns. The comedians also suffered. The Westerns fell out of favor and were replaced with the television variety show. The variety shows appealed to an older audience and were replaced with series in which the characters and plot continuously evolved, such as Dallas, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. Live anthology television is gone but generations of viewers for the past 38 seasons have been able to turn on their sets and hear “Live from New York it’s Saturday night.”
Notes
1 A tabulation of all the television dramas directed by Delbert Mann can be found at Internet Movie Database (IMDb). http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542720/
2 Mann, Delbert. Looking Back at Live Television and Other Matters (Los Angeles: A Directors Guild of America Publication, 1998) p.7.
3 Mann. P.7.
4 Kindem, Gorham. The live television generation of Hollywood film directors: interviews with seven directors (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1994) pp 31–32.
5 Kindem. p.51.
6 Kindem. pp. 54–55.
7 Kindem. p. 59.
8 Sidney Lumet director’s commentary Network (1976). Two Disc Special Edition, Turner Entertainment Co. 2006.
9 Delbert Mann director’s commentary for Marty (television 1953), The Golden Age of Television.Criterion Collection, 2009.
10 Interviews. Bonus Material for Marty (television 1953), The Golden Age of Television. Criterion Collection, 2009.
11 Kindem. p.35.
12 Hondo(1953) Special collector’s edition. The Making of Hondo. Paramount Home Entertainment.2005.
13 Sidney Lumet director’s commentary, Network (1976). Two Disc Special Edition, Turner Entertainment Co. 2006
Wonderful essay, Barry! I learned a lot!
ReplyDeleteWonderful essay, Barry. I learned a lot!
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