HG: So, when I started working with Dave [David Letterman], the show was going to be cancelled, and gone off the air, and that's why I was attracted to it, because I was retired at the time, I was living in Ireland, I'd come back; and so I thought I'd have maybe four weeks work. His manager, I'll think of his name in a minute. [INT: Jack Rollins?] Jack Rollins, thank you. Jack Rollins, I knew Jack because he did Nichols [Mike Nichols] and May [Elaine May] back in the ‘60s [1960s] and I had worked with them on the PAAR SHOW [THE JACK PAAR SHOW], so I knew Jack; very nice man. I met him on the street... He said, "What are you doing in town? I thought you lived in Ireland?" I'd been living in Ireland for seven years. Came back occasionally to do a special. And I said, "Well, I'm back, my wife insists on moving back 'cause our kids are now in school here." And he said, "Well, you know it's funny, we're looking for a Director to take over on the morning show we're doing, with a fellow named David Letterman." I never heard the name before. And I said, "Well Jack, I don't mind working, if it's going to be for two weeks, every once in a while." He said, "Well, this is what this is gonna be, NBC is about to pull the plug on the show, and we figure it has maybe another four weeks, would you like to do four weeks?" And at the time we were fixing up an old farmhouse, my wife and I, and I said, "Let me think," 'cause I wanted to build a porch on the back. And I said, "Well, this will pay for the porch, it'll be just right." I always liked that, designating a certain amount of work for a structure; I always thought that was, even though I could pay for it another way. So, he said, "Well, I'll have you meet Dave." So we met and Jack wasn't there, but Stu Smiley, who is now in charge of comedy at Comedy Central, was working for Jack. And so I met with Stu and Dave, at the old... it was a little restaurant, right on the corner of 6th Avenue and 50th Street. [INT: The old building, it's in Rockefeller Center?] Yeah, when I was working at NBC, it was a pharmacy; it was Walgreens. And then a Lindy's; it was a very unsuccessful Lindy's. The food was awful. So we met in the bar there, and Stu was next to Dave. And we talked--and we didn't talk, Dave was more interested in my living in Ireland; he was really fascinated by that. So we talked about that. We talked about storing potatoes, we talked about making sauerkraut. And I said, "And my father used to make sauerkraut." So we talked about like preserving food for about a half hour, and then he said, "You know Hal, I want you to do the show. Would you do it?" And I could see Stu sitting next to him going... because there was no talk of money and the Producer, guy named Barry Sand, hadn't made up his mind who he wanted. You remember Barry?

HG: And Barry [Barry Sand] was of the opinion I was too old, well I was in my late 50s. And I was too old to do that kind of show [THE DAVID LETTERMAN SHOW], but Dave [David Letterman] wanted me to do it, and I said "All right." He said, "Will you start Monday?" This was Friday. And I had never seen the show. So I came in on Monday, and after having, not having worked in this kind of television, I did the show and it was kind of fun, there was something called a chyron, I never heard of before. It was like invented while I was gone, all these little... And I did it, and after about three or four days, I was beginning to enjoy it. And Dave was up for, he said, "You know, we're being cancelled, we can do anything we want to. If you have any ideas, let's do it." And I thought it'd be fun to do a cold opening, with Dave introducing the show, and it comes from the Chaplin [Charlie Chaplin] scene where he's flying through the air, and they get mixed up in the fog, and they come out and they're upside down. And he shows himself upside down on the plane, but then he's able to convince you that he's still upside down when he's ride sight up, and if you remember, he had a watch, and he took the watch out and the pilot, an Englishman, I can’t think of his name, asked him what time, and he took the watch out, and he told him what time it was; he was sitting in the back of the two-seater. And then turn around, and the watch went straight up in the air, because he was upside down. And he did a couple other, and I thought, that would be great 'cause I thought Dave could be there with a thermos, and he could introduce the show, and then open the thermos, "I'll have a cup of coffee." And then the coffee came rushing out of the thermos, straight up in the air. And people started talking about that, they didn't know how it was done. I mean, it was so... we just made a harness and hung him upside down, and he did the whole thing, as if he was ride side up. And Dave loved the idea of that. And then we did a couple other; I stole some stuff from Ernie Kovacs, an early one where Ernie was still down in Philadelphia. He said, "There's something wrong up there, up in the grid." So he took a ladder, and then he went up the ladder, and he disappeared and then someone came along and took the ladder away. So I did that with Dave, we did it at the end of a show, and then the next day on the show, so this is live, live at NBC for an hour, god help us an hour and a half, and then someone brought the ladder back and he came down as if there was no time lapse. So that kind of thing, I think made a difference. It made a difference in his mind, seeing what could be done. And what we were really doing is like reinventing Steve Allen, 'cause Steve Allen did a lot of that stuff. So I knew that it wasn't original, but it was original to Dave, and I think I made a difference in the way he looked at the show. [INT: That you were comfortable enough in that environment to reach back to Ernie Kovacs and then Steve Allen and pull those things out and make them new again and...]

HG: I believe if you're honest about it, there's nothing wrong with borrowing from somebody. If you say, if you convince people that this is your idea, then you know, but we were very open that this came from other people, and I told Dave [David Letterman] this, I saw this on THE GREAT DICTATOR, but that didn't make any difference. And we did things where we had a photomural on a floor of a tall building, and so he's gonna put the camera on the floor, and it looks like he's climbing up the building. Oh I know why this was more palatable, because at the end we pull back and show the rig and showed him upside down. So it wasn't a complete; it was like, here's the joke, here's the effect, and this is the way we did it. We don't really care if you see how we did it. It's like a... kinda hot new thing for magicians to reveal how they do things. [INT: Right, which in theory doesn't really make any difference.] Doesn't make a difference, 'cause people are still fooled. They still... So it's almost like a double whammy, whether you do it and then you show it. [INT: Yeah they used to do that, it was a regular part of the BATMAN series, the television series. They would show Batman and Robin climbing up the side of a building, and they were clearly walking across a flat building surface and they just turned it on its side, but it was so obvious, and they just did it every show.] I never saw that, yeah. [OVERLAP] [INT: Just pulling themselves up a building, but they were just walking. We could go on like this, and will. But I should go back. I should go back in time, and I will tell you that this interview will be divided up into a little history, and then the Letterman show, but the thing I'm very interested in and want to make sure we leave time for, is that there was a moment in time when you were there, between the Letterman, the late night show, which became a success, and the move to CBS, which to this day, is in my opinion, the last time a studio was built that was totally appropriate for a show that could do anything; and after all of this time, it still is the best looking, on every level. Scenically, lighting, shots, the discipline; it's just incredibly, incredibly sharp, because you were able to take everything you knew and put it in a brand new space. But you were still at a network. So I've got to get to that, to the dynamics of that transition, because I have a feeling you were very deeply at the center of it.] Yeah. [INT: Which is unusual, for a Director.] For a Director, oh yeah.

INT: So let me go back in time. And if you could just take us to the moment where you first realized that you were working in this medium called television. What year was it and what were you doing? 

HG: In live television, a Director, you got a kind of an excitement that you would get flying a fast plane, because you were on the air, and you had to supply something, and often things went wrong and it was not unusual for in the show, an hour, a half-hour show, for at least one camera to go and many times, when I worked at DuMont [DuMont Television Network], two cameras. So you always had everything planned, then you had to re-plan it as you did it, and I loved that. I felt like a fighter pilot. And I think that's why I did it. [INT: Not to mention the fact that, because we have this through line of this one television show that's been on for so long, is that when you started doing it, I'm going to guess now that you did it in essentially an old studio; it was a radio studio converted to television, using-] My first? [INT: Just going back, just the Letterman show.] 6A. 6A was a radio... [INT: Right, which they had put, TK47 cameras in eventually, and it was a big, lumpy machine, but yet when you look at the old Letterman show [LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN], and you look at the new Letterman show [LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN], which is very high tech, there's not a significant difference.] Well, the same geography. But that's been the same, almost every show I've ever done, I've kinda forced it into that form, from JACK PAAR [THE JACK PAAR TONIGHT SHOW] on, because it's the best for a Director. There's a reason why the desk is on one side in one studio, not on the other side. It has to do with doorways and things like that. [INT: But there's timing and things that are now, with editing, they're no longer Director functions, but there was a moment and certainly you were there at the beginning, and it carried through into your modern work, where it really was about exactly the moment. I mean, the LETTERMAN SHOW [THE DAVID LETTERMAN SHOW] how actually has, and had funny cuts; the timing on the cut was funny.] Yeah. Well, I did that because it was a way of my staying, kind of having kind of a... I don't know, I think it was seeing how far you could push the network. Taking shots of other networks while you're on the air. I mean, things that were done on the NBC show, that weren't talked about afterwards, because they were so egregious. Taking shot of an NBC show, of an ABC show that was on the air while Dave [David Letterman] was on the air, 'cause we had the feed, I insisted the feeds come in, so I said "I just want to see what else was being done at the time." And I think it was, if someone had questioned it, if someone started a lawsuit, it would have seemed trivial, but it would have been a lot of money being paid to, you know, using someone else's show on the air at the same time, yeah. But I loved doing it. And Dave loved it too; I mean to see all of the sudden to see Rather [Dan Rather], from CBS when we were at NBC on our show, while he was preparing to go on, being made up. Shots like that. Anyway.

INT: All right, I'm going to come back to all of that, but let's go back to, to--you can tell me anything you want before that, where you were schooled and everything, but the place we're getting to is just when you suddenly were working in television. 

HG: Well, I came to New York in '48 [1948], and I wanted to be in advertising. In college I majored in psychology, 'cause I wanted to be in advertising. I did everything 'cause I wanted, and the reason I wanted to be in advertising is that I got my look into advertising from movies. THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT and there was a film, you'll probably know the title. It's Clark Gable and it was a fairly famous popular novel at the time, and he plays an advertising executive, and I think it was the clothes he wore, the fact that they went to beautiful places for lunch; I had a view of advertising, that was so glamorous, I wanted to do that. And so I ended up, of course, at Dancer Fitzgerald [Dancer Fitzgerald Sample] in the mailroom, and I was more interested in the glamour of the business, rather than the nuts and bolts. And after a while, I was let go because I wasn't a good mailroom boy, I was always showing up late. I was actually the messenger boy, and I would, I remember I was bringing packages for the fall two-way Campbell's soup meeting, in Whitehall building. And I stopped, I'm going to tell you what happened. So I kind of took my time getting there, and I got a haircut on the way, and looked in windows and when I got off the elevator, the guys in charge of the Campbell's soup account was waiting at the elevator and he said, "Where the- Can I swear? [INT: Please.] Yeah? He said, "Where the fuck you been? Do you want us to lose this account? These people have come all the way from southern New Jersey to just look at the stuff you have." And so he grabbed it out of my hands, and when I got back, I was called in by the personnel Director who said, "Harold, what happened? You should have been there, they're very upset. They want me to fire you." I said, "Well, I guess you have to." So that was my end of my advertising career. And I had a friend who worked at DuMont [DuMont Television Network], and he was like an assistant to the man who hired people. His name is Bob White, who was a brilliant NBC kind of communications guy, setting up phone lines. But anyway, Bob was my friend and I knew nothing about television, didn't have a TV set. Didn’t know--[INT: And DuMont was still a network then?] DuMont was a network, a limited one, but they had, because Dr. DuMont [Allen B. DuMont], worked out of his garage and he really made some breakthroughs on the camera, the tube itself, and he started a network, experimental at first and then he was given five cities; New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Boston. I mean these things, there was no way of measuring their worth today, I mean these, we're talking about billions and billions of dollars. But at the time, he did a very bad job of programming and networking these wonderful locations. [INT: This is 1949/1950?]

HG: This was '48 [1948], I started there [DuMont Television Network] in '48. I started almost the first of January in '48 at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample [Dancer Fitzgerald Sample] and by the summer I had been fired and I was out on the street, and that's when I, at DuMont, Bob White showed me around, and I had no idea how what it was. I knew film 'cause as a child and as a young man I went to film, I went movies two or three times a week. [INT: Where was home for you?] Spring Valley, New York. [INT: And after college, which was where?] Dartmouth [Dartmouth College]. [INT: You came to New York City?] Came to New York, had a little business of my own; I was in the food business, upstate New York for a while. My idea was to make a lot of money, very quickly and then retire and then write books and do all those things. You know, it's everybody's dream, I think if they understand what life should be like, and so, make a lot of money, retiring; and I knew that television, that people were making money in television. So Bob showed me around, and then he took me over to ABC, which was right nearby. And there was a show called HOBBY LOBBY, that was a famous radio show, and it was turned into a pretty good television show. So I sat in a rehearsal for HOBBY LOBBY and I was fascinated by the job of the boom man, he seemed to be up on top of things, kind of looked over, like in the middle of things. I said to Bob, "That'd be a nice job." And he said, "No, that's engineering, you don't want to be an engineer, you want to be in programming." And then, in the middle of the rehearsal, I could hear this voice, and he was telling one of the stagehands to move the table this way and that way, and it was this voice from above, deep bass kind of like the sound of, the voice of God. And I said to Bob, "What's that?" He said, "That's the Director telling people what to do." And I said, "Bob, that's what I want to be. [LAUGH] That's what I want to be.” He said, "Well, that's a long ways away." So I got a job at DuMont, working as a pageboy, but it was such an unsuccessful, cheap place, that we didn't get uniforms; we just wore our street clothes. And within weeks, it was so unstructured that a fellow named Tilt, Al Tilt; he came from a very wealthy family in Long Island, was an Associate Director in the master control switching headquarters, down at the Wanamaker Building. We were like on the same, the piano department was right next to the master control headquarters. So I kind of went up and used to watch Al and then one day Al said, "I want to go away for a couple of days. Don't say anything, but why don’t you just--you know how to do the show." So I went in, and on my days off did his job. [INT: In master control?] In master control, switching from once we had a theater at the Ambassador Theater; the major studio was the 515 Madison Avenue. And Wanamaker's, and we had a little theater; 'cause Wanamaker's had a theater at one time, Wanamaker department store, and that's where CAPTAIN VIDEO came from, and all kinds of very poorly thought out shows.

INT: So we were talking about connecting one live feed with another live feed, right, that there was no video tape or anything that you were... 

HG: Oh no. [INT: You were coordinating…] It was transcription disks, and that was part of my job as the pageboy, was at the end of the day, to take the 16mm transcriptions. [INT: Like the kinescopes?] Of kinescope, yeah, and then take them up to a lab where they would be processed and they would have them the next day. And some of these were shipped off, they were, you know, like they want to show the show in Pittsburgh, it would [LAUGH] be this very poorly made 16mm print, and that was the way shows would be produced. [INT: So the network wasn't connected up like a network, it was a series of--] There were some phone lines, but I think Washington, 'cause of... But I think a lot of the stuff was sent out overnight, and just like NBC did with the California feed, that was all stuff that sent out. The telephone lines didn't go in until I had been working at DuMont [DuMont Television Network] for a couple years, and that was a big deal, because I think it was LA to Denver, and then New York to maybe St. Louis and then finally they were connected and I remember making the first switch; I don't know why. We didn't have a studio; we didn't have an outlet... No, I must have been at NBC at the time, 'cause by then I'd moved to NBC. But, the job was so loose, that I could go up and fill in for a fairly important job, it was switching from place to place, all the commercials are done there, we had racks of slides and we had something called a tel-op; have you heard of a tel-op machine? [INT: Say what a tel-op machine was.] All right, a tel-op is just an art card in a format that would be like three inches by four inches, and you would put it into a scanner, a tube that would take a picture of it and it was like having an easel, and you could store these things. [INT: But you could store the tel-op cards, the actual artwork, you couldn't store any images?] No, no. You could have a box full of tel-ops and they would... [INT: Like a title camera became, later on.] That's right, yeah. It was easier to change than a slide, see a slide was actually a piece of film. [INT: And had to get made.] It had to be made. But you could take a tel-ops, you make a tel-op out of anything, and one of my first experiments was with a tel-op machine. I remember I was fascinated by the dissolves and different effects that they were doing in films, they had done for years. So I could take a tel-op, could take a black card in the shape of a tel-op, and I could put it down and then when it came to the tel-op machine I would slide it out slowly and reveal the next image. And I would call uptown and tell somebody up there, "Take a look; watch this next transition." It was so crude, and also I made a paper airplane with a sign, and I could pull that through, so it would the airplane and then the cardboard and then you would see the title of the next show. And we're talking about 1948 now, it's almost like the French, you know, the filmmaker... the rocket to the moon [A TRIP TO THE MOON], what was his name? [INT: Méliès [Georges Méliès]. I'm not a film historian, but even I know those things.] It's back there someplace, but I can't think of it. It's on that level, it was on that level. [INT: Well it's interesting 'cause there's a direct connection, for me there's a direct connection between playing under a tel-op camera and hanging David Letterman upside down, I mean that's the same ability to think outside of technical process, and go for results.] Yeah. But always having fun doing it, yeah. And I think maybe a lot of good things have come because of people playing around rather than having a serious purpose.

INT: Well you did, I'm going to continue with your story, but I mean I still speak of, I remember THE DAVID LETTERMAN SHOW where the whole, I think every act you flipped it, because the technology had presented itself that allowed you to turn an image 360 degrees and the show just kept... 

HG: Yeah, you could turn the whole [OVERLAP] was rotated 360 degrees in one hour. [INT: Right. I remember a show where you were for no reason that's ever been explained to me, you dubbed the entire show. Just completely dubbed it. With no explanation. Now to me that's the height of surreal humor.] It's not what happens, but the thought that made it happen is interesting yeah. [INT: But without saying anything. But I must go back, just as part of this.] You just tell me where to go.

INT: All right, so it isn't even 1950 yet, and you've found the tel-op machine in master control at DuMont [DuMont Network Television] and you're starting to get this love of this feeling for the medium. What happened next? 

HG: Right. Then Al Tilt left, and I took over; I got a regular job. So I went from pageboy, to Associate Director in operations. That's a very important distinction; operations had nothing to do with creativity, it was getting commercials on the air, switching from studio to studio, putting commercials in football games that came from outside feeds. So I did that, and I didn't like it. I resented the fact that I'd have to, first of all it was so crude too; we had an antenna on top of the Empire State Building and we had a telephone, an outside telephone to the man in the transmitter, so if we were switching from the Wanamaker's feed to the 515 Madison Avenue feed, I'd have to call him, say "Stand by." And if anybody else interrupted that feed, I couldn't make the switch. Which happened every once in a while, someone else would get on the line. So I would say, "Five, four, three... switch 515." And he would switch up then. It was that crude. Also, what I didn't like was that I didn't get any more money as a pageboy, than I got as an Associate Director. This is before the Guild [Directors Guild of America]. [INT: That was my question, so this is pre-Guild, especially in terms of AD work?] Right. And the reason I didn't get any more money, was that there were a lot of people waiting for my job. At the time, I'm trying to think; it's like magazine work today. A lot of people came from well-connected, rich families, were in television. Al Tilt I think was part of the Vanderbilt family. So if you had those connections you got the job because they were glamorous jobs; I didn't understand that. To me, the media itself I found fascinating. The fact that people at home were watching what I- When I would walk to work, and I knew I'd be relieving the man who was rolling the commercials, and I would pass a bar. There's the Yankee [New York Yankees] game. And then a commercial, I would stop and watch, and I would think to myself, in a few minutes, I will be there, switching to that commercial, and all the people all over the country are watching it, will see what I've just done. And it meant a lot to me, I know I was just a kid, but it meant a lot to me. It was like a kind of a power, but a secret power; no one knew I was doing it, and I was doing it. So it was, I remember the salary as 22 dollars a week, as a page. 22 dollars a week as an Associate Director in operations. And then, I said "You know, shouldn't I be getting more money?" He says, "Gurnee, you're lucky to have a job." This is my boss, at 515. He says, "You know, a lot of people would like to have your job." So I kept my mouth shut. And then one day, I noticed in my paycheck it wasn't 22 dollars, it was like 23 dollars and 75 cents. And I called my boss, I can't think of his name now. And I said, "Well thanks for recognizing the fact that I'm doing a good job for you." He said, "Forget about it. The reason you got the raise was that they just raised the minimum wage." And I always wanted to be able to let people at the Guild know that this was what it was like before the Guild, and so when the Guild came in from $23.75 it went to like 95 dollars a week, which was a couple of years later. [INT: It's an enormous amount of responsibility.] Yeah, but it's like supply and demand. A lot of supply of people, and I could either take it or leave it, and I liked it so much I stayed on.

INT: So what was your next move [after DuMont Television Network]? 

HG: The next one was to go up to 515 Madison Avenue and work on live shows, which is what I wanted to do right along. [INT: Also with DuMont?] At DuMont. So I went up and there was Dennis James, remember Dennis James? Well, he had a show called OKAY, MOTHER and I worked on that as an AD [Associate Director]. And his brother, Joe Sposa, 'cause Dennis' real name was Sposa; another one of these deals that would be allowed at DuMont, when he went away, I directed the show. [INT: His brother was the Director?] His brother was the Director. And I liked Dennis; Dennis liked me. And I would do the wrestling matches with Dennis and if you remember that wrestling was very popular on television in those days, and it was taken seriously, until Dennis James came along. I mean, everybody, I still don't understand the phenomenon [LAUGH] of why people buy this stuff. And so it was the same kind of fakery, but Dennis James at ringside, didn't go along, he just explained how things were done, and how phony it was, and would laugh and he became very popular. And he had like little stick things that he would do to imitate breaking bones, as people did things. He was a nice guy, and he was also kind of daring. He would, the show opened with like a one minute opening, telling where we were, St. James Arena, Brooklyn, and who was going to be in the match, and he would, every once in a while, to tease me would not show up. This was live. So I would have to go on the air; I wasn't seen, but I would have to do the opening announcement, and then in the middle of it he would come over and tap me on the shoulder and tell me to move aside. [INT: So these were actually real remotes then? Along with everything else, they were remotes. It must have been very exciting.] Oh yeah. Right. It was a remote truck, black and white cameras, big cameras and very crude microphones, and I would supply the commercials and he would read the commercials. But it was all so loose, and I think again, it was because it was live, a lot of things happened that wouldn't have had if it was taped and they could fix it up. Well, it’s still the base--I mean all that stuff is still live. [INT: Well it's live but it's no longer... it's controlled.] It's controlled. [INT: Right. So at this point now it's still...] Before 1950s, like 1949. [INT: And television's only two years old, and you're getting some directing shots at Dennis James' show and you're directing the remote wrestling matches from St. James.] Well, no I'm still the AD, there's a Director in the truck, Harry Coyle. Harry Coyle is kind of the icon of early sports Director, and Harry and I worked on, I knew Harry all my working career. I knew Harry and he was very good to me, and we did football together, all those things at DuMont. DuMont, because it has the Yankee [New York Yankees] contract and we did Giants [New York Giants] games, we traveled around. Harry Wismer was the football announcer. So I was not interested at all in sports, I never was, but it was kind of thrilling to be, you know, sitting next to Mel Allen in a very glamorous business. My family thought it was glamorous and I, you know. So I had a lot of shots at unofficially directing.

INT: Take a moment, and I'll bring you right back, but in the days of doing live sporting events there was no chyron, cameras were limited, there was--[HG: Art cards.] Art cards; and so could you just take a moment to describe what a remote of a typical football game would be like physically? What would you have to do physically? How many cameras? 

HG: Well you start with a truck, cables running out of the truck; you would have at least five cameras. [INT: Five cameras, which would have been a lot of cameras.] But one of the cameras was tied up in the announce booth, and that was to shoot the opening and closing titles. [INT: And those are all art cards?] All art cards, you'd carry with you in a big envelope. [INT: And if there was any statistics or graphics or anything that you had to show, what quarter you were in, or anything.] It wouldn't be shown. [INT: You wouldn’t show. You’d say it.] He would say it. The idea of showing how a play worked, I don't know why, I don't know why we didn't do that, it could have been done, but it was mostly for the opening titles and then commercial. We'd do like a Harry Wismer, Mel Allen would do a commercial and they would be like for Camels [Camel cigarettes], and we'd have cards. Often we brought along an IA [IATSE, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees] guy who would flip the cards, like we did in the studio, and then once in a while he wouldn't show up and I'd have to flip the cards and cue Dennis [Dennis James] and I would keep him, time his stuff and supply the commercials. [INT: So the IA guy would have a jurisdiction over the cards? Not on the tel-op; in tel-op you could get away with it.] Tel-op was part of the engineering equipment, yeah. [INT: The union dynamic is very interesting.] Well, just as a sidebar, one of the reasons that the lighting is done by IA, by the, I mean by the engineering department is that the IA, the stagehands didn't want to do it. They didn't like the idea of climbing up and down on ladders; they were lazy. And so that they let the engineers take over that function, which became a very important function and created some, I think, geniuses. Imero Fiorentino is a friend of mine… I don't think people understand how important lighting is, especially in the early days, how important lighting was; probably maybe more important than the set decorators. [INT: Well especially as the medium matured, I mean, when you were doing that, someone like Imero Fiorentino hadn't even graduated from college yet, you know, there was a moment when it required a giant leap in faith, to allow someone who actually knew how to light, to light. And you were right there, when that happened. But it was very jurisdictional, so… Okay, so--] Let's finish up the, that's a sidebar.

INT: The remote, so what a remote was like. Audio was limited I assume too. 

HG: Audio was the announcer, there would be some kind of very crude, they weren't called shotguns at the time, but I remember on the first kind of microphones with reach, kind of long. Some of them were ridiculously long. [INT: But very narrow.] Very narrow, very narrow pattern, but they were on a camera and they were longer than the camera and, but they were able to, instead of running the boom in you could get stuff from awkward positions. And then it would be I think two sideline cameras, no handhelds, and one on--I think the big decision Harry [Harry Coyle] had to make was, in back of what goal is he going to put that other camera. And he would like to think that it would be the side that was--but then you had, you know, would change mid, you know, at half-time, so, yeah. [INT: The teams would change?] Teams would change. [INT: Because it was easier to change a team than a camera.] Well, they do that anyway, they change the goal, you know, the… [INT: And I assume you were fighting the light in some cases that…] Yeah, the cameras didn't have the sensitivity they have now, and when things got wet, things broke down. And as I said before, there wasn't a time, I don't remember ever doing a show at DuMont [DuMont Network Television], a live show, where at least one camera didn't go out for a while. And they had these kind of kamikaze engineers, the Gady brothers, people like that who could rush in and fix a camera, and they were kind of proud of the fact that they could find out what was wrong and fix it within a minute or two. And when they would look up, like that, you knew you lost the camera for the show. And so you did a show with two cameras. And I've done shows with one camera, very awkwardly. So that was kind of the thrill of doing those shows. And so when you did a remote and it was wet, you expected there was going to be a very ragged show.

INT: But you had no interest in sports, but you were definitely developing a passion for the process? 

HG: Yeah. It was an opportunity to get out and do live stuff, out of the studio, and that's why I did it. And I think Harry [Harry Coyle] liked me, I liked Harry. But when I did leave there, let's just say that I got a chance to work on a detective show; I don't think people understand, at DuMont [DuMont Network Television] how loose things were. We had wonderful Directors, some came from film; Bill Marceau was an Englishman who was very good, had great sensitivity but didn't understand television, had no desire to understand television; he was more interested in the performances, and he was very good at pulling performances out of people. So he would leave to the AD [Associate Director], going through the script, pulling out all the sound effects, the set requirements, any artistic asides or cards that had to be made. So I would, at the end of our meeting, when we read the script down, I would go down to Wanamaker's and there was a fellow named Rudy Luchek, who was the only scenic designer there. He hadn't been working, but I would say, "All right Rudy, we need a living room, there has to be a door and two windows, and there has to be an opening so we can shoot, 'cause someone comes up and gets some... pours some whiskey into a glass and then takes a [inaudible--01:46:04;05], and we had to see that real tight." So he would make an opening in the set, and then I would go uptown and go into various retail outfits and rent furniture for it. There'd be a house that would kind of rent us pictures, another one for phony flowers. And that was my job as the AD. And then talk to the sound effects people, order up sound effects and then go back down to Wanamaker's 'cause there was one man who was in charge of background music, and he had just a bunch of 78s. [INT: But this was all week long? I mean, you would do this on a week-by-week basis, and this was your job?] Yeah, that's right, this was my job as an AD.

INT: What about when you got into camera blocking and the part where eventually shots had to get called? [Referring to Associate Directors’ duties & responsibilities.] 

HG: Well I would ready the shots for the most part. [INT: What about picking the lenses?] No, the Director would do that. But that would be… Actually with a fellow named Bill, it was the cameraman. They were turrets, so you had a choice of a 75, a tight one, or a wide one. And it was, I think it was pretty much the Director who would say, "A little tighter, a little looser..." And he wouldn't call it a lens. [INT: Just leave it to the operator to give him what he wanted?] That's right. And so, often the camera operator would have to move in so tight he said, "Well I better back off and then change the turret." It was all very mechanical, and the idea of moves and that sort, so we had... The cameras were on wheels, and they moved around, but they were only a few people who could do those moves gracefully and make them look like something on the air. And those people became valuable, and they were the ones who were sought after. But I remember, a lot of times you could get in trouble because the cameraman would be coming out of black and then he would be on the wrong lens, and he couldn't in the middle, you'd have to get off that camera, to get him to change the lens. I remember there was one scene, it was a courtroom scene, where there was a close-up; there was supposedly a close-up of the man in the dock, what do you call it? The witness box. And it's kind of a shot like that, and for some reason we come out of the commercial and the cameraman was on a wide shot, so he could see the man in the witness box, and the judge. And at the end, the man who was in the witness box had to duck out and get into another scene, so on the air, and we see this coming up, there's nothing we can do, he's finishing it, and then he finished it and thinking he was only seen from this up, he kind of ducked and then walked out in front of the judge, kind of like an old bent over man like this, and all seen on the air. And we all fell down laughing; it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Or someone… Often it happened, I remember, I'll think of the man's name in a second... The Actor who played Bela Lugosi in that wonderful Johnny Depp film [ED WOOD]. Martin Landau. He always played the kind of punks, the killers and he was very good at it, he was very menacing, dark. Cadaver like. And I remember on this same show with Bill Marceau, he came in and he was to sneak up on someone in the room, and then put a gun to his head and shoot him. And it's not the all night thing, but he came in and he was, kind of edging around, he wasn't doing his move, and then in desperation, he went...to the camera, to the camera. [LAUGH] He lost it. And Bill would say, "What is he saying?" He's saying, “He doesn't have a gun!” [LAUGH] So we faded to black and then did the scene later on. But that, many times the body got up before the shot was finished, or the stagehands at the end of a cooking show, you would see the hands reach in grabbing the food on the beauty shot and that kind of thing. [INT: I remember seeing when I was a kid, an action, a fight scene that they were supposed to cut into the middle of a fight scene, so all the Actors were in there, just waiting for the cue and the camera cut a second before the cue so you saw them all go and start fighting.] That could have been an effect. [LAUGH] [INT: Yes, exactly. Exactly.]

INT: So what you're projecting here is that this was television in it's crude form and it was more exciting; people didn't dwell on the mistakes, there was no time. They were barely recorded, except maybe on film; everything moved forward in time and you laughed your way through it, and kept going. 

HG: Yeah. I think when things were really embarrassing; it's kind of like the dysfunctional family that never really talks about the terrible things that are going on in the family. They happened and you just go past it, because there's nothing you can do about it. And I think that television was that kind of family. It was fun; we would laugh about it, but quickly forget it, because we didn't want it to happen again. We thought it would never happen again; of course it happened every other show. [INT: Plus, you had no choice, there was nothing you could do. There was no way to undo it.] Yeah. I think it also added, intelligent people look for the mistakes, and also there were a lot of mistakes made in the scripts. You would think that, well they had a chance to work that out, but I remember in the detective show, it started with two detectives; it was always like a little dialogue between the two of them. They would be talking about something in their pasts, and I remember the one where they were talking about baseball. And they didn't let us know; it was scripted, but we didn't rehearse that, they kind of just did it, and I remember they were talking about a famous pitcher, and one policeman said to the other, or detective, he said, "He was so strong, he was a powerful man,” he said, “he would pitch seven innings with his right hand, and then relieve himself with his left." And it's on the air, it's gone, but that's a great moment, I'll always remember that line. I mean, that would be a joke, I mean that's a joke, but he didn't... It was, the guy who wrote it, he was probably writing three plays that week, and he just wrote it without rereading it, and seeing how funny that was. [INT: I'm always going to remember it. Take that one right home to my wife and tell her that one.]

INT: So, you're still ADing [associate directing] and it’s… 

HG: But trying like hell to be a Director. I had, because I was allowed, not allowed; I was not a troublemaker, but I was ambitious and when things were wrong, I would speak out, which I realized that you don't do that, in my position as an AD [Associate Director]. You know, I wouldn't find fault with some other people's work and you kind of keep your mouth shut, but I didn't understand that and I could see that things could be so much better if they would just do it my way. And so they would bring people in from the Pittsburgh Carnegie school [Carnegie Mellon University], just got out of school and hire them as Directors. And here I was an AD and this is like two or three years down the line, and I was really pissed off about this, but I wanted to be a Director very badly. Ever since hearing the man on the talk back. [INT: The voice of God?] Yeah. And I felt that was a, you know, a proper role for me and I wanted to do that. So that, it was frustrating, but it was fascinating. And it all ended suddenly, when DuMont [Dumont Television Network] just went out of business. They just gave up. It was so badly run, there was a man named Jim Caddigan [James Caddigan] who was in charge of programming, with dreadful decisions. And they were lucky, and they came along with the first Jackie Gleason show [CAVALCADE OF STARS] was done at DuMont. Jack Carter followed him, was wonderful. They had Bishop Sheen, kicking ass at the time. He was very big. And so they had a handful of things, but most of the stuff that Caddigan came up with; he's long gone, he's been dead for years, but I think... And Commander Loewi [Mortimer Loewi] was the kind of president, nobody with any real sensitivity to what people wanted, was running it. Otherwise it would be what came later on. This is what Fox is now, Fox owns that. It was a Multimedia, was it? [INT: Metromedia.] Metromedia. And so, it was an enormous potential. [INT: Well, also it was generational too, that the people that were in charge were from a World War II generation, and this was a new era.] Yeah. But I wonder why they didn't look around and look at the other networks to see what they were doing. I think it was all there, but it was... I think the opportunity, because everybody wanted to be in television in those days, in New York. And I know in California they were fighting television. [INT: Of course.] It still puzzles me why something so valuable was wasted. And so, one day I was called in, and told that the network was closing down; they were going to sell off the stations in Washington, but they would keep New York and they would only keep a handful of people, and I just went and just applied to other networks, and I got a job at NBC. [INT: What job?] As back in the master control. I couldn't get a job as a local AD, I mean as an AD in live programming. But they did need somebody in master control. And I had the background. And I figured this was a way of getting a foothold. [INT: What year?] 1954. I was married, and one month later they closed down.

INT: So you were really with DuMont [DuMont Network Television] for a few years? That you really cut your teeth-- 

HG: '48 [1948] to '50 [1950], you know, five years. [INT: A few years of really, of being in that kind of free form environment.] Yeah. [INT: For better or worse.] Right. As it turns out, for better, because I think, having worked in live and also having worked in the master control, especially at NBC, a lot of that was very demanding. There would be all kinds of remotes. WIDE, WIDE WORLD was done at that time, and NBC had the facility and the, you know, all the equipment they needed and they also had the men they needed. There were some very, very good people. My friend Bob White was one, set up, he went to NBC after I did, or before I did, and did all their communications and he was a genius. And they had other people like that. And I was disappointed I had to be back in master control, but I figured, if I just waited I would get a chance to go back into live again. Which did happen.