12/23/22
Newsletter #197
The Crack of Dawn
I just watched an interview with writer-director, Melville Shavelson. Combined with, I just read The Last Lone Inventor by Evan I. Schwartz, about the development of television. These two subjects collided to answer a question lurking in my head: what was the first TV show?
I know Melville Shavelson from his last two movies, which he wrote and directed, Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) with Kirk Douglas and Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball. I also recognized his name as the writer of a number of lesser Bob Hope movies from the 1940s, like: The Princess and the Pirate (1944), Where There's Life (1947), The Great Lover (1949), and Sorrowful Jones (1949). Melville Shavelson did write and direct one of Bob Hope’s best movies, The Seven Little Foys (1955), which has a wonderful sequence with James Cagney recreating his Oscar-winning role as George M. Cohan from Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). What I didn’t know was that Shavelson started his career in 1938 as a joke writer for Bob Hope’s radio show, The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope.
OK, stick with me, this all makes sense. So, Phil T. Farnsworth, a 14-year-old Idaho farm boy, dreamt up the concept of electronic television in 1920 while he was plowing a field with a four-bladed plow, thus creating parallel lines in the dirt, which is the basis for TV – lines. Until digital, TV was based on how many lines of image did you have? 400 lines? 500 lines? The more lines the higher the resolution. Farnsworth spent the next 8 years figuring this all out and received the first seven patents for TV in 1928 and 1930. The Farnsworth TV system – called “RadioScope” – can be seen clearly in the very silly, funny movie, International House (1933), with W.C. Fields.
RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, run by the powerhouse executive, David Sarnoff, had a monopoly on radio, and intended to control television as well, without paying Farnsworth, although eventually he had to. Due to the Farnsworth/Sarnoff conflict impeding TV’s development, and the Great Depression, radio itself was very slow in taking off as an entertainment medium. Radio didn’t really get going until about 1935-36.
In 1938 David Sarnoff, still embroiled in the federal patent courts with Farnsworth, decided to launch television anyway. Fuck Fransworth, David Sarnoff would make sure that he was remembered as the “inventor” of TV, and he is.
So, one day the producers dropped in on the radio show, The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope, and informed Bob and the staff that the radio show was now a TV show, and they turned around and left. Then gigantic cameras arrived, and nobody had any clue how to convert the show from radio to TV. They did, however, bring in an audience, that could barely see the performers past the huge cameras. Just like in radio, Bob and the cast came out holding their scripts, performed the show, and it dropped dead. Not a single laugh. Everybody was horrified.
One of the writers, 21-year-old Melville Shavelson, said to Bob Hope, “You can’t have the scripts in your hands.” Bob asked why. Shavelson explained, “The audience has to believe that you’re making up the lines, that there are no writers. In radio they couldn’t see the scripts.” Bob Hope said, “Do you mean I have to learn the lines? I can’t. It’s too much stuff.” So, young Melville Shavelson invented what he called, “The Idiot Card.” They wrote out all of Bob’s lines on big cards and held them beside the camera. The next week Bob got all his laughs.
Thus, one fortuitous night in 1938, both the TV show and the Idiot Card (later the teleprompter) were born.
And a good day to you.