CLS: Television: History & Future

From its beginnings to its evolution, regulation and entertainment value, join others in understanding the impact of television on our lives.

Neil McCormick & Jim Culley

Monday, July 22, 10:30 a.m. | Orchestra Hall
“Radio with Pictures. The Rise of Television”

Although the invention of the cathode ray tube made television theoretically possible in 1907, it wasn’t until after World War II that television standards were set, and TV began to be accepted.

NBC’s New York City station, WNBT-TV (now WNBC-TV), had the first TV license. It ran the first official TV commercial on its first day of operation, July 1, 1941 — a “test pattern” image of a Bulova clock on top of a map of the United States that ran before the start of a baseball
game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. The audience for that ad numbered around 4,000 television sets.

The fall 1948-spring 1949 TV season was the first time all four networks in operation in the United States (ABC, CBS, DuMont and NBC) offered nightly prime time schedules Monday-Friday.

The networks were “networks” in name only. All of the programming originated live in New York. The only way the networks had to distribute the shows to the rest of the nation was to point a film camera at a television screen and convert video to film.

These 16 mm films, known as kinescopes, were then duplicated and shipped to the few affiliated stations for broadcast later. By necessity, most programming was local, and cooking shows, wrestling and cartoons took up most of the broadcast day.

It wasn’t until fall 1951 when AT&T finished laying a system of coaxial cables from coast to coast, that the networks had enough bandwidth to transmit thousands of telephone calls, as well as television signals, coast to coast.

On Sept. 4, 1951, President Truman gave a speech in San Francisco that was simultaneously broadcast on both coasts. At the end of the month, “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” hosted by Eddie Cantor, became the first network series to originate from the West Coast. The next
month, “I Love Lucy” could transmit its half-hour filmed episodes via the coaxial cable from its Hollywood studio to homes across the country.

In 1952, for the first time, television news broadcast the Republican and Democratic conventions live from Philadelphia to the rest of the nation.

Consumer acceptance of television happened quickly. In 1950, over 10 million were in use. Five years later, over 37 million televisions were in use in America, mostly concentrated in the Northeast.

Cinécraft was a pioneer in the made-for-television film industry. The advent of television broadcasting in the late 1940s provided Cinécraft with its first real competition for American leisure time by offering consumers “movies in the home.”

The studio was one of the first to use three cameras with teleprompters operating in synch with each other to shoot the same movie scene from three different angles.

The studio used the technique when it produced “The Ohio Story,” a TV-series that it produced for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company. Premiering on Oct. 4, 1953, “The Ohio Story TV” lasted nine years, with 175 episodes produced.

Cinécraft was the first to film a TV infomercial. The first infomercial featured William Grover “Papa” Barnard selling Vitamix blenders. The studio assembled many early productions featuring Cleveland-based Louise Winslow, a pioneer in television programming focused
on sewing, cooking and crafts.

A pioneering, five-part series was created for The Austin Company in 1948. It explained how live television was produced and broadcast.

The shows and commercials that Cinécraft Productions produced often featured local talent from the Cleveland Play House, but the company was also able to land some big names from Hollywood and other parts of the country.

The list of actors and other notables who traveled to Cleveland to be in Cinécraft-produced shows included Basil Rathbone, Merv Griffin, Joe E. Brown, Don Ameche, Danny Kaye, Joel Grey, Tim Conway, Ernie Anderson (Ghoulardi) and future United States presidents
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, advertising agencies produced most of the TV programming and the advertising. This allowed for easy blending of ads and entertainment, sensitivity to the sponsor’s concerns, and outright promotion of advertised products as part of the programs themselves.

Cinécraft working with major national ad agencies was an early TV program content producer. In the early years of television, TV stations sometimes rented airtime to an advertiser, who then, working with their ad agency, produced and paid for the programming. “The DuPont Cavalcade of America” (1952-1957) TV drama series is an example.

By the 1950s, stations began moving away from allowing advertisers to create programming to selling ‘participating’ sponsorships in a TV station or network-produced programs.

Tuesday, July 23, 10:30 a.m. | Orchestra Hall
“Cinécraft Productions: The Historic Ohio Film Company Produced by a Love Story”

In this lecture, discover the world of sponsored films through the Hagley Library project to preserve the films of Cinécraft, the country’s longest-standing corporate film & video production house.

Neil McCormick is a retired Executive Producer and Chairman of Cinecraft Productions in Cleveland. McCormick started at Cinécraft in 1976 and became co-owner with his wife,
Maria Keckan, in 1985. He started making films in high school when cameras still had cranks on the side.

In his more than 45 years, McCormick has worked on hundreds of films and other digital media projects. His work has garnered many awards, including Tellies, Cindies, CineGolden Eagles and PRSA Anvils.

The tools of filmmaking have changed over the years, but what has not changed is the need to engage an audience, communicate and tell a story.

Neil McCormick & Jim Culley

Wednesday, July 24, 10:30 a.m. | Orchestra Hall
“The Ohio Story – the Longest-Running Regional Scripted Radio & TV Program in the Country”

“The Ohio Story” won much of its recognition because it sought out little-known but important people and facts in Ohio history, including sharpshooter and exhibition shooter Annie Oakley, famed African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe, President William McKinley, television host and media mogul Merv Griffin, Vickie Claflin, the first woman to run for President, Civil War-era financier, Jay Cooke and cartoonist Milton Canif

Two Films: “Free Wheelin'” & “The Long Ships Passing”

Thursday, July 25, 3:30 p.m. | Orchestra Hall

“Freewheelin’” (1976, color, 21 minutes” was recently restored through a grant to Hagley Museum and Library from the U.S. National Film Preservation Board (NFPB).

The NFPB is a federal agency located within the Library of Congress whose goal is to preserve “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films.”

Vanning is an American phenomenon, an unlikely automotive hobby that swept the nation in the early 1970s and became a kind of youth movement. By the middle of the decade, it peaked in an uproarious crescendo with an annual event known as the National Truck-In.

“Freewheelin’” is a minimally branded documentary about vanning filmed at the July 1976 “4th Annual “National Truck-In” get-together in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which attracted thousands of vans and their owners.

The film was shot in 16 mm but was blown up to 35mm for release as a short, or trailer, in movie theaters.

“Freewheelin’” had the same fancy (expensive) opticals or special effects: split screens and wipes. Visual tricks that today can be done digitally on editing programs on your phone, but back in the film era, it was a time-consuming and expensive undertaking.

The movie features the JTS Band playing “Complications,” “Golden Highway” and “Free Wheelin’.”

“The Long Ships Passing” (1959, 27-minutes) is a color film commissioned by the Lake Carriers Association, a trade association representing shipping companies operating on the Great Lakes.

The movie touted the importance of the large freight carriers that transported limestone, iron ore, coal, grain and salt from mines and fields to industrial centers throughout the lakes.

As the narrator says, “There are no ships like them anywhere in the world.”

The original movie was re-edited with new footage and reissued several times. The film’s production posed a challenge for Cinécraft Productions, the studio making the film, as the Lake Carriers required shots of 23 specific ships, in addition to location shooting throughout the Great Lakes and in some cases on moving vessels.

The film was also challenging because the filming in those days required long set-up times, powerful lights (10,000 watts), bulky and heavy equipment to lug up and down narrow, steep stairs and quiet sets for good sound — a challenge on any stage — but a real challenge on a working freighter.

The film served a need for the Lake Carriers to bolster the Great Lakes shipping industry’s image and “help interest youths in a career on the lakes.”

Two years before the making of the film, a ship called the Carl F. Bradley sank and killed all but two of its crew. Twenty-three of those killed came from the same town of Port Rogers, Michigan.

After the movie was made, two other ships featured in the film sank in terrible storms. The 600-foot-long Great Lakes freighter, SS Daniel J. Morrell, went down in Lake Huron in November 1965. Twenty-eight of 29 crewmen perished. On Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund
Fitzgerald, carrying a full cargo of iron pellets, sank on Lake Superior. Her entire crew of 29 perished. No bodies were ever recovered.

When launched in 1958, the Fitzgerald was the largest of the long ships sailing the Great Lakes, and she remains the largest to have sunk there. Gordon Lightfoot made the Fitzgerald the subject of his 1976 hit song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

It wasn’t only danger that caused a recruiting problem for Great Lakes Carriers. Working on the freighters takes a special kind of person. The days are long — four hours on, eight hours off, seven days a week from April-November, and the life is not conducive to raising a family.

The Association intended to use the film for recruiting and counter the industry’s public perception due to events like the Bradley sinking. According to the film’s proposal, they planned to use it in schools, public relations, legislative programs, conferences, recruiting and the Association’s engineering and navigation schools.

“The Long Ships Passing” was a popular film. Many libraries bought copies, and in the 1950s and 60s, the film was frequently shown, according to newspapers.com. The Association correspondence notes that in the last 10 months of 1960, the film was sent out by the Association to 14 states and the Province of Quebec 170 times with an estimated audience of at least 25,000 people.

Jon Siedel & Jim Culley

Friday, July 26, 10:30 a.m. | Orchestra Hall
“‘But wait! There’s more.’ Papa Bernard & the Making of the First Filmed TV Infomercials”

When you ask TV viewers to name early TV pitchmen and the product advertised in the first TV infomercials, Ron Popeil and the Veg-O-Matic blender, and Ed Valenti, Barry Becher and copywriter Arthur Schiff and their Ginsu knife commercials are usually mentioned.

A digital archive of sponsored films, TV commercials and early TV series produced by Cinécraft Productions in Cleveland shows that credit for creating “But wait! There’s more” “Great Scott… a knife that cuts trees!” “And that’s not all” belongs to others.

Jon Siedel is the son of Frank Siedel, an American novelist, historian, educator and broadcaster. His father wrote over 1,500 movie, radio, and television scripts and three historical novels.

Frank was critical to the survival and success of Cinécraft Productions as the studio evolved to be a nationally recognized sponsored film studio with important clients like DuPont, Standard Oil, Westinghouse and General Electric.

Jon has been a key partner in the Hagley Library project to preserve the films of Cinécraft Productions, the oldest still in business-sponsored film production in the country.

Jim Culley is a movie historian working on the Hagley Library effort to preserve the films and records of Cinecraft Production, a film studio founded by his mother and father in 1939. Jim retired from Hologic, a multibillion-dollar medical equipment company, in 2017. When
he left, he was Senior Director of Corporate Communications. Jim and his wife, Mary, an attorney, live in Newark, Delaware.