It'll Never Show On Camera
It'll Never Show On Camera
worry. It'll never show on camera.""But it's slopped all over the velvet. And what about all those little chunks of food? There's almost no clean place left to put the beer glass." |
|
In that scruffy little TV studio on the outskirts of Saginaw, Michigan, I thought I was being taught that appearance was more important than substance. It took a lot of years for that lesson to wear off and be replaced with a sense that appearance surely matters if you want to get a hearing but you'd better be prepared with something of substance when you finally gain that audience. That scroungy scrap of black velvet, maybe 18 by 24 inches and liberally sprinkled with leftover bits from live TV food commercials long gone by and that evening's several attempts to shoot three more live beer commercials, came to symbolize for me a large part of the next forty years. And a lot of it included some good fun. |
had a beer sponsor with a live announcer who did three commercials on camera with real beer. The sponsor had been told that we needed two cases of beer each week to do the commercials and for rehearsals. I suppose we really did need a couple of extra bottles.We certainly appreciated a whole extra case. |
|
The biggest problem was that we had a live kiddy show between 5 and 5:45PM, live
news, weather and sports from six
until six thirty and the live beer sponsorship at seven. What with changing the
studio and a little rehearsing there was no time for supper before the
beer company's show. Those of us who were full time studio crew were making all
of two or three hundred dollars a month so missing a supper was, by itself, not
extraordinary. Missing supper with all that beer around, though, was a different
matter. |
|
What you are reading here are only a few selected paragraphs from the start and from the end of this particular chapter. If you happen to like it and want a copy of the entire chapter - which comes cunningly wrapped within the entire book - please see the information on the Order Form. Thank you. |
not implying that we were ever drunk on duty, but there were only about six
of us - the director, two cameramen (including me) who doubled as stage managers,
two engineers, the announcer - and a couple of cases of free beer. |
|
No one could bring themselves to pour a perfectly good glass of beer into the prop room sink after each rehearsal and after each of the three live takes. Some of the camera shots required two glasses: one for the announcer to wax eloquent over and one for the glory shot. That's where the velvet came in. We'd set up one of the beer cases under a special box we had, sometimes on a folding chair or whatever we had around from the prop room. The top of the box had a small roundish hole with a midget spotlight mounted inside and pointing up. The nasty hunk of velvet also had a small hole. It actually had several, and some not so small, but only one was on purpose. The Pilsner glass was placed on the velvet with the holes lined up over the lamp so that the light came up through the bottom of the glass. Pour in some lukewarm beer, a dash of salt to hasten the lighted bubbles and, all in all, a nice effect. |
a great effect, mind you, but close enough for black and white, snowy UHF
television in the late fifties. And that crusty old cameraman was right. Most
of the crud didn't show on camera.
|