Breakfast All Day Podcast 9/11/20
The world is on fire — literally — but we’re here to protect you, or at least distract you, at Breakfast All Day. On our latest episode, Matt, Alonso and I review the completely charming romantic comedy “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” the Helen Reddy biopic “I Am Woman,” the enlightening documentary “The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show,” and “Unpregnant,” which is sort of a comic version of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.” But it works! (And I love the fact that women directed all four movies we reviewed this week.) In news, I tell the boys about my trip to see “Tenet,” and we discuss the Toronto International Film Festival and the Academy’s new diversity requirements for best-picture contenders. And over at our Patreon, we recap the latest episodes of “Lovecraft Country” and “The Vow” on HBO. Stay safe, and thanks for staying with us.
I hope you guys review the hbo-max documentary “class action park”
Greetings from Seattle. That piece of information is relevant to your discussion of tapes of early TV shows getting erased.
In the early days of TV there was only a single “cable” from New York to Los Angeles that could be used to get shows from the east coast to the west coast. To get network shows to Seattle they were filmed off of a TV set in LA, flown to Seattle, then played the same way TV stations then played movies. (The process is called Kinescope, if you are wondering.)
As a result, a whole bunch of 16 MM movies of early TV shows ended up in Seattle. These spent a few years piling up in storage at a local TV station (KING, if you care). At some point it was decided to throw them out but one of the station engineers took them home and stored them in his garage instead. This trove is where much of the little that survives from early TV comes from.
More on point, when Johnny Carson found out that NBC was erasing the video tapes of “The Tonight Show” in order to save a pittance, he got a clause added to his next contract. It gave him ownership of the tapes and the broadcast rights to the shows. That’s the reason later years of his show can be purchased for “four easy payments”.
Eventually, executives figured out that these tapes really were valuable. But that was years after Carson did his deal. And, if you want to know why there is a lot of Carson around but no Jack Parr, now you know.