Camera Three - Successes and Failures

Successes and Failures

Camera Three is recognized as being the first TV program "to use poetry extensively" and the first "to succeed with dramatizations of classics." The program also broke ground in sensitive areas, such as presenting a sympathetic portrayal of Sacco and Vanzetti and casting a black actor, Earle Hyman, in the role of Hamlet.

Noteworthy guests on the program included Son House, Richard Burton, Melissa Hayden, Carlos Montoya, Agnes Moorehead, Ogden Nash, Katherine Anne Porter, Christopher Plummer, and Thornton Wilder.

During Clare Roskam's tenure as producer of the show, he did an episode that focused on the work of Salvador Dalí and purposely omitted an interview with the painter. After the program aired, Dalí phoned Roskam and left a terse message, "I'm not dead, you know!"

While the show was recipient of several awards, including the Sylvania, the Peabody and the Emmy, not all its innovations succeeded. An episode consisting of a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations against images of a harpsichord and a piano was "disastrous," according to Roskam. The attempt to adapt Isak Dinesen's Deluge at Norderney resulted in "a deadeningly talky" episode dismissed by WCBS-TV program director Dan Gallagher as "a real failure."

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