Lost in the Sand
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television LOST IN THE SANDS BY MARVIN KITMAN Nothing Abba Eban narrates on Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (Monday, 9 p.m. EST), WNET/13's monumental nine-part miniseries airing October...
...But they didn't let Eban walk around...
...In the beginning there was the Charles H. Revson Foundation...
...That's exactly what they didn't want to do, however...
...I missed Charlton Heston," one of the more unkind critics said...
...It is also necessary on big, expensive public TV miniseries to justify the travel expenses...
...The producers should have known better than to try to make an actor of him...
...It is a miracle the project was completed at all, something that could be said of any WNET/13 undertaking...
...He had soul...
...The camera cuts him off at the waist most of the time, so it is hard to say whether he is moving or not...
...One desert looks like another...
...At least they didn't turn him into Dr...
...Where is it written that he has to do stand-ups...
...Carl Sagan...
...I found myself getting lost in the desert, the way my ancestors did before me...
...That's what is missing from Eban's narration...
...If ever a program was destined to be an audio-visual aid for the ages it is "The Abba Eban Show...
...Imagine the pitch that had to be made to these different groups, each of whom no doubt wanted to put in its two cents...
...These explain the reports I keep hearing of the internal station battles everybody fought and lost over what to do with the first episode...
...There is a feeling coming off the screen that somebody was worried about Abba Eban's appearance on TV...
...If they had to take Eban out on location and incur great expense, they should have sat him down at a cafe near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and given him a glass of tea and an open mike...
...It has brought us those auctions, an hour of McNeil/ Lehrer, pledge drives lasting longer than the old commercial interruptions, and Mobil's Herbie Schmertz...
...But in the few moments that my street education was interrupted by such acts of God as snow and rain, I was forced into the house of learning where they taught us the Hebrew alphabet and history...
...They bounced ideas off her, asking if Eban would look better in a caftan or British Army shorts...
...They should be examined on The Brain, that other WNET/13 effort finally appearing this fall after many exhausting years of fundraising...
...The mistakes in the conceptualization and production are mindboggling, in fact...
...When he opens his mouth, though, he is a magician...
...The show wound up with —count them—75 underwriters...
...Especially one that makes it seem that civilization began with the Jews, ended with the Moslems, and whatever else happened in between didn't count...
...That is generally the most important installment, and here there are too many sand shots...
...His knowledge of the subject and general brilliance would have done the rest...
...And they will be...
...In the first few episodes Eban is almost always standing in front of a wall...
...Smoke was coming out of my ears from time to time during Abba Eban's opening lecture accompanying the shots of the various sights...
...I was bilingual at the time, speaking both Pennsylvanian and Brooklynese, and I didn't learn Hebrew in either language...
...A news producer once told me of interviewing Eban on a dry subject, archeology...
...Or maybe they did...
...I keep hearing more things about that concern on the part of the program makers...
...They had a man who has written a book about Jewish history, who is one of the world's great conversationalists...
...You knew he was talking out of a lifetime of research and experience...
...Usually they have the narrators strolling around...
...He looks like the distinguished diplomat and scholar he is...
...But I never understood the small Torah section I finally managed to read, or how it fitted into the larger story Abba Eban has now recorded for television...
...It reminds me of how I felt as a kid listening to Winston Churchill's radio broadcasts during the War...
...It's not for dedicated nonlearners...
...and a lifeless one at that...
...What we needed was one man's Heritage, a personal interpretation...
...Quell vocel It is as if the English language had been created for him...
...He looks like a penguin with a British accent...
...You might think this had something to do with the notion that miniseries are not taken seriously unless they have a colon...
...Jacob Bron-owski also took time to get used to, but his Ascent of Man (1975) soon proved captivating...
...What they did to him is a shanda...
...If you make a phone call or go to the john, you miss 300-400 years...
...The people who gave us lip gloss and Charley perfume gave Civilization and the Jews seed money...
...Yet as great an accomplishment as the existence of Civilization and the Jews may be, there are matters of content and style that one might raise, if so inclined...
...Thank God for little favors...
...The original (Jewish) investors were extremely upset about the colon, not having paid for a colon series...
...We have the footage and by God we are going to use it, some producer probably said...
...The tragic misuse of Abba Eban alone in his debut as a series host would be an entire episode...
...The man is also extremely charming and remarkably knowledgeable...
...No cue cards...
...Then they hired a fashion consultant, a noted costume designer, and went downtown to her Soho loft for important talks...
...He was hypnotic...
...Congratulations, WNET/13...
...Well, PBS is not called the Petroleum Broadcasting System for nothing...
...He is standing in front of a wall in Jerusalem, in this city, in that city...
...As it turns out, his debut as a narrator has none of the charm and eloquence of the original Eban...
...Yet here they actually gave him a script—written by John Sharnik (who...
...The pictures that were shot should have been used to illustrate his remarks, not vice versa, as was done...
...Still, his face would be interesting on TV if it were lit properly...
...Maybe Abba is not classically handsome...
...That approach worked for Kenneth Clark on Civilization (1970): We accepted Lord Clark, despite his speech problems, because the shortcomings in presentation were mitigated by his sharing his own view with us...
...You can hear why people who worked at the UN in the late '40s and early' 50s used to drop everything to listen to him...
...Next to the history of the Jewish people, Abba Eban was the show's biggest attraction for me...
...Russians, Arabs and everybody else found excuses to be in the General Assembly when Eban was scheduled to speak...
...Previewing the tapes of the whole series, it struck me that because the premiere tried to cover so much ground— 3,000 years—there was a lack of focus and everything became dense...
...Financing this one was an achievement that will live in the annals of creativity...
...they would make an intriguing miniseries...
...Many times, starting at Hebrew school, where I was one of the worst students in history—"in three millenniums," the rabbi told me...
...The inadequacies of the show makers are apparent throughout...
...I've heard it all before...
...It is said to add life or kick or something to the scenery all over the world...
...He was asked five questions and responded off the top of his head for a half hour nonstop...
...It was a brilliant tour de force, all usable, sentences perfect and paragraphed...
...She wisely said they should let him be himself...
...EST), WNET/13's monumental nine-part miniseries airing October 1-November 19, is news to me, of course...
...His unadulterated Cam-bridgese, foreign-sounding in some so-called English-speaking countries such as America and TV land, always gives me a thrill...
...You have to pay attention...
...You can draw blood from a stone, too...
...It makes very few for a major educational television outlet, and the producers apparently have to relearn how every time...
...What we have been given is a scattershot, whole-history-of-everything survey that makes the facts hard to follow...
...Nobody could be less dedicated to pure or impure knowledge than I was when I emigrated from Finleyville to Bensonhurst, descending on the cheder like the 11th plague...
...The former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations and the United States is probably the least photogenic person ever to appear on the tube...
...Produced in only seven years, the miniseries is spoken of with awe...
...Whether it is The Adams Chronicle or The Brain, each series virtually bankrupts the New York station...
...Actually, I spent most of my afternoons in the '40s studying punchball, stickball, boxball, and ball-ball...
...No discussion of the finished product would be complete without a reference to the evolution of the title, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews...
...Even better, instead of putting him up against all those walls they should have let him stay home in his book-lined library to tell the history of the Jews as he saw it...
...I hope Channel 13's financial aid officer kept transcripts...
...Kids today are lucky...
...That roll of foundations, corporations and other eleemosynary organizations sets a new record for public television...
...Crab grass grew while the producers were raising the rest of the multimillion dollar budget (which also kept growing, to around 60 per cent more than the $6.9 million they are admitting to...
...The first part was a late addition...
...They have the opportunity of being forced to watch Heritage: Civilization and the Jews...
...The result would have been a much livelier, more focused series...
...We also read the Torah, especially the part needed for Bar Mitzvah—which meant graduation at age 13 from the prison, as I used to think of this place I had to go to every day after public school...
...I had the pleasure of seeing him live, so to speak, during a WNET/13 promotion junket to Ellis Island this summer...
...The ordeal of raising money is one of the 10 plagues of public broadcasting...
...The reason for the change, though, was more invidious: Heritage: Civilization and the Moslems is on its way...
...For instance, there were discussions about putting Abba in robes, or a safari jacket...
...He's staring at cue cards...
...Could this be the Arabs and oil money at work...
...What a treat he is going to be on TV, I thought...
...Whenever God is mentioned, up pops a picture of the Negev...
...This was not only wrong, it was stupid...
Vol. 67 • September 1984 • No. 17
