INT: Hello, I'm Taylor Hackford. Today is January 31, 2006. I am conducting an interview with Steve Binder for the Directors Guild of America [DGA] Visual History Program and we are here today at the DGA headquarters in Los Angeles, California.

SB: Hi, my name is Steve Binder spelled B-I-N-D-E-R. I was born in Los Angeles. Let’s see. No nicknames, and my birthdate is December 12, 1932.

INT: Steve, I've been looking forward to this because, you know, I've long been a great fan of your work and have, as you well know, experienced and been majorly influenced by a lot of the shows that you did. My, of course, first introduction to Steve Binder was your credit on the T.A.M.I. SHOW. Little did I know that you had done so many other shows that I had known about, seen, and then subsequently also discovered that had influenced me. So, we first met when we, I was at KCET here in Los Angeles as a Producer and loved the T.A.M.I. SHOW and decided to put together, you know, kind of a rediscovery of the T.A.M.I. SHOW, it hadn't been seen in years. And you came on, and I interviewed you at that time. So it's great, I don’t know, it must be 20 years ago or something, so it's great to kind of get back together. I particularly want to start with influences. You were born in Los Angeles but give me a little bit of your background?
SB: I was born to a middle class family in the heart of Los Angeles in an area called Carthay Circle and my father owned a gas station, a truck station, downtown Los Angeles near the Central Market [Grand Central Market]. My mother was basically a homemaker, but she always was there to help my dad. I have an older sister who graduated UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] and became a teacher. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. I kind of, I think I was motivated by wanting to make my parents proud of me. So, I registered, when I graduated L.A. High School [Los Angeles High School] I went to the University of Southern California [USC] and I enrolled as a pre-med student.

INT: When you were in high school at L.A. High [Los Angeles High School], L.A. High is a good breeding ground for a lot, it’s, you know, people look at L.A. High today and it's very interesting ethnic mix and, you know, at a certain point L.A. High was a major feeder for, you know, both UCLA [University of California Los Angeles] and SC [University of Southern California] and did you involve yourself then with theatrical productions, with broadcasting, with anything at L.A. High?
SB: I had no interest in being in show business when I grew up. It was the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, when I went to USC, I joined the Air Cadets, thinking I wanted to be a pilot and I remember we were at the Shrine Auditorium at some kind of lecture and there was a part of a movie being made down on the stage. An independent film, probably. And the commanding officer of our unit looked down there and he said, and I never forgot this. He said, "I want you guys all to look down on that stage. That is the lowest form of mankind." And so there was a basic prejudice I think against show business, you know, that I heard very early in life.

INT: Did you accept that? I mean you said, “I'm one of the cadets so I agree, these are subhumans?”
SB: I didn't know what he was talking about. I mean it just never occurred to me to make judgment on anybody. And ironically, it was my mother who, knowing that I was kind of going to school but not really having any passion for becoming a doctor, I hated the sight of blood on other people. I could accept it on myself, but I just, you know, when it came time to dissect a frog and I was saying, "This is not for me." So my mother cut out a little article in the L.A. Times [Los Angeles Times], which said USC [University of Southern California] was starting a telecommunications department [now, The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism] along with their cinema department [USC School of Cinematic Arts]. And she suggested that maybe I should take some electives, and I don't know why. And I did and I met somebody in my first telecommunications class that was working on the radio station at USC. [INT: KUSC?] KUSC FM. And I became an announcer, not just for KUSC FM, but I also was hired to do some voice-overs for the Department of Defense [United States Department of Defense] in the cinema department that they were making training films for the military. And I also got the job, USC had a sister relationship with a commercial station in Los Angeles called KFAC, classical music station, and I started announcing chamber music concerts at the Shrine [Shrine Auditorium] or in that area with Franz Waxman, a very distinguished composer, conductor, had a chamber music orchestra and I'd broadcast the shows on AM and FM and they were simultaneously carried by KUSC as well.

INT: So you know, in this instance, and you had no relatives that were in show business?
SB: None. [INT: So in this instance that’s your entrée into this strange world of, as your friend said, 'the worst human beings on earth'. What was your sense? Did you have a sense, "this is where I belong", or "I dig this", or "I still don't know but it’s kind of cool"?] I grew up very introverted. I belonged to some high school clubs, but I was kind of, I always considered myself a loner. I would lock myself up in the bathroom and pretend I was a football star. I really used my imagination. Just, it was kind of a funny story because nobody could -- and we had one bathroom in our home and my parents were getting worried that I was having personal sexual encounters in the bathroom because I was in there so long and they never realized-- [INT: They may have been right] Could have been right, yeah. But basically I was very introverted, and when I went to work on KUSC I found this magical other person that was totally comfortable in front of a microphone. I always kind of felt I was talking to somebody out there so it was kind of a more of an intimate one-on-one, and it unleashed a whole other, you know, person that I kind of liked as opposed to this kid who is, who felt the world was looking at him when he was out in public or whatever, and felt uncomfortable with that kind of feeling.

INT: Now at the time, in terms of camera, this was an announcing situation. Did you have any relation with the camera at all?
SB: Allan Hancock was a very larger than life USC [University of Southern California] alumni and he started what was basically educational television in Los Angeles. They had the Allan Hancock Foundation on the campus and they were starting up a television station. And I remember, at the age of, I don't know, eighteen, I went to audition as one of the anchors. It was my first introduction to television and sitting in front of a camera and talking. And I didn't get the job, but I remember an interesting thing that happened while I was in the middle of all of this. Somebody said "You're gonna fail 'cuz you have the name 'educational' in your station name and you've got a spoonful of medicine. Spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down." And it didn't stay on the air very long and people weren't really excited about it until, you know, years later in a sense. But they were, I was very anxious to get into television without really knowing it.

INT: Now it's interesting, you know, USC [University of Southern California] was also involved in the forming of KCET, which was educational television at the time, but they called it community television.
SB: They took out the name educational. [INT: They took educational out. But it was effectively the inheritor of what Allan Hancock had started.] Absolutely. [INT: Now you graduated from USC?] No, I never did. I finished three and a half years and went into the military. [INT: You did? Alright. So, you get some broadcasting experience. You're not really connected to the camera, you're in front of the camera, in front of the microphone.] One job, I met at USC a nice young guy named Hal Dasbach. Hal Dasbach got a job working at KTLA with Klaus Landsberg and he asked a few of us if we wanted to work at KTLA at night on the stage crew. So I volunteered to be one of the guys, and you’re gonna get paid for it. And I had to show up at midnight and work until six in the morning or whatever, and my job was with a bunch of other guys, moving the scenery from stage to stage. But two really good things happened: one is that I got to listen in on Klaus Landsberg who was an icon in Los Angeles as a Director, Producer, and I got to listen in on his headset which was a shocking experience because he loved using four letter words as he talked to people and that was kind of shocking to me in those days. I came from a family where my parents, you know, would tell dirty jokes and leave out the punch lines 'cuz they didn't want to hear us, or let their kids hear four letter words. And the other thing is, that I realized this was not fun, moving scenery. Nobody was on the lot, it was just us. And so I went to Hal literally days later, maybe two, three days, and I said, "I quit." And he said, “Steve, if you can't make it here you're never going to make it in Hollywood.”

INT: Now this is, I want to divert here a little bit because I think it's important. I grew up in Santa Barbara, which was in the sphere of broadcasting of Los Angeles, so I got the Los Angeles stations. You grew up in Los Angeles and you mentioned Klaus Landsberg who is, you know, an icon, he's a major icon and a pioneer in television. You know, a lot of television came out of New York and, you know, live television, all the beginnings of the pioneering form but, KTLA was a beacon of creativity and innovation in early television and Klaus Landsberg was primarily responsible a lot for this kind of aggressive, pushing of the medium. I remember growing up and watching those shows on KTLA. I mean incredible you know THE SPADE COOLEY SHOW. Spade Cooley [Donnell Clyde Cooley] was part Indian and had this country-western show that was far ahead of its time. Of course he was then famous for having found his wife involved with some guy and killed the both, and we never, and that was the end of Spade Cooley’s career. And things like, weird, like Korla Pandit [John Roland Redd] in the afternoon playing the organ and you never heard his voice.
SB: He had a turban and he was very sexy looking and women loved him-- [INT: All the women would look at, I mean, I couldn't believe it. My mother would turn on, "Oh I gotta stop. Korla Pandit’s on." And he wouldn't ever say anything. He'd just play the organ and had this turban. But, you know, it was very funny but it was the early days of television. But I remember the remotes, you know, they would, they had the opening of the Statler Hilton in downtown Los Angeles. They had the opening of the Captiol Records building, you know, in Hollywood. And these were big, you know, major moments and somehow you were outside, you were seeing this, it was a live event, you felt that there was something dynamic happening. What influences, just from watching early television in Los Angeles? Because the other thing is, you're not in show business but you're watching this new medium. What were the influences?] Well, there were two things that really influenced me. One is that I really loved to listen to radio and I used to, you know, bury myself in the CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT and DICK TRACY, and all the radio shows, and use my imagination. And the other thing was watching television. I was fascinated that in the early days, nobody had a television set so in order to watch the shows you're mentioning you had to go to your local television store and look in the window and they had a little Philco or something sitting in the window and I used to do that all the time. We had one of those stores in our neighborhood and, you know, when you talk about KTLA's influence, they were the first television station in Los Angeles. They still hold first position rights to the Rose Bowl that's broadcast every year. They get the choice locations. They were innovative in news, they had tremendous news anchors who went out in the field, went on remotes, they had Lawrence Welk, they launched him way before ABC took him on. So, it was definitely fascinating and then obviously the big influence was watching, you know, THE MILTON BERLE SHOW, THE TEXACO HOUR [TEXACO STAR THEATRE] and things like where Ed Sullivan used to wait for those days to come. Because most people, in the beginning of television, all you'd watch most of the day were test patterns. An Indian head, and they'd play music behind it, and people actually spent hours in front of their television set watching test patterns.

INT: Yeah, it is fascinating. You're talking about, this is the early days. Nobody had a television set. The first person in the neighborhood I remember in Santa Barbara, my friend down the street, his parents splurged and they had a television set. And I would go down there to watch BEANY AND CECIL, which was, you know, a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant mind: Stan Freberg. You know, Stan Freberg creating these puppet characters and creating this show [BEANY AND CECIL created by Bob Clampett] and, you know, it was a children's show but it was incredibly smart.
SB: When I did PEE WEE'S PLAYHOUSE, that show was one of the major influences to Paul Reubens when he created Pee Wee as a matter of fact.

INT: Well, alright. You leave USC [University of Southern California], and you go in the armed services. What branch and what happened there?
SB: What happened was that in the middle of my, or the beginning of my senior year the Air Force decided that they wanted to extend our two year contracts to four years. And I was about to put my name on the piece of paper and my father convinced me that, you know, I’d better think about it twice. And he said there's a big difference when you're living two years and you're living four years, so I decided to drop out and instantly there was a draft in those days, I received my notice that I was drafted in the Army and I was to report to Fort Ord, California for my basic training. Before I left, somebody had told me about going to Armed Forces Radio Service [Armed Forces Radio and Television Service] on McCadden in Hollywood and audition. And there was a man there who my brother-in-law knew, I think he was a cousin, named Bob Goodman. And Bob Goodman auditioned me, gave me a letter saying that I’d passed the audition and that I would qualify, this was during the Korean War, I would qualify to become a radio announcer for the American Forces Network. I wanted to go to Korea, I wanted to be an announcer there. This was the Robin Williams movie [referring to GOODMORNING, VIETNAM] but this was the real deal. And so I went to Fort Ord with my letter in hand, showed it to the -- when they were gathering us all in etcetera -- and they were giving you your military occupational specialty, and I handed them my letter from Armed Forces Network. He looked at it, and he laughed, and he tore it up in front of me, threw it away and said "Okay, we're going to put you in the medical corps after your eight weeks of basic training in the infantry, because you have a pre-med background at USC." So, I spent eight weeks going through basic training and then I shipped out to Texas. I went to a military hospital base in San Antonio, Texas. And from there, when I finished that eight weeks, so I had sixteen weeks of basic training, they sent me to Fort Lewis, Washington to, again, go to a medical facility there and that was also one of the shipping points for Korea.

SB: So in between going from Texas to Washington, I went back to the Armed Forces Radio Network, looked up Bob Goodman and said that, you know, told him what had happened and he said, "Well, fortunately, we have a colonel here named Graf Beppel and he's just come back from Austria and I want you to meet him,” etcetera. I met this colonel and he asked me for my name, rank, and serial number and I gave it to him and he jotted it down and I went to Fort Lewis and I was basically assigned at the Medical Corps there. I talked to an officer who I said, I had heard the word 'Public Information Office' so I said, "How do you get into the Public Information Office?" And so I went to see the commanding officer of that division. He heard I lived in Hollywood and this guy was from South Carolina or something, so he was already impressed. And he got me out of the Medical Corps, into the Public Information Office and my job was going to King Television once a week in Seattle and doing a public service show for the military, a half hour show which I hosted. And then, at the same time I was also, part of my job was covering military trials and reporting on [TAPE BREAK] them. From there, in the middle of having this great job, my commanding officer called me and he was totally pissed off at me. I said, "What's wrong?" And he said, held up a piece of paper and said, "You've been ordered to go to Salzburg, Austria. How could you do this to me?" etcetera. So, I thought Austria was Australia, I was very bad in geography I guess. It just, had to look it up on a map to see where I was going. I shipped out of Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, went to Salzburg, Austria and they had a radio network there called the Blue Danube Network and when I got to Lakehorn, Italy where we were mustering in, the guy there looked at my piece of paper and my orders, and never even heard of this kind of military specialty. He said, "I'll tell you what, I'll send you up to Salzburg. And you've got 48 hours. If they don't take you at the radio station, come back here and we'll put you in the infantry or the Medical Corps."

SB: I went up to Salzburg and walked in, there was a Sergeant sitting at the desk, and I handed him my orders and he said, "I'll be damned," and I spent about six months there as a -- one of maybe six radio announcers for all of Austria and Italy -- as a disc jockey and then the United States, it was, Austria at that time was a four country, four-power occupied country. It was England, France, Russia, and the United States. They divided up the, basically the city, all the cities. Salzburg, Innsbruck, Vienna, and so forth. And then we got orders to immediately move out of Austria because all these four powers had given Austria back to the Austrians. So I was then shipped into Germany and I was, went to Frankfurt and there was George Clooney’s dad, Nick Clooney as an announcer on AFN [Armed Forces Network]. I met Nick and lived for a little bit in a actual castle with a moat. It was incredible. And that was AFN Frankfurt. And then I was assigned to Munich, Germany. And from Munich I announced the Munich Night Train, Lunch into Munchen. And then I was sent to Nuremberg because a General had liked my voice and he did not like the sports announcer in Nuremberg and asked me to go there and announce football and baseball and so forth in Nuremberg and I learned an incredible lesson because I met a gentleman and his wife, Jerry Hausner and his wife Velma [Velma Hausner]. Jerry was best friends with Jim Backus [James Gilmore Backus]. The two of them had done all the MR. MAGOO movie voices and GERALD MCBOING-BOING. And Jerry kind of, and his wife, adopted me as their son while I was in Germany. And I used to go to their house a lot for dinner and Jerry was working for Radio Free Europe, and so when my two years were up and I was coming back to the United States, he gave me some names of friends of his like Jim Backus to look up with the thought that maybe they'd help me get into radio 'cuz I was strictly radio.

INT: And were you playing, just while we’re there, I mean first of all, Salzburg’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I mean it's not a city, it's a village but it's still fantastic. Were you playing music? Was this like, were you playing music for the troops? Were you playing classical music, popular music, R&B, was Rock n' Roll or R&B even on the airwaves?
SB: No. We were playing, basically, all the great radio dramas. LUX RADIO THEATER with Cecil B. DeMille hosting. We were playing CLIMAX!, I think was the name was of the show, THE GREEN HORNET. I mean every show I ever grew up with was in our library. I couldn't believe it and these huge transcriptions. And then in between this we had disc jockeys. So, we did music shows that we picked our own music and we played Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, Perry Como, all the pop singers of the ‘50s. And Sinatra was the big superstar at that time. And I found something really interesting, which is that as I would go to the library to pull the music for every day's show, I found that I didn't have to listen to them. I automatically knew the melodies in my head the second I saw the title. And I would just, I mean, thousands and thousands. And I was wondering, "Where did I get all this knowledge?" because I didn't make a conscious effort at this, but I guess I listened to radio so much that I got to, you know, and shows like Lucky Strike's Hit Parade [THE LUCKY STRIKE HIT PARADE] and things like that. My repertoire of knowing music was pretty immense at that time, and it did fascinate me and I was sort of questioning myself, again, where I got all this knowledge. And it was, we became really popular. We not only broadcast to the troops, but we broadcast behind the Iron Curtain. And we were in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and so forth. And we used to get fan letter from all over from behind the Iron Curtain. Plus there was a local guy who just retired, Alex Sullivan. And Alex and I were best friends and Alex was the news voice for Los Angeles on KNX Radio up until this year [2006]. And Alex and I had a one-ad show which turned out to be kind of a comedy show where all the military families, and especially officers and their wives, would sell refrigerators and cars and things like that and we had the obligation on the air to do this little half hour show selling their goods, but we made it a comedy show and I remember getting lots of calls from the commanding officers saying, “You're becoming too big of a personality for us. We just want you to be voices on the air. We don't want you to get a following and have people know who you are,” but we did, we became pretty famous in the community of who we broadcast to. And they would write to us personally and request songs, they’d request whatever and we were like, in a strange sense, we were the Edward R. Murrow’s of the time, and the big disc jockeys in Europe.

INT: So when you came back to Los Angeles and you had a few names, you had Jim Backus [James Gilmore Backus] and a couple of names, and you're knocking at the door, how does someone move from radio into television?
SB: I met Jim Backus and Jim was doing, I think it was right before he did GILLIGAN'S ISLAND and he was very polite, very nice, but he didn't offer any help to get me a job and I think that was Jerry Hausner’s, you know, reason for giving me these numbers. Another guy that he gave me the name was the Director of the MR. MAGOO series, Pete Burness [Wilson D. Burness], very well respected Animation Director. And Pete liked Jerry so much that he picked up on it, he said "Hey, I'm going to take you around town and introduce you to a few people. Maybe you can get a job, you know, by meeting some of the people that I know." So one of the first places we went to was the Program Director at CBS Radio on Sunset Boulevard in CBS Square. Steve Allen was doing his radio late-night show from there as well. And I became an early Steve Allen fan as a kid. And I went to see this Program Director and he was very polite, he’s, you know, greeted me warmly and he and Pete obviously had a really good relationship. And he looked at me and he said, "Kid, is your father Art Linkletter?" I said, "No, my father works in a gas station." And he said, "Well, if your father's not Art Linkletter find another profession, you're never gonna make it in this business." And I was shocked, I mean I was kind of, you know, stunned, and I'm saying this is a horrible way to begin thinking about a career but in my mind, which has kind of been a trait of mine, I sort of looked at him and said, "Boy, am I gonna prove you wrong." And that's what got me into television. I came home, I was, you know, heartbroken that this guy was so blunt and so negative and I said, “You know, I'm gonna try to get into television.” It's a new field, I went and I applied as a, just to get a job, to the Personnel Director at CBS and first question is, you know, "Can you type?" In those days they didn't have computers and I didn't know how to type at all, other than I'd taken one class in high school I think. And I said, "Yeah, I can type." And they said, “Okay,” and then I went to ABC. Now ABC in those days, television, was just a big lot on Prospect [Prospect Avenue] and Talmadge [Talmadge Street] in the Los Feliz area of Hollywood. And there were no fences, no guard gates, no sophistication. Where CBS was the big eye and CBS and NBC were the two big powerhouses. And so I applied for a job at both places and literally, within about a week, I got a phone call from CBS saying, “Okay, there's a typist job open if you can type sixty words a minute,” or something or 80 words. And then I got a call, fortunately, the next day saying ABC is, “We need a mailman. Would you like to deliver mail at ABC?” And I had one friend that I had been in my high school club, Eddie Milkis [Edward K. Milkis], and he became partners in a big company called Miller-Milkis and they did HAPPY DAYS and all the slew of shows with Gary Marshall and so forth and Ed said, you know, “I got a job as an apprentice editing STAR TREK at Paramount [Paramount Studio] and man, there's so many beautiful women here, you should try to get a job in show business. If nothing else you'll meet some nice looking women to date.” So, I decided that I would take the ABC job because it seemed like A) I wouldn't be stuck in a room, I could go walk around the lot and learn a little bit about, you know, what goes on behind gates of a studio. And I went there and I went to meet the head of the mailroom and I just remember he had curly hair, he was about six-foot-four, and he looked at me and he said "Now if I give you this job, Steve, you have to swear you don't want to do anything else in life except work for me and be in the mailroom. I don't want anybody who comes here as a stepping stone to get into something else." And so I think I did one of my first lies in the business and I said "It's all I ever want to do, is work for you in the mailroom at ABC. KABC."

SB: So, I got the job and literally within days I had a ball. I mean I didn't meet any beautiful women to date, but I started making the rounds and I got to meet every, you know, all the different department heads and so forth. And I walked into this, I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember her name, but she was the head of the mimeograph department. And we got to talking after I was delivering my mail to her department, and it was my mother's birthday and I wanted to get her a gift and she suggested that her husband was a manager at Bullocks Wilshire and I should go down there and he'd take good care of me. And while we were talking we kind of befriended each other and she said, "You know, Steve, if you stay in the mailroom you're gonna stay there forever and nothing's gonna happen. You gotta move. So I would suggest that you leave the mailroom and come and work for me in the mimeograph department, but aside from working the mimeograph machine doing all the scripts and schedules and so forth, I will try and introduce you to the programming department and see if you can't move into that job." And she delivered, she did. She told me I was one of the best mimeograph operators she ever had, and hated to lose me. But she introduced me to Selig Seligman and Pete Burness who were, not Pete Burness, Pete Robinson who were the Program Director and Station Manager of KABC TV. And I had my first interview with Selig Seligman who was, you know, aside from being the I think the brother-in-law of the president of ABC network, he was a powerhouse figure, you know, very dynamic and you knew this guy represented power. And he looked at me when I came in and she had set up an interview, one-on-one with him, and he said, "Young man, what would you like to be doing other than sitting here having me interview you?" And I said "I'd like to be sitting in your chair with you in my chair, interviewing." He laughed, he thought it was very funny, and it just came off the top of my head and he befriended me and he said "I'm gonna look for a job for you and I'll talk to Peter Robinson, my Program Director and see if we can find something for you." And I think within four or five weeks of the mailroom, the mimeograph department, I was offered my first big opportunity, which was to become an Operations Director for KABC TV. And there were about six guys in there, one of them was very young, John Orloff, who became a big commercial Director and owned a big commercial company, eventually. And John was very much the Director. He was a young guy who's handsome, collar up in back, you know, he played, nobody was allowed into his control room when he was, you know, when he was an Operations Director and what we did-- [INT: Explain what an Operations Director is?] In those days Operations Directors were guys who sat with the Technical Engineer in a dark control room, which was called a master control room with a switcher. And basically our responsibility was to put shows on and off the air. So we'd get THE LAWRENCE WELK SHOW, or THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW, or whatever it was and we would roll the, either the films or the two inch videotapes [2-inch quadruplex videotape, also called 2″ quad, or just quad] masters and in between them going on and off the air, we'd be responsible for doing all the commercials. And in those days, commercials used to be split-second timing and on, they weren't on one reel, they were on individual, different machines. So you'd have a ten second, 16mm [sixteen millimeter] film followed by an eight second, 35mm [thirty five millimeter] film followed by a thirty second videotape or whatever, and you had to get them all in in the space, split second, of when the show ends and the other show begins.

INT: So let's just take a little case in point here. You have a Technical Director with you, sitting next to you?
SB: You're giving commands to the Technical Director. [INT: So give us a little example of what it would be like, you're rolling these things in, and how you do it. I mean just for the people who are there, you know, there's no live show, you've got videotape, and you've got film, and you've got all these things, and you’ve got a certain period of time for the station break before you go to the next program, right?] And the key to it all was you had to translate the command to the person sitting next to you and figure out the timing of how long it takes for you to say, "Roll tape," you know "Take one," "Set up two," whatever the Director commands are, and figure out, by working with this person, what their reaction time would be so that by the time they press the button on the switcher, or dissolve the fader, you had to make sure that there were no delays. So you’d have to anticipate the physical reaction of the person that you're working with as a team. And all the commercial sponsors would watch their commercials and if you made any mistakes at all they would get a free commercial. So they were betting on you to screw up and you know, get, up-cut the commercial, or down-cut the commercial, or whatever. And in many, many cases, because you also, in that break would have public service announcements, you'd have things that, in sense weren't making revenue for the station. And in some cases I became so good at it that I could make up a commercial within the same break. I used to love when things went wrong because it's always been an attribute when Rome is burning for some reason I get real calm and while everybody's, you know, kind of looking at what do we do? I find a real calmness and sense of okay, you know, we take one here, we, you know, we roll this, take two here, you know, and so forth. But there were no live cameras, it was all, you know, film tape commercials.

INT: ...the essence of a live Director or let's call it a multi-camera Director, whether you're doing it on tape or you're doing it live or whatever, is effectively communication. You're in a control room, this is a mini control room, you weren't having real cameras out there, but this was your first opportunity to kind of communicate with that Technical Director and what you're saying is somebody could be fast on the trigger, somebody could be slow on the trigger-- [SB: Exactly.] and if you gave a command that you thought should be instantaneous and the person was smooth and slow, you'd roll behind so you're getting to know the personality of the person next to you?
SB: You have to, or else it was no, you know, you'd always be late or you'd be early. I mean you have to know exactly, I used to take a stopwatch and in my head I’d close my eyes and I would figure out when a minute was. I got so good at that that literally within weeks I never missed. I would basically start the stopwatch, close my eyes, in my head count the sixty seconds and then stop the stopwatch, and it would be sitting on the one minute mark because timing was everything as television is, especially live television.

INT: So now you've got yourself a little island of learning in the operations department. When did you move out of that and actually get to be able to control cameras?
SB: The operations job and I made some great friendships there, some really strong friendships. We were a very tight knit group of Operations Directors, there were about eight of us in total. And stations weren't on twenty-four hours a day. We were on six o'clock in the morning and then we signed off the air after the late show, which would be around 11:30, midnight at the latest. There was a Director on KABC, Norman Abbott, who was actually related to ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, he was a, you know, nephew or something. Norman was a really nice guy and he was the most popular Director on the station and he was first one to move away while I was there to get a big job. He got to direct THE JACK BENNY SHOW on CBS, and he also I think did the Bob Crosby [THE BOB CROSBY SHOW], who had a band, who's Bing Crosby’s brother and he was leaving. So I got a call from Selig Seligman who called me in, and he said, "How would you like a summer job replacing Norman Abbott on the network, on the local station?" And I said, “As what?” And he said, "As a real Director." And I said, "I'd love it."