![]() ![]() "On one filmed drama I directed, the female lead got sick, and I ended up having to shoot 17 pages of script the following day. ![]() ![]() "A lot of people couldn't handle the pressure," echoed Charles Haas, who directed Lucky Strike's Your Show Time in 1949, which was the first dramatic series shot on film instead of broadcast live The Hardy Boys on ABC from 1955-1957 and a number of successful '60s series such as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. "You had to have the guts of a blind burglar and the coordination of an athlete," director Arthur Penn said in a 2006 DGA Quarterly interview when asked about the qualifications of a TV director in the early years. Oftentimes, they figured things out on the fly. The men-and they were mostly men-who ventured into directing television were cowboys of sorts, finding new techniques and methods for working in a hybrid medium that borrowed elements from theater, radio, and film. Cables attached to large, clunky cameras snaked across the floor. There was no blueprint on how to direct, and the director's job within television production was still being defined. In its nascent decade, the miraculous new medium posed daunting challenges for young directors. And even when you did your job really well, it was tense there was always the possibility of all those things going wrong."Īsk any director who worked in live television in the late 1940s and early '50s, and he will undoubtedly have a similar anecdote (or many) to share. Furniture was always getting in the way or somebody was tripping or forgetting their lines. You couldn't do a second take and there were so many things that could go wrong. "You had to be on your toes," continued Hiller, a former DGA president whose career eventually took him to features. He was running behind the actors with the pages in his hand, trying to stay out of view of the cameras and give the lines to the women. "I was in the control booth and the associate director was on the floor. "Darren carried the scene for about five minutes by himself," Hiller recalled in a recent interview. This was the sort of thing directors dreaded. It was the early 1950s and Arthur Hiller was directing a live drama with actor Darren McGavin for Matinee Theatre when two actresses in the scene forgot their lines. This article originally ran in our Spring 2011 LIGHTS, ACTION: In 1955, the Guild participated in a series of liveĭramas, the Screen Directors Playhouse, directed and introducedīy prominent members. ![]()
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