Bing Crosby, Television Sports Preservationist

Hugh Pickens submits news first gleaned from a now-paywalled article at the New York Times (and, happily, widely reported) that "The hunt for a copy of the seventh and deciding game of the 1960 World Series, considered one of the greatest games ever played and long believed to be lost forever, has come to an end in the home of Bing Crosby, a canny preservationist of his own legacy, who kept a half-century's worth of records, tapes and films in the wine cellar turned vault in his Hillsborough, California home. Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio. Crosby knew he would want to watch the game later — if his Pirates won — so he hired a company to record Game 7 by kinescope, an early relative of the DVR, filming off a television monitor. The five-reel set, found in December in Crosby's home, is the only known complete copy of the game, in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a game-ending home run to beat the Yankees, 10-9."

Comments

The Fall Classic and 2" quad

[schmidt349]

1960 was a classic Series. It's right up there with 1955-6, 1986, 1996, and 2001 on my list for the all-time best.

It's amazing to realize how different program preservation policy was in the prime of 2" Ampex quad videotape. So much of historic significance has been lost -- and not just Doctor Who and the moon landings, either. British TV before 1978 is a Swiss cheese. American programming suffered as well -- there are huge chunks of The Tonight Show that just plain don't exist anymore. For a long time, possibly the greatest baseball game of all time (1956 WS game 5) was thought to be gone forever.

What with Google pushing something like 20 PB of data every day it kind of makes you wonder what's being done to ensure the long-term survival of the digital patrimony. I mean, I don't particularly give a damn whether the wingnuts' blogs and every video of a dog pooping on a baby makes it to the 22nd century, but isn't there some stuff worth saving? Who's taking that responsibility?

Re:The Fall Classic and 2" quad

[schmidt349]

Well, bear me out, I have a pretty interesting perspective on this. I'm a classical philologist, which means my job is to read and ponder texts written in Greek and Latin between the 8th century BCE and the fourth century CE. The difference between what was actually written and what's come down to us is colossal. A lot of people have heard of the Iliad and the Odyssey -- but most don't know names like the Cypria and the Margites, epics also thought in antiquity to have been created by Homer (whoever or whatever he was). Sophocles may have written more than a hundred plays in his career; we're incredibly lucky to have seven. Sure, some of these selections were made on the basis of quality, but I sure wish that I had been the arbiter of "quality" rather than some asshole monk sitting in a cloister in 10th century Greece looking to crib lines for a passion play.

It may be impossible, but we should try to convey as much of our data to our posterity as we can. Folks in my line of work have a long list of texts that they would quite literally give an arm and a leg to get back. Let's not leave our descendants with the same sense of loss.

He could sing

[PopeRatzo]

Man, I love those old Crosby recordings, like "I Remember Dear" and "Moonlight Becomes You". And the "Road to..." pictures he did with Hope were some of the funniest, hippest movies of the era (especially "Road to Bali"). But as as person, he was a piece of shit. Worse as he got older.

That he saved some old recordings doesn't make him a pioneer of media preservationism as much as someone who wanted to have what other people couldn't have.

A "preservationist" is someone like Martin Scorsese who has worked tirelessly to make sure old celluloid films aren't lost. He's doing it to make sure others can get the kind of exposure to the history of our culture as shown in cinema.

When I was growing up, the local TV station, WGN-TV, had an amazing library of films and played at least two of them every day. There would be one a 9am and another after the evening news. Sometimes another after midnight. Everything from film noir to Busby Berkeley to Fellini (both dubbed and subbed). Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Walter Huston, Welles, Michael Powell, Billy Wilder, the Marx Bros, Kurosawa, Vittorio Di Sica. Even modern masterpieces like "Joe" or "Little Murders". Everything. Sometime in the early '80s, there must have been some change in the way they were licensed or something because those movies were replaced by back-to-back episodes of some lame TV show like Dallas or even worse. I got a remarkable education in cinema just from my local TV station. Now that's all gone. The cable stations that are dedicated to "classic" films aren't nearly so eclectic or comprehensive. When they went to commercial, the bumper music they used was "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck. Whenever I hear that song today all those images flood into my mind's eye. I'll always associate that 5/4 melody with the excitement of being exposed to another nugget of cinema greatness, curled up in a comfy chair in my parents' basement, watching an old Sylvania console TV.

When I was in college, I had campus job in the film school's archive. It was always slow, so I could project 16mm versions of foreign and avant-garde films, such as the work of Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, Maya Deren, Bunuel, and my favorite Joseph Cornell (if you ever get a chance, see the film "Rose Hobard" actually projected on a screen. It's a mind-bender.

Sometimes I wonder about some young kid out there using the Internet to search out these films and to be exposed to cinema in the way I did, without effort, almost accidentally. With luck, Scorsese's foundation got to these works before the masters disintegrated beyond saving.

Re:The upside to letting people copy media

[westlake]

Just think about all the culture that would still be available to us today, if the technology to copy was wider spread and available when TV first appeared. We would have a complete collection of all the old Dr. Who episodes.

Some 280 rolls of film survive of Berlin television broadcasts ca. 1934-1944.

The kinescope was in broad commercial use in the states in 1947.

NBC, CBS, and DuMont set up their main kinescope recording facilities in New York City, while ABC chose Chicago. By 1951, NBC and CBS were each shipping out some 1,000 16mm kinescope prints each week to their affiliates across the United States, and by 1955 that number had increased to 2,500 per week for CBS. By 1954 the television industry's film consumption surpassed that of all of the Hollywood studios combined. Kinescope

Network kinescopes were often 35mm and can be of strikingly good quality.

It has even become possible to recover the chroma - color - signal - that was occasionally recorded on the B/W kinescope of a color production.

The problem was never the technology. The technology was always there. What was lacking was the desire, the will, the commitment and the money to maintain an archive.

 

Re:Crosby's estate is screwed

[yotto]

You joke (and it's funny) but when it comes down to it, piracy preserved this game.

The irony is, now that they've got it back they'll probably sell it on DRM'd blu-rays.