An Evening With Fred Astaire
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An Evening With Fred Astaire was a one-hour television special starring Fred Astaire, broadcast on NBC on October 17, 1958. It was highly successful, winning nine Emmy awards and spawning three further specials, and technically innovative, as it was the first major television show to be prerecorded on color videotape. It was produced at NBC's Color City studios in Burbank, California.
Considered something of a comeback for the then 59-year-old Astaire, the special was his first starring role on television. It was directed and co-produced by Bud Yorkin and introduced Astaire's new partner Barrie Chase, whom he would later describe in Interview magazine in 1973 as perhaps his favorite dance partner.[link] The Jonah Jones Quartet and David Rose and his Orchestra provided the music, and the Hermes Pan Dancers appeared in the ensemble dance numbers. The show was sponsored by Chrysler Corporation, and typical for advertising of the era, Chrysler cars featured prominently in the show; Astaire's final words were "I only hope the show is as good as the cars."
The use of videotape
The program was highly innovative in its use of color videotape, a technology then in its infancy.
The first major television program to be recorded on videotape had been The Edsel Show in 1957; however, this was a straight recording of a live performance with no editing. Early videotape use was confined largely to rebroadcasting programs from the east coast two hours later in the west, and was a cheaper, better-quality alternative to the film-based kinescopes. The experimental low-band quadruplex recording system in use was troublesome and hard to copy.
Furthermore, early video editing was a highly complicated matter that required the engineer to cover the two-inch tape with iron oxide sulution to locate the magnetic tracks and then splice it with a razor blade. An Evening With Fred Astaire used a number of groundbraking editing techniques that are now commonplace, such as overlays and dissolves. To simplify the process, the raw videotapes were first copied onto film kinescopes, and these were edited into a mockup of the final edit; then, the same edits were performed on the videotapes. [link]
Interestingly, the show was to earn a further technical Emmy in 1988 for Ed Reitan, Don Kent, and Dan Einstein, who restored the original videotape, transferring its contents to a modern format, and filling in gaps where the tape had deteriorated with kinescope footage. (The three had also restored the oldest color videotape known to exist, the dedication of WRC-TV's new studio in Washington, DC on May 21, 1958. [link])
Musical numbers
- "Morning Ride"/"Svengali" — Fred Astaire and the Hermes Pan dancers
Sequels
Astaire produced another three similar specials:
- Another Evening With Fred Astaire (November 4, 1959)
- Astaire Time (September 28, 1960)
- The Fred Astaire Show (February 7, 1968)
See also
External links
- [fredastaire.net article metioning the special]
- [fredastaire.net production details]
- [Ed Reitan color TV page]
- [Engineer Kris Trexler's page about early videotape, with short clip from the show]
- [Barrie Chase's (unpublished) recollections of the aftermath of the show]
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