Television: Sunday Sops

To TV’s hucksters, Sunday afternoon is known as an “intellectual ghetto” where the networks stow their small sops to the minority. Thus when two unsponsored NBC shows landed quietly in the ghetto this week, it was not surprising that both turned out to be far more impressive than the season’s new commercial fare (see below). Wisdom, a filmed series of interviews with “the world’s foremost seminal doers and thinkers,” and Look Here!, a live, remote interview show with public figures, proved again that the most effective TV comes straight from life.

Wisdom offered an extraordinary visit with Pablo Picasso, whose serene and massive figure illuminated the screen with almost as much distinction as his art. In his cluttered studio in the south of France, the 75-year-old artist sketched a town scene, fashioned a big-beaked bird from a freshly molded clay vase and made a figure on the floor from a clay pipe, broken bits of pottery and an olive branch. But he never uttered a sound. “I do not talk,” Picasso had told NBC. “I only paint.” In a fascinating finale, Pablo, bare-chested and wearing soiled black shorts, clambered up a ladder and with no preliminary sketches drew dancing goddesses across the wall of a chapel with an ease and grace that made genius look simple. The stunning close-ups of his works (pink eyes, blue breasts) provided color-conscious NBC with its best argument for color TV.

Look Here! brings NBC’s bowstringtaut Martin Agronsky, 42, into what he calls “the tremendously rich area between Mike Wallace and Ed Murrow.” In the paneled, high-ceilinged office of John Foster Dulles, Agronsky tested his new concept—”penetrating the wellsprings of character”—to good effect. By exploring areas that the news panel shows had never found cause to enter, Agronsky made a refreshing switch on the usual Dulles interview. (Sample questions: What does a man feel when he faces a decision that might mean the difference between peace and war? How do you reconcile the doctrine of massive retaliation with the Christian ethic?) Though NBC rudely cut the Bible-quoting Secretary off in the middle of an answer (to plug other NBC shows), the net result was good human drama, “After all,” says Agronsky, “this is show business. The interviewer is part actor and must work in dramatic terms.”

The success of both series is due largely to Producer Bob Graff, 37, an ex-U.P. reporter who helped put together the award-winning Assignment: India and has worked on the Wisdom series for three years. Graff credits Pat Weaver, sometime president of NBC, with the original idea (“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get Michelangelo and Shakespeare on the tube?” Pat said). Of the 26 shows that Graff will run off on consecutive Sundays at 2:30 E.D.T., seven will be entirely new, e.g., visits with Jacques Lipchitz, Igor Stravinsky, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, Vannevar Bush, Walter Gropius. Next week Graff himself steps in to interview David Ben-Gurion in the library of his Tel Aviv home. His basic idea: to provide “a uniform panorama of human leadership in the first half of the century.”

For Look Here! (Sun. 3:30 E.D.T.) Graff has drawn up another impressive roster: Dorothy Parker, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Edith Hamilton, Jimmy Hoffa, Noel Coward, Jack Kennedy, Ethel Merman, Kukla, Fran and Ollie. He and Agronsky also plan to fly to Havana to interview Dictator Batista via the nation’s first “over-the-horizon” TV transmission system, which opened last week. “In every case,” says Graff, “we are looking for the real essence of the man. We’re trying to show, rather than show up, character.”