INT: So, you know, Jayne’s [Jayne Meadows] coming out as co-host, what were your feelings?
SB: My feelings were that, and we all felt it, it wasn't me. It was every crew member came to me and said, you know, "You've gotta talk to Steve." He became Mr. Husband and he was so concerned about the way she looked and the way she was presented, that he stopped being the old Steve, you know. And I actually, before I resigned from the show, I went to him and everybody said, “You've gotta do it, you've gotta do it,” and I looked around, nobody was behind me, but I was in a situation where I was alone, one on one with him and I told him. I told him the absolute truth. I said, "Steve, we're losing it, you know, and I think a lot has to do with having Jayne on the show, you know?" And he thanked me and that was the end, you know? [INT: So, after this kind of incredible explosion of creativity, and growth for you. Because now when you're in a situation where you can try anything, you throw out ideas, Steve vamps with you, you're working in the concert with a really brilliant talent like that. How did that set you up for the future and where did you go from there?] It totally set me up because when you do two years of a late night show, you meet everybody in show business. You meet Agents, Producers, Directors, stars, you know? I should tell you one very funny story, which, Robert Goulet was on fire, and he was-- [INT: CAMELOT.] Richard Burton on Broadway in CAMELOT and he was, like, the talk of the country. Handsome, baritone. And he came on the show as did the John Raitt’s of the world and so forth. And we hit it off. He had a great sense of humor and we were, you know, both young and having fun. So one day he came on the show and he said, "Are you doing anything for lunch today?" And I said, you know, "No, I'm just hanging out, we're doing two shows a night." He says, "Let's go have lunch," so we go to, on Vine Street up the street, was a Greyhound bus station and a little restaurant called the Grape Vine [INT: The Grape Vine.] which was a bar-- [INT: I know it well.] Very dark, and they have these leather plush booths in there and Robert and I go in, we sit in back and by this time we'd established on THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW, pie throwing. I mean that was our big thing. [INT: Did you bring that from SOUPY SALES [THE SOUPY SALES SHOW]?] Yeah I did. And it became kind of, you know, a thing we looked forward to, especially with, you know, if we spotted a guest who was really a narcissist and really egomaniacal, etcetera, he was the first person, or she was, that we said, "Let's hit 'em with a pie." And we were not indiscreet about it. Women got hit just as much as men did. So, we're sitting in this corner booth and we're having, you know, a conversation, just social talk, and this well dressed man walks up in a suit and tie and, you know, very distinguished looking, etcetera, and he leans over to Goulet and he says, "Which one of you is Steve Binder?" Goulet hesitates and he looks over at me and he says, "He is." At that point, all I can see is a lemon meringue, real pie, coming into my face. It seems that the crew had found this guy walking across the street on Vine Street, paid him fifty bucks or a hundred bucks or something to go, they knew we were having lunch at the Grape Vine, to go hit me with a lemon pie. And it was really funny until I realized, if you've ever had lemon meringue on your clothes, you can wash it off your skin but, you know, it was the biggest mess, I was just starting another show as soon as I got back to the studio, I mean it was, but it was very, very funny. I mean it was, we just reached that kind of family point of anything went.

INT: Once you decided to leave that show, which has got to be a major moment, what did you do?
SB: Well, when word got out that I was leaving the show, there were lots of opportunities for me and one of them was, there was a brilliant promoter, one of the most brilliant men to ever hit Hollywood in my opinion. William Sargent [H. William Sargent Jr.], Bill Sargent. Sargent was in the Navy and was considered a genius when it came to electronics and what have you and he partnered up with two other gentlemen, one was a guy named Bill Rosensohn [William P. Rosensohn] who brought Ingemar Johansson to be the World Champion heavyweight prize fighter and the other one was a guy named Oliver A. Unger and Unger was the father of paid television in California and he ended up having a company called, a film company called Commonwealth United. And the three of them partnered up to do a tribute show to the anniversary of the NAACP. That’s National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, and they came to me at THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW and said, "We're doing this big production, two hour closed circuit and we'd like you to produce and direct the west coast version." Another tremendous Producer who was a Director to begin with, Bob Banner [Robert James Banner, Jr.], was gonna do the east coast and that experience really got me to love what could be done with the medium. We were totally independent of each other. Banner had already announced that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were gonna be on his show and they were the front cover of LIFE Magazine, they were at the height of their marriage and career. And he also had people, you know, on the shows from Sammy Davis Jr. to, you know, star after star after star, and here I was given the responsibility to do a show like his, and I really didn't know where to go but I had the people around me that I could, you know, create with and bounce with. And there was a documentary Writer that I was very friendly with and he came aboard to handle the script and now I went out to go get my stars. I didn't know about Talent Coordinators and casting people and stuff. I’d been basically, you know, we had one casting person on STEVE ALLEN [THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW], I had no casting people when I was at ABC so I was really on my own. And first person I went to see was Nat Cole [Nat King Cole] and this was before he had gotten cancer but right around that period and I went to Nat and he had a Musical Director named Ralph Carmichael who was a brilliant musician, orchestrator. He went into religious music and became very, very successful with his own label and so forth. And he was Nat’s conductor in Las Vegas. I flew to Las Vegas to meet with Nat and I offered Ralph the job to be one of our orchestral composers on the show or one of our music people and Nat turned me down cold. I mean he met with me, he listened to my pitch, and he said, “Forget it, I don't want to do it.” So the next thing I did is I phoned, somebody gave me an entree to Burt Lancaster, and Burt was just about to go into production on a movie called THE TRAIN with John Frankenheimer directing. Incidentally, I mean, the people that I admired in film and what have you, in television, were Frankenheimer were certainly on my list. I though he was, you know, he was ahead of me but he was the guy.

INT: And he started in live television?
SB: Absolutely. And as a matter of fact I was producing a, honoring him at the Hall of Fame for the Academy of Television. In the middle of it all he died and it was very, very sad and we did this huge tribute to him. I love, one of my favorite motion pictures was AMERICAN IN PARIS [AN AMERICAN IN PARIS], and so Stanley Donen was a big hero of mine when I started out and then I loved Richard Lean [Sir David Lean]. I was a big Richard Lean fan. I went to see his movies-- [INT: David Lean] David Lean over and over again. I mean, you know, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, I mean if it was a David Lean film I was there. It was before I really thought I wanted to be in show business. So I called Lancaster [Burt Lancaster], got a direct number, it was a guy named Roland Kibbe who was involved in his company. He told, I'd met Roland somehow through THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW and he said, "I'll get you to Burt, you know, he'll be expecting you to call" and so I called him. Went over to his office and I told him what I was about to do, and so forth. And he said, "I'm making this movie, I'd love to do it, it sounds great, but, you know, I can't 'cuz our schedules conflict." Went home depressed, saying I don't have any stars, Banner’s [Robert James Banner, Jr.], everyday I'm reading in VARIETY [Magazine] and, you know, reporter the television bibles of magazines and newspapers, that, you know, this incredible show’s being done on the east coast and I don't know where to go from there, you know? I just, I can get some jazz people, you know, maybe I can ask Steve [Steve Allen] to do it or something but that's not what I want to do. So I went to library, and I went to bookstores and I found a little tiny book which was called I WONDER WHY by Shirley Burden and it was basically a series of beautiful photographs and it says, you know, “I love the smell of the ocean, I love to see flowers blooming,” and it had a picture of, without any people in it, but it had those sayings and pictures of the different, you know, “I loves.” You get to the very last page, and you turn the page, and it's a little black girl about eleven, twelve years old and the caption underneath is, "I wonder why some people don't like me" and I said, "This is my story."

SB: So, I called Shirley Burden, and I got him on the phone and I asked if I could get the rights to use it for this NAACP show, he said, "Sure." And now I had my book and now I had to figure out how I'm gonna use it. I went to Ralph Carmichael, who I had befriended with Nat Cole [Nat King Cole] and asked him if he would compose an original piece for this as the underscore and help me with the show. And there were two music writers: Dotty Wayne and Richard Loring, And Dotty Wayne wrote an album for Nat Cole. That's how I got the entree to Nat which was a concept album that he recorded and then I got a phone call out of the blue and it's Burt Lancaster. He said, "I thought about our conversation and I've asked John [John Frankenheimer] if we could postpone our movie, I'd like to do your show." That was open sesame. By having Burt Lancaster, no matter who I called, an agent, manager, another artist, Burt Lancaster is hosting. I wonder why. Everybody wanted to do it. Even to the point where, after I was completely booked, I was ready to go into rehearsals, Nat Cole calls me, "You have to put me on the show. It'd be embarrassing if I'm not on this show, you know?" I said, "Nat, there's no room, you know, but if you'll sing an original song that we wrote," and Dotty Wayne, Richard Loring and myself wrote a couple of songs for the show, "You can do the show." And he agreed to do it which was part of the whole theme. Burt ended up not only narrating the book, but he actually sang and danced with a group of children and did one of the songs, big production number on the show. We ended up with Edward G. Robinson, Ed Begley, Agnes Moorehead, Gene Kelly, Richard Widmar;, I mean everybody came aboard. First appearance of Bill Cosby on national television. We shot it live at CBS Television City. Beverly and Fairfax. It got a tremendous write-up in the L.A. Times [Los Angeles Times] by a music critic or a television critic. Richard Widmark came to me and I thought it was hysterical. And he said, when he came, you know, I remembered him from the sneering laugh, and the killer, and throwing the old lady down the stairs and so forth. [INT: KISS OF DEATH]. Nicest guy in the world. Nicest guy in the world. He came up to me, he said, "Steve, I can't do your show." and we're taping. I said, "What do you mean you can't do my show?" He said, "I haven't done anything in front of a live audience, I mean I'm scared to death. I can't walk out on that stage." And he did and he was great. But it was such a great experience and it was, you know, it just flowed.

INT: Did that, you know, did it, I don't know this process, but it went out into theaters, or it went out into auditoriums or, but it wasn't broadcast on television?
SB: No. It was, went out in closed circuit, four walled, and it went to arenas all over the country. Played at Madison Square Garden. Played at, what they did was they took Banner's [Robert James Banner, Jr.] show and my show, put them together and they did a two hour closed circuit and it was basically, this was the beginning of Sargent's [William H. Sargent, Jr.] run in Hollywood with Electronovision and eventually TheatroVision. [INT: I think, see I knew Bill Sargent also and one of the more unique and incredible characters I think in Hollywood. I mean, he just, you know, Mike Todd [Michael Todd] is very famous, has this huge kind of showman entrepreneur and Bill Sargent, you know, fits into that category. Bill Sargent, from Oklahoma. You know, describe Bill Sargent?] Irish, robust, heavyset, you know, cherub-type face. [INT: Red hair.] Red hair. And just wouldn't take no for an answer. He was a ball of flame. He got investors out of the mainstream like it was hysterical. I'd walk into his office on other projects and there'd be a stockbroker from Florida, a representative from the Mormon Church in Utah. For real. A lumberman from Washington, the state of Washington, sitting there with their checkbooks. One time, one of the investors in one of his movies, which was James Whitmore doing GIVE 'EM HELL, HARRY!, they were looking at the ads and the one-sheets and the investor's sitting there writing hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks, comes up and he says, "Bill," he said, "I think," and Bill stops him cold and said, "I don't give a damn what you think. You write the checks, I make the decisions." And the guy walks back to the desk and keeps writing checks, but he was unbelievable.

INT: Later in his career, we'll talk about him in a moment, about the T.A.M.I. SHOW but later in his career he, you know, offered, I don't know, some huge amount of money for The Beatles to get back together [SB: I was part of that] And then subsequently after that he was gonna do a live, closed circuit of a man fighting a shark that was you too? [SB: I had a press conference turning it down.] Really? I mean the man was just amazing and the fact that he could get this stuff off the ground but he was able to sell.
SB: Bill [William H. Sargent, Jr.] was so unique. I mean, he, first of all, he wanted in the worst way to be Mike Todd [Michael Todd]. I mean he wanted the industry to recognize him as one of the great, you know, entrepreneur Producers in Hollywood. Joe Levine [Joseph E. Levine] was incredibly successful film producer, a lot of prestige, he was at Paramount [Paramount Studios], he decided to do the life of Jean Harlow and Sargent said, "I'm gonna make a movie of Harlow that's better than his." They both made HARLOW at the same time and Bill's HARLOW got better reviews than Joe Levine's HARLOW, you know, but who would even do something like that? Anyway, Bill was partners with this group, we did the NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] which turned out, it was very disappointing because I loved the show, I loved the creativity of the show. Two quick incidents happen, one is Shirley Burden called me after it aired and said his name wasn't big enough on the screen which taught me a lesson about credits and egos. The other lesson that I learned was that the NAACP didn't get any support from their members, and all the local chapters either were at the baseball game, you know, the Angels [now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim] were playing the same night it aired in Los Angeles at the sports arena and we were half empty and they were, you know, scalping tickets to the game and most of the local chapters basically didn't turn the money over of the revenues to the national chapter and so it turned out, unfortunately - I'd say nine out of ten people probably never even knew it ever existed or happened but to this day. I mean I've watched it recently and I love it. I think it's, I tried calling the channel that specializes in black programming to just say, "I'd give it to you to air and everything," and never could get it shown again. It is, it's real special and it had, you know, Cannonball Adderley [Julian Edwin "Cannonball" Adderley], it had Tony Bennett with Ralph Shearing [?], it was one of the great highlights of my career.

INT: So at this point, 'cuz I think we need to, what's important from this oral history is the directing, you know, the thing. I mean, the idea of learning your craft, but then taking and doing the innovations. I mean THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW, you know, learning on that jazz show and then doing THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW for total spontaneity. This has to develop into a Steve Binder style doesn't it? I mean Steve Binder starts to have a philosophy, he has to have a sense of what you want to get spontaneity-wise. Tell us about that?
SB: The greatest compliment for me, and I'm hopefully not saying this out of ego but I always would get telephone calls after one of my shows aired, and people saying, "I started watching the show, and I knew you had to do it. And waited for the credits to come on to see if I was right or not." So my style, basically I can't pinpoint it other than it was passionate, it was, you know, visually, if the shots called for being off the set I'd be off the set. If the shots called for, I did an Olivia Newton-John special, her first one, and there's one number in it that took me longer to shoot it than any other number in the show and I'd say ninety nine and nine tenths of everybody, even professionals, who watched it said, "Oh, you used three cameras on it." Well what we did was, we shot one camera 'cuz I really got into shooting film technique on even variety shows, you know? Many of my ice-skating, Disney [Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group], prime-time shows were all shot like film. This one shot of Olivia was that, it was a Billy Joel song, I LIKE YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE. And she would sing maybe, you know, a verse and two choruses before she got to the next verse and it was one set up and what she'd do very subtly is she would, we'd do a lighting change on both sides and she would turn to another angle but it was, it took three set-ups to do the one ballad and I could see where people would say, "Well you just changed camera angles." But there was no way to do the lighting changes and her turning her head at the same time but those are the moments. I have, I depend heavily on my camera crew and a DP [Director of Photography] and I've been blessed with working with some incredible people and if I have anybody to really, looking back on my career, to thank is every damn, it's the crews. It was never the front office, it was never the executives, etcetera. That's politics. I mean my, I wanted to be respected by the people I worked with and there's so many cameramen that I couldn't begin to thank. Of course, when I told them what the shot was, to say, "Have you thought of doing it this way instead of that way" and so forth. And it always looked better, you know?

INT: And, you know, lighting, some lighting people. I mean we're both friends with Bill Klages [William M. Klages] who is an incredibly talented Lighting Designer and who also puts his own stamp on things.
SB: When, I've worked with Billy so many times. He was my first Lighting Director when I went to New York for the first time to do HULLABALOO and he was red haired and a temper like you couldn't believe I mean he would throw tantrums, I always kid him to this day, you know, because he loved his craft so damn much that he could not see anybody not giving a hundred percent or ruining what he had labored over, you know, in terms of, I mean how many times have you worked with an Art Director or a Lighting Designer, etcetera, who basically, because they give you so much, you couldn't possibly use everything they bring to you and they're saying, "Why didn't you just shoot, you know, over on the right side when I had something upstage, you know?" Because it was great, it just didn't fit into the master plan of what you're trying to, you know, convey to your audience and for me my directing technique is to try and put myself in the seat of the audience as opposed to the seat of the Director. People say, you know, "I noticed how great the Director was with all their great shots," and so forth then you've done a lousy job directing because you want them pay attention to the story, the song, the script, the actor, you know? That's the only thing that's important and if I do a really good show it flows. Nobody's paying any attention to the camera changes or the angles.

INT: I think that the other element of, that's interesting about that NCAA [refering to NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] special is this whole process, of course you said that, you know, sports and Ingemar Johansson and the whole concept of you've got television, you've got broadcast, you know, videotape is coming in and so forth but the whole concept of closed circuit which is a video-based process, it's not a film-based process. You know, taking up a championship fight and putting it in an arena, is it just another type of broadcasting to a live audience. It's, I mean of course a fight. Is there's nothing more pressing, nothing more real, nothing more live than a live fight. You want to see somebody get knocked out at that moment. And then to take that, which is again the Bill, you know, the Bill Sargent [William H. Sargent, Jr.] idea of making it a theatrical event and mixing it with broadcast which is I think is very interesting which will lead us to another Bill Sargent production. I don't want to jump over important things but I do think what's important is cuz you've got so many kind of crucially important, historic productions that you did. One that was incredibly important to me and to anybody else who was young and loved rock n' roll cuz it was totally pioneering, was the T.A.M.I. SHOW and again, a Bill Sargent production.
SB: Let me say this. The reason that I have had the opportunity to do so many of these productions is because people like Bill Sargent never cared about the artistic side of the product. They made the deal, handed it to you, and said. "Do it." Never once, and it's been most of my career, until lately, I've just been blessed with working with Producers who said, "You're the guy." You know? "We're not gonna tell you what to shoot, or how to shoot, or anything. We're not gonna give you notes and suggestions." And I went through a whole period of my career, including the Bill Sargent years, where Bill had such confidence in my talent or whatever you want to call it, that he never once offered a suggestion as to what I should do. You know, I was given a total free hand in creativity and the people who really made the contributions were my team, you know? I used to go into think tanks from the T.A.M.I. SHOW to, you know, Diana Ross, I mean, you name it.

SB: Before we ever went into pre-production we would just sit and talk about ideas and what is it that we wanted to do. Usually the very first things that everybody threw in were the pedestrian, commercial ideas that we threw out and went to the next, you know, it was like peeling an onion. We went to the next layer and the next layer and so forth so in the T.A.M.I. SHOW, you know, I didn't know what I was doing other than just, you know, going by instinct. I had shot music shows, I didn't know who The Rolling Stones were, I didn't know Mick Jagger was gonna be the superstar and the lead signer. They were just a band from England, you know? Diana Ross and The Supremes were three girls from Motown and it just turned out it was Bill's [William H. Sargent, Jr.] genius, first of all, to not make it a television show but to go make it a movie, you know, because to me, whether you're doing movies, television, closed circuit, you know, now with, you know, you've got telephones and the new technologies and so forth. To me, that's just a palette to paint with. How it's distributed, how it's shown to an audience, it still needs to make an audience applaud, laugh, cry, etcetera. It's the same product. There's no different technique. You do one thing for movies, you do another thing for television, you do another thing for closed circuit. I was just using all my tools to put together with what I was asked to accomplish, the best way I knew how and with the best people I could hire to help me accomplish it. So when it came to the T.A.M.I. movie, my instinct said, "Make Mick Jagger and the Stones go on after James Brown and The Flames [The Famous Flames]." You know, I don't even know why I came to that decision but here was a case when I did James Brown he did a spectacular number, all his numbers were spectacular, but this one which is where he has a cape and-- [INT: Please, Please Me] PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE. Two microphones on stage left, stage right, and when he dropped to his knees and then, you know, bow his head forward and then his valet or whatever, his man, would take the coat basically and then walk him over to the other side of the stage and then as he's going through this painful...

INT: The whole thing is he's so exhausted, he's given so much that he collapses onstage and his valet comes over and puts the cape and says, "He's just exhausted, we have to take him off."
SB: Takes him to the other microphone and then James [James Brown] would all of a sudden get the strength to do it again, whip the cape off, come to the other side of the stage, and then continue the song until he got exhausted and fell again. Well, I was never able to rehearse James on the T.A.M.I. movie. I rehearsed everybody else, but James looked at me and said, "You don't need rehearsal, you'll know what to do when you see it." So now we're doing the song and I knew the song, you know, I had heard it and we had basically arranged it. And that was a time when all the singers, all the artists, didn't have these egomaniacal managers, agents, PR [public relations] people, etcetera. They went along with the concept of the T.A.M.I. SHOW, and they didn't insist on their full songs, they just did what they were basically told. We took all their hits, for each artist, and condensed them into this short little mini act for each one of them. We used dancers in their sets, I mean, I look at it now and I see Marvin Gaye inundated with twenty or thirty dancers. I'm saying, "What artist would let you do something like that today?", you know? Especially if they had a hit record. So, anyway, when James is going over to the side of the stage and he's gone through this routine, and all of a sudden, mathematically, music is mathematics, it locked in that he was going to do so many bars at this microphone, and so many bars at that microphone. Now I guess the very, you know, near the end of the song, or at least I think it's near the end of the song, he's exhausted, he goes over to the other microphone and now it comes time to whip off the cape and come to the other microphone and my instinct said, "He's not gonna come back." [INT: Don't cut the camera.] He's going to stay right where he is. Now we're not editing anything except live in cameras and for whatever reason, to this day, I did the perfect thing. I didn't cut away, he stayed at the microphone, finished the song, etcetera. And I was thinking, "Jeez, if I'd to cut, which I should have, to take him over to the other side of the stage, it would have ruined the number," cuz that was the climax of the whole piece and he didn't tell me he was gonna stay there, I just knew it, you know? And it worked out. You know, I always say that, you know, if you really think about your success in the business, it's a combination of your talent, it's a combination of timing and luck and luck is just as important as the talent, you know, so a lot of things I've done have been lucky.

INT: But your instincts are the most important. You know, that shot, your instinct was, "I should go the other way I mean but I'm not. My instinct says I'm staying on this camera for no logical reason because every other shot was, but there's something I feel inside." And now your instinct was right. [SB: Exactly] You know, the T.A.M.I. SHOW again, you should just explain to people that aren't familiar with it, was the thing that was interesting was that the history of rock and roll, Dick Clark had had his AMERICAN BANDSTAND, and he had a show on Saturday nights called THE BEECHNUT SHOW [THE DICK CLARK SATURDAY NIGHT BEECHNUT SHOW] where he'd have a kind of live audience, but it wasn't that live. But he'd have a live audience-- [SB: Everything was lip synced.] Yeah. He'd have people come on and do their hits, rock and rollers. But the idea of a mixed race show, there had a been a long, long dearth of rock and roll on television. It wasn't, you know, when you put rock and roll on television it had to be done in a particular way, which was more old show biz way, and the thing that I thought was incredible about the T.A.M.I. SHOW was that it had a real audience that you knew wasn't, you could hear the audience in the sound track. Now those kids were kids and they were seeing their absolute top artists of the era, the people that were their idols, the people that had the hit songs of the moment. It was so much like, you know, it was, I'm sure it was a feeling like being at the Brooklyn Paramount [The Paramount Theatre] when Alan Freed was doing those early rock and roll shows. And it's one of the rare instances when it's really captured. There was such a live feeling to everything with also, an incredible array of talent.
SB: Well, I think it was luck and Sargent's [William H. Sargent, Jr.] instinct because when you think about it all those acts were kids. All of them.

INT: Talk about who was on the show.
SB: It had Chuck Berry, it had Gary and the Pacemakers, Jerry and the Pacemakers, it had The Rolling Stones, James Brown and the Flames [The Famous Flames], The Supremes, [INT: Beach Boys.] Miracles, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Beach Boys, [INT: Marvin Gaye.], Jan and Dean, Marvin Gaye. It had one house act where the drummer had a claw, he didn't have one hand, it was, I guess he lost it in an industrial accident or something but he played the drums with an iron claw, you know, which was kind of unique. The Barbarians, they were called. But interestingly enough is that the audience was not trained by television on how to react. Dick Clark was very sedate, it was lip synced, it was play their commercial records, you know, do it down and dirty and cheap, which he continued on doing for years and years and years. In Bill's [William H. Sargent, Jr.] case, it was the show was shot at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which is a beach town, practically all Caucasian. That audience never saw the black acts in their life, though they heard their records. They didn't know what James Brown looked like. I didn't know what James Brown looked like. I didn't know what Smokey looked like, you know? I knew what Marvin Gaye looked like. I had seen him on something. But it was incredible that if you walked out on that stage, you were a layman. You had no credentials or anything. If you walked stage left, the whole right side of the audience would scream and react to you just moving on the stage. The stage was electrified. I mean it was mind-boggling, just the energy. It was pandemonium. I didn't use a soundtrack, or sweeten after the show was over. Now I had to make the movie by piecing the different segments together. Jan and Dean were used as the interstitial hosts on the show, but we were trying to get rid of a lot of the soundtrack. There were these white, blue eyed, blonde haired, you know, from upper middle class Santa Monica, Brentwood, Westwood, whatever, screaming at James Brown, "Fuck me! Fuck me!" Pardon my, you know, French but that's what was going on, and we could hear it in the soundtrack when we finished, you know, when we were in editing and playing it back to ourselves, and saying, "How do we get rid of this?" There wasn't any of that sophisticated audio equipment. It was done on two-track so there wasn't any way to remix. It was done with basically modified electronic cameras.

SB: That was Bill's [William H. Sargent, Jr.] genius, that's where he was going. When everybody had decided videotape was the answer. We don't have to use that old kinescope stuff where you record off the live picture, videotape is the way to go. Now we don't have to do shows live, now we can, you know, we can tape everything. Two things happened. Desi Arnaz, who was brilliant, said, "I'm not going for videotape. I'm selling this show all over the world and LUCY's [I LOVE LUCY] gonna be done on 35mm film." And he stuck to his guns even, though he'd basically invented the multiple camera sitcom, you know, situation. The other thing was that Bill Sargent said, you know, "Why is everybody stopping with this kinescope stuff?" Electronovision, electronic cameras are the future. He was the father of digital television which is now being used by George Lucas making STAR WARS, and so forth. But he decided that, you know, without getting too technical, when America decided to do commercial television and broadcast into the homes, whoever it was decided you could have five hundred and twenty five lines in your picture - vertical and horizontal - which composed, basically, the grid to, you know, broadcast the picture. Well, Europe was much later than we were and Japan was much later, etcetera, and said, "We don't have those rules." Cuz once you set that pattern, you cannot legally change it on television, on broadcast television. So when you'd go to Europe or go to the Orient, and you look at their television compared to our television, ours was mediocre. I mean the-- [INT: The quality was.] The quality was. [INT: They had many more lines.] They start increasing the lines. Well, Bill Sargent said, "I'm gonna make movies. And I'm gonna use electronic cameras and I'm gonna start increasing the lines so that I can project it on a big screen." Because if you have five hundred twenty five lines and you start spreading it out as the picture gets bigger, the quality starts, you know, dissipating, it looks almost out of focus, it's very soft, and so forth. He said, "But if I have more lines, I can keep that grid, even though I'm expanding the lines, I can keep the quality of the picture." So when we started out, close-ups looked great, wide shots looked horrible, you know? So, basically, his first project before even the T.A.M.I. SHOW was convincing Richard Burton to do HAMLET on Broadway and he got to photograph it and released it as a limited run motion picture, and it would prove to be very successful. People didn't care about the quality, they cared about the performance and the material.