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"My Living Doll"? (1 Viewer)

classicmovieguy

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Amazon says "Temporarily Out of Stock" which isn't unheard-of. Stocks may have depleted before Amazon ordered in more copies. I don't think MPI has pulled it off altogether.
 

Neil Brock

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Jack P said:
Shout was able to find the one episode of "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" they wanted for that Marx Brothers set. Did they use a 16mm or 35mm for that one?

UCLA has a complete run of the show on 16mm from the ABC donation. I would bet that it came from there or else Fess Parker's estate.
 

Neil Brock

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Tory said:
What is the current situation with Volume two of this? Is it a possibility? I was recently devastated to find my second disc in this set cracked just a half hour ago. I'm not sure if it cracked naturally or because of the way I pulled it out of the case or in the player. I am devastated and probably going to repurchase the set but if a complete set were possibly on the horizon I might would hold off. Dang it I feel so sad right now, I hate it when this stuff happens.

There is no Volume 2 coming now or ever. The remaining prints are long gone and the likelihood of the missing 15 shows surfacing are highly unlikely. We were lucky to get the 11 that we did.
 

classicmovieguy

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Neil Brock said:
There is no Volume 2 coming now or ever. The remaining prints are long gone and the likelihood of the missing 15 shows surfacing are highly unlikely. We were lucky to get the 11 that we did.
That is sad but I'm not surprised. Oh well... We'll just have to appreciate what we've got all the more.
 

bmick24

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There is no Volume 2 coming now or ever. The remaining prints are long gone and the likelihood of the missing 15 shows surfacing are highly unlikely. We were lucky to get the 11 that we did.

Not true. There have been so many shows and specials thought to be lost forever that have seen releases in the past few years. Over 50 runs of syndication prints were made from My Living Doll and it's unlikely that every print has been destroyed, as you say.
 

The Obsolete Man

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Not true. There have been so many shows and specials thought to be lost forever that have seen releases in the past few years. Over 50 runs of syndication prints were made from My Living Doll and it's unlikely that every print has been destroyed, as you say.

Yes, but they're likely in the hands of collectors if they still exist, and collectors are, well, usually assholes who would rather keep the only existing copy of something to themselves, and sometimes will go out of their way to make sure no one else can have something rare (episode 3, Doctor Who: Enemy of The World, anyone?) so they can horde it in their little collection that will most likely be destroyed by relatives who don't care the minute after they're buried.

/if you're new, you haven't seen the discussions here from older collectors who just wonder why people didn't buy a VCR in the late-70s if they really wanted something instead of waiting for a DVD. Even though not everyone was alive in the late-70s, we should have popped out of the womb with a VCR remote in one hand and a TV Guide in the other if we REALLY wanted unedited copies of AfterMASH instead of waiting for a DVD release, because that's the lazy, easy way of doing it. :blink:
 

David Rain

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Yes some shows thought to be lost do sometimes show up again. But that's very rare & not something that anyone should count on. Be thankful for what's available. It could be nothing.
 

Neil Brock

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Over 50 runs of syndication prints were made from My Living Doll and it's unlikely that every print has been destroyed, as you say.

And you get this misinformation from where? The show was never syndicated anywhere in the world, so, no, there weren't 50 runs of prints. There were zero runs of prints.
 

bmick24

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Yes, but they're likely in the hands of collectors if they still exist, and collectors are, well, usually assholes who would rather keep the only existing copy of something to themselves, and sometimes will go out of their way to make sure no one else can have something rare (episode 3, Doctor Who: Enemy of The World, anyone?) so they can horde it in their little collection that will most likely be destroyed by relatives who don't care the minute after they're buried.

/if you're new, you haven't seen the discussions here from older collectors who just wonder why people didn't buy a VCR in the late-70s if they really wanted something instead of waiting for a DVD. Even though not everyone was alive in the late-70s, we should have popped out of the womb with a VCR remote in one hand and a TV Guide in the other if we REALLY wanted unedited copies of AfterMASH instead of waiting for a DVD release, because that's the lazy, easy way of doing it. :blink:

Oh man, I know the horrors, but rare programs surface all the time and nobody knows where these films went. Many were likely destroyed by affiliates as their archives grew and they phased out 16mm, but since there are 11 films, it's likely there are more. Whether they're in a garage or the home of a greedy collector, I'm confident that there are more of them SOMEWHERE and more will eventually surface.

I spent the past 20 years searching for a Munsters' special called Marineland Carnival. Everybody told me it was gone, that the master had been destroyed and no prints exist. I found it in the Paley Center for Media a couple years ago where it had been sitting, unlabeled in a box since 1997 when it was donated by the family of a collector. All hope is not lost, but the collectors who try to "keep it rare" really are the bruise in all of this. I don't see the point in keeping a film you probably never watch in a closet where it is just going to degrade until you pass away or get rid of the collection, but hey, hopefully those collections will be donated to a place that can care for them. It's frustrating for sure, but just keep looking and something will come up.
 
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bmick24

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And you get this misinformation from where? The show was never syndicated anywhere in the world, so, no, there weren't 50 runs of prints. There were zero runs of prints.

I thought that was dodgy. Thanks

Jack Chertok TV gave me this info and yes, there are multiple sets of prints, with documentation of them being ordered. A minimum of 50 were made and sent to affiliates, and prints from 5 of those sets have surfaced. The lab reports also indicate that there were two sets of 35mm masters made, one for LA and one for NY. Prints have been located in Germany and it is said that it aired in Australia, but I haven't confirmed that yet.

Hope is certainly not lost in this and as new information comes to light and more people hear about it, something is bound to turn up. It's just a matter of time.
 
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Neil Brock

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I spent the past 20 years searching for a Munsters' special called Marineland Carnival. Everybody told me it was gone, that the master had been destroyed and no prints exist. I found it in the Paley Center for Media a couple years ago where it had been sitting, unlabeled in a box since 1997 when it was donated by the family of a collector. All hope is not lost, but the collectors who try to "keep it rare" really are the bruise in all of this. I don't see the point in keeping a film you probably never watch in a closet where it is just going to degrade until you pass away or get rid of the collection, but hey, hopefully those collections will be donated to a place that can care for them. It's frustrating for sure, but just keep looking and something will come up.

The LAST place anybody should donate anything if they want it cared for is the Paley Center. The only thing that institution is good at is promotion and raising money. They have so many items which are lost, misplaced, untransferred and improperly stored its ridiculous. I also can tell you first hand that they have purloined material from other archives. They are a nightmare.
 
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bmick24

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"Jack Chertok TV" is Peter Greenwood, who is well known in the film community as a kook and bullshit artist. Your information is flawed, as is the source.

The LAST place anybody should donate anything if they want it cared for is the Paley Center. The only thing that institution is good at is promotion and raising money. They have so many items which are lost, misplaced, untransferred and improperly stored its ridiculous. I also can tell you first hand that they have purloined material from other archives. The are a nightmare.

I'd rather continue looking than throw my hands in the air and say "I guess that's it." Like you said, the Paley Center has misplaced and lost items and they are one of the better known archives. If it can happen there, it can happen in others, too. There were prints made, believe it or not, and yes it's very likely that many have been destroyed, but the likelihood that only 11 survived and all of them have been discovered is very small. There are more out there.
 

Neil Brock

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I'd rather continue looking than throw my hands in the air and say "I guess that's it." Like you said, the Paley Center has misplaced and lost items and they are one of the better known archives.

Except, they aren't an archive. Speaking to archivists at other places, which are actual archives, none of them really know what the Paley Center is. UCLA, Library of Congress and Wisconsin Historical Society are the 3 best television archives in the country and all are far more organized and professionally run than Paley, in addition to having far better collections.

Here's a great article from 1989 on what a slipshod place Paley is:

IT TURNS OUT THAT NEW YORK'S MOST POPUlist
museum, New York's fun museum, is run
with an altogether appropriate sitcom screwiness.
Founded in 1975 by CBS chairman William
S. Paley, the Museum of Broadcasting was
charged with the farsighted mission of preserving
Americas sanitized radio and TV heritage
(after all, who would have known in 1975
that colleges would one day be offering courses like
"The Mid-Century American Sitcom"?). But under
president Robert Batscha preening, pretentious
and occasionally embarrassing, he functions as the
museum's very own version of The Beverly Hillbillies's
Mr. Drysdale the Museum of Broadcasting
has become an institution where the majority of its
energies and hard-won moneys are lavished not on
its collections but on more glamorous considerations,
such as its impending move to a new, vigorously
stylish $45 million home, one that may
quickly become functionally obsolete. The Museum
of Broadcasting is also a place where, a recent confidential
study indicated, it would take nearly 40
person-years to repair the abuses to a once-enviable
catalog system, and where possibly irreplaceable
pieces of the American television heritage lie rotting
as a result. Even so, Batscha's interest in record
keeping appears to extend only so far as instructing
one of his assistants to inscribe on a frequently
note the date and time when she
last changed the bottled water in his office carafe.
Employees who fail to appreciate Batscha's uncanny
sense of priorities have been quitting in
such numbers that efforts to maintain a directory
of staff telephone extensions, formerly updated
in weekly desperation, were abandoned altogether
this spring.
Of course, regardless of its bureaucratic high
jinks and managerial fecklessness, the museum has
de facto surrendered a large chunk of its charter
mission to the advent of the VCR and the sofa-side
video library. After all, where would the Museum
of Natural History be if everyone collected genuine
mastodon skulls? Who would think twice about
the Museum of Modern Art if everyone living room
were cluttered with actual Marcel Duchamp knickknacks?
Yet the Museum of Broadcasting, unconscionably,
seems intent on forfeiting what's left of
its birthright. (Fortunately, the Library of Congress
has been quietly accumulating television and radio
broadcasts over the years, 15 times as many as the
museum. The library's collection is accessible only
to researchers, but down in Washington they know
what they've got and how to find it.)
Not to imply that the MoB, which claims to
clock in more than 100,000 visitors a year, hasn't
had its triumphs. The museum's constantly growing
collection has been chosen variously for its
"historical impact, artistic value and social significance,'
in the words of a spokeswoman; anyone
who has the time to wait around for one of the
museum's 23 viewing consoles to become available
can concoct a diverting afternoon's entertainment,
cuing up a Bullwinkle cartoon, say, before moving
on to jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. And
considerable numbers of lonely-looking, oddly
preoccupied young men are bound to turn up for
the museum's late-night-on-Channel-11 festivals,
devoted to reruns of perennials such as Monty
Python Flying Circus and The Honeymooners.
Under Batscha's eight-year stewardship, though,
curatorial concerns have been relegated to nuisance
status by an administration more devoted to
planning celebrity-larded parties than to the dry,
scholarly work of running a museum and the
dreary chores of serving a public. Accordingly the
MoB's six curators are routinely snubbed by its administration,
and public relations are approached
with a genteel uninterest that suits that department's
snobbish, inattentive and recently promoted
director, Letty Aronson. Her unofficial title,
Woody Allen's Sister, affords the museum certain
connections it might not otherwise have a recreated
set from Radio Days was used in an exhibit
on early radio broadcasts but her near-celebrity
mostly serves to mesmerize the doggedly starstruck
Batscha.
"Bob has contempt for the general public," says
a former employee, who adds that this is not an uncommon
trait among museum administrators.
"But the difference is that there are forces inside
other museums that do care about the public, and
that generally get more attention and weight than
at the MoB, where there is very little authority
given below the president's level Indeed, Batscha's
effect on the small, young museum is akin to what
might have happened if the Metropolitan Museum
of Art's sycophantic current director, Philippe de
Montebello, had had the opportunity to throttle
the Met in its nineteenth-century cradle.
FORTUNATELY, THE DYNAMIC 44-YEAR-OLD
former Queens College associate professor
who sometimes prefers the extra-estimable
title Dr Robert Batscha, Ph.D. , is blessed
with a saving talent for sleight of hand.
Mustering as much as half of the entire
museum staff in order to impress guest
speakers, funders and reporters (Act like you dont
know one another! Say you're a tourist!) is just the most
inventive of the administration's many efforts to
distract employees from their morbid daily contemplation
of rusting kinescopes, shattered 50-
year-old radio discs and a videotape collection that
sits largely unwatched in a storage vault clogged
with donated broadcast history. (To give just one
example, kinescopes of the original Ed Wynn
Shou.'dating from 1949 to 1950 were recently
observed, by this reporter, corroding inside a battered cardboard box, which had been shoved out of
sight beneath a table.)
Perhaps the best example of Batscha's talent for
hocus-pocus is the hypnotic sway he holds over
credulous New York Times reporters who make frequent
pilgrimages to his door in order to write
down faithfully whatever he has to say. (The Times
tends to be reflexively contemptuous of television
produced last week or last year, but old TV given
the museum imprimatur, is always seemly and significant.)
No matter how desperate life at 1 East
53rd Street becomes, the gloomy MoB staff rests a
little easier in the knowledge that Bob Batscha and
Letry Aronson will put a gleam on things in the
Times. For example:
'Visitors to the museum] can choose from
among 40,000 radio and television programs," said
a typical bit of secondhand puffery last year.
In fact. the number of programs actually available to
the public is closer to 6.000. Another 1l000programs are
virtually inaccessible because information about them is
incomplete; i 9, 000 await processing; 3 00 master tapes
have been either lost, stolen or damaged and never
replaced.. according to employees who work with the collection. Moreover. the museum has been threatened with
more than one lawsuit by people who claim their donations
have been lost. (Officially, the MoB denies it has ever
lost master tapes.)
,. 'Says Mr. Batscha, . . .One hundred percent of
our collection is always available to the public,"
explained a 1985 puff piece.
More precisely. 100 percent of the collection that is
available to the public is available to the public. Slightly
less than half of the whole chaotic lot is actually accessiblé,
and only a sixth of that is fully cataloged, according to
museum staffers. A MoB spokeswoman claims that any
program is available to the public within 72 hours"
meaning that employees aré somehow able to locate and
identify tapes that have been left. unregistered. in box
after box after box.
"Tomorrow [August 1, 1988)...the Museum of
Broadcasting will start a two-pronged project to
restore to pristine condition all 25,000 hours of its
television and radio programs, and to then preserve
them on digital tape."
At the time, none of the dubbing equipment had been
delivered: nearly a year later technicians for the project
still hadn't been hired and the bulk of the museum's television
collection remained on all-but-obsolete Betamax tapes.
"To judge by the audience reactions [to a radio
exhibit last year), the museum has found in
television-reared generations now in their 20's and
30's an enthusiasm for its voice-art exhibition."
in fact, the museum found its young audience upstairs
in its own offices.
p- "As Mr. Batscha explains, Someone will come
to us and say, "I have a collection of 100 kinescopes."
... If the museum didn't keep the old machines
around, we'd be in the position of having
the Rosetta Stone and not being able to read ¿t.
Television curator Ron Simon has one kinescope viewer in
his office. but in the museum vault where donated kinescopes
are actually viewed and, with luck, the fact of
their existence is recorded, until recently the only way to
watch them was by holding theft/ms up to a light bulb.
"Programs are cross-referenced, often as frequently
as 25 times."
Often is a relative word, but even in the museum's
pre-Batscha cross-referencing heyday, when catalogers
spent eight hours working on one or two hours of programming,
a dozen cross-references were most common an
episode of Bonanza, for instance, would be referenced
under its stars, director production people, genre, story
subject and so on. Today. the two catalogers who have to
cope with the 3,000 hours of programmrng that pour in
every year are allowed 15 minutes for each program.
Some programs are cataloged the title only - which means,
to give an unlikely hypothetical example, that a future
Penn Jillette scholar might have trouble looking up the
magician guest appearance on Miami Vice. This panic driven
short-forming was the museum response to the
1988 study that indicated it would take until the early
twenty.first century to straighten out the archival nightmare
of its neglected cataloging system.
OF COURSE, BEING UNDERSTAFFED AND
overwhelmed is the lot of many cash strapped
nonprofit institutions. But the
MoB is remarkably free of the camaraderie
that life-during-wartime conditions
usually promote - perhaps because this
is one nonprofit institution that doesn't
appear to be particularly cash-strapped. Indeed,
many of the MoB's 70-odd employees, eking their
way through life on the tiny salaries traditionally
paid to museum workers, maintain a bitter curiosity
about the $6,403,330 raised in 1987 through
donations, grants, admissions and the frequent
injection of money from the Paley Foundation
($400,000 last year alone). According to records
filed with New York State authorities, expenses
for 1987 totaled only $3,343,311, with the museum's
net worth swelling from $15,807,950 to
$18,867,969this in addition to the more than
$30 million raised so far in a separate fundraising
campaign for the new building.
On paper, then, the Museum of Broadcasting is
decidedly healthy, even if its collection is not;
healthy even if employees are sometimes given the
impression that it is necessary for the museum to
overstate their wee salaries on funding applications
in order to seduce that much more from
foundations; healthy even if museum administrators
have on occasion diverted the resulting
grants from the impoverished curatorial depart.
merots for which the grants had been pledged and
(presumably) used the money elsewhere in the
museum, or simply dumped it in the endowment
For instance, one department head got a letter
from a foundation inquiring about the dispensa.
don of an earmarked grant that the department
head didn't know had been received. The head of
another department was recently ordered to spend
only a portion of some moneys donated specifically
to that department. (People familiar with non
profit organizations say these kinds of shenanigans
are not uncommon, but they also single out the
MoB in this regard. However, a museum spokes-
woman claims that "not a penny of grant is ever
misappropriated")
Oddly, almost no one knows
the particulars of the museum's :
miii
financial health. Batscha con- il iiI
trois the budgetary information
so tightly as to mystify even the i
professionals who raise the p
museum's funds and who have pØU
become accustomed, in their
jobs with other institutions, to
readily available budget information.
"Only Batscha and one .
or two flnancial guys see the actuaj
budgets incredible but
true." says a disgruntled former 'i-è
fundraiser, one of several who
have quit the museum in disgust over such practices during the last few years.
The constant scheming for dollars not only affects
the staff's morale but dictates what's in the collection,
and even influences how the museum studies
broadcast history At Batscha's instruction, curators
are prohibited from using the phrases "Golden Age
of Radio" and "Golden Age of Television" in museum
literature, lest contemporary, potentially check writing
members of the broadcast community get
the impression that the museum regards their current
artistic efforts as something less than precious.
Anyway, the true Golden Age of Television might be
happening right now, so it doesn't hurt to pack the collection
with recent programs made by flattered, deep pocketed
producers hence the museum's rich
sampling of Stephen Cannell's The A Team and its
even larger sampling of "auteur" Aaron Spelling's
oeuvre. ("Aaron makes it look so easy The naturals
always do," said a typically erudite, not-at-all-toadying
museum publication. "Sinatra's phrasing, Gene
Littler's swing, Aaron Spelling's sense of story and
audience - all of them come into being with a style
that can't be copied.")
But the most naked use of the collection as a
money-drawing vanity exercise has been the establishment
of the museum's Creative Council.
'I am writing to invite you to become a member
of the Museum of Broadcastirig's Creative Council.
growing group of over 500 leading members of the
broadcasting community begins a solicitation
letter Batscha sent out last winter. A former administrative
staff member says the council was
treated in the naive hope that the mere bestowal
of embossed membership certificates would entice
hardened professionals into forking over generous
donations. The museum quickly wised up, dangling
1 front of an alarming array of entertainment
meservers the added promise that they would be
able to install the best examples of their own work
the museum. "After the programming is in the
museum, then we'd go after them for money," exlains
the former staffer. And even if the broadcast
(ulirely coivincing facades: le/I to ¡igl, drawing al the Mol's ew building, Robert Balsca, Williari Paley,
rodel of the building, Philip Joson
community's leading members - 709 as of June 1
don't unfold their wallets satisfactorily, the museum
has at least secured the use of their names for
leverage with other potential donors. No taste goes
unaccounted for: the list of Creative Council members
ranges from Meryl Streep, David Brinkley
and Gore Vida! to Joe Franklin, Jim Nabors,
Heather Locklear and Phil Rizzuto.
AND YET, DESPITE THEIR RESENTMENTS,
MoB employees do credit Bob Batscha for
his ringleading razzle-dazzle. And when he
takes home large pieces of video equipment
a few color monitors, say, for some
no doubt urgent research project museum
technicians good-naturedly cornplain
that the boss's zeal is impeding their work.
While his direct pipeline to the Times suggests
that his true calling might have been as the official
spokesman for a production of a Eugene O'Neill
play, Batscha does indeed have a firm background
in the world of broadcasting: he taught communications
at Queens College and then parlayed a
partnership with former CBS president Frank
Stanton (the two founded a nonprofit organization
whose mission was to introduce job-seeking college
students to media professionals) into his present position. When the MoB was looking for a
president, Stanton recommended Batscha to his
former boss, Pa1ey the museum's founder, chief
underwriter and ultimate ruler. (Paley had become
disenchanted with founding president Robert
Saudek, according to staff members from the
museum's early days, because Saudek had failed
to acquire for the museum a public profile befitting
Paley's pet project. Saudek moved on to run
the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded
Sound Division at the more sober Library of Congress,
where he isn't called on to pose for party' pictures
with Cybill Shepherd.)
Those who know Batscha say he has all but
abandoned the scholarly inter of his
youth in slavish pursuit
of social skills that are far
IItIests
more useful to a guardian of
the Paley legacy. "Bob Batscha
ç Coodson Gift Shop
would be better off running a
restaurant," says a not quite admiring
colleague who has seen
ft opportunities" countless meetings that are supro adcasting's
ex. posed to be devoted to planning
to open next fall, new exhibitions derailed when
values remain. Batscha launches into spirited
discussions of vases, flowers,
candles and menus for black-tie
dinners meant to celebrate the
exhibitions that, oddly enough,
Batscha is in the very process
of ignoring. Then, the table-
ware discussion at an end, he
will take outside phone calls
until the vestigial curators
t finally scuttle away.
Certainly no one likes the
tireless favor-currying and
sweaty desperation of social
climbing, so essential to run-
ning any institution dependent
megalomaniacal rich people.
No one gladly answers to a
clubby, easygoing board of
trustees that includes Twent
tieth Century Fox chairman
Barry Diller, Creative Artists
ion: Agency chief Michael Ovitz
and CBS president Laurence
Tisch. And yet Batscha man-
ages to go about these chores
with enthusiasm. Fortunately,
osestheseat'sl«a:ion hes the sort of professional
who evinced no ethical qualms
in presiding over an exhibition devoted entirely to
the advertising ofYoung & Rubicam, even as Edward
Ney, president of PaineWebber/Young &
Rubicam Ventures, sat on the museum board (the
company enthusiastically donated $200,000 last
year). Batscha's cultivation of Aaron Spelling's
checkbook once drove him to consider a Dynasty
fashion show at the museum until cooler, more
socially inappetent heads prevailed.
In recent months it has sometimes seemed as if
Batscha might be tempering his Olympian disdain
for the public by adopting a Gorby-like penchant
for glad-handing the masses. For example, a standing
order used to prevent museum elevator operators
from stopping for passengers when Batscha
was aboard, descending from his fifth-floor office.
In the MoB equivalent of spontaneously piling out
of a ZIL limousine, Batscha will now sometimes
instruct an elevator operator to stop and pick up
museum visitors on the second floor so that he can
briefly exchange pleasantries with them before
reaching the lobby. Of course, observers have noted
that Batscha indulges his populist yearnings only
when he has an important guest on board a fine
point not lost on the elevator operators.
INSOLENT LIFT JOCKEYS NOTWITHSTANDING,
nothing slows down Bob Batscha for long. Indeed,
the prospect of moving to his new
building next year has opened yet another
arena for his limitless energy: interior decoration.
Lately the museum president has invited
staffers to pet carpet samples and stroke wood
panel sections while he deliriously describes the
subtlety of the buildings color scheme. The new
building's luxe furnishings (one of its theaters will
feature crystalline light bulbs mounted on 14-karat
floor.to-ceiling gold strips) may not console all
those who worry that the museum will outgrow its
expensive new home. Emerging from a very important
carpet-sample meeting, one unconvinced staff
member concluded, 'The new building is the
physical manifestation of the museum's horrible
values.' Another person familiar with the project is
willing to bet that three years from now the new
tape vault the heart of the museum will be exactly
the sort of unnavigable closet the current
vault has become.
Happier about the new building, presumablare its nominal designer, Philip Johnson, and Bill
Paley himself, who contributed $12 million for
the impractical sliver structure and the tiny patch
of West 52nd Street on which it will sit. And whatever
the new building's drawbacks as a home for a
museum, it does have the. advantage of strategic
location: within sight of Black Rock, CBSs headquarters,
and adjacent to Paley's regular lunchtime
hangout, the '21' Club. Indeed, no hint of trouble
will be apparent to the museum's trustees as they
ooze next door for meals: Batscha has gone so far
as to visit a West German quarry personally, as
part of his unceasing quest to ensure that the new
building has an entirely convincing facade. )
 

bmick24

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Except, they aren't an archive. Speaking to archivists at other places, which are actual archives, none of them really know what the Paley Center is. UCLA, Library of Congress and Wisconsin Historical Society are the 3 best television archives in the country and all are far more organized and professionally run than Paley, in addition to having far better collections.

Here's a great article from 1989 on what a slipshod place Paley is:

IT TURNS OUT THAT NEW YORK'S MOST POPUlist
museum, New York's fun museum, is run
with an altogether appropriate sitcom screwiness.
Founded in 1975 by CBS chairman William
S. Paley, the Museum of Broadcasting was
charged with the farsighted mission of preserving
Americas sanitized radio and TV heritage
(after all, who would have known in 1975
that colleges would one day be offering courses like
"The Mid-Century American Sitcom"?). But under
president Robert Batscha preening, pretentious
and occasionally embarrassing, he functions as the
museum's very own version of The Beverly Hillbillies's
Mr. Drysdale the Museum of Broadcasting
has become an institution where the majority of its
energies and hard-won moneys are lavished not on
its collections but on more glamorous considerations,
such as its impending move to a new, vigorously
stylish $45 million home, one that may
quickly become functionally obsolete. The Museum
of Broadcasting is also a place where, a recent confidential
study indicated, it would take nearly 40
person-years to repair the abuses to a once-enviable
catalog system, and where possibly irreplaceable
pieces of the American television heritage lie rotting
as a result. Even so, Batscha's interest in record
keeping appears to extend only so far as instructing
one of his assistants to inscribe on a frequently
note the date and time when she
last changed the bottled water in his office carafe.
Employees who fail to appreciate Batscha's uncanny
sense of priorities have been quitting in
such numbers that efforts to maintain a directory
of staff telephone extensions, formerly updated
in weekly desperation, were abandoned altogether
this spring.
Of course, regardless of its bureaucratic high
jinks and managerial fecklessness, the museum has
de facto surrendered a large chunk of its charter
mission to the advent of the VCR and the sofa-side
video library. After all, where would the Museum
of Natural History be if everyone collected genuine
mastodon skulls? Who would think twice about
the Museum of Modern Art if everyone living room
were cluttered with actual Marcel Duchamp knickknacks?
Yet the Museum of Broadcasting, unconscionably,
seems intent on forfeiting what's left of
its birthright. (Fortunately, the Library of Congress
has been quietly accumulating television and radio
broadcasts over the years, 15 times as many as the
museum. The library's collection is accessible only
to researchers, but down in Washington they know
what they've got and how to find it.)
Not to imply that the MoB, which claims to
clock in more than 100,000 visitors a year, hasn't
had its triumphs. The museum's constantly growing
collection has been chosen variously for its
"historical impact, artistic value and social significance,'
in the words of a spokeswoman; anyone
who has the time to wait around for one of the
museum's 23 viewing consoles to become available
can concoct a diverting afternoon's entertainment,
cuing up a Bullwinkle cartoon, say, before moving
on to jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. And
considerable numbers of lonely-looking, oddly
preoccupied young men are bound to turn up for
the museum's late-night-on-Channel-11 festivals,
devoted to reruns of perennials such as Monty
Python Flying Circus and The Honeymooners.
Under Batscha's eight-year stewardship, though,
curatorial concerns have been relegated to nuisance
status by an administration more devoted to
planning celebrity-larded parties than to the dry,
scholarly work of running a museum and the
dreary chores of serving a public. Accordingly the
MoB's six curators are routinely snubbed by its administration,
and public relations are approached
with a genteel uninterest that suits that department's
snobbish, inattentive and recently promoted
director, Letty Aronson. Her unofficial title,
Woody Allen's Sister, affords the museum certain
connections it might not otherwise have a recreated
set from Radio Days was used in an exhibit
on early radio broadcasts but her near-celebrity
mostly serves to mesmerize the doggedly starstruck
Batscha.
"Bob has contempt for the general public," says
a former employee, who adds that this is not an uncommon
trait among museum administrators.
"But the difference is that there are forces inside
other museums that do care about the public, and
that generally get more attention and weight than
at the MoB, where there is very little authority
given below the president's level Indeed, Batscha's
effect on the small, young museum is akin to what
might have happened if the Metropolitan Museum
of Art's sycophantic current director, Philippe de
Montebello, had had the opportunity to throttle
the Met in its nineteenth-century cradle.
FORTUNATELY, THE DYNAMIC 44-YEAR-OLD
former Queens College associate professor
who sometimes prefers the extra-estimable
title Dr Robert Batscha, Ph.D. , is blessed
with a saving talent for sleight of hand.
Mustering as much as half of the entire
museum staff in order to impress guest
speakers, funders and reporters (Act like you dont
know one another! Say you're a tourist!) is just the most
inventive of the administration's many efforts to
distract employees from their morbid daily contemplation
of rusting kinescopes, shattered 50-
year-old radio discs and a videotape collection that
sits largely unwatched in a storage vault clogged
with donated broadcast history. (To give just one
example, kinescopes of the original Ed Wynn
Shou.'dating from 1949 to 1950 were recently
observed, by this reporter, corroding inside a battered cardboard box, which had been shoved out of
sight beneath a table.)
Perhaps the best example of Batscha's talent for
hocus-pocus is the hypnotic sway he holds over
credulous New York Times reporters who make frequent
pilgrimages to his door in order to write
down faithfully whatever he has to say. (The Times
tends to be reflexively contemptuous of television
produced last week or last year, but old TV given
the museum imprimatur, is always seemly and significant.)
No matter how desperate life at 1 East
53rd Street becomes, the gloomy MoB staff rests a
little easier in the knowledge that Bob Batscha and
Letry Aronson will put a gleam on things in the
Times. For example:
'Visitors to the museum] can choose from
among 40,000 radio and television programs," said
a typical bit of secondhand puffery last year.
In fact. the number of programs actually available to
the public is closer to 6.000. Another 1l000programs are
virtually inaccessible because information about them is
incomplete; i 9, 000 await processing; 3 00 master tapes
have been either lost, stolen or damaged and never
replaced.. according to employees who work with the collection. Moreover. the museum has been threatened with
more than one lawsuit by people who claim their donations
have been lost. (Officially, the MoB denies it has ever
lost master tapes.)
,. 'Says Mr. Batscha, . . .One hundred percent of
our collection is always available to the public,"
explained a 1985 puff piece.
More precisely. 100 percent of the collection that is
available to the public is available to the public. Slightly
less than half of the whole chaotic lot is actually accessiblé,
and only a sixth of that is fully cataloged, according to
museum staffers. A MoB spokeswoman claims that any
program is available to the public within 72 hours"
meaning that employees aré somehow able to locate and
identify tapes that have been left. unregistered. in box
after box after box.
"Tomorrow [August 1, 1988)...the Museum of
Broadcasting will start a two-pronged project to
restore to pristine condition all 25,000 hours of its
television and radio programs, and to then preserve
them on digital tape."
At the time, none of the dubbing equipment had been
delivered: nearly a year later technicians for the project
still hadn't been hired and the bulk of the museum's television
collection remained on all-but-obsolete Betamax tapes.
"To judge by the audience reactions [to a radio
exhibit last year), the museum has found in
television-reared generations now in their 20's and
30's an enthusiasm for its voice-art exhibition."
in fact, the museum found its young audience upstairs
in its own offices.
p- "As Mr. Batscha explains, Someone will come
to us and say, "I have a collection of 100 kinescopes."
... If the museum didn't keep the old machines
around, we'd be in the position of having
the Rosetta Stone and not being able to read ¿t.
Television curator Ron Simon has one kinescope viewer in
his office. but in the museum vault where donated kinescopes
are actually viewed and, with luck, the fact of
their existence is recorded, until recently the only way to
watch them was by holding theft/ms up to a light bulb.
"Programs are cross-referenced, often as frequently
as 25 times."
Often is a relative word, but even in the museum's
pre-Batscha cross-referencing heyday, when catalogers
spent eight hours working on one or two hours of programming,
a dozen cross-references were most common an
episode of Bonanza, for instance, would be referenced
under its stars, director production people, genre, story
subject and so on. Today. the two catalogers who have to
cope with the 3,000 hours of programmrng that pour in
every year are allowed 15 minutes for each program.
Some programs are cataloged the title only - which means,
to give an unlikely hypothetical example, that a future
Penn Jillette scholar might have trouble looking up the
magician guest appearance on Miami Vice. This panic driven
short-forming was the museum response to the
1988 study that indicated it would take until the early
twenty.first century to straighten out the archival nightmare
of its neglected cataloging system.
OF COURSE, BEING UNDERSTAFFED AND
overwhelmed is the lot of many cash strapped
nonprofit institutions. But the
MoB is remarkably free of the camaraderie
that life-during-wartime conditions
usually promote - perhaps because this
is one nonprofit institution that doesn't
appear to be particularly cash-strapped. Indeed,
many of the MoB's 70-odd employees, eking their
way through life on the tiny salaries traditionally
paid to museum workers, maintain a bitter curiosity
about the $6,403,330 raised in 1987 through
donations, grants, admissions and the frequent
injection of money from the Paley Foundation
($400,000 last year alone). According to records
filed with New York State authorities, expenses
for 1987 totaled only $3,343,311, with the museum's
net worth swelling from $15,807,950 to
$18,867,969this in addition to the more than
$30 million raised so far in a separate fundraising
campaign for the new building.
On paper, then, the Museum of Broadcasting is
decidedly healthy, even if its collection is not;
healthy even if employees are sometimes given the
impression that it is necessary for the museum to
overstate their wee salaries on funding applications
in order to seduce that much more from
foundations; healthy even if museum administrators
have on occasion diverted the resulting
grants from the impoverished curatorial depart.
merots for which the grants had been pledged and
(presumably) used the money elsewhere in the
museum, or simply dumped it in the endowment
For instance, one department head got a letter
from a foundation inquiring about the dispensa.
don of an earmarked grant that the department
head didn't know had been received. The head of
another department was recently ordered to spend
only a portion of some moneys donated specifically
to that department. (People familiar with non
profit organizations say these kinds of shenanigans
are not uncommon, but they also single out the
MoB in this regard. However, a museum spokes-
woman claims that "not a penny of grant is ever
misappropriated")
Oddly, almost no one knows
the particulars of the museum's :
miii
financial health. Batscha con- il iiI
trois the budgetary information
so tightly as to mystify even the i
professionals who raise the p
museum's funds and who have pØU
become accustomed, in their
jobs with other institutions, to
readily available budget information.
"Only Batscha and one .
or two flnancial guys see the actuaj
budgets incredible but
true." says a disgruntled former 'i-è
fundraiser, one of several who
have quit the museum in disgust over such practices during the last few years.
The constant scheming for dollars not only affects
the staff's morale but dictates what's in the collection,
and even influences how the museum studies
broadcast history At Batscha's instruction, curators
are prohibited from using the phrases "Golden Age
of Radio" and "Golden Age of Television" in museum
literature, lest contemporary, potentially check writing
members of the broadcast community get
the impression that the museum regards their current
artistic efforts as something less than precious.
Anyway, the true Golden Age of Television might be
happening right now, so it doesn't hurt to pack the collection
with recent programs made by flattered, deep pocketed
producers hence the museum's rich
sampling of Stephen Cannell's The A Team and its
even larger sampling of "auteur" Aaron Spelling's
oeuvre. ("Aaron makes it look so easy The naturals
always do," said a typically erudite, not-at-all-toadying
museum publication. "Sinatra's phrasing, Gene
Littler's swing, Aaron Spelling's sense of story and
audience - all of them come into being with a style
that can't be copied.")
But the most naked use of the collection as a
money-drawing vanity exercise has been the establishment
of the museum's Creative Council.
'I am writing to invite you to become a member
of the Museum of Broadcastirig's Creative Council.
growing group of over 500 leading members of the
broadcasting community begins a solicitation
letter Batscha sent out last winter. A former administrative
staff member says the council was
treated in the naive hope that the mere bestowal
of embossed membership certificates would entice
hardened professionals into forking over generous
donations. The museum quickly wised up, dangling
1 front of an alarming array of entertainment
meservers the added promise that they would be
able to install the best examples of their own work
the museum. "After the programming is in the
museum, then we'd go after them for money," exlains
the former staffer. And even if the broadcast
(ulirely coivincing facades: le/I to ¡igl, drawing al the Mol's ew building, Robert Balsca, Williari Paley,
rodel of the building, Philip Joson
community's leading members - 709 as of June 1
don't unfold their wallets satisfactorily, the museum
has at least secured the use of their names for
leverage with other potential donors. No taste goes
unaccounted for: the list of Creative Council members
ranges from Meryl Streep, David Brinkley
and Gore Vida! to Joe Franklin, Jim Nabors,
Heather Locklear and Phil Rizzuto.
AND YET, DESPITE THEIR RESENTMENTS,
MoB employees do credit Bob Batscha for
his ringleading razzle-dazzle. And when he
takes home large pieces of video equipment
a few color monitors, say, for some
no doubt urgent research project museum
technicians good-naturedly cornplain
that the boss's zeal is impeding their work.
While his direct pipeline to the Times suggests
that his true calling might have been as the official
spokesman for a production of a Eugene O'Neill
play, Batscha does indeed have a firm background
in the world of broadcasting: he taught communications
at Queens College and then parlayed a
partnership with former CBS president Frank
Stanton (the two founded a nonprofit organization
whose mission was to introduce job-seeking college
students to media professionals) into his present position. When the MoB was looking for a
president, Stanton recommended Batscha to his
former boss, Pa1ey the museum's founder, chief
underwriter and ultimate ruler. (Paley had become
disenchanted with founding president Robert
Saudek, according to staff members from the
museum's early days, because Saudek had failed
to acquire for the museum a public profile befitting
Paley's pet project. Saudek moved on to run
the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded
Sound Division at the more sober Library of Congress,
where he isn't called on to pose for party' pictures
with Cybill Shepherd.)
Those who know Batscha say he has all but
abandoned the scholarly inter of his
youth in slavish pursuit
of social skills that are far
IItIests
more useful to a guardian of
the Paley legacy. "Bob Batscha
ç Coodson Gift Shop
would be better off running a
restaurant," says a not quite admiring
colleague who has seen
ft opportunities" countless meetings that are supro adcasting's
ex. posed to be devoted to planning
to open next fall, new exhibitions derailed when
values remain. Batscha launches into spirited
discussions of vases, flowers,
candles and menus for black-tie
dinners meant to celebrate the
exhibitions that, oddly enough,
Batscha is in the very process
of ignoring. Then, the table-
ware discussion at an end, he
will take outside phone calls
until the vestigial curators
t finally scuttle away.
Certainly no one likes the
tireless favor-currying and
sweaty desperation of social
climbing, so essential to run-
ning any institution dependent
megalomaniacal rich people.
No one gladly answers to a
clubby, easygoing board of
trustees that includes Twent
tieth Century Fox chairman
Barry Diller, Creative Artists
ion: Agency chief Michael Ovitz
and CBS president Laurence
Tisch. And yet Batscha man-
ages to go about these chores
with enthusiasm. Fortunately,
osestheseat'sl«a:ion hes the sort of professional
who evinced no ethical qualms
in presiding over an exhibition devoted entirely to
the advertising ofYoung & Rubicam, even as Edward
Ney, president of PaineWebber/Young &
Rubicam Ventures, sat on the museum board (the
company enthusiastically donated $200,000 last
year). Batscha's cultivation of Aaron Spelling's
checkbook once drove him to consider a Dynasty
fashion show at the museum until cooler, more
socially inappetent heads prevailed.
In recent months it has sometimes seemed as if
Batscha might be tempering his Olympian disdain
for the public by adopting a Gorby-like penchant
for glad-handing the masses. For example, a standing
order used to prevent museum elevator operators
from stopping for passengers when Batscha
was aboard, descending from his fifth-floor office.
In the MoB equivalent of spontaneously piling out
of a ZIL limousine, Batscha will now sometimes
instruct an elevator operator to stop and pick up
museum visitors on the second floor so that he can
briefly exchange pleasantries with them before
reaching the lobby. Of course, observers have noted
that Batscha indulges his populist yearnings only
when he has an important guest on board a fine
point not lost on the elevator operators.
INSOLENT LIFT JOCKEYS NOTWITHSTANDING,
nothing slows down Bob Batscha for long. Indeed,
the prospect of moving to his new
building next year has opened yet another
arena for his limitless energy: interior decoration.
Lately the museum president has invited
staffers to pet carpet samples and stroke wood
panel sections while he deliriously describes the
subtlety of the buildings color scheme. The new
building's luxe furnishings (one of its theaters will
feature crystalline light bulbs mounted on 14-karat
floor.to-ceiling gold strips) may not console all
those who worry that the museum will outgrow its
expensive new home. Emerging from a very important
carpet-sample meeting, one unconvinced staff
member concluded, 'The new building is the
physical manifestation of the museum's horrible
values.' Another person familiar with the project is
willing to bet that three years from now the new
tape vault the heart of the museum will be exactly
the sort of unnavigable closet the current
vault has become.
Happier about the new building, presumablare its nominal designer, Philip Johnson, and Bill
Paley himself, who contributed $12 million for
the impractical sliver structure and the tiny patch
of West 52nd Street on which it will sit. And whatever
the new building's drawbacks as a home for a
museum, it does have the. advantage of strategic
location: within sight of Black Rock, CBSs headquarters,
and adjacent to Paley's regular lunchtime
hangout, the '21' Club. Indeed, no hint of trouble
will be apparent to the museum's trustees as they
ooze next door for meals: Batscha has gone so far
as to visit a West German quarry personally, as
part of his unceasing quest to ensure that the new
building has an entirely convincing facade. )

Archive, garage, attic, basement, shed, school library... they could be anywhere.
 

Jack P

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 15, 2006
Messages
5,595
Real Name
Jack
I have learned firsthand how seemingly more "professional" outlets can often do shoddy work on a "restoration" project compared to a one person operation who will treat the material with more care. Earlier this year I came into possession of some rare reel to reel tapes on e-bay of some lost New York Yankees radio broadcasts and New York radio programs from the 1977 postseason. I sent two reels to an operation in Ohio that boasted of how they had a thorough trained staff etc. and had done work for all kinds of archival and professional institutions. They sent these two reels back to me saying "too brittle, couldn't do anything with them". I then took those same two reels to a one man operation near where I lived and while he was more expensive and took over six weeks he got beautiful pristine results bringing back to life a rare full broadcast of Arlene Francis's radio program on WOR radio from October 1977 (which is now on YT).

Which just goes to show that if you *do* find something rare in your attic or on e-bay, be careful of who you take the material too and don't be fooled by the hype some professional outlet might give you.
 

JoeDoakes

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 1, 2009
Messages
3,453
Real Name
Ray
Remember the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they take the Ark and put it in an unmarked box and put it unlabeled in a gigantic storage warehouse? That's how I imagine all of the elements of the shows that Fox wound up with from Metromedia are stored. Just as a side note, I met with someone last month who worked at one of the local Metromedia stations. When the Fox buyout took place, he asked one of the lawyers about the dispensation of the Metromedia local shows ownership and he was told that nobody had thought about it and they weren't even included or mentioned in the transaction. Who knows, maybe that even applies to the MPC shows as well.
You must be wrong. I've heard that they have top men working on those shows.
 

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