Television Heaven — I recalled this post having mentioned my saving the copies of Silicon Spin from the garbage dump myself. I did not keep many copies of my radio shows sadly enough, but I have some digitized which I will post. What is sad about the Edie Adams/Ernie Kovacs tragedy cited above is that there is never any reason to dump any of this when employees will gladly take this stuff home. A good editor friend of mine in Manhattan told me how he found that the entire Dell paperback cover art collection was being thrown away. He recovered what he could but most of the original art ended up as landfill or burned from what he could tell. He gave me three pieces from the collection including an oil painting from the Alfred Hitchcock mystery series. These stories of waste and carelessness amaze me.
In 1996, Edie Adams, the widow of inventive comic Ernie Kovacs, testified at a public hearing on video preservation about the fate of her husband’s early DuMont shows (along with episodes of “Cavalcade”; “Captain Video” and others): They were destroyed. There was a legal fight over the cost of storing and preserving those artifacts of television history. Because of that, Adams noted that an attorney “had three huge semis back up to the loading dock — filled them all with stored kinescopes — drove them to a waiting barge — made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the upper New York Bay.” Still, a number of DuMont kinescopes are with us; many of them are now in collections at UCLA; the Museum of Television and Radio in both Beverly Hills and New York City; and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. (The founder of MBC is Bruce DuMont, the nephew of network founder Alan B. DuMont.)
related link:
Kovacs — read about what you missed and what’s been lost
When my company bought new art to decorate the building (health care facility), they sold the old art (mostly local artists.) Seems that that would be the best solution for anybody. Even if sold for pennies in bulk it’s a profit. Putting it out for collection is actually an expense. But I’ve learned not to expect good business sense from the Corprate America.
We’re going to be entering a period where we have almost no material getting into the public domain and where a lot of old stuff is just being tossed. In 100 years people may look back and what they have to remember this time by will be nothing like what was actually going on. It’s one of the reasons I’m such a big proponant of the Internet Archive (which would be a great place to put your radio shows and Silicon Spin) which includes all of the old Computer Chronicles (I like the one where John is fascinated by the PS/2) amongst other stuff.
I think that what used to happen is stuff expired quite quickly into the public domain and then was widely copied and distributed at little cost. This meant people had lots of copies of it distributed in attics around the world, preserving at least a few copies long enough for people to see the value. Extended copyrights means that by the time the copyright expires all the original copies may already be lost because it stopped making money a long time ago and the company that owns it just tossed it. You can already find a lot of examples of this in the internet era making the future look even bleaker. With the addition of DRM and the move towards subscription based services you end up with even more content being centrally stored which is looking for an even bigger disaster…
It will all eventually be blowing in the wind. Most of those tapes would be falling apart anyway. The cost of digitizing and restoring would be astronomical. Desi Arnez insisted the Lucy show be shot in 35mm, just because it looked better. Can you imagine the profits related to that decision?
A guy in Florida opened a Tragedy in US History Museum
http://www.lostparks.com/tragedy.html
I read some time ago that the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be some of the worst historically documented periods in the history of humanity. In the past there were tangible records of human history, now it’s all on computers, which means that all that information will not last 50 years. Videotape self destructs, data media becomes unreadable.
Take for example photography… I have some photos of my family from the late 1800’s, plus miriads of photos of us growing up, which were kept in a shoebox. They are prints, and you can look at them directrly. 50 years from now, my surviving relatives will find a CD in the attic and throw it away because there will be no way for them to view the contents easily.
Every time Paul Shaffer dawns that turbine on The David Letterman Show, I have a ‘flashback’ to Kovacs & Mr. Question Man.
John — you’re giving me a big nostalgia jolt, tonight. I watched Ernie Kovacs before he “made it big” on Dumont. He started out on WRGB in Schenectady, NY — doing the same surreal satire that worked on national TV. B&W. Phew!
Pieces of art may be donated to local libraries and universities and schools. Our own local library will lend pieces from its art collection, most of which would otherwise never be displayed for want of room. Donors may also claim a tax deduction.
What about the damage of museum holdings? They put up many things for display, but many artifacts are never shown because they’re not considered important enough. They should be selling these things as well.