Press-Enterprise: Rare Johnny Carson footage found

Wed Oct 03, 2012 11:11 am

RIVERSIDE: Rare Johnny Carson footage foundArchivists at the American Forces Network Broadcast Center in Riverside stumble on pre-1972 footage, likely the only film left

BY MARK MUCKENFUSS

STAFF WRITERmmuckenfuss(at)pe.com

Published: 02 October 2012 03:40 PM

Somebody didn’t do their job. And Jeff Sotzing couldn’t be happier.

A kinescope film can, full of early footage of the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, should have been destroyed decades ago. Instead, the film can — containing portions of shows long thought lost — was found recently in the archives of the American Forces Network Broadcast Center in Riverside.

On Monday, Oct. 1, on the 50th anniversary of Carson’s first appearance on the “Tonight Show,” officials at the broadcast center turned the film over to Sotzing, Carson’s nephew and president of Carson Entertainment Group.

“Johnny would appreciate it,” Sotzing said, accepting the film. “He would be thrilled.”

Very little material exists from the “Tonight Show” episodes earlier than 1972. The show was recorded on tape, and because those tapes cost $100 apiece in those days, they were routinely taped over, Sotzing said. It wasn’t until Carson wanted to do a retrospective show in 1972 that he found out there was almost nothing to draw from.

From that point on, Sotzing said, Carson insisted that the tapes of his shows be preserved.

As a portion of the kinescope film fed through a table-top console, Sotzing stood smiling, shaking his head. Black-and-white images of Carson and what appeared to be a young Jimmy Breslin appeared on a small video screen. The audio was scratchy but discernable.

“Look,” he said, “They’re all smoking and drinking. It’s crazy. I know that we don’t have this. I’ve never see this before.”

Mary Carnes, a program support manager, was the person who stumbled on the film in mid-June. She was close to retirement and had been asked to go through some old boxes of archived material to see if there was anything worth keeping.

“My stomach dropped with I saw the title on the can,” Carnes said. “I knew it was something special.”

She took it to the center’s archivist, Pedro Loureiro.

“My eyes popped open,” Loureiro said. “These are the finds that make my work fulfilling.”

But he knew he couldn’t keep it.

The broadcast center is a conduit for television and radio programming that is fed to U.S. military troops and their families around the world. An array of satellite dishes surrounds the facility, which beams a mix of network and Pentagon programming to 1 million viewers in 175 countries.

“This is the biggest broadcast operation in the world,” said Lawrence Sichter, spokesman for the center.

But the military has no rights to the material it broadcasts. With digital transfers today, that’s less of a logistical problem. But in earlier years the center had to deal with video and audio tapes, even vinyl records. Once it was finished with the material, it either had to be returned to the networks it came from, or destroyed.

The broadcast center also houses the operations of the Defense Media Center, which processes material from Combat Camera operations around the world. That material is housed in an archive room that looks like an updated version of the warehouse scene at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Instead of wooden crates, 30-foot-high stacks of metal boxes stretch toward a distant wall in the climate-controlled vault. It was in one of these that the film can was found.

“We think this was an assembly of monologues that was sent to our affiliates for filler material,” Sichter said.

Since the military network deletes commercials from the shows it broadcasts, there would be a gap between the end of one show and the start of the next. Clips, such as those on the reel, were used to fill that space.

“Someone along the line thought this was significant to preserve and put it in the archives,” Sichter said. “And all these years later, we found it.”

Sotzing said the kinescope reel would be transferred into a digital format and made available through his company.

“This is great stuff,” he said, “It should be available. It’s historically significant because it’s a very clear representation of what the show was like in that period. We only need about 1,000 more of these.”

He told Sichter he would reward anyone with other such material with two roundtrip tickets to New York.

“All we have to do,” he said, “is find someone else who didn’t do their job.”Bruce Calvert http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com