Come of Age

When TV first became mass entertainment three years ago, nobody had a very clear idea what to do with it. "We started out on TV peeking through a keyhole at a Broadway revue," says Max Liebman, producer of Your Show of Shows (Sat. 9 p.m., NBC-TV). When Liebman put on his first TV revue in 1949, dancers practiced in a bare room off Broadway; skits were worked out in cubbyhole offices and washrooms. Liebman's show went on the air without a camera rehearsal and from the stage of a theater. Curtains opened & closed for each number. The camera looked straight ahead. If there were more than five dancers together on the viewer's screen, they looked like a subway mob at rush hour.

Dollies & Process. This week, as Liebman produced his 97th TV revue, television had a lot more technical experience. Liebman's 80-man staff spreads over five floors of a Manhattan building. A $250,000 musical library fills a room nearly as large as his original office. Twelve arrangers, orchestraters and copyists turn out the scores for one week's show. Its half-dozen sponsors pay $150,000 a week to put the show on the air. Last month Liebman built the interior of a submarine at a cost of $2,000, then used the set for only 72 minutes in a Sid Caesar sketch.

Director Bill Hobin uses cranes, dollies and ramps to move his five cameras up & down, back & forth, this way & that. A wide-angle lens can catch as many as ten dancers and eight singers in a single shot without having them trample each other or clutter the screen; the zoom-type lens moves from long shots to close-ups with a breathtaking rush and without loss of focus. With process shots (filmed backgrounds), Hobin can shoot scenes that look like Paris, Tokyo, the Taj Mahal or a Venetian canal.

Scoops & Baffles. Liebman's actors, now TVeterans, have survived the harsh lights of early TV and, thanks to the new orthicon camera tube, which makes a clearer picture possible with less light, use little make-up and fewer aspirins.

But for singers and musicians, things have not improved so much. If the musicians play loud enough for a singer to hear them distinctly, they may find themselves playing too loud for televiewers to hear anything else. Soprano Marguerite Piazza has to go it alone in her operatic arias, trusting Music Director Charles Sanford to follow her lead. Sanford, trying to outwit ricocheting echoes, wages continuous war with tricky acoustics; he has hung the theater with painted canvas, shellacked beaverboard, velvet draperies and soundproofed scoops and baffles. TV music has become more a question of artful deception than full-bodied playing. Says Sanford: "When the score calls for an aggressive style of music, we sound aggressive but we don't play aggressive."

Theater to Come. Liebman believes that TV's technical advances will doom such contemporary makeshifts as remodeled theaters and reconditioned warehouses. He has already blueprinted the ideal TV theater of the future: "It will be a big, empty building measuring 100 by 100 feet, with bleachers at one end for a small audience. One large area will have a 180DEG cyclorama to form a permanent background for sets and create a genuine illusion of curving space." There should also be a separate property building connected to half a dozen subsidiary studios and a large back lot for outdoor sets. Some of the twelve to 14 cameras will fly overhead on electrically operated cranes; others will peer through trap doors in the studio floor for ant's-eye glimpses of the action. "With a setup like that," says Liebman, "we can put on a 'live' TV movie in an hour."

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