--- Station newsfilm and
newsreel footage showed the modern history of South Carolina. WIS-TV's primetime special
beat what the network normally did in the same time period.
--- Old film commissioned by a public agency or private
firm can be very useable. A cache of rare fifty-year-old footage shot to document the
construction of the Golden Gate bridge has gave viewers a chance to see what it was like
when it was built.
"It was excellent," said KTVU-TV Station Manager Brooke Spectorsky.
--- Home movies provided unique insights of life as people
lived it in San Francisco thirty years earlier.
"We have received some amazing material," said KRON-TV's Jan Waldman, Special
Projects Researcher.
Carolina Today: Big Stories Of Yesteryear
In Columbia, WIS-TV told the modern history of its state.
In 1980, the station donated all of its television news
film to the University of South Carolina. The school had also purchased Movietone News
footage. The curator, Jim Jackson, used to be an anchor at WIS. He suggested making a
program out of it.
"The idea is to produce a contemporary South Carolina history," explained Diane
Bagwell, WIS Program/Promotion Manager.
"Everything else you see is in a book. There's really
not much information about the history of our state from the time television was
invented," she said.
They didn't want the film to be sitting in a morgue. She
said they wanted "to bring it to life in a form which would be entertaining and which
people would watch."
Viewing the original footage takes time
It took about a year to go through the material and decide
on the format. The program covered the 1950's through 1984. "It hit on the
headlines," said Bagwell.
They selected the Top 10 stories each year as listed by the
Associated Press.
"It gave us an outline so we wouldn't miss any big stories," she explained. From
that, they looked at the footage which they had. They started culling and deciding what
they wanted to include.
They had events such as Dr. Martin Luther King in Columbia.
There were Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon during the presidential campaign of 1960. Other
stories: the dam being constructed at Lake Murray, a very large man-made lake; sports
highlights through the years; integration; and major weather stories and hurricanes.
The station ran the half-hour show on a Friday night at
8:30 p.m. The program drew a 22 rating and a 37 share --- a rating point higher than what
NBC would have drawn with "Stingray." "It out-performed the network,"
said Bagwell.
The program was sponsored so there was a financial success
as well. A local bank and a car dealership sponsored it and produced nostalgic spots
inside the program to keep in feeling with the theme. One commercial, for example,
featured a 1957 Ford.
Staffers must be enthusiastic for project
"Know your morgue. Know what shape it is in,"
said Bagwell.
If you're going to undertake a project like this, she recommended you find someone who has
been at the station a long time --- or someone who has retired from the station --- to
head up the effort.
>"If you're cutting old film and looking through
reels and reels of it, you need an excellent film editor and an historian," she said.
And, it's important to have the support of station
management. WIS General Manager Dixon Lovvorn actually signed the station on the air in
the 1950's, and was very enthusiastic. The station managers planned to donate the
"Carolina Yesterday programs to school systems or the state, so they could use
contemporary history in video form as a teaching tool.
Golden Gate Bridge Construction Recalled
Many public and private organizations have ordered films produced to
document their accomplishments. This footage can often be utilized.
With San Francisco excited about the fiftieth anniversary of their great
Golden Gate bridge, KTVU-TV in Oakland hit on an important find. They discovered the
original footage which had been shot fifty years earlier for the bridge officials.
When they found it, it was immense. There were six and a half hours of
film. It included the original fund-raising campaign, detailed views of construction, the
ground breaking, and aerials.
"It was in cardboard boxes stored in the basement at the bridge," said Station
Manager Brooke Spectorsky.
It required a long search. Officials didn't know where it was. They
weren't sure if it still existed. It took patience to work through it.
"It was extremely repetitive at times. There's only so much spinning wire you can
watch," he said.
The footage was 35 mm black and white nitrate film.
"The quality was spectacular," said Spectorsky. KTVU had it transferred at a
production house.
Blend Original Footage with Fresh Interviews
Central to their success was blending current interviews with the
vintage film. The original photographer was ninety years old. He was "a fiesty old
guy --- great," according to Spectorsky. Frank Vail could explain exactly what it was
like and had some fine stories to tell.
KTVU ran a four-part news series which set up its prime time special.
Reporter Bob MacKenzie fleshed out the video with several interviews. He talked with an
original cable spinner up on top of the south tower of the bridge. The son of the
supervising engineer had information he had collected from the start of it all.
Spectorsky was happy with the way it all turned out. It pulled a strong response from
viewers. The critics endorsed it, too.
The Station Manager's Advice: "You can find incredible stuff. It
is, however, a rarity to find the quality and quantity which we found here."
Home Movies Document 1950s
Home movies --- the right home movies --- can give you a
glimpse of precious moments of the way people lived and acted in another era.
For their show "San Francisco in the Fifties,"
producers at KRON-TV placed ads in local papers looking for anyone with home movies of
hometown landmarks and life. This was the third program on the colorful history of the Bay
Area.
"It's extremely difficult to get old footage --- let alone footage from our
area," said Jan Waldman, Special Projects Researcher. "We're relying a lot on
old newsreel we have in house. But, we want to see people living in the Bay Area and what
their lives were like. We needed home movies for that," she explained.
Amateur historian had been busy
One man used to read the newspaper every day, and when he
would see what he perceived to be an historical event, he'd go out and shoot it. For
example, the Bay Bridge used to have the lower level devoted to the train system which ran
between San Francisco and Berkeley. On the upper level, there were two lanes of traffic.
In the 1950's, the city stopped the trains and made the lower level automobile traffic,
too.
"As soon as he read this was happening, this man
filmed the traffic going both ways on one level. He was a real historian," said
Waldman.
People filmed typical activities at home
"The stuff we have is priceless. Home movies are
totally different than newsreel footage from that time period. There are couples kissing
and people are doing all kinds of things," she said.
The producers were particularly interested in suburbanization --- people
moving out of the city and into suburbs because of the availability of automobiles. They
were able to get home movies from the Daly City area, one of the first suburbs outside of
San Francisco.
"The footage shows suburban life, with the little backyards," said Waldman.
Another person had footage of the cable cars.
"If you tried to get on a cable car now, you may have to wait for two or three cars
before there was space to get on," she said.
"In those days, the cable cars were just a mode of transportation and they were empty
a lot of the time. The pictures also show the old cars," she added.
They also got home footage of a wedding from the 1950's, which shows
styles and fashions.
"The flavor of the home movies shows a very different
scene than you would see today on the streets of San Francisco. That's what we were trying
to capture," she said.
Movie owners valued their footage
People would call and describe what they had movies of.
"Sometimes they would be of interest to us and sometimes they wouldn't. But I told
every caller to bring them in to the station. You never know what you would end up
finding," she said.
The problem was to convince people to hand over their movies.
"They all personally brought them to me. Nobody wanted to send them through the mail.
They were giving them to me personally. I assured them we would take good care of their
movies, they would be sitting in my office at all times, and I would know where they
were," she said.
"The films were of good quality to start with and we
would carefully screen them," she explained.
The station rented the equipment to transfer the film to tape and did the operation
themselves to maintain quality control.
KRON gave everyone a letter saying the station had taken their movies,
and the station would compensate them for whatever they ended up using --- either a cash
fee, or possibly a VHS copy of what was transferred.
Could yesterday's home movies work for you? We certainly think so --- in
select cases. Waldman felt it had been valuable for her station. The movies which viewers
had shared were genuine.
"It is the 50's and the films show it. They are real people. It could have been my
home movies. It's a wonderful way of giving a flavor of the time period," she said.
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