History By The Minute
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television HISTORY BY THE MINUTE BY MARVIN KITMAN On july 4, 1974, television history was made. The first in a widely-hailed series of 732 documentaries on a single subject, the American...
...Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy...
...Monty Hall, the game show wheeler-dealer...
...As patient a man as I am, I have to confess the vague feeling that there is less to it than meets the eye...
...Actually, the mini-doc is not that new an idea...
...186 in Brooklyn either...
...The American Bicentennial," he told an Associated Press reporter in one of the dozen laudatory articles written about his endeavor, "is a new subject that demands a different format to celebrate it...
...The Bicentennial Minute has been running in prime time, usually at the conclusion of the eight o'clock entertainment show...
...The essence of Freedman's genius is that he realized the amount of learning the public could take at one sitting had doubled in only three years...
...The third hundred batch we are now watching has more graphics, the last technique for pepping up TV information...
...Sticking to the script, he read a letter Washington had written at the time...
...Louis Jourdan, spokesman for the Florist Association...
...It did not sell...
...I'm sure the CBS moguls were relieved that Heston didn't say, "When I parted the bullrushes . . . good grief, I'm at the wrong bicentennial...
...My heart goes out to the poor Shell Oil Company, however, for allowing itself to be talked into sponsoring this desecration of history...
...A different celebrity will serve as narrator for every one of the mini-history lessons...
...Yet one continues to feel, after the newer and more visual minute goes by, "Who cares...
...and Graham Kerr, the revolting Australian gourmet...
...There is no dramatic tension, nor are the thrilling events really linked together...
...Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) has told us about the founding mother, Martha Washington, and her secret recipe for keeping cherries fresh ("Keep them under a featherbed, where one lays continuously...
...It also wasn't clear whether George Washington was bringing us a Shell Oil commercial, or vice versa...
...would give the wrong answer today...
...Could there be some conspiracy afoot to prevent the viewers from finding out that we actually had a revolution...
...an episode has a life-expectancy of only 24 hours...
...Lewis Freedman, I have learned through the sourgrape vine at CBS, not long ago quietly jumped or fell from power as the project's producer...
...The irony is that it is not even an American company, but Dutch...
...My favorite came in July, when a Colonial soldier was shown standing in the snow while the narrator intoned, "And that's the way it was, on July " (I was never any good at remembering dates in history classes at P.S...
...Never before has the birth of a nation been celebrated in such a revolutionary manner...
...The last 30 seconds were set aside for a commercial message...
...The saddest thing is that each show ends with the phrase "That's the way it was," which happens to be the title of the Mobil Oil sports series on public television...
...Over the months, the list of narrators' names has been truly dazzling...
...But most of the episodes, no matter what the day in history, tend to look alike, and the viewer's reaction can't help but be, "So what...
...I guess Professors Miller and Morris were on sabbatical during that particular minute...
...Like "Platformate XI-100...
...But I'm a patient person...
...He has been replaced by another luminary of television drama, Robert Markel...
...But my reaction to that first Minute, starring Charlton Heston and George Washington-as you will surely recall-was that it wasn't exactly the greatest story ever told...
...The productions are remarkable for television because there can be no reruns...
...But at the risk of being labeled trigger-happy and a false-alarmist, I would like to suggest what is wrong with the momentous undertaking...
...The first in a widely-hailed series of 732 documentaries on a single subject, the American Bicentennial, was presented on CBS at 8:58 p.m...
...it is planned disappearance...
...I don't feel too sorry for the viewer, who has been misled and abused so much by TV that he's used to it...
...At this rate, what we will have been given after all is said and scrapped is a back-of-the-hand treatment of the bicentennial that may satisfy some network president's conscience...
...Of course, there had to be some fascinating moments in the Revolutionary era, especially when presented in the famed CBS You Are There style...
...In fact, at the end of a hundred or so episodes, I began to conclude that a minute may be too long...
...You would be amazed at the number of people who, if asked "Which President was the George Washington Bridge named after...
...Afflictions no less serious than, say, bad breath can be identified, a best friend can advise the proper solution, and the offending individual can live happily ever after-all within the confines of a one minute commercial...
...True, one pleasant result of the marathon serial is that it adds a lot of dignity to the station break, heretofore a cultural disaster area...
...The project was proposed at a vulnerable time back in 1974, when there was an energy crisis accompanied by an excess-of-obscene-profits crisis...
...Somebody at Ogilvy and Mather, Shell's advertising agency, must have advised, "Here's an opportunity to sink $9 million into a worthy cause that will give CBS an $8.5 million profit...
...And anybody who can't tell the story of a bicentennial in 12 hours just isn't much of a communicator...
...I'll bet the "don't knows" would be impressive, too...
...It's a shame that Shell's ad agency couldn't have come up with a better tag line...
...Two distinguished scholars were reportedly serving as advisors: John C. Miller, Edgar E. Robinson, Professor of American History at Stanford University, and Richard B. Morris, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University...
...Irving Wallace, the author...
...After years of meritorious achievement at New York's Channel 13, he was cast into the wastebasket of worthy talent during one of the many palace revolutions that have taken place in that crucible of innovation...
...For 60 seconds, or less time than it usually takes the Waltons to say goodnight to each other, viewers were able to get a short glimpse of our glorious past...
...It takes courage to be so topical in a medium where even commercials for new cars take a year to become obsolete...
...In the opening installment, Charlton Heston told us what George Washington happened to be doing on July 4, 1774...
...Paul Revere himself would be hard-pressed to make it from the couch to the dial before an installment was over...
...A 60-second presentation has the advantage of being too short to turn off...
...Most of the segments since that first week in July have bored the hell out of me...
...I. Magination show in the '50s and his Tubby the Tuba children's records...
...Freedman, most recently the producer of the educational network's Hollywood Television Theatre, is credited with selling CBS on the commercial-length documentaries...
...But this is more than just planned obsolescence...
...The tendency is to resist learning about the past in any context other than postage stamps or bridges...
...True, there is more than a year left to whip the show into shape...
...Eddie Albert gave the impression that he was reciting a page from the Koran...
...Voluminous research material has been assembled to guarantee the series' historical fidelity," a CBS press release boasted...
...Certainly that didn't seem to be likely in the case of the founding father of the project, Lewis Freedman, who was also an early promoter of drama on educational TV...
...The program ended at 8:59...
...The greatest difficulty is finding a way to reach an audience whose only association with the subject has been in school...
...By July 4, 1976, I told myself, the combined episodes will add up to more than 12 hours of programing...
...Though we may have come to expect too much from television, 1 see no reason why history cannot be taught in daily bursts...
...John-Boy Walton (Richard Thomas) has talked about another young writer, Alexander Hamilton...
...The mini-documentary form being used by CBS reflects the spirit of the times rather well...
...Each show in this ambitious project, titled Bicentennial Minutes, is limited to a discussion-a rather short one-about what happened on that particular day 200 years ago in Colonial America...
...Other star lecturers have included: Gail Fisher, a secretary on "Man-nix...
...He then organized a crack team of professional researchers to go through the literature of the period for his brainchild...
...George was working around the house at Mount Vernon, and July 4 wasn't even a holiday yet...
...Nobody at CBS seems to recognize that the tale of the Revolution is not going anywhere...
...As a matter of fact, in the electronic age that is a rather long time...
...And only a scoundrel would claim he couldn't spare a minute to learn more about a history that took 200 years to produce...
...Some social scientists contend that as a result of watching TV, most viewers have a brief attention span...
...But these are only petrodollars, so one can't cry too long...
...In the summer of 1971, ABC Films made a pilot for a series of one minute lessons titled Uncle Sam's Family Album, It consisted of a 30-second discussion about great events in American history narrated by Paul Tripp, best known for his Mr...
...In addition, the vast majority of illustrious narrators appear to be giving their history lessons as if they were reading their Bar Mitzvah speeches...
...It wasn't very much of a day, although Heston described it in his most ominous, bringing-home-the-tablets-from-the-mountain style...
...I know purists will ask, "What can you do on TV in only 60 seconds...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 6
