Universal Film Magazine - Issue 8 - www.ufmag.biz

Universal FilmIssue 8 - 2013REAL MEN RECORD LIVEWhen Film and Television Were Oneby CHRISTOPHER TEMPLETONCan you imagine shooting a film live? ...That you are placed in the position of making afeature that you painstakingly develop, but onlyas one-off experience? A film that is transmittedand not effectively recorded? Imagine further,a production that is to be viewed by a single,scheduled audience. A production that after all the effortsof its authors is then lemming-like thrown intoa metaphysical void, never to be seen again, existingas a kind of kinetic excitement in the memoriesof its first and only audience?The ‘Golden Age of Television’ (1950s -1960) wasat the same time a golden age for film. Risks takenby early television dramatists were recouped as successesby the more established film producers. Takingnewly minted creative concepts and producing new filmcoinage.when filmand televisionwere onegive a fizz in the brain. Every offering had to delight in away that the previous offering had delighted, but moreso. It was expected. The only way was up.This imperative stretched the minds of the writers superhumanly.It hyper-concentrated the minds of the actorswho had to deliver the drama live. The danger thatthe idea of a live offering implies is only matchedby the unimaginable creative rewards that camefrom embracing it. The experience, for writers andactors who had the confidence to work in thisway, was often described autobiographically, asa career highpoint. They knew that the gods hada special place for those who take such risks and succeed.The gods reward all earthly bravery as the fullestexpression of the human experience. After all, it makes forthe best kind of entertainment.The dawn of US television in the early 1950s. A primordialmoment when the potential for every kind of creature waspossible. Where if you were a writer, you became masterof your own universe. You could write anything. Play withtime, mix genres, invent new characters, new fictions,new unimagined dramatic scenarios. As experimentalas you could get without the police coming to knock onyour front door. Your only guiding remit? To create a miseen scène fascinating enough, to keep an audience longenough, to maybe buy a washing machine at the end ofthe show .Early American television drama was driven by volume.Crudely put, entertainment produced on an industriallevel. Programmes shot out of the blocks at speed, withenough of them to prove that the new fangled TV mediumwas working and that these magical ‘wires and lightsin a box would keep you coming back for more. We’renot talking about formulaic dramas here with establishedcharacters and dilemmas. Every feature offering had toThanks to the kinescope process some of these early, livedramatic productions were salvaged. They have lived toolong in the cinematic shadow, waiting to be brought outof the moonlight as a contributing parent to the modernfilm experience. To understand the power of this declaration,indulge me a little by watching, back to back, the liveStudio One version of ‘Twelve Angry Men’ (1954) and thecross-fertilized version of the film of the same name, producedin 1957. See how Sidney Lumet, the director of filmversion goes out of his way to recreate the visual grammarof the original by Franklin Shaffner, where the urgency ofthe performances generate a ‘nowness’ and a new kind of‘visual reality’. Some of the power is of course lost in themigration, but it’s still clearly there to be enjoyed. Here,the producers of the film have analyzed the live versiongranularly and in an attempt to find patterns, have triedto distil the visual reality from it. Effectively mining a creativeseam.For the actors, the live Studio One experience made men37www.ufmag.org