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."
Read more about this topic: Camera Three
Famous quotes containing the words successes and, successes and/or failures:
“The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Do your children view themselves as successes or failures? Are they being encouraged to be inquisitive or passive? Are they afraid to challenge authority and to question assumptions? Do they feel comfortable adapting to change? Are they easily discouraged if they cannot arrive at a solution to a problem? The answers to those questions will give you a better appraisal of their education than any list of courses, grades, or test scores.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“If tragedy elicits our compassion, comedy appeals to our self-interest. The former confronts life’s failures with noble fortitude, the latter seeks to circumvent them with shrewd nonchalance. The one leaves us momentarily in a mood of resignation, the other in a condition of euphoria.”
—Harry Levin (b. 1912)