I need a recap as to why some people are so sure this was a photoplay awards 11/11/70 event and the pic was taken at NBC Burbank???
After 1968 there was a switch in photoplay awards and they just started giving out a gold medal award to certain catagories; i.e. it was no big deal anymore. In 1971, the photoplay gold medal award was presented on the Glen Campbell show and he was wearing a tux.
Starting in 1971, Johnny Carson hosted a few years of the Emmy shows. In all lists of Tonight Show episodes, 11/11/70 is blank. There are other pics floating around of all guests wearing tuxes on the tonight show for various occasions.
The mm has lightish hair. He is over 30 and under 60. The ‘boot’ is a photo artifact. The rug crawls up the couch leg or it is something else. The man is not Robert Peter Richman or whatever his name is. What have I left out?
So? Maybe there was another segment after this one. But the evidence is totally compelling. We know that on November 11, 1970 the Tonight Show hosted the winners of the Photoplay awards. Named in the listing is every single identified person in the photo. Then we have an undated photo that we’ve managed to trace to somewhere between 1969 and 1972, with the same guests, and all wearing formal wear as if they came from some kind of special occasion. And as far as I know, no one has turned up another tonight show from that era that has even half of these guests on it.
And of the other awards shows, you can’t find one where all the people in the shot actually won. I posted a couple of them where all the people in the shot won or were nominated, but that’s a stretch because why would nominees who failed to win be invited into the show? It’s possible, but now that we know of another event in the same year where they all won, it is much more likely. Couple that with the listing that shows all of these people, and it’s pretty much a slam-dunk, if you ask me.
Occam’s razor says that this is an image from the Nov 11, 1970 episode with the Photoplay award winners. Our best hope for identifying that guy is to track down whatever information we can find on those awards - find out everyone who won, who the major producers of the show were, perhaps the editor of the magazine at the time, etc.
I think that’s crazy. To summarize your theory: Someone went to the trouble of very carefully doctoring a photograph to insert a ‘mystery man’, then went to the trouble of hacking the archives of multiple small newspapers and laboriously inserting a fake listing into the images of old newpaper listings for this show, excluding the mystery man but including all the other guests.
This person then slyly injected the photo somewhere where it would be picked up by someone on the internet. And for what? In the hope that people would be curious about the man and start a big internet meme? And that people would be so motivated to find out who he was that they would start searching newspaper archives and find his cleverly faked listings?
It’s a completely crazy theory. But just for yucks, I loaded the image in Photoshop and inspected it very carefully, and I can’t see any signs of photo tampering whatsoever. If it’s a fake, it’s world-class.
What we know and don’t know, as far as I can see at the moment:
BURBANK: We are probably safe in assuming this IS Burbank, because this was the set used for the “occasional stints in California” that the Tonight Show filmed before the May, 1972 permanent move from New York City to Burbank. There does seem to be photographic and filmed evidence of the set being used pre-1972. (One source: Johnny Carson - Wikipedia )
1970: We are simply assuming this from the fact that so many people in the photo DID win Emmy awards at the June 7, 1970 “22nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards.”
Contradicting “1970” (possibly) is the photo someone posted of Carol Burnett in identical hairdo and chocker, dated 1965. I’m not sure how well-sourced that is, but perhaps the person who posted it can come back and let us know.
11 November 1970: In my view this is EXTREMELY shaky, given that it’s based on relatively obscure (and in some cases out-of-business) newspaper “listings.” Listings from better-known papers would have been more difficult to hack or spoof, and that’s why (I believe) we see only the obscure/out-of-business ones. In other words, I’m suggesting that the LACK of such listings from better-known sources is evidence that they’ve been faked. (More on this in my post #215, at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17340245#post17340245
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Glen Campbell: You mention that a tuxedo-clad GC gave out the Photoplay Gold Medal in 1971 on his show. (Source on that?) He’s not in a tuxedo in our photo–why wouldn’t he be?
PHOTOPLAY AWARDS: This seems really iffy. On what were we basing the idea that this photo is related to Photoplay Awards?
A search of Photoplay “Gold Medal Award for 1971” brings up 14 hits that all seem to stem from a Wikipedia article on Christopher Mitchum, son of Robert and would-be politician. As we all know, Wikipedia can be edited. Is this award fictitious? If not, why isn’t more evidence available?
Photoplay, the magazine, began in 1911. A 1971 anniversary celebration of some kind seems plausible, but surely some evidence of it (if it happened) would have been uploaded to the Internet.
Note also that there was not a full card of Photoplay Award winners (such as the Emmy awards for comedy show, drama show, comedy actor, drama actor, directors, writers, etc.) at any point. There was, at most, a Most Popular Male Star, Most Popular Female Star, and Gold Medal movie winner…and THAT ended in 1968.
I continue to think someone might have found a real photo of some of the participants and added in others. Given that poor beleaguered Peter Mark Richman says people have been bugging him about this for years, the photo manipulation might have been done…well, a few years ago. Perhaps some enterprising hoaxer decided to provide support for a theory by producing the “TV listings” in the aforementioned obscure newspapers…and here we are.
If you’re going to cite the Syracuse Post-Standard, Independent Press-Telegram, Bridgeport Post, and Daily Kennebed Journal…
…then how do you explain that the “listing” appears only in these relatively obscure publications, and NOT in The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, etc. etc.?
Willow2Us or Lee H. ( his real name) posted the first net appearance of this photo on fan pop and he says he got it from ‘some movie magazine’. I have to believe he is telling the truth. It would be so easy to theorize that somehow it is a photoshopped or altered scam but it isn’t unless someone duped the movie magazine back then.
When we look at the floor we need to see the floor, not molecules.
This link reproduces the TV listings that were apparently in the Eastern Virginia version of TV Guide for Nov 11, 1970.
This is what the site lists for The Tonight Show that night:
Now, that site doesn’t link to an image of the actual TV guide, but it’s in a discussion from 2011. So unless the hoaxer has had this in the pipeline for three years, I would take that as authentic.
Movie magazines routinely altered photos. Additionally, they bought many photos from stringers (as opposed to having all pics taken by their own staff, as is more likely for modern magazines such as “People.”)
Certainly the editors wouldn’t have set out to create a Fake Event (or at least it’s implausible that they’d do so). But they might have unknowingly bought and printed a photo that they failed to verify in all its details.
I believe that it would be far too much effort to go to in hopes of kicking off an internet meme. It would be very hard for the schemer to even know that anyone would care about this image. It just stretches credulity - especially when the explanation given doesn’t need any kind of conspiracy theory. Johnny had a show for the Photoplay award winners, and we have a picture showing those people. There’s nothing strange about this, other than that we can’t identify one person in the shot.
There’s simply no reason whatsoever to go for a conspiracy theory or a ‘hoax’ theory, and there’s no evidence for it at all, other than that you managed to concoct a tale for what could have happened.
Now, at the risk of feeding the conspiracy theory, I have to point out that the listing from the newspaper for the Tonight show says that the guests are the winners of the 50th annual photoplay awards, but the 50th annual awards were in 1971, not 1970. So the listing must be wrong, at least in that regard. Or the article I just linked to is wrong, or the people running the awards decided to have two ‘50th year’ celebrations.
From what I can tell, the real Photoplay and the real Photoplay awards ended in 1968. After that, the magazine merged with another. I’m guessing that these ‘Photoplay’ awards in the 1970’s were a publicity stunt - an attempt to get the magazine back in the news, but the awards weren’t taken very seriously. The Internet Movie Database doesn’t even list those awards for these people. But they existed - you can find all kinds of references to Photoplay awards in the 1970’s, including a site where you can purchase a video of the entire 1978 photoplay awards show.
It would be a mistake to take it as an authentic reproduction of what was actually in a TV Guide from the period. For one thing, Photoplay began in 1911. The 50th anniversary would have been in 1961.
For another, notice that most of the shows listed contain no description at all. That is not the case for actual “TV Guide” listings of the period, as can be seen from pages reproduced online, as at Old Time NY Area TV: Image
From this two-page spread, you can see that the poster in your linked message board has simply typed some show titles–rather than reproducing “TV Guide” (as claimed).
(The poster adds a few editorial comments here and there, which are kind of funny, as in
10 PM Dan August (unsuccessful in its original run, it was a smash
hit when CBS reran it in 1973, by which time Burt Reynolds
had become a superstar)
…But the poster is NOT reproducing “TV Guide” listings. So we can take what we find there with a rather large grain of salt.
So now the hoaxer added a fake person to a photo (before photoshop) so seamlessly as to make it impossible to see the changes, and sold it to a movie magazine 43 years ago, in the hopes that one day a thing called the internet would come along and it would drive a few people on a future message board a little crazy for a while?
Or maybe he altered the photo then for some other reason, then realized 40 years later that someone might wonder who the guy in the picture was and went about hacking into obscure newspaper sites and modifying the TV listings, just to throw people off the trail or something?
Perhaps you need to spell out exactly what you think the hoax is, and why someone might have done it. ‘Just to mess with people’ isn’t really very useful, as you can trot that out any time anyone can’t be identified in a photo, or for any other mystery. You need some kind of motive, and you need some evidence that leads to the hoax as a reasonable explanation, other than that you managed to concoct a story. Anyone can do that for anything.
To be straight: That photo is not doctored. It’s certainly not doctored with any technology available in the 1970’s, and I see no evidence that it was doctored in photoshop or any other digital tool. Likewise, the TV archives online are actual images from that time, and there’s no evidence that they were doctored either. And the ‘logic’ behind the hoax makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s not a hoax. It’s an example of how sketchy information can be in the pre-internet era. That’s what makes it maddening, but much of our history from back then is lost. Many of the episodes of the early Carson show are gone forever. Many magazine articles are gone forever. Small time awards shows or poorly documented Hollywood events may exist only in fragments or not at all. That’s just the way it is.
Jesus. So now that guy is in on the conspiracy too? Three years ago? Or we’ve identified the hoaxer? Or maybe someone hacked that message board and inserted a message that just looks like it’s three years old, just to mess with the people on the SDMB?
And yes, TV guide often did not list the contents of the show. I’m old enough to have used TV guide as a resource for decades. Many shows had no description - either because the networks didn’t provide them, or because TV guide made an editorial decision that the description wasn’t helpful, or whatever.
That’s still true today, BTW. On my DVR, some upcoming shows have descriptions, and some don’t.
I mentioned the anniversary of the magazine itself to answer potential questions as to “why 1971”. (As in: ‘1971 WAS an anniversary year, given that the magazine began in 1911.’)
I’m a bit mystified by your continued insistence that there is a “conspiracy.” What’s your source on that? Why do you think it makes sense to claim “conspiracy”?
As far as I can see, you’re the only person in the thread who is using the term. What’s up with that?
You might find interesting this Time article “Top 10 Doctored Photos: Photographers Have Been Manipulating Imagery Since the Medium Was Invented” at
Why can’t it be both?
The sketchiness of what’s available promotes all sorts of mischief and re-writing of history (as in the doctored photos in the Time article). It’s good and useful for us to be reminded of the gaps—and more importantly, of the use that can be made of those gaps. And this Mystery Man Challenge is really driving that lesson home in a memorable way.
It’s good to be skeptical. It’s good to question information that can be found only in obscure, hackable sources when it should be just as available in sources-of-record. It’s good, in general, to ask “why do we think we know what we think we know?”
Look at actual pages from “TV Guide” of the period. (An image search for “TV Guide page” is at "TV Guide page" - Google Search
Actual pages provide better evidence as to the quality of the match of your message-board-link (with the typed ‘tv listings’) to the actual 1970/71-era TV Guide, than do your memories.
(And much better evidence than is provided by your observations about DVRs.)
The bottom line: it doesn’t make sense to take what someone has typed on a message board as being Actual Proof Of What Was In The TV Guide For Date ______.
What people type isn’t proof of anything (except that they can type, I guess).
