SPACE INTERVIEWS

RR: How did Captain Video get started?

CP: Well, the writer was M. C. Brockhauser, it was his idea to have a children's show, a kind of science fiction children's show, and there was no budget, no money to pay for the show, it was really done on a shoestring. Inexpensive western serial films were shown, for roughly 14 minutes of each 30 minute program, and the hero of the serial being shown was always referred to as one of Captain Video's agents.

The situation was so impoverished that--- I had been working for CBS previously, and we had a little more money to work with than DuMont--- DuMont was operating really on the bare bones of financing. The DuMont network was a joke. The company was struggling along with such crazy management decisions, it's just incredible. But television in those days was a crazy world.

I was given the script, there was no producer, I had to function both as producer and director. I had an assistant, a young man named Larry White, who later became director, and eventually an executive at Benton and Bowles ad agency. The first day I arrived at the studio and found the script called for some elaborate props, and I said, "Where's the prop department." This guy laughed and said, "We don't have a prop department." I realized I was going to have to improvise something. The DuMont studios were located at that time above the Wanamakers Department Store, Broadway at 9th, so I stepped out the door of the TV studio directly into, I think, the toy department of the store and I asked the sales lady, "Do you have any toy guns?" I had to find a electronic ray gun and an opticon scillometer, an electronic telescope that could see around corners. So we asked to see toy guns, and she said, "We don't carry any kind of toy guns in this store." Beside the toy department there was a brand new department, just opened since Monday morning, an auto accessories department, and so I said, "Let's go over here," and we put together a ray gun made out of a spark plug, a rear-view mirror, an ash tray and some wires and a bent pipe from a vacuum cleaner attachment... this was the electronic ray gun. This was the way the show went!

We often didn't have enough money to hire actors for all the parts in the script, so we used the shadows of stagehands, shadows on blank walls, and we would shoot the shadow while another actor would speak the lines, changing his voice.

I was the director for eight or nine months, and then I got an offer from NBC so I left!

RR: Did Captain Video do any space travelling in the first year of the show?

CP: No, only in a title sequence did we see a spaceship. He himself never got to do any space travelling. He was a crime fighter with agents all over the world. Richard Coogan was the original Captain Video. He remained with the show for a few months after I left, before Al Hodge took over. When I left, Larry White became director. The uniforms for Captain Video, the Video Ranger and the other Rangers were war-surplus, of course. The only Rangers you normally saw were Captain Video, and the young man, Don Hastings. Each show had about three or four actors, in addition to Coogan and Hastings. I don't remember the size of the sets. The biggest set by far was the Ranger Headquarters, of course.

We usually used three cameras, all three for each set. I don't think we had any dolly cameras, we had what were called pedestal cameras. They moved, but we had to be careful about getting too ambitious, or we'd start shooting off the set.

RR: How much rehearsal did the actors have?

CP: Well, we arrived in the studio about 11 o'clock and the show went on the air at 5. We rehearsed pretty continuously. There were not many flubbed lines, although Dr. Pauli, Bram Nossem, had trouble, as I recall. Coogan and Hastings were pretty good at improvisation.

RR: How often did your guest actors forget their lines?

CP: Oh, that happened all the time! What we did was during the dress rehearsal we took the attitude of making as much fun of the show and script as we could, so that we could relax and loosen up as we went on the air. All our reaction to the zaniness of the situation would have been pretty much played out. Although sometimes the actors broke up on the air. We had to cover that up somehow. Part of the deal. Because doing a show every day from scratch took quite a bit of improvisation on everyone's part.

RR: Frankie Thomas and Jan Merlin have tales to tell about incessant practical jokes on the set of Space Cadet. Did Captain Video offer such opportunities?

CP: Of course, all the time. I can't remember any one in particular. One common thing was trying to deliberately break another actor up. Someone just offstage or with his back to the camera in a given setup was the usual culprit. Dr. Pauli was a terrible victim of this kind of thing. He was very easy to break up, and so his fellow actors used to torment him by trying to see if they could get him to start laughing on the air. He was supposed to be the menace, and usually had a scowl, if he managed to stay in character.

RR: How common were fistfights and ray-gun blasts on the early program? What kind of action was there for the kids?

CP: There was certainly shooting. We tried to put as much action in it as we could, given the budget and the sets. We always tried to end each episode on a cliffhanger. We never got complaints from parents about the cliffhangers, or violence, that I remember. This was at a time when very few people had sets, after all. In 49, TV was just beginning to develop.

RR: Did the situation with lack of support from DuMont ever improve during your tenure as director?

CP: Not while I was there, which was only for about eight months. What happened later, I don't know.

RR: Everyone asks me, why do Captain Video and the Ranger wear goggles in so many scenes in the early days of the program? Even sitting in the comfort of their headquarters!

CP: It may have been my idea. We tried to mock up a space suit costume, I think that's what it was.

RR: So the goggles were originally part of the space suit?

CP: They were intended to simulate a space suit... with no budget.

RR: Allen Harris, an astronomer, tells me he remembers the first Captain Video space suit, which consisted of a war surplus gas mask, and a coverall. He was able to find the exact items at a surplus store near his home and create his own version.

CP: That I don't remember. As for space travelling, we at first tried to give that impression, without actually showing anything.

[Note: the goggles might have been inspired by the comic strip Buck Rogers, whose hero generally always sported a pair of goggles on his forehead, indoors and out. A cheap way to give a futuristic flavor to the character.]

RR: It's obvious that M. C. Brockhauser wanted to do science fiction and space travel stories, but couldn't depend on a budget to really show things.

CP: It was all his idea. He came and presented the concept for the show to DuMont, and DuMont decided to put the show on the air.

RR: It was their biggest hit by far, I believe.

CP: I had been directing another show at DuMont, called Charade Quiz. Then they offered me the Captain Video show, and so I decided to take that.

RR: DuMont provided so little. Who built the sets themselves?

CP: I don't remember; everything was so catch as catch can. Whatever we could find lying around, we had to use. We used plenty of cardboard!

RR: The headquarters set is pretty elaborate. I gather that most of the actors were from Broadway? Frankie Thomas says there were problems with such actors, because they depended on a lot of rehearsal, which they didn't get for live TV.

CP: That's right. The standard procedure for a Broadway show was four weeks of rehearsal, and we offered them a few hours. Of course there was only roughly 15 minutes of script per program.

RR: Did you have problems running overtime?

CP: Oh, no. The problems were always more like stretching.

RR: I got the impression that Brockhauser deliberately wrote short.

CP: Actors would often have to ad lib for quite a while to fill out a scene. You could probably get more information from Larry White, if you could find him. If he's still alive, you should be able to find him.

RR: When live TV began to die out around 1955, most of the veterans of Golden Age live TV went into soap operas in some capacity or other--- Frankie Thomas and Jan Merlin wrote scripts, Don Hastings, Ed Bryce and Ed Kemmer took key roles. How about yourself?

CP: I went into soap opera myself. I produced Edge Of Night for a number of years. I think Don Hastings worked with me on Edge Of Night. His brother Bob found work in the soap operas also. I like to say I went from grand opera to soap opera.

RR: And you went from space opera to grand opera! Tell me a bit about the operas you directed. First, what was your own musical background?

CP: I studied singing in my younger days, but didn't have a big enough voice to be a professional singer, so I decided to become an actor, going to theater school in Chicago, starting at the Dublin Theater. By the time I got to New York, I was also working as a director, and in 1943 I went to work for the CBS Shortwave Radio department, as a director and producer. We did programs, news for Europe, news and entertainment for Latin America. After the war ended, it became easy for people to transfer from the short wave to the television department, which was very small at that time. I got a substantial pay cut when I transferred to TV in 1946. I worked for CBS Television from 46 to 48, I think it was, and went through a lot of ups and downs, then through a kind of unusual circumstance I got fired, and went to DuMont, and then was invited to NBC, where I directed the NBC Television Opera Company in live performances, and later went on to produce the Voice of Firestone TV show. In the pioneer days, there were not many people qualified to do this work.

RR: Obviously you did the operas in English. How much did you have to cut?

CP: We did the opera broadcasts live on Sunday afternoons, and our time slot was flexible... an hour, an hour and a half, even two hours or more. What we would do sometimes is divide the opera, for example with "Der Rosencavalier" we did acts one and two one Sunday for an hour and a half, and act three the following Sunday for an hour.

I think we got a block of two and a half hours for "Magic Flute," one of our most elaborate productions.

RR: Where did you get your singers?

CP: We started out with a kind of stock company of singers that we used regularly, and we would fill out the stock company with guest performers as needed. They were young American singers who... actually, what we were really doing was laying the groundwork for the development of an American style of opera, which is now in existence. Some of the performances we staged were very, very good, but some of them were awful. We found the kind of singers who actually performed and sang and acted at the same time. We usually got a really remarkable performance. The style was developed for TV, quite a bit different from your broad opera-house performances, much more natural in style rather than the over-blown operatic style. One problem we did have in dress rehearsal... these broadcasts were all done live... we had to caution the singers not to use full voice, because if they did they probably wouldn't have any voice left for the live performance. This created a big problem for the audio engineers. But our singers were trained to hold down the voice levels even in the live broadcast. They were aware that they were creating a new style of opera. The singer was actually a singing actor; in the old-style opera, singing was enough! But things were changing even in the theater at this time. Great actors were appearing among opera singers, Maria Callas in particular. Opera was being understood as a form of theater, not just as a form of concert music.

RR: Did you have a full orchestra?

CP: We sure did, oh, absolutely, the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

RR: With Toscanini?

CP: Toscanini did not conduct the orchestra for us, but he was there during some of our performances. Of course he was very upset that we were singing everything in English. The musical director was Peter Herman Adler. We discovered that the best way to control the sound of the orchestra was to put it in another studio; otherwise it was picked up by the singers' microphones. The singers could watch the conductor on video monitors; they could hear the orchestra on monitor speakers. But the orchestra couldn't hear the singers! The conductor wore headphones, only he could hear them. The orchestra was... you really had to count bars in order not to get lost! But it was one of the best orchestras in the world, they could do it.

RR: After the days of live prime-time TV, how did your career develop?

CP: After I left Voice Of Firestone on NBC, I became the producer on Edge Of Night. Eventually I moved to Los Angeles and I also did some soap opera there.

RR: So you really stayed with live performances all the way. Did you have problems finding actors who could handle the live performances without cratering?

CP: They were all from the theater so they could handle the pressure.

RR: No stage fright? No camera fright?

CP: What do you mean, no stage fright? Of course there was stage fright. Every actor experiences stage fright.

RR: But people didn't freeze up when the red light came on.

CP: Oh, no. They were not that bad!

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