I was recently speaking to a TV writer from the 1950’s who told me about an interesting process, but I have questions that we can’t figure out (he doesn’t remember all the details).
He says they used to shoot the show he worked on at NBC in Burbank, and it’d be broadcast live to NY, not not live to LA (was too early in the day). In NY, they’d use the wet kinescope technique – basically pointing a film camera at a live tv monitor and recording the image – and then they’d rush the film via motorcycle to an NBC owned airplane. The plane would fly to the west coast while the film was developed ON THE PLANE (how cool is that?!), and that it’d land in LA, another motorcycle would bring it to Burbank, and it’d be aired locally in the same time slot as the east coast show.
But how is that possible? Even today, it takes 4-5 hours to fly across the country in most airplanes, and with a 3-hour coast-to-coast time difference, there’d be no way to air the show in the same timeslot. A few hours later, sure.
Were there faster private jets in the 50’s that could accomplish this? Or does anyone have any additional information on this process?
No, planes were slower in the 1950s because most were props. Private jets didn’t really take off (har!) until the introduction of the Lear Jet in the early 1960s.
I suspect your source is conflating a couple different concepts. Before the widespread use of videotape recorders in the mid-1950s, the only way to repeat a program in the same time slot on the West Coast was to perform it live all over again. That was done on some shows for a while, I believe.
But coaxial cables connected the coasts from the early 1950s on, making simultaneous broadcasts possible, and eliminating any possible reason for flying a kinescope print across country. According to Wikipedia:
I have no hard information, but there very likely were airborne labs that could process film from some news site while carrying it to a broadcast location. News footage from Europe, for instance, might have been handled this way, since it wasn’t until well after Telstar (IIRC) that simultaneous transatlantic broadcasts became common. There were coaxial cables from 1956, but I’m pretty sure they were much more expensive to use than the transcontinental ones connecting the U.S. coasts, and weren’t used for TV as often.
In short, I think your source was confused, and I don’t believe that it would have been possible (or necessary) to use the combination of techniques you’ve described to achieve that goal.
There’s also the point that the prevailing winds are west-to-east, which adds to the travel time (in winter, jetstream winds can be over 100 kts). There is no subsonic plane that could reliably do this trip in anything like 3 hours.
Instead of broadcasting to NY, filming in NY and flying the film to LA, why didn’t they simply film in Burbank, as the show was being broadcast?
I’ve heard numerous accounts of radio programs being done in this manner, but I don’t believe that I’ve heard this about television.
One item that could be causing the confusion is that, before the coaxial cable reach Los Angeles, kinescopes of programs with a New York/Chicago/Other origin were shipped to Los Angeles (as was done for all sites off the cable), but not for same-day broadcast.
Mainly because in the 1950s NYC was the center of nearly all aspects of the entertainment industry except film production. Radio and theater, both of which were the main sources of talent for the nascent TV industry, were largely headquartered in New York. (Don’t forget that in 1950, NYC was the largest city in the world, with 12 million, compared to a measly 3 million for L.A. IIRC, it remained the largest city in the country until sometime in the 1970s, when greater L.A. surpassed it.)
You know, after I wrote that it occurred to me that I might have been thinking of radio, not TV. And since the coaxial cables were available from the early 1950s, and the kinescope option could be used, the live repeats might never have become routine. But I’d wager that, at least for less complex productions, it must have happened a few times in the early days.
I wish I had a cite for this, but I think your friend is mis-remembering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952.
There was no transatlantic coaxial cable or satellite at that time, so film of the coronation was flown across the Atlantic to be broadcast in N. America.
According to this site the film was flown on an RAF Canberra, a military jet. However, I’ve also heard that one of the networks (either NBC or CBS) also shot its own film, equipped a plane with a film processor and flew it across the Atlantic directly, beating the “official” plane.
All the more reason, you’d think, to shoot the film in CA, where the show is being performed, where the film can be developed, and where the film is needed.
My point was that most of the performing was being done in NY, not LA, because that’s where the performers lived. Traveling across the country before the jet age was an ordeal that took the better part of a day, not just five hours.
ETA: Sorry, I just realized I misunderstood your post. By “film production” I meant the movies, as opposed to TV, theater, and radio. I didn’t mean processing kinescopes. They processed plenty of film in NYC in the 1950s; it didn’t have to be done in LA.