[Frankenheimer Interview]

or either mostly in literary form they're going in to talk about motion pictures and then television what about the advent of the video tape recorder know For Whom the Bell Tolls was done and video taken it was it was completely done on is there difference there working with videotape as to say three years ago and Playhouse 90 may have been done strictly on it yeah there's a tremendous difference Carl and the difference is that you have all the advantages of both live and film and I don't mean to get too technical on a program like this but what it means is that you can do a scene in continuity with three or four or however many cameras you want to and then at the end of that you can stop look at what you've done if you don't like it you do it again because the playback on videotape is instantaneous you don't have to wait for any processing or anything like that and then you go on and you do your next scene or you can do segments of a scene and cut it together like a film it's perfectly in fact it's very simple to edit videotape now and it also gives you much greater dimension and you can get out more and you can well you can do things that were literally impossible to do on live television even as much as a year and a half ago and by that I mean that I don't mean that we should do spectacles or anything like that because I think the tape should just just go one step further than live television was able should go into where film does no in fact is there any danger in television we're talking about videotape and editing it there ain't danger and television moving toward the same trend that motion picture does what a director loses some of his best shots on the cutting room floor yeah it's possible Carl I'm not gonna say it isn't I hope it doesn't happen but of course the way to protect that is not the overshoot well what about let's go into another area here in television pay television that's something to do that's quite prominent now and they're much much controversy how do you feel about pay television let's say putting yourself into that position do you think you could do a better job or well call in theory pay television I think it is magnificent how it's gonna turn out in actual practice it's a question that no one can answer with the same people get in control of it as are now in control of the Hollywood output of motion pictures I could say the results would be disastrous because after all what kind of motion pictures have no advertisers do they they never had that and yet I think that the quality of American movies is just absolutely shocking and I'm afraid that most people are gonna go into television to pay television for a quick box it stands to reason that you can make an awful lot of money out of it when you stop to consider that you don't have to wait three years we're affected to play all around the world you just pick up the telephone next morning in Fallout and say how much money did I make and I think that if people go into it for those reasons and try and do that kind of product I just hate to say what would happen to it on the other hand I think that it's got to be possible with may be good things will come out of it I hope so I'm for Whom the Bell Tolls now I suppose we had quite a few problems and I think most of our listeners would be interested to hear some of the the main problem did you ran into first of all doing it in two successive weeks and so forth well that of course was not my problem that was a network problem because I pre take the whole show so I shot it as one complete segment a little bit of it out of continuity and things like that my problems mainly were trying to literally shoot this in 11 days which is what we had plus four loops rehearsal now that might sound to you like a lot of time except that I had actors that were in Broadway plays so I had to let them go at 6 o'clock at night I also couldn't work Wednesday inside of the afternoon and I had I had a few censorship problems not many in fact we we managed to win on every point I think the big problem that I had in to Whom the Bell Tolls was that this was an entirely new technique no show had ever been done this way before no show had ever been completely pre-taped in segments as this was and there were 480 segments to pre-tape in film the bell fell so that'll give you an idea of what it was I ran a lot of television show you go from beginning to end here we would shoot out of continuity I mean we did the last scene or we did the last scene strangely last which was not the way it was originally planned that's the way it turned out that we've did all the war stuff together and all the cave scenes together and things like that and television just wasn't geared for that type of a production at that particular time and also we were operating at a very small studios in New York and the space problem was tremendous I mean we would be ripping down one set and then we'd be going to another studio and everybody was commuting back and forth in taxi cabs and it was quite a wild rat race the whole thing and I've had a boo-boo ever been I do it you know I loved it I loved doing it it was a great experience for me I think the most of the viewers of television today could certainly say oh good luck to you and hope that you continue to do such things as that better that that for example is one of the high points that most people will agree with me on that my time is up and I want to thank you very much for talking with us this evening and I certainly hope you have a nice day here in Chapel okay that's different