SB: I got a call from Selig Seligman asking, you know, he'd heard good things about me as an Operations Director and he said "Would you like a summer job?" But I had to go get permission from my boss who was a woman named Norma Olson and she was sort of a first sergeant person who was very protective about her little niche at the station. [INT: Her group of Operations Directors.] And when I told her that I had, I was going to leave and take Norman Abbott’s job for the summer, and evidently they had promised Norman that if it didn't work out at CBS he could come back. So she said "If you take that job you can never come back as an Operations Director and you may be out of work after the summer and, you know, that will be your career in show business." And I thought about it for about half a second and I said, "I'm leaving, I'm taking the job." So I left to take the job, and this was my first real exposure to live television cameras. One of the great lessons I learned was I had a cameraman who I really liked a lot and he was very well respected. He had done network ABC as well as KABC shows. And one of my very first jobs was putting on the afternoon movie for KABC and doing live commercials with an announcer named, I think his name was Bill Gwinn, and he'd sit in a chair like I'm sitting here now and he would basically re-cap the movie, kinda tell you we'll be back and tell you a little about the movie we're gonna see, and it was very casual kind of show and we didn't, at that time, even have any particular time when we'd bail out to do commercials. We'd just make the decision improvisationally and decide to, "Okay, let's do a commercial," and I’d-- [INT: In the movie?] I'd wait for the movie to end the scene and then I'd go. There were no leaders, no anything. [INT: So you stop the projector?] Stop the projector. [INT: Go to the commercial then you'd start it up again?] Yeah. [INT: Oh my god.] And then he’d do the commercial, and he’d, you know, he’d mostly speak about the commercials as opposed to roll films or anything. And it was -- I had one camera to work with and we had, in those days, turret cameras. We didn't have zoom lenses. [INT: Turret camera meaning you’ve got three lenses?--] Four lenses with a handle on the camera and you would turn to the various lenses. So, you learn quickly that probably a fifty-millimeter lens is the perfect lens to use if you want to squeeze into the actor. But I had also on those turrets I had a 135mm lens, I had a 75mm lens and you had options if you had another camera.

INT: But you couldn't switch those lenses when you only had one camera, you couldn't go from one lens to another live?
SB: Exactly. So, I lobbied the station, Peter Robinson was my Program Director, I lobbied him to give me two cameras and I could do a much better show. And he did. So one day I arrive and my cameraman is Mike, I'm trying to think of his name, he became a pretty famous sports director and unfortunately he passed away a few years back. But he was a hot head and he just, you know, God forbid the Director did something wrong, he was the first one in your face telling you, you know, not to do it. And I -- on the one camera we had an incident when I was shooting the host when he went to a commercial and I started out on a 135mm lens and I asked him to dolly. We now go back to the film and in comes, I think it was Mike Levy or something like that. He storms in the control booth, he comes up to me and he gets right in my face and he says "I don't want you ever to open your mouth again until you learn what these lenses can do." [INT: Does Mike Levy had bald head?] Yeah. [INT: I worked with Mike Levy. He was, he worked, he ended up I think working for NFL FILMS and he was one of the great--] Same guy. [INT: He was one of the great long lens men of all time. He was really, but he had huge experience in sports and he was a really good cameraman but he did speak his mind.] SB: He just, just, I mean it was, I was so intimidated I mean I couldn't speak to him for about a week, you know, it was like I was scared of death of him. And he said "You don't open your mouth until you know what these lenses can do." You know? So...

INT: And he was right.
SB: A hundred percent. [INT: I mean, you know, dollying on a 135mm lens is rather tough. But that's interesting. So, you know, you learned through, you know, that kind of experience.] So now I get two cameras and now, in the live thing I've got two toys to play with so I'm going back and forth, etcetera. And I'm not saying anything and then I'm on a 50mm lens with Mike and I said "Dolly into Bill [Bill Gwinn]." First time ever. And this is like a good week, if not two weeks later from our incident. And Mike [Mike Levy] dollies in, and he comes into the booth and he says, you know, "Now you're talkin'." And we became best friends. So I've found there are guys in the business who, if you consider yourself a perfectionist, they are too. And they, they're the real teachers of, you know, I mean they’ve, I've learned, when I taught at USC, a directing class, all the kids wanted to be the Technical Director, they wanted to be the cameraman, they wanted to be this and that. I said, "I'm here to teach you how to be a Director. You don't have to be an expert at other people's jobs. They're the experts. You just have to learn to speak their language. You know, your language is directing and, you know, that's what you have to focus on.” So here I was being accepted by a cameraman that I totally respected who was now accepting me because I had done what he told me I had to do. And I did, I started studying lenses like crazy, you know. Depth of focus and what have you. And I kept it up through my whole career of going, if there's a new crane that they’re debuting on the market, I'm one of the first guys to call the company and say, "Can I come look at it?" and so forth, I just want to keep on top of what tools we need to know about to be able to use. You know, I think, I did a tribute show to Sam Kinison when he passed away, the comedian. And I got the idea I want to use six Louma cranes and put ‘em, do a theater in the round thing and every, I'd have six hard cameras and six Louma cranes and it turned out to be an incredible experience of letting the entertainers be totally free, not worry about television, not worry about cameras and booms and what have you, and just do their normal walk around, you know, in an arena environment etcetera. But, very funny story, when I was at KABC I got to do all kinds of shows. There was a music composer show with a guy named Larry Finley and he had a trade deal with the L.A. Examiner [Los Angeles Examiner]. And his show, he didn't know what his show was and he was strictly, should have never been on-camera. He was a guy that was just a promoter, a salesman. And he came to me and said, "I want to do a music show, what should I do?" And I called the show MUSIC IS MY BEAT and we had the great songwriters, the Sammy Cahn’s, and anybody who was well known as a songwriter we put on the show and basically did a biography show where they sat at a piano and they'd talk about, you know, the songs they wrote. Then they give a little--

INT: It's funny I've always found that, you know, songwriters, a lot of times, don't have as greatest voices and great voices like Ella Fitzgerald or Sinatra [Frank Sinatra] can interpret their stuff, but songwriters are always interesting to hear do their own material, 'cause they've got a particular, interesting slant on it 'cause they created it.
SB: Exactly. I did Liza Minnelli’s first special [LIZA, 1970], network special, and I booked two young, unknown songwriters, one by the name of Jimmy Webb and the other by Randy Newman. And I put ‘em both on, and the audience sort of stood there with their mouths open just wondering who are these guys, you know? And I mean it was not a commercial success to say the least by putting them on, but it was fascinating, and then realizing, you know, dissolve 30 years later they're two giants in the music industry, you know, and people love to hear them sing. Neil Young, who would ever, ever give him a chance to sing, you know, and yet, you know, I find him more fascinating than a guy who just has a great voice and picks other people's songs, etcetera. But I got to do, aside from MUSIC IS MY BEAT, I got to do a local paint salesman [Charles M. Runyon], called himself Chucko the Clown and did a kid's show. There was another show, there was a sports personality in town named Hank Weaver, he was pretty popular. And Hank did basically a version of the Steve Allen show late at night where he'd have, you know, great guest stars talk about, you know, topical subjects. We had Lenny Bruce on the show as a regular and a lot of great jazz artists and so forth. That was a wonderful experience to be able to, and that was, probably two cameras was my maximum in those days. It’s all the station could afford. But I also learned to discipline myself, not to just use cameras because I’ve got 'em. You don't take camera two if you still can work the shot on camera one. And I find, as I watch, especially in the music variety world, I've seen Directors who laymen say "Boy, they're great directors, they're snapping their fingers, they're dissolving, they're doing this, they’re doing that." And if you've got a great talent, you know, and I've been blessed with working with some great talents, the camera gets in the way if take, if you start cutting away from them, you know. If you've got Diana Ross singing a song, a ballad, you don't want to leave her, I mean she's there, she's the one who's the money shot, you know? And I'm very frugal when it comes to multiple camera shots even in a multiple camera show. You know, I really, you know, I use the cliché that I want to be motivated as to why I go to another shot, you know? There has to be a reason, whether it's the breathing of the music arrangement or whatever it is where it changes keys or what have you, but I just don't like the idea of taking a lot of shots because it’s, you're showing off the Director as opposed to the talent that's in front of the camera.

SB: One of my funniest incidents was that on the Hank Weaver show, he did the late night show and then after that it would sign the station off until the next morning. So it was just, you know, playing the Star Spangled Banner and having an announcer go through the end result. We had a guest star and it might have been Lenny Bruce, as a matter of fact. And he was in the middle of a story when I was supposed to be off the air. So I decided, you know, no harm no foul, you know, we did all our commercials that we were obligated to do, so I decided to let the show run over about three or four minutes and let him finish his story and then, you know, and then I'd sign the station on afterwards. So I did and the station was, you know, like signed off instead of at midnight it was 12:04:30AM or something like that. Next morning I get a call and Selig Seligman wants to see me. So I go into his office, I don't have a clue why he's called me into his office. I walk in and he said "Congratulations" and hands me a little package with a bow on it. I take it and I said, "What's this for?" He said, "Open it." So I undo the ribbon, I open it up, it's a stopwatch. He said, "The next time you let the station run overtime you're fired." And I still have the stopwatch and I still don't get it why stations run, you know, exactly, you know, if you flip the dials or hit your remote, you know, all the news stations go to their commercial breaks exactly at the same time and it's down to the mechanical instead of the human emotion thing and I've always, you know, a good story is worth telling. And every time I used to produce and direct the national Emmy’s as an example. You know, I loved hearing people, you know, even if they wanted to thank their agents and their mother and their father and their kids, etcetera, the real highlight of the show for me were the speeches. Because every once in awhile you'd get a Dustin Hoffman or somebody who’d just give a great, you know, speech after they won their award. And now it's a case of, you know, you're tested whether it's a good show or bad show if you got the show on and off the air on time and their speeches only ran 30 seconds, you know, so they'd give another award, and so forth. And it never made any sense to me. But while I was at KABC I really got lucky and I started to direct SOUPY SALES. And Soupy --

INT: Which, again, being somebody from Southern California, you know, THE SOUPY SALES SHOW was something that every teenager tuned in to see. You know, he had a certain irreverence and kind of a strange, off-color quotient that you felt like you gonna, were in the middle of something risqué.
SB: Well, we were in a way. I think the reason we had such a great youth following is because Soupy [Soupy Sales] used to program a show with a lot of dirty jokes, only would never tell the punch lines. But all the kids watching the show knew the punch lines. So he became really popular, you know, in that sense where he did very irreverent, you know, bits. And I used to do the show five days a week at 4:30 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday and used to have a ball. I mean we -- [INT: You should describe a little bit, you know? 'Cause this is a, those people who don't know who Soupy Sales was, I mean it is a quote "kind of kid's show" it isn’t, and I think it was really a show kind of aimed at young people, but White Fang explained those things, and the door and all the unique things that were part of that show.] Soupy, I was convinced had ADD [now known as ADHD, or Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder]. I mean he was a ball of energy and he was constantly fidgeting, etcetera. He wore a black top hat, a big bow tie, you know, that was polka dotted and a sweater like I'm wearing and a shirt underneath and he had a wonderful partner at the time and his name was Clyde Adler. And Clyde did all the voices on the show. You only saw on the show Soupy. You never saw anybody else. What you'd see is, where he'd go to the door you'd see a hand come in, if it was a salesman, the hand would come in with a attaché case. He had, his companions were two dogs. And it's funny 'cause I just had dinner with my nephew the other day, and my nephew came to see the show when he was like five years old and these dogs were Black Fang [White Fang] and White Tooth [Black Tooth] I think it was. [INT: That was it, yeah.] And they were just big paws with Clyde standing on a little stepladder and his hand would come in, his paw would come in over the lens and then he would speak in this guttural voice [INT and SB making guttural talking dog noises] Right. Exactly.

INT: And then Soupy Sales would translate it.
SB: You got it. But anyway my nephew said, when he came to see Soupy Sales, he said, “You ruined my life," because it was like finding out there’s no Santa Claus. He wanted to see, you know, these monstrous dogs and when he saw this guy with his paw, but he never said anything to me until this week when we're sitting and having dinner and talking about Soupy. But Soupy caught everybody's imagination. One of the things he did is he was the master of the slapstick. He was the master of the, you know, old Mack Sennett, KEYSTONE KOPS thing, and he loved throwing pies. It became a signature of the show. What it was basically was, you know, white shaving cream on a paper plate but we would use a quarter load gunshot with the sound effects so that every time it hit, you swear you got hit smack in the face with a real pie. And we did one bit which I remember was very funny. We actually were so popular that ABC decided to put us on the network. And first show that went on the air had Frank Sinatra as a guest star. And the reason that we had Frank as a guest star was that Frank actually called me and asked to do the show. And at first I didn’t-- [INT: He was a fan?] I didn't think it was him. He was more than a fan. It seems that Frank Junior [Frank Sinatra, Jr.] was neglected as a child and spent about, you know, a lot of his spare time at Soupy’s house with Soupy’s two boys. So Frank was repaying a favor to Soupy. But we went on the network and the first three guests we had were Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis who was huge at the time, and Mickey Rooney. They were the first three weeks of the show. And we're getting calls all over the place saying, you know, "I want to come on and be hit with a pie." And I have a lot of funny pie stories along the way in my career. But Soupy, when he went on the network, he was the rage of, you know, a successful local show that translated itself onto prime time across the country. Most of the country was scratching their heads saying who is this character, you know, with the dogs and the salesmen and the pretty girls behind the door and so forth. And now Soupy became so popular in those first few weeks that he got an offer to replace, I think it was probably in those days it was Jack Parr, and come to New York and do THE TONIGHT SHOW as the host. And he was incredibly excited and he made the biggest career mistake of his life. He left Clyde [Clyde Adler] at home, he left White Fang and Black Tooth at home, he left his bow tie, and his top hat at home, and he went to go be Jack Parr or Steve Allen or Johnny Carson and become this great standup comedian and he bombed. I mean the public, you know, had he gone on as Soupy Sales I think it would have been even more--

INT: Was that show live, or was that show taped?
SB: We were live. [INT: So, first of all, if you--] There was no tape in those days. [INT: No I wasn’t, so you had to have a pretty good sound or prop guy to be able to match those gunshots with the pies, right?] Perfect. [INT: And then beyond that there's a famous story about at least, maybe it's apocryphal, but the whole thing about Soupy opening the door and you couldn't see beyond the door but he opened the door and you actually had a naked woman back there?] There is a, we, yeah, there was a, we decided as the crew to play a joke on Soupy and not realizing the repercussions but what we did is somebody had a friend who was an actress, who was very voluptuous, incredible body, and we convinced her to take her clothes off, stand behind the door, not tell Soupy anything. And then when Soupy went to the door, the bit was that somebody was supposed to hand in a glass or prop to him and so forth. He would open the door, take the prop and come back into the room and continue on. So on this particular live show, Soupy goes upstage and he opens the door and now what he's seeing is this beautiful, nude woman and he freaked because he didn't realize the camera angle was at such a point where you couldn't see anything. All you could see is Soupy going to the door and the little crack in the door and the prop coming in, but his mind told him that what he was looking at is what was on television. And it was, and we were allowed, you know, the crew was encouraged to laugh at the jokes and so forth, and not worry about being off camera, etcetera. And it was so shocking that because it became such a famous story and we had figured out how to, we didn't have videotape, we had kinescope and we figured out how to kinescope the bit and then it started circulating at all the various networks and local stations, practically throughout the country and it became, it probably exists somewhere to this day but it became a very famous piece. [INT: And he was pretty freaked out though?] Totally freaked. [INT: Lose his track for a while?] Oh yeah, absolutely.

INT: Well, let's talk about now, you know, the evolution. Because you've graduated from a novice, to Operations Director, to the fact that now you're doing several shows, you know? How many shows could you do a day when you were a staff Director?
SB: I did a full eight to ten hour shift so I was moving from show to show to show. [INT: So show to show?] There was a very famous show, which was a prelude to DANCING WITH THE STARS that was Al Jarvis who was a local disc jockey. [INT: MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM.] MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM and it was swing, waltz, and cha-cha. And we did a five day a week show with that. And the funny story because when Ann-Margret first hit town she’d just come from the University of Illinois where she went to school, and her boyfriend bandleader at the time from university was a young guy named Scott Smith. Really nice guy. And they hit town and they went to see my managers who were Bobby Roberts and Pierre Cossette at the time and Bobby called me up and said "How about putting them on the dance," it was an amateur dance show, "How about putting them on the dance show?" because if they win they got $50 bucks or something and it would really help them financially. So I said, "Sure." And they came out to the studio and this show's live everyday and we put them on the show and they lost. As it turned out, Al found out they were friends of mine and didn't want them to win anything but it was very funny that Ann-Margret could not win a dance contest on LET'S DANCE.

INT: So what is, you know, just in terms of, because you're quite famous as a freelance Director. You know, you did this, but you know, that early part of your career you got some gigs that lasted awhile. Now, what was the motivating factor to have you leave ABC and go out on your own?
SB: The greatest thing that happened is, I got fired. When I started doing the Soupy Sales network show [THE SOUPY SALES SHOW] there was an executive at ABC who was all-powerful for the network and hiring Directors and so forth. His name was Sandy Cummings and Sandy happened to be at Pebble Beach during an ABC golf tournament. There were famous stories of him, you know, in a riding crop, and so forth, and riding boots and he'd be on a horse on the golf course, and so forth. And Sandy heard that a local Director was directing a network show and he had not had his two cents, you know? Nobody had-- [INT: He hadn't put his stamp on it?] Nobody had asked him. And demanded that I be fired immediately, but I could continue directing the Monday through Friday KABC show. And I was, when I heard the story, I couldn't believe it. I said, you know, "Soupy, couldn't you tell them no?," you know. By that time Soupy was so excited about being a network star that he wasn't about to challenge Sandy’s decision, so I was literally fired. The next thing I know another Director who I became friends with after, a network Director named Bob Henry called me and said, "I don't know why but I've been hired to do THE SOUPY SALES SHOW, can you teach me how to do it?" By that time we had a very smooth running machine, and I said, "Sure." And we met and we became friends afterwards, but he took over the show and I wrote a letter to Leonard Goldenson; never got a response. [INT: Who was the owner of ABC.] That's right. And I told him how, you know, unfair this decision was and that, you know, if he didn't rehire me I was going to quit the network. I was going to quit the KABC job. Never heard back from him, and within I think two weeks I was out of there. And while I was at KABC there was a very popular network show called JAZZ SCENE USA or it was called STARS OF JAZZ. It was a half hour show sponsored by Budweiser. Very, very artistic and it had every major jazz artist you could think of that did the show. Bobby Troup and his wife Julie London were the hosts of the show. [INT: Bobby Troup of "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66?"] You got it, the songwriter-pianist. And Budweiser, from what I gather, Auggie Busch [August A. Busch Jr.] or whatever, loved the show. But the show sponsors, before and after, because jazz got such low ratings in television, insisted that ABC take the show off the air. Typical network thinking. And so I got an opportunity and met the Stage Manager of JAZZ SCENE [USA] and he was my Stage Manager quite often on some of my own local shows including [THE] SOUPY SALES [SHOW], and he befriended Steve Allen. Steve Allen had an ABC show at the time--

INT: I think we should just, for the general public. A Stage Manager, you know, define that. I mean a Stage Manager is the person who kind of runs the stage while you’re in the booth, right?
SB: Stage Manager is the voice of the Director. And I'm very hard on Stage Managers, though I have some of the most talented, favorite Stage Managers I've ever worked with. But I'm also very loyal. I usually work with the same people over and over and over again. In this particular case, the Stage Manager is on the stage. Television Directors generally speaking, live in the control room, with the equipment and the monitors and the cameras. And the Technical Director, the Script Supervisor, the Lighting Designer, the Video Control Operator, etcetera. And I learned very early in my career that a lot of Directors hide from talent. They don't know what they do, they don't want to confront them. Usually, you know, television Directors have been given a reputation in many cases of being traffic cops, not real Directors. So I started out early saying, "I love people, I love actors, I gotta learn what actors do," so I started doing freelance, taking classes as an actor, though I knew I never wanted to act, but I wanted to be able to communicate. I wanted to be able to-- [INT: You took a class with Jeff Corey, right?] ...speak the language. Jeff Corey. I spent a lot of time with Jeff. I took the class with a few other people. One of my favorite classes was here at the Directors Guild [DGA]. Ted-- [INT: Post.] Post taught a class here and I took it for the title. The title was, "What Do You Say to an Actor After You Say Hello?" and I thought that was one of the great titles I had heard about and I took the class and he made us all not just be Directors in the class, it was a class filled with Directors Guild Directors but we had to be the Actors too in our scenes, and it was a lot of fun. And therefore I started to realize how insecure an Actor is onstage. I don't care if it's a singer or a dramatic Actor. If they're just hearing this quote unquote "voice from God" coming over the public address system. And so I decided very early in my career that I was not gonna to live in this control room and hide. I was going to be out on the stage . And I, for years now, I've been putting my control room out on the stage and I work through my Associate Director and my Stage Manager, but I have my whole set up. I'm on a headset and I have my monitors of each one of the cameras on a rolling table and that way when the actor, or the singer, or whatever says, "Steve, should I do such and such," they're not hearing a voice coming from the control room, I'm there to talk to them. It used to frustrate me when I would say to the Stage Manager, "Tell them not to be such a baby." And he would try and clean it up for me and be tactful and said, "Steve says could you do it such and such" and I say "Tell them exactly what I said. Don't tell them your interpretation of what I'm telling you.” you know? And, but I have, you know, Stage Manager is the Director in lieu of the Director being there. They're the ones giving the stage crews directions, of scenic, you know, changes, instructions to the Actors when the Director's actually physically in the booth directing. And it's a very, very responsible job.

SB: I feel everybody on your crew, everybody, is equally important. I don't care if it's the guy holding up the cue cards. If they screw up, everybody suffers. And if you can get them all working together, you know, in a coordinated effort, even if it's a mistake, it'll come out right if everybody's doing a mistake the exact same way. It's only when people are trying to outthink the Director and half the team goes this way and the other half goes that way it gets all screwed up, you know? So, I’ve been very, you know, I love input. I tell everybody on my crew always, you can make all the suggestions you want with one, you know, exception. I make the final decision, you know? I don’t want to hear, and especially if you're dealing in multiple cameras and you have, in some situations, fourteen cameras and fourteen people behind the lenses and everybody is vying for turf. Every cameraman wants to be the [emphasis] cameraman that's got the shot that's on the air. And I've used shows where I've told the cameraman upfront, "You know, in this hour you're only gonna have two shots. Period. So, I don't want to hear you complaining that so and so got forty shots, you know, but you're being hired for very specifically for certain, you know, shots and reasons." And because especially when you've got a three-camera crew, you know, you're dealing with the dynamics of their personalities. Each cameraperson is basically saying, you know, "I can get you that shot." And I do a lot of homework when I do shows. They may seem, you know, I used to, when I did Steve Allen as an example, for over two years, and I did his late night Westinghouse show [THE STEVE ALLEN WESTINGHOUSE SHOW], which was ninety minutes a night, five nights a week, it was live on tape, meaning we never edited the tape. We just recorded it and then it would be syndicated throughout the country. But that's where I really got my education. Really got it. I mean I went to grammar school, junior high, high school, college, and probably got my masters working for Steve. It was just, you know, every night was ninety minutes of improvisation, experimentation, you know, and the more I experimented the more Steve patted me on my back and said, "Go for it." You know, so it was-- [INT: I want to, we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW [THE STEVE ALLEN PLYMOUTH SHOW] because it was such a groundbreaking show. But just go back a moment because you left ABC, your Stage Manager loved jazz, I’m going to paraphrase it here, but who financed that show? In other words, you have a jazz show that's thrown off of ABC and now you’re gonna, but you want to talk about who financed the show and what you did?] I'm glad you brought me back. [INT: Okay.] Okay. When I quit ABC, Jimmie Baker [James H. Baker], my Stage Manager, said Steve Allen had just gotten fired from ABC. His ratings were low and he was-- [INT: And a network show?] and he was taken off the air. It was a network primetime ABC show. I'd never met Steve. And-- [INT: What year is this?] This would be 1960, probably. In the '59-'60 area.

INT: And how long had you worked at ABC?
SB: A total of about a year. [INT: Okay.] Jimmy Baker came to me and said Steve [Steve Allen] doesn't want to do television anymore. He's sick of the networks, sick of the, you know, the edicts. He had done a segment he was passionate about called MEETING OF THE MINDS [MEETING OF MINDS] and this was when he had a primetime show competing with Ed Sullivan on NBC. [INT: Right.] It was very popular. [INT: He had Elvis Presley on.] You got it. That's a whole other story. But what happened is that NBC decided that MEETING OF THE MINDS [MEETING OF MINDS], which was intellectually brilliant. MEETING OF MINDS concept was taking actual, recorded history of dialogue, speeches given by everybody from Plato, Napoleon-- [INT: Benjamin Franklin.] Benjamin Franklin, putting them at a round table in costume and he would somehow put together a cohesive, meaningful, story of these guys meeting over a subject, whether it be democracy, capitalism, you name it. NBC said, “We hired Steve Allen to do a comedy show. We don't want him to do a serious PBS-type, you know, show.” And so they told him he had to take it out of the show. They got into some kind of a, I don't know the exact story. And the next thing you know he’s, the show's taken off the air at NBC for contractual infringement. He then goes to ABC and they hire him in primetime to do a comedy variety show and it didn't make it. It just, you know, the ratings were low, etcetera, and now he's taken off the air there. That's when I'm in this mix. Jimmy tells me that Steve is so frustrated at television, and networks, and network edicts, and so forth that he's going to become a Producer instead and he's going to finance his own money to do a jazz series called JAZZ SCENE USA.

SB: Jimmy [Jimmy Baker], who's a stage manager at ABC, was also very well known because he was producing the MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL, and for years. And Steve's [Steve Allen] business manager at that time was a man named Phil Turetsky, and he was a big jazz fan. And I used to hang out with these guys at Shelly Manne’s Manne Hole [Shelly’s Manne-Hole] in Hollywood and anywhere there was jazz. There was a big band jazz club, which was next door to PJ’s Nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, it was very popular. And I got to see all the really great, all the jazz musicians who happened to be in Hollywood at the time on Tuesday nights, would race to get to the venue because it was first-come, first-serve. So they would jump into the chairs whether they were saxophone players, or piano players, or drummers, or whatever. And as a result, you know, it was just a Mecca for the great jazz musicians of that era. And we, they, Phil and Jimmy went to Steve and said, "There's this young Director that we really are excited about, he's a great guy, we really like him. We'd like to hire him to do this jazz series." And they actually convinced Steve to hire me, sight unseen. We produced twenty-six half hour shows hosted by Oscar Brown Jr. We did them at CBS with the PLAYHOUSE 90 crew. And at that time CBS really treated their engineers like talent. They weren't just on a list of seniority, and there was such pride in working with these guys who always considered themselves the best that CBS had to offer and had done PLAYHOUSE 90 and a lot of those great shows. So, what basically happened is that was a great education. We worked with Stan Kenton Big Band, Shorty Rogers [Milton “Shorty” Rogers], on and on, twenty-six of these half hours, Nancy Wilson, Lou Rawls [Louis Allen Rawls]. And I got to experiment in the show with montages of close-up cameras. And when you look at jazz on television, if it's shot without creative lighting, without creative camera work, it's pretty boring. You got to close your eyes and listen to the music. But I felt there was a generic relationship between the camera, the mood. Used Vaseline on the lenses on ballads and all kinds of different things. And people were saying you can't take a close-up, and cut to another close-up, and cut to another close-up. You've gotta have medium shots and long shots, and so forth, and I broke a lot of rules in that show.