Mistake in live drama

[Rinehart]

Just before the 26-minute mark of "Twelve Angry Men" something comes into shot from the right, stays for several seconds and then moves out. Can anyone suggest what it might be? At first I thought it might be a lens turret from another camera. Most people I've asked say it looks like it might be a lamp, but can anyone positively identify it? Here is the link to the You Tube page, where you'll find it at 25:49.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCFJpBUCyYU

[David Roper]

Camera moving in for the closeup of the juror (Will West?) who says "He doesn't even know how to speak English."

[earlyfilm]

Originally Posted by David Roper

Camera moving in for the closeup of the juror (Will West?) who says "He doesn't even know how to speak English."

David,

I agree the bottom object in the picture is a camera lens.

All lens on camera turrets in that era pointed in the same direction, and you will notice top object does not.

On some live programs with a lot of fast camera changes, cameras had small fill lights, in case they needed to grab a shot quickly and the shot they needed was in the shadow. On live shows they could not stop and adjust the lights.

The top protrusion is one of the probable two camera lights. You can see the diffusion filter in the lamp to prevent it from blinding the actors. Using lights on cameras was dropped as soon as film and later video tape ended live drama production. When these lights were not needed, they were kept turned off. In most operations these lights were remotely controlled from the booth by the video engineer, and not by the camera man.

The two lights slightly higher than the lens were needed so the talent could act straight into the lens and not be blinded. We tend to forget how bright the studio light had to be in 1954.

I am very impressed with the mobile camera work on this live presentation.

Jas.

[Eric H]

It's fun to find stuff like this, I guess there was a lot of mistakes on live TV back then.

Watching shows on a modern set with no rounded corners and no overscan sometimes shows up things that would never have been seen back in the day,
Example, on I Love Lucy they sometimes pull back so far you can see the edge of the set, one time the camera man was a little slow and you could see around the wall from the main set into the bedroom set, it wouldn't have mattered on a set of the period, you simply wouldn't have seen it.

[Rinehart]

OK, that seems to cover everything. Thank you.
Those live dramas must have been incredibly difficult to do. I don't know how many camera shots there were in a 55 minute show, but if it were four hundred it wouldn't surprise me.
In the mid-1970's a guy called Kenneth Whelen wrote a book called How the Golden Age of Television Turned My Hair to Silver about his experiences being a staff director for CBS. He says they used to play a game called "Attaboy Aw Sh*t" that worked like this: he would tell the cameraman to get in position for his next shot, and if the camera was in the right spot at the right time, he'd get an "Attaboy". On the other hand if the camera wasn't in the right spot, he'd get an "Aw Sh*t". Three Attaboys cancelled out one Aw Sh*t. They totaled it up at the end, and depending what the score was, the the crew might not be speaking to each other.
The juror who says "He doesn't even know how to speak English," is John Beal. Will West, aka Larkin Ford is to Beal's left; you can just see a little bit of his profile.

[Jeffhs]

There was one hilarious slip of the tongue in the dialogue of "The Honeymooners", which was filmed presumably before a live audience, using the DuMont "Electronicam" television film system and ran on CBS in the mid-1950s. Ralph Kramden was trying to figure out where he had goofed on his income tax return; while listing his deductions, he said to his friend Ed Norton (in paraphrase), "...the horse with the stomach in its clock -- er, the clock in its stomach", describing a prize he had won in a poker game, IIRC. Since the program was being filmed, no part of it could be redone if an error was made in the dialogue or in the acting itself. I have this episode on VHS (taped in the early '80s from a Cleveland TV station, WCLQ-TV (now WQHS) which has since affiliated with Univision) and I laugh out loud every time I hear it.

[Rinehart]

There was a nightmarish mistake in one of the Honeymooners episodes where Gleason for some reason thought the sketch was over and was in his dressing room taking his makeup off. Art Carney was alone on stage at the time, so there was nothing to do except fill the airtime until someone got Gleason back. Fortunately, and just by chance, there was an orange in the icebox, so Carney improvised a 90-second mime routine about peeling the orange, full of all sorts of weird hand gestures and facial expressions. The man was a genius.

[Dude111]

Originally Posted by David Roper

Camera moving in for the closeup of the juror (Will West?) who says "He doesn't even know how to speak English."

Thats what i thought also,A CAMERA!

[Sandy G]

Jackie OWNED "The Honeymooners", IIRC, & since he was the Boss, the Star, he pretty much ran the whole show. He didn't believe in rehearsing too much, & if he flubbed his lines, or forgot 'em, he patted his tummy, & that was a sign for Art or Audrey to "Wing it" for a minute...

[Dude111]

I love that show!!