INT: So let me ask you, before I go into the history, what's going on right now? Are things particularly crazy?
AB: It's calming down now actually. It had been. [INT: What was it like, what it like in terms of what it used to be like, and what it is now? What was the...] Going back to early days of television? Where it's, where we're crashing now instead of being a sweetner and making things better but now we're going back to now where it's starting to slow down. [INT: Well when you started there and the technology was just not so available, it must have been very exciting to make things, to communicate things?] It was supposed to be kind of invented as we went along, we had no, we had basically in early days, cameras, film, and a wipe. And everything we do, and we can super, and we learn from that, rig up ways to do new things. We were always ahead of the technology.

INT: There’s a moment in time when the technology became incredibly accessible, could you pick that moment? Do you know when it was?
AB: Probably the biggest change was the mini camera. [INT: So that would be ‘79?] ‘79 yeah. And then the next big leap of which changed news was probably the satellite dish, which changed everything. The first major change was the mini cam. [INT: There was a moment when the technology changed, and then a generation has come along, and there’s a generation that doesn’t really understand how complex it was to get stuff done. What an accomplishment it was.] It’s true. It’s much easier to do your job nowadays. [INT: Right.] You know in the early days, for example, if you do a piece everything was on film. [INT: Right.] And we used to have up to four projectors running to cover a story; in fact I did a piece with six projectors. You know, the audio on several tracks. .

INT: I remember when I was first working, doing young people’s concerts at CBS, and they were still doing the evening news with WALTER CRONKITE, and it was still a primarily film show and at that concentrated moment there was enormous number of people that were devoted towards getting the imagery up [AB: There was.] and no matter what we were doing in the editing center or anything, there were all the machines and everything were dedicated to that half hour evening news broadcast. And that was quite something.
AB: They were hard shows. They were actually very hard shows to do. I’ll tell you what were harder shows to do than the evening news were local shows. [INT: Because?] They were just shorter stories. So for awhile I was at local station, I was about to graduate college I kept becoming an overcut while working with the network, so I went to the local station and you really learned at the local station because there they would do little twenty second clips, and in those days if you had videotape with a seven second roll, and they’d have, you know twenty seconds to three seconds, to get back to another tape clip or film so you were rolling tapes while you were on last film or tape clip. I mean they were the nightmare shows, the local station shows. They were actually harder than network shows to do. [INT: Also was there a point when prompter technology changed? When the person reading the news now had to stare into the camera] That was always there. The prompter was always there. I was there in ‘60 and we had prompter. The way prompter is done is different but still looked into camera basically. [INT: I was curious if any of the energy when you were making it all up has come back because of recent events?] Well, there’s a lot of adlibbing in the early days. Well there still is adlibbing but the prompter didn’t change. I don’t know when that started. Probably started with first news show I would think. [INT: When there were seven second rolls, and when it was film, and film chains, and all of that, did the producer still have the kind of power that they seem to have now, where they sit in a chair and basically say what they want, stuff had to back up more in order to happen. Has the dynamic changed?] You know once I got rolling, and they always had a lot of power, and I actually became producer-director to overcome that, because you needed to do it right, you had to call your own shots. So early on I became a producer-director so I was not really affected by that, so I’m not a real good person to answer that question. [INT: It really had to do with, and we’re going to do your history in a moment, but it had to do with CNN and that whole technology that was really created around their style, it seems to be more producer driven?] Well, it is a producer driven industry, the news, basically when you get to my history is I learned editorial first, and when I directed I would never let how I directed interfere with the editorial story because that’s our training and we are news and we are trying to get the right news out there. So I think that’s important that the director of news division understand that, you shouldn’t get in way of the story. [INT: Do you think that sometimes editing and just available technology gets in the way of a story now? I don’t mean 60 MINUTES, but I mean in your average news story?] At times. You know I’m the old school, I don’t think you should see a directors work, if you’re seamless, and it’s a good show you don’t notice it, I think you do a better job. I think some people would contest that and say I’m wrong.

INT: What was your first professional job in television?
AB: In television, EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY [INT: Could you give that a date?] 1961. [INT: So that was a show in which there was a recording process involved, video tape existed then so were you doing this live?] We did it live. [INT: What was the structure of the show?] It was the story of the week. I think Cronkite [Walter Cronkite] was the anchor, Vern Diamond was the director, Leslie Midgley was the producer, they didn’t have executive producers yet, in association with John Sharnik who went on to become the executive producer there and it was basically the story of the week, the major story. And they crash on at, I think, at 10:30pm on a Friday night [INT: What was your job in that?] I was a desk assistant. [INT: And what did the desk assistant have to do?] There you broke down the copy, you were the goffer. [INT: Got it. What happened next?] Next in my career, about 6 months later I became a production assistant, on the SPECIAL EVENTS of the WEEKEND NEWS. [INT: And then what happened?] Then I, it was really early days, I really moved rapidly, about six months later I had become, actually in that period of time there were such few people at CBS News that the Cuban Missile Crisis hit, so that was ‘62, and the news division was so busy, and I was a new PA. Don Hewitt was part of the evening news and Special Events and he actually sent me the tape three months to edit the year end review and produce it. So as a PA, because they were so short on people because the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on, I produced the year-end show, an hour show. Which was my first time I ever edited.

INT: So here you are, it’s the first part of the 60s, John F. Kennedy is president, there is that sense of Camelot in the air, was it an exciting time?
AB: It was terrific, it was great, that was a time when people knew that John F. Kennedy was having affairs, but press wouldn’t even report that, that was illegal in those days. And it was an exciting time with Kennedy, and that was the beginning of Vietnam War era, the assassination of Kennedy. It was hectic times and you know television just starting to learn how to cover all these events. [INT: They were beginning to find their own voice?] Well, the importance, you know? It was like these terrible, tragic events would happen and you go on television on the air for a week at a time, and everyone across the country were watching you, television was getting the power, and news especially to cover these major events, you see it happening now with CNN, we’ve been at war since September 11th, and here it is, what the 15th? [INT: Yeah, it’s two months later.] And they’re still on the same story basically.

INT: So there’s this post war era sort of change, everything was post war and then suddenly Kennedy's president, you’re a young man, and you’re working in the television business, was there a point in time, was there some event, or something happened that made you think I’m going to stay with this, what married you to television?
AB: That’s a good question, because what I was doing, I was intending to become a lawyer. I graduated college, I was 18, it was nice being overcut and losing semesters, I think I was 24 when I graduated, and I was just having a ball. We were having a great time. And we traveled, you go and meet a president, we should be doing something more exciting, seeing history. In person. [INT: So you looked around you and there were many directions you could go in, but you seemed to have become a producer-director?] Yeah. I’d do it again and again and again. It was wonderful. It was a great era. There were only three networks in those days and they were very powerful and the voices of those three, the competition was really intense between the three networks, and to give an example you do a convention, there were no local stations there were the three networks, and you would be on gavel to gavel you go on air say 6 o'clock at night till 3 in the morning. Now if you go to a convention the networks are not even that important, because not only do you have the three networks, you have the CNN’s, the MSNBC, every local station is represented, so it’s very different today than it was then. You were one of the three top guys. [INT: Also just from a technical point of view, there was nobody else that could take on the technical commitment?] No. [INT: It sounds like a wonderfully competitive situation.] It was. Plus before the mini cam, like I said what was the biggest event, if an event happened you’d have to go out of town with these big studio type cameras and a remote truck, you got it there and hooked it up, and wired, cabled it. It wasn’t today where you just have a camera on your back and you’re anywhere. So when you do anything it was, you know, you’d have to go out there, with big equipment. [INT: It was also a very powerful discipline behind this, and it had come from radio I assume, how they did radio, the whole network discipline transferred into television so when you turned around there were people behind you? It wasn’t a kid in a van.] It was black and white still. It’s funny but when we went to color we only went to blue basically because we were engrained in black and white, and all the networks when we first shifted over to color, we didn’t know anything about color, so everything became instead of grey was all blue. [INT: It’s funny because I was looking at CNN a couple months ago, and everything was all blue, they just ran out of ideas, it all turned into shades of blue, and when you look at New York One or anything it’s just how many shades of blue can you put up there?] We never really quite grew out of that. [INT: Blue kind of stuck.]

INT: So now we’re in the 60’s and you’re hooked. What was the next big break, the thing that put you into a position where you, I mean I sense you thought about it all the time, that you’d be working on these things, and how can I do that better, that it was in your head?
AB: You know, you didn’t because it was, first of all, there were very few people in the networks in those days, so you worked enormous hours. To this day my wife tells me how she raised the children and I was working all the time so you didn’t always think of these things, really what happened was you were just always busy, you’d go from one event to another. Things would slow down a Pope would die, they elected a pope, a week later the same pope died so you’re back in that story. There’s an assassination of one Kennedy, then a second Kennedy, then a Presidential election, the Cuban Missile Crisis, so you just went from event to event to event and you didn’t really have time to think out your career. [INT: There’s a point where you found a project, you found something that you could really focus on in the 60 MINUTES era?] That was 60 Minutes. That’s kind of an interesting story. I was working; Don Hewitt was producing the primaries. I guess it was in ’67 the primaries would have been, the presidential primaries, and what happened was I was the AD, Vern Diamond was the director, Don had just been fired from the evening news by Fred Friendly he didn’t know it yet and he now was producing the primary coverage and what happened was I, we were doing the Oregon primary, and we had Bobby Kennedy on remote and I think it was Symington [Stuart Symington] was running against him in the primary and another Republican. One was talking, the other was reacting and I said, “Don let’s split the screen and create a debate”. He said, “We can’t, we can’t, we can’t.” and we got into a fight over it and he started cursing at me, he says “You know you’re right, do it.” and what happened was we split the screen, it was one of the few tools we had in those days, and we actually had caused a debate. Which made all the papers the next day and Don was kind enough to give me credit for it and he came to me the following week and says “You know I came up with this new idea for a TV magazine.” which came out to be 60 Minutes, and he said “I’d like you to direct it.” So that really was my break. I had been at that time, I was AD but I also used to direct the weekend shows, the news shows. I think I was 26 at the time. So that was my break of becoming a staff director. [INT: And that break really came out of having an argument with Don…?] That was the nature of our business. It was a very dynamic, live position, and you were making it up as you went and in network television you fight a lot, there’s a lot of arguments that I’ve had to do things, what to do. Because when you’ve worked in a show, today when you do a show, I used to work sometimes as much as a year in advance on some shows and those days you work a week in advance, or a day in advance. It was really crashing to how are you going to do this, it’s a new show, and there’d be a lot of arguments so that was kind of typical.

INT: So what was it like when 60 MINUTES began, since I assume you didn’t know what it was going to be at that point?
AB: No. You know we didn’t even get the clock that you see today was, came out of my pocket of the third show to say “I wonder what this would look like on air.”, and after we said “Wow that looks pretty good”, it took us about another two weeks to be able to figure out how to make a book around it and it was just taking pieces of white, wiping lines to make it look like a book. So we just didn’t have any technology, so it took actually quite a while to this very simple look of todays, a very simple television. [INT: It’s the ultimate in minimalism.] Exactly. But even in those days it was very advanced believe it or not. We didn’t know how to do it. Even in the T’s, you know the T’s where the three stories are there? All we could do was lower the frame in the film projector to get it to drop below the ‘60’ but we used to actually take a frisket and put it on a Moviola and actually try and pick scenes that would fit in the book. You know today we have the technology we can turn things upside down, twist them, blow them up, and make it fit in there properly. But to make that T, it was so hard to produce and direct and put together an early 60 MINUTES show. It was a nightmare. We start a week in advance, in fact we were on every two weeks, and it took us those two weeks to manipulate material, position it, and create it, and make it fit inside a book, and we did it and we create the background of the magazine that we needed those two weeks in those days. [INT: Did you record that to tape? Was it ultimately aired on tape?] We ultimately aired it on tape. Because the Chroma key which we used in those days, so it wasn’t reliable in any way. So we never wanted to give away the trick we used. It was years before we ever did one live. We do it live to tape. But we were afraid that the key would drop out so we would always try to pre-tape it, in fact the only thing we would do live was, we used to in the early days, do the headlines in the book and the T’s, it was the only things we would do live because I just never wanted to give away that that’s not a real set back there. [INT: It certainly worked.] Yeah.

INT: When you were doing it, the idea of working on it for so long, that was really because you needed to figure out ways to make that technically work, it was all technical?
AB: Well, it was besides that. Once we got it working we could do it, but even every week, even to do a crawl inside the book credits, and it would take us an hour to do that in those days because you would glue on each name and they would peel off, and light would hit it wrong, and you have to go a certain time, and you really couldn’t control the time, you had a little wheel you turn to go faster or slower and it didn’t say a minute. So it would just take an hour, two hours, to sometimes to do a crawl. [INT: And you had to open up a studio?] Exactly. Plus now, besides that, whenever it was breaking news I had to go out in a remote truck with up to four cameras, shoot it, come back, and edit those tapes by hand. In those days you didn’t EdiTek, or do Avid recording, you were on two-inch tape. Two inch? And you would make every splice by hand. I’m sure you’ve done splices by hand where they would open up, they would break. [INT: Right. Actually I started in television just after that. I started in EdiTek days so I escaped this but I did it in audio so…] So in the early days not only did you do the studio portions, edit the show together, but you would have to go out, especially during the Nixon era, we were at least doing one or two pieces every week on tape. These John Ehrlichman interviews, these White House tours, and so we would do a lot of stories on tape and it wasn’t the mini cam it was us in a remote truck. And I kept bringing the tape back and editing it by hand. So you’d be here, you shoot, come back, and spend twenty four, thirty-six straight hours editing to get on air. [INT: Incredible, incredible.]

INT: So, as the show moved forward and found its base you now had freedom to work within the structure to keep tweaking and improving, what are you proudest of?
AB: There’s so many things we developed, for example, I started with what they called edit teching through a studio. In other words you do the show instead of having to start from scratch if you have something break down like ten minutes in, stop, have them put an edit in, and I would feed the same thing again from upstairs in the studio. Now I know the tech people when I started this said, “You can’t do that, we’re not built to that”. We actually at 60 MINUTES developed edit teching through the studio. Where we became a tape machine upstairs and were feeding the tape downstairs. [INT: So, the tape would play back, and you’d hit record…] We actually would either have our studio on the line or the tape through our studio feeding it so we were the edit tech source. Instead of using machine-to-machine edit teching I developed a system where the control room was the source. So that really was a great leap forward believe it or not. [INT: Yeah, that was. That’s exactly the things I want to document for the future. It took an enormous leap of something, faith isn’t the right word, but it took a leap of something to realize that a studio was just as valid a source as anything else. Interesting. Are there more like…?] I was the one who changed the seven second roll cue to the four second roll cue. [INT: How did you do that?] Well, I used to, at a certain point I took over directing most of the specials with Cronkite, and the conventions, and elections, and it was all adlib. And all I would know is he’s going to lead to a Nixon tape. All I know is it’s a Nixon tape so I’d have to guess when he was going to stop talking in seven seconds from where he stopped talking, so which, you know, was really impossible. And I was getting pretty good at that though, but I went to tape one day and said, “Hit the machine” and I sat there with a stopwatch and seeing like nine out of ten times I’d did like two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, and I realized at four seconds, nine out of ten times the tape was locked, so one time we get some break up that’s OK, in those days mistakes were OK, it was expected. You hit a lot of black, if you go to trouble you go to black and stay there till you regroup and go back on the air. So that was another thing I had a big fight with the technical management they say, “You know you can’t do that.” I says “Why?”, “Well, tape may break up.” I say, “We’re responsible, we will not blame it on you”. So, I always used to have the backing of management, news management, to make the changes I wanted.

INT: In the structure of, especially of CBS, that must have been a major accomplishment?
AB: It was. It actually was a lot of fights over that. But we changed that from seven to four, and it really helps us quite a bit. Even because of those days you rolled into set with egg on his face with two seconds, you know, you just guess with two seconds in advance that was pretty good. It was better than five seconds. [INT: Did you roll from multiple, did you have like a back up source, or were you rolling a single source?] We never had back ups those days. [INT: So it was really almost ten years of doing that before you could actually see a still picture before it rolled because that didn’t happen till…] I’ll tell you another thing is that when you edited we used to go out and shoot, for example, I remember we did a tour of the White House with Richard Nixon for 60 MINUTES and we’d shoot hours and hours of tape and you could not look at this tape fast forward. You would, I think we shot that about twenty minutes into the tape and you go look for it and you would need a scene for cut away and sometimes it would take you two hours to find a scene. So here you’re crashing trying to make it work and you don’t even have a way of finding the tape because you’re looking at blank tape unless it’s rolling. And you’d hit it and it would take a while and you couldn’t look at it fast forward you’d have to sit there and look at it and all we had was counters on the tape machine. [INT: That’s right, there was no time code yet.] There was no time code, there’s a counter. So editing was a nightmare. It was a real nightmare.

INT: Now the early editing systems, the first CMX systems, there was a connection to CBS, that technology, that CMX technology, was connected to CBS. That was the first time I saw it.
AB: I know the mini cam was. We really developed the mini cam. I think AMPEX came up with…was it AMPEX? [INT: CMX, now I’m not an authority, but the CMX 600 which was the editing system where you put everything on big disks was created in conjunction with CBS.] We had a great engineering group, headed by Joe Flaherty, and they were great. In fact they were one of the reasons I had such a successful career was I really worked well with the engineers and understood their power. And it’s very possible they did because they were terrific. [INT: This happening again a little bit now so I’m going to just press you a little more on the subject. A lot of the traditional filmed dramatic shows are being shot, essentially, on video and the disciplines are not always blending and they should. And the person who’s going to be a success in that is someone who is going to understand the value of the video technology plus the discipline of the filmed arts which are very high. So tell me a little bit more. Did you have to deal with jurisdictional problems within the work?] No. [INT: So people were flexible about new technologies?] We crave them. And every time we got a new tool it was like “Oh my gosh!’. Like to go to CMX from hand cutting a tape was, I mean a leap I can’t explain to you what an enormous leap this was. [INT: You can. (Laughs) It was like I’m no longer in a nightmare. I used to sit there and go “Why can’t we develop something we can look at tapes fast forward”. Which now with digital I mean, last time I was looking for a scene was 60 MINUTES 2 and I found it like, I looked through fifteen minutes of tape and I found it in fifteen seconds. I mean, I would have had to look through fifteen minutes of tape to find that years ago. [INT: Sure. I mean, did you think it was going to come down to this? (Shows tape)] You never thought that but I used to tell them what we needed. Because it was so obvious the things that cause us headaches like, “Why do we have to do this?”, “Is there a way around this?”. Even the AVID was perfect for 60 MINUTES. Why can’t we find a system, we were going to re-work the show we don’t have to re-edit the whole show we can just recombine it. It was asking for a gift that you knew someday the technology; technology always went in a direction of what you needed. You know engineers from other companies used to come in and talk to us, “What are you looking for?”, and then they would go out and develop equipment to satisfy our needs. Basically that’s how the industry worked because the developers, the engineers, would come in, watch you work, ask you some questions, “What drives you crazy?”, “What would help you?”. So basically we worked hand in hand, we didn’t know it, but we were basically telling them what we needed.

INT: I’m not an authority but I get a sense that the three networks approached this technology thing differently, that CBS was doing what you say which was that they were giving a strong technological support. ABC really didn’t evolve until sports became such an important franchise and a lot of the technology, the slo-mo’s and things, came out of sports. And NBC was essentially an equipment business through RCA so they were selling their equipment which was not top of the line by the time you started directing, it was sort of an older generation. So it seems of all the places, well of the three choices, the three networks to work at, CBS was the best because they were giving you pure engineering as opposed to some other. [AB: Right.] Very cool.
AB: You know one of my gifts there I would say was I would misuse equipment. I would find equipment and use it for something it wasn’t designed to do. [INT: What would be an example?] Well an example would be, this is kind of a long story. What happened was is in ’74 when I first started, the first times I ever directing the election coverage, I’d built a new set, and ’76 was my first presidential election and I wanted to, I came up with an idea of color coding Democrats and election and showing the election, blue against the red guys. And I wanted to build this giant map and put it behind Cronkite [Walter Cronkite] and one of the Vice Presidents asked how much it would be and I had priced it at $50,000 and I told them it would be $35,000. And they said, “You just built a new set last year, no more new sets.” So what happened was they wouldn’t allow it. The following year Gordon Manning, who was not the vice president who killed it but was the vice president there who knew about this and he went to NBC and wanted me to go with him, he said, “We’re going to build this giant map at NBC, come do it there with me. It’s your idea.” and I said, “No I can’t leave.” So they did it there and they looked terrific. I think they used it the first time in ’80 and Bill Leonard the president of CBS News called a meeting and said, “What happened? They beat the shit out of us.” And I said, “Well that was my idea, I wanted to do it here four years ago but he stopped it.” I pointed to the vice president who stopped it and he says, “Is that true?” He says, “Yeah, well we didn’t think we could afford it at that time.” So he said, “Beat it.” So the only way I could come up with beating it, because I didn’t want to do the same thing, was an idea of coming up with motion graphics. [INT: So what would motion graphics have been in 1976?] There were none because it had to be real time. So how would you make a motion graphic, because I wanted to be able to go from, in those days you could not control the editorial technology. In other words, Cronkite [Walter Cronkite] wanted to do an order he picked out not the order I would give out. So I needed a technology that could go from New York to Jersey or to Ohio, any order we wanted to so I needed something that turned out to be in the digital world, some type of real time graphic that I could change the order. So I couldn’t develop a graphic that I knew the order in advance that’s the only way we could do it. [INT: Are you talking about text now? Listing text?] Well it turned out, what I did was there was a device out there called a Dubner. Which ABC was using and what they were really doing was really a device made to layer, like commercials you can put one layer on, play it back, add a layer, add another layer without degenerating the quality because it used to be when you do several generations your quality goes down. This was the device that was made for that. So they took me out to look at it and I go, “Oh my God.” I saw how I could do a digital, like a CD disc, you could jump from track one to track two, so I said to them afterwards when I got this demo, I said, “If I gave fifty things on here you could jump from one to six or a seven to nine?” “Oh yeah, you could do that very easily.” I said, “All I have to do is design a seamless splice.” He says, “What do you mean?” “Well something turned and on that edge, I made a splice on an edge, you could flip it, every flip would change to anywhere I wanted to change it. He said, “Oh, that would be no problem.” So I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll use your equipment if you can give me those people that are working for me.” And I hired these two people and it was terrific. In fact I almost got fired over this show because of Sorter, the president of CBS News, I lied down the United States and popped states up, if you recall seeing that, in ’76 I think that was in front of Rather [Dan Rather] at the time. And he says, “You know I’m a historian, I can’t tell what the United States looks like when you lie it on it’s side and flip states up. I don’t want you to use it.” I said, “This is breakthrough television and I refuse to change it.” Rather [Dan Rather] told me afterwards he had a meeting and said, “I don’t give a shit what year he got into the show but he’s fired.” And the show got great reviews, in fact it reviewed only the graphics, it was fireworks at CBS. And then the fact that (name indistinguishable) tried to hire me at ABC because they had this equipment for three years and I had used it differently so that was how I changed, used technology differently, a device like a Dubner but I’ve done that like ten, fifteen times.

INT: You’re making an interesting point and I just want to mention it. Two things happen here that don’t happen today. One is that what you were doing was important you could go and say I need these two engineers for this thing because it was the election night coverage so it was important. The other things was that attention was paid, that there were less networks and so…
AB: Great competition and they really supported us. [INT: Right.] The difference between today and yesterday is it’s more of them, companies making money. In those days we were subsidized, the news divisions, and they wanted to be proud of the news divisions and wanted to win. It was always good will. And the people who are doing the shows there now are working hard but don’t get the support. Just get it done and get it done inexpensively as you can. But they do have the technology, the technology is great. [INT: Do you think that they use it, and this is an opinion, do you think they use it? Do you think it’s really used or do you think it’s become knee jerk?] No, it’s being used. They’re trying hard. There’s so much technology that I’m jealous of it. I used to store on computers in those days that were so slow that doing an opening animation would take me six months that you do in a day and a half now. So yes they’re using it, it’s just easier to do, everyone can do it, and it’s inexpensive to do. [INT: Because I realize when you said you did that first split screen back where you got into an argument with Don Hewitt about it that in order to make that split screen you weren’t just repositioning existing pictures you actually had to frame.] AB: You had to frame your camera. [INT: Which corrupted the picture so now you had to, how do you cut out of that?] It was hard. You had to stay in the split frame. You would cut back to someone else listening and reframe your shots. [INT: And that’s the place where it took the nerve, I really admire you for your nerve.] Well, you had to survive in those days, you had to do it, and it was the nature of the beast. Today you wouldn’t have to have the nerve because you have the tools to manipulate for you. Actually I’m lucky to have been in the time and space I was in because it was the time that we were inventing it, we had the backing to invent it, we were encouraged to do it, we were encouraged to take the risk, and I was a great risk taker. That’s, if anything, that’s probably where I should be patted on the back that I would take the risks. [INT: Sure, that’s a great thing to be proud of and the other thing is that you seem to have a sense for mixing media that you take this and you apply it to that. And that’s something you don’t see a lot. Usually I used to go to the NIB and this is what this does and can I use this for something else.

INT: Have you had any experience and what do you think about the virtual set moment that came and went for a while? Where Harry Smith is breaking ground on virtual sets.
AB: I had a real problem with that. I thought that looked phony, it was phony, and in fact 60 MINUTES is a natural for that almost because we could take our book which is not there, put it back there and zoom in but it’s not ready yet, they’re not there yet. I thought that was a horrible, that Harry Smith thing especially was just, it looked phony and it should not have been used, it was a gimmick. That’s where things aren’t done right when you were leading before. [INT: Do you feel that even if they had mastered the graphics and they were stunning, and they figured out the shadows, and all those humanizing things, do you feel that there’s still something about a person having to stand in a large green or blue space that…] No. I think if you can do it right you can do it. You should do it. And they will. Eventually we’ll be a virtual newsroom and there’s nothing wrong with it. It has to look right. You know if going to make it look like Mickey Mouse that’s not the news. It will be done right, they’ll get that down. [INT: Do you think that the things to be worked on are in the technology or in the design?] Design working with the technology, they go together. You have to design for technology and you have to then develop the technology for that design.

INT: So when you made the original 60 MINUTES background, the classic, minimalist, perfect background, those were real. What was the scale of them?
AB: It was based on a stopwatch. It was based on two things, there were three things it was based on, OK, it was based on the stopwatch so what we did is we built the magazine to go around the stopwatch because Don [Don Hewitt] would’ve wanted it to look like when we built a little magazine which was maybe three inches tall. [INT: It was that small?] It goes around a stopwatch. [INT: Right. Oh, the cover?] The cover. OK, now the book was just made of, you know I think it was because we work with eight by ten sheets of paper, there were two eight by ten sheets that we put on cardboard. And the third thing we built to scale was the letters which we still do the same way which we flip up by someone’s hand and what we did was we reduce the original page and we only could only reduce it to one size maybe six by eight so we would then reduce the type that we could type up on top of it we would just keep to fit on it six by eight. So everything was on scale that we had to work with. [INT: Now surely somebody in the last twenty years has said to you, “Why don’t you just use a DVE page flip or something for those letters?” But somehow you’ve resisted.] They don’t look as real. You probably could do it now but people are still shocked when they come in to see it when we do letters on the show and we’re still using that technology but we have it down pat, we can do it quickly, and it works for us.

INT: Are you able to assemble the show because of the editing is really seamless now are you able to assemble the show more around people’s convenience than you could?
AB: Yes. We started that early on. Once we got sophisticated maybe six, seven, eight years in we really started changing the show because the correspondents travel so much that we tried to tape them, a breakthrough we came up, I’ll tell you a great breakthrough for 60 Minutes was being able to shoot them on a blue background and insert into the tape, we could not do that in the early days we had to have them there with a background. Now we can shoot them against a key, a blue screen, and key into it as well as we can as if we don’t have the material after the fact. What we could then do was shoot them and tape them, both sides, we then give the artist the freedom of making any book he wants, left or right, and we would then shoot them around their travels. So that was a great breakthrough that we would not, in the first five, six years we did it live to tape. Then we started taping it to their convenience, with the book in the early days. We made sure we had the book. Now starting maybe only five, six years ago, seven years ago, we can now, we have keying material that we can do key after the fact. [INT: And you can export these keys without all the Ultimatte and other rituals?] No we’re using the Ultimatte in fact now for the first time starting with 60 MINUTES 2 because we had Simon [Bob Simon] as a regular we now tape him occasionally in Israel or in London and what we do is we go directly out of the camera into the tape machine, bring the tape machine back, and put that into the Ultimatte and it looks like it’s New York. Before we had to wipe around it. We still do it, in fact this Sunday, Monday, we’re actually do somewhere from overseas and not have time to get the tape back. It doesn’t look as good, you can tell the difference.

INT: Just as an aside one of the great side things that can be done in Avid is it does keys beautifully.
AB: We don’t use the Avid for keying. [INT: Just mentioning it. They do it in real time and if you render it it’s perfect. It’s the best key I’ve ever seen.] AB: Better than the Ultimatte? [INT: Yeah.] Really? What have you been keying it as? [INT: You use the FlexFill. I’m doing it for this. The reason you’re against that neutral background is just so…] So you’re saying if I put… [INT: Take Larry Auerbach. I just did this in real time and it’s not even that good a key but if I rendered it, it would be flawless. You’d see every hair.] Right in the… [INT: In the Avid.] And you do it in real time? I’m going to try it Monday. [INT: People don’t know about it because people are so burned by how hard it is to do a key that unless you do it in the studio and I began doing keys in the studio. The minute you get involved with an Ultimatte you’re carrying all this extra stuff around.] So if I just take a picture or keyed a book in there it would be a perfect key you’re saying? [INT: If you shoot your correspondent against a consistent background of any color, and light them properly, and take it to your editor and say, “I want you to make me a test key it makes very good test keys in real time and it makes stunning test keys if you give it an hour to render because it does it one frame at a time.] OK, an hour to render how much material? [INT: Two minutes? Three minutes? Enough for your talking head.] OK. Well, thank you, I’m going to try that. [INT: I wanted to pass that on to you. It’s none of my business but…] What happens is sometimes we have to, right now actually what we’re doing if I don’t have time to fly the tape back, it’s harder to fly the tape back since September 11th. We actually paint a key and we actually slice their bodies slightly. Cut off the edge but if they move we can’t do it. So we’ve actually been doing a trick like that. [INT: I’m convinced that the next thing is that you’ll be able to do it and send it as a file you know?] Oh we’ve made such leaps, keys are now sensational.

INT: It’s my memory that 60 MINUTES continued to work in film for a really long time, which I’m sure was a choice based on many things?
AB: It was. It was a choice of quality. Even though we did switch over the editing was terrible because we basically used film editors to switch over to tape and it was quite interesting over a year or two to see many less edits. They were slow at it; they weren’t very good at it. So the editing was very poor when we switched over. [INT: What editing technique were the film editors working in when you began to make the switch?] They were cutting film. [INT: No, I mean they were cutting film and when you say we’re now going to learn to work video which of the systems was in place at that moment? I’m just curious because they seem to be taking very well to Avid but they didn’t take well to CMX at all.] No. What was the early, I don’t remember. [INT: It would be CMX.] It was machine to machine. What was the early editing system? [INT: Editec.] Editec? That’s what it was. [INT: Oh, that’s tough. Yeah, that would be hard because they couldn’t…] Exactly. [INT: No bins.] Right. [INT: Yeah I can’t imagine a real editor. Well…] No, a lot of them also had troubles switching over to the Avid because that meant using a computer. [INT: Yes, but at least the Avid made some attempt to honor their craft.] Yes, yes. But the switch over for people going to videotape to film was almost impossible and people going from film to videotape was very hard. [INT: What about the situation within our own union here because the, I recall in the early days of video when it wasn’t defined yet but it was clear it was happening is that a film crew could just go out with a shooter and an audio man but a video crew had to go out with a stage manager and an associate director.] No. [INT: Didn’t have that problem?] We didn’t really have, you know jurisdictionally they tried to intervene at times but it really, you know even when I would even direct there was always, the camera crews did not like directors. They weren’t used to working with the directors. [INT: Right. The film crews?] The film crews. And when they started working with videotape you know as mini cams they really took the same function as the film crew and at times we would work with them and it was very hard. They did not want to listen a director because they were, you know, they were a free hand always. And it took about ten years for us to really work well together. [INT: That’s amazing. And you were there.] You know something? Number one, I respected these guys and I was not the, you know, you don’t want to step on someone. You like to let some people have some creativity. These guys were creative guys. They did not take direction well and a lot of them didn’t need direction. You know they were better at it than we were; they were doing it more than we were. I was pretty good about that with them. There were certain guys who did. So if anything I was, personally I was lax in giving them direction. Probably there were other guys besides me who were better at it than I was. [INT: But in the end you got footage that you could use?] Oh yeah. Well, I’m talking we use them for live shows even and they weren’t very good at that. [INT: Live shows meaning interview kind of…] In other words, nowadays when you use the same guys who go out and shoot with a mini cam on their back would be hooked up to a studio at times to do studio shoots. I did that yesterday with the Vice President, we had two mini cam crews and I would talk in their ear and tell them what to do. But it’s fine now, they work well with it now, but there was about, I would say maybe, a ten-year transitional period where we did not work well together. They didn’t want direction. [INT: I’m boggled by the length of time that you were able to…] Well because there are certain people you had to change, they had to retire, or move on.

INT: Also it’s always been a hit show. So the dynamics that you would have insight, the bottom-line is it’s still in the top ten.
AB: Yeah. You know you talk about things, a show like 60 MINUTES, we have twenty editors and we don’t want to give them hard rules. You want it to look like a show but you don’t want to stop creativity. [INT: Right.] So we kind of let people do their own thing to a certain point and we’re not like, “Do it exactly this way.” It’s who we are by nature because we want to be treated that way. So as a cameraman you want to give them the same freedom because you can’t be watching all these shows, all these shoots at one time. You can’t send out, you’ve sent out, you know we’re doing between 60 MINUTES and 60 MINUTES 2 were probably working on fifty stories at a time. You can’t send out fifty directors and get the same show back anyway. So you have to you know, we believe strongly in leaving some freedom out there. Let’s let people use their creativity.

INT: The process of putting the show together is obviously different now, but there was a moment when you were still assembling it at the last minute using the older editing processes and was it literally being rearranged right up to the last minute or was there a certain moment where they let you make the show?
AB: No, we used to always finish a show, for the Sunday show, unless it was a breaking story, we’d used to finish it on Friday. Our tape days were Thursday and Friday. And we would come in probably fifteen; twenty Sunday’s a year because we were working on late stories. [INT: And would you drop a late story into a window in a pre-existing show? How would you do that?] Yes. Even today, get the show ready, and sometimes we’ll shoot a story, screen it, and we know it’s going to be eleven minutes eighteen seconds and we can drop it in. Now it’s with the Avid, you just dump it into the Avid and you play the whole show out. [INT: Did they leave your Chroma key set standing all the time so you could access it?] Yes. In fact now we have a dedicated studio. In fact we have kind of a unique, they want us to move out of a facility that we liked about ten years ago and I refused and they said, “We’ll let you design your own facility.’ So I designed a facility that is an edit room, control room. In fact we have two audio consoles, one for editing and one for live. So basically I understand we’ve been copied around the country but we can actually be editing and switching over to taping within five seconds. So we’re an edit suite-control room combination now and a dedicated studio. [INT: That must have been wonderful?] It’s great to have. [INT: To have that opportunity to make something like that?] Well I just had them design something exactly the way I wanted to work the show. [INT: It’s a unique position and that’s why I’m emphasizing it because it’s rare that a person who is the director and the producer gets to actually do that. That’s it’s usually done by consultants.] It’s actually usually done and then you know we’d rent their facility. [INT: The time I noticed it in a variety show where I thought it was perfect was when David Letterman moved to the old Ed Sullivan Theatre and the person who was at the center of that was Hal Gurnee and it’s one of the most beautiful set ups, it’s not extravagant.] No. [INT: It’s just everything works.] Exactly. It works the way we know we want to work. [INT: Yeah. I just have to note on this videotape that that was a remarkable opportunity to be able to…] Oh, it was great. I used to run downstairs to edit, go back upstairs to tape something. We were running all the time. I said, “Why don’t we just do it in one spot?” So it’s a unique situation, it’s great.

INT: Do you sense that there is going to be change? Aside from what I read in the papers, is technology going to affect you differently since September 11th? Will you be…?
AB: This has been going on for years that if some breaking story; they want us to become hard news. So that will always happen. But no, one of the things we decided about twenty five years ago on 60 MINTUES, twenty years ago, is that while there’s minor changes, the typeface of 60 MINTUES, colorization, the thin lines around the book, putting the head in front of the title with the correspondents. Those are little, minor changes but Don [Don Hewitt] and I decided we want to really stay “comfort food”. Everything in the world is changing, so why don’t we just keep 60 MINTUES the same so people tune in on Sunday night… [INT: And hear that…] They hear the ticking and we’re “comfort food”. And so our changes on the show have just been really slight cosmetic changes to try to keep up to date. [INT: It seems very wise. It’s like a really good thing to do because by staying the same it becomes reliable. It’s like the New York Times. It’s changed dramatically in the last ten years but it still looks like the New York Times and it’s outside my door.] We have a gift. We were the first news magazines and we designed it to look like a magazine. So we’re the only news magazine that looks like a magazine so why should we change that? You know if you’re a reader you like to change it and come up with something new and it was hard discipline not to change it because we had the ability to make a lot of changes and we were in charge. We could have done what we wanted; we were the golden show at CBS. If anything I think it showed a lot of restraint and I did come up with ideas for changes. You know someone had once said, “Why don’t you use an atomic clock?” and I started researching an atomic clock. How can we change this look? What should it be in ten years from now? And it was… [INT: Well it’s like new Coke.] Exactly. So actually you had to keep your ego under control not to change it.

INT: This is of tremendous interest but there was a moment when the digital rendering technology got to the point where you could make the clock better. You could make it better than a real one. I assume it was a real one.
AB: Actually it’s interesting this clock now. The hands are real. I actually shot the face of a clock with a key, we painted a key, and shot the hands because we never could make it on a computer and I didn’t try for the last ten years. So the clock you see the face is painted but the hands are real for a clock. [INT: Interesting.] That was the best we could make it at the time. [INT: It’s a beautiful symbol.] Actually about six, seven years ago we got some new equipment at CBS and I had them make the clock hands. It just didn’t look real to me so I didn’t use it. But that’s such a minor change. [INT: It is but as you said it’s a sort of staple of American life and the restraint is worth noting. It’s certainly worth noting for me.]