SPACE INTERVIEWS
Frankie Thomas (1/2000)
RR: I have to start with a confession, that it is easy to
fall into erroneous mind-sets even when you know better.
For example, I tend to think of you as flying in from
Hollywood to take the role of Tom Corbett, yet I have a
number of radio shows from 1947-49 where you play roles, and
these are all New York based programs--- for example, the
very first broadcast of
T-Men, January 14, 1947. So you
were right there at the very beginnings of postwar TV, in
the very earliest days of DuMont and CBS and NBC.
FT: Yes, remember I was born in Manhattan! At first, as I
recall, DuMont had studios located on Madison Avenue, and, I
believe, 52nd Street. [515 Madison Avenue.] This was a
very cramped space, tiny radio studios, never designed for
TV, and as their schedule expanded they rented space in the
old John Wanamaker Department Store, downtown but not quite
in Greenwich Village.
RR: Jim Caddigan was the DuMont executive who had to come up
with programming in those days? It seems he had a
completely free hand.
FT: Completely... he was able to experiment with programs
and program concepts very freely, because Dr. DuMont had
really bought the station as a tax writeoff, to compensate
for his profits from TV set manufacture. In fact, one of
the DuMont directors had been a production line worker at
the DuMont factory in New Jersey--- Frank Bunetta--- how he
got tapped to be a TV director, I can't tell you, but that's
how open the organization was. Bunetta was the first
director on the first Jackie Gleason show,
Cavalcade Of Stars. They worked out of a theater just east of 7th
Avenue, maybe the Adelphi. I worked with Bunetta once, I
got this call for "Hands of Murder," and I showed up and
here were four or five fellows, all of whom I knew, there
was a very small group of actors doing TV in those days.
Stage actors were good, but actors with movie experience
were preferred for early TV, because the actor has to always
be conscious of the overhead mike. When you make a fast
cross, you have to wait for that mike to catch up before you
deliver a line. Bunetta, I know, did a
Philco Playhouse,
and I was on that show too. Anyway, Bunetta had these five
or six actors, and he gave them a few pages of the script,
and said the rest was coming in, the producer was working
on it, because the writers were on strike. We changed the
name from "Hands of Destiny" to "Hands of Murder." We asked
Bunetta what parts we were to play and he said he didn't
know, he just hired all the people who could learn a script
fast! We parceled it out between us, and the show went on
and did all right.
RR: You were involved in one of Caddigan's first programs?
FT: Yes, one of his first
trial balloons was A Woman To Remember, the very first five-a-week
series on TV. [2/21/49 to 7/15/49] It was an interesting
concept, it was a soap opera about a soap opera. That is,
the characters were actors who were putting on a radio soap
opera. We used an existing radio studio for the TV show, so
that all the radio equipment in the room was real. I played
one of the two male leads on the show, which ran for 26
weeks. The studio was tiny, with three rows of seats
against a wall, in which people taking studio tours sat to
watch the live performance. The director and producer was
Bob Steele, who had directed a radio soap opera,
Aunt
Jenny, 12
Noon, CBS, 5-a-week, and the writer was John Haggard. They
created
Woman To Remeber and Caddigan bought it.
I better describe this small studio to you. It had the
control room with window, and the usual radio studio
equipment. As I recall we had only two cameras, and
sometimes as many as four sets, three not counting the
studio itself. On top of that there was a railing behind
which were those three rows of seats. I suppose they were
there originally for live audiences for the old radio shows
done in that studio. There were times when I was playing a
tense scene that I could have reached out and touched some
of the studio tourists in these seats! Our producer's
office set, I remember, consisted of a blank wall on which
was mounted a Venetian blind, fronted by a table and two
chairs. The weird thing about it was, when you looked at
the studio monitor, the set didn't look bad! It really came
over pretty good.
RR: This was in the uptown studio. What was the first
"downtown" show, do you remember?
FT: The first show done downtown, I think, was
Famous Jury Trials [October, 1949 to March 1952] This was based on an
earlier radio show, and the format established on the radio
show created frenzy on TV. Here was the reason. The show
opened in a courtroom with someone testifying, and faded out
to a flashback of the events covered in the testimony. But
of course the flashback involved the same actor or actress
seen in the initial courtroom scene, and the problem was
that the different sets were in quite far apart in a large
studio. The actors quickly became breathless running from
set to set. Donald Woods was the narrator and I believe I
did either the first or second show.
RR: This was a very small world in those days, was it not?
Everyone knew everyone else?
FT: Actually, if you were there at the birth of TV you did
know everybody, since there were not that many people
involved. The agencies and networks knew mainly radio
performers, but most of them could not do TV since they
could only work from a script, not memorize lines. About
ten actors did almost all the work, and thank heavens, I was
one of them.
RR: Despite all Caddigan's efforts and creativity, DuMont
had only two shows with much of an audience,
Captain Video and
Rocky King, Inside Detective, with Roscoe Karns. What
do you remember about Jim Caddigan as a person and as creator of TV programming?
FT: He was very good to me, personally. He gave me a lot of
work.
RR: Any favorite stories of those pre-Tom-Corbett days?
FT: In radio, and later in televison, there were three
primary hand signals given by the director to the cast. One
was one finger extended into a circle meaning speed it up,
we're running slow, another was two hands together, fingers
touching, then pulled apart, meaning slow down, stretch it
out. The third, the finger touching the nose, meant right
on schedule. Well, it was a warm day on the set of
Woman To Remember, and I guess the air conditioning was off, it was
pretty hot in the studio. There were just three leads on
the show, a female lead, Pat Wheel, a male lead, John Raby,
and myself. Pat and I had this close scene, and out of the
corner of my eye I saw a frantic speed-up signal, so I
started to pick up the pace, and Pat caught it from me, she
was very dependable and speeded up too. But the signal
continued, so I went faster and faster... the two of us were
racing through the lines, as if we didn't like them. And
finally we come into the theme music, and the director comes
out of the control booth crying, "My God, Frank, what have
you done?!? We're two minutes under!" And I looked, and
there was the audience there... and all these little ladies
were fanning themselves with their hands. And that's what I
had seen out of the corner of one eye! To me it looked
like the circular speed up signal! Ah, well.
As primitive as it was, the show didn't really come over
that badly. John Haggard and Bob Steele really had an
interesting idea. The major labor was spread among the
three leads, with Pat being the dominant character in one
show, John in the next, and me in the next, to divide the
burden. Sometimes Pat or John would be written out of the
script to get a day off, but I was in all five shows every
week. I was sort of the steady man. Caddigan loved the
show, and also he liked my mother, who had appeared with
Judy Holliday and Paul Douglas in the big Broadway hit
Born Yesterday. Eventually he hired mother, Mona Bruns, on the
show to play my aunt!
Another story will illustrate how efficient Bob Steele and
John Haggard were in putting on this daily program. It was a
very snowy, icy day in Manhattan, and we were living in the
London Terrace Towers on 23rd and 9th, and I would walk
every morning to the 8th Avenue Subway entrance and grab
that to get to the studios. With snow and slush all over
the place, when I got to the long, long flight of subway
stairs, I slipped and went all the way down, and I hit on my
right wrist and arm. I knew I was hurt, but the show must
go on, so I continued to the studio. I didn't say anything
but the wrist started to swell and I couldn't really conceal
it, and the pain became quite serious, so I rolled up my
sleeve and admitted it. Caddigan, Bob and John sat down and
reassembled the program, so that I was cut out of it. This
was a major revision! They sent me off in an ambulance to a
doctor and the show went on... and it went all right! They
whipped it all into shape in something like two hours. I had
a Calles fracture in my right wrist, but the next day I was
back in front of the cameras, with an Ace elastic bandage
concealed by my long sleeve shirt. The fracture was OK in
about two or three weeks. That was the only
Woman To Remember show that I missed.
After that I spent a year playing Cliff on
One Man's Family,
and then left that to do
Tom Corbett. Strangely enough,
about that time, Mother came on
One Man's Family. We had a
fine cast. Burt Lytell, Margie Gateson, Lillian Schaff,
Nancy Franklin and Paul Thorson.
RR: Was there much difference in the TV studio facilities of
NBC, CBS, ABC and DuMont?
FT: DuMont was always way behind NBC, CBS and ABC in studio
facilities.
RR: Did you ever appear on a
Captain Video program?
FT: No, although of course many Broadway actors did.
Probably early TV eventually used all the available actors
in New York, other than radio performers, who usually
couldn't memorize scripts. I do remember that Olga Druce,
the producer who fought to increase
Captain Video's budget
and quality, later became a director doing TV soap operas.
And she also hired my mother! A bit later my mother went on
A Brighter Day, where she played Aunt Emily, the female
lead, for many years. And Dad was doing Captain Burke on
Martin Kane, Private Eye. and of course I was doing
Tom Corbett, so the Radio-TV Mirror listed us as the "first
family of television." We were actually running against
each other to some extent. On your web site I don't think
you mention anywhere that Al Hodge had created the role of
The Green Hornet on radio, and played the part until he left
to serve in WWII.
RR: That's an oversight, because I have collected every
audio tape I can find of
Green Hornet broadcasts in which
Hodge plays the Hornet and his alter ego Britt Reid.
Hodge's voice is so distinctive, I love to listen to it in
any role. The voice of Frankie Thomas, by the way, is also
completely distinctive.
FT: Al Hodge and I were on a radio show together once, but
never did any TV together. A standard WXYZ mystery show,
directed by Ernie Ricka, can't remember the title, a
one-a-weeker, was the radio show we were on. It happened
once on that show, on many shows on both radio and TV ...
never when I was there, fortunately ... that a whole cast
would break up. Something struck somebody funny, and the
giggles spread like wildfire.... and that was a dangerous
thing.
I was surprised to read in Charles Polacheck's interview
about how much kidding around there was on
Captain Video.
Don Hastings later went on
Edge Of Night, and was on it for
decades! I directed him once for a show at the Lambs' Club.
He and Al Hodge were real sober citizens, it's hard to
imagine them cutting up much! We didn't have much impulse
to cut up on
Tom Corbett. We had our hands full with that
show. Our problem was always time, we always tended to run
long. The guest performers would tend to slow down their
lines when the red light came on and they realized they were
being seen in 30 million American homes. We'd get to the
second commercial and the producer would say, "Jeepers, we
gotta pick up some time, here, Frank." So I'd speed it up.
I said once, "I'm playing these scenes like I don't like the
dialogue!"
RR: Michael Menkin has
told me about some non-studio-areas being used on
Captain
Video and
Rocky
King and
other shows, to give some space to the scenes. I can recall
one
Captain Video
set that was just a long, dark corridor, obviously the
corridor of the studio building, decorated with some
elaborate fake girders, and this was the interior tunnel of
a giant Space Ark. Do you recall anything like that?
FT: I remember we used a stairwell on
Tom Corbett. We were
uptown at the ABC studios, and we did a scene on one of the
stairwells. Sure, you used anything you had that you could
get the cameras and mikes to, that fit into the script.
RR: There's the famous grudge boxing match between Tom
Corbett and Roger Manning, in about the first month of the
program, still on CBS. The match takes place in a
real-looking gymnasium, on a real-looking boxing ring.
FT: That was the actual studio, which in fact had been a
gymnasium, complete with balcony bleacher seating! Mort
Abrams, our producer at that time, was always fighting to
make our show look good, and he usually succeeded. For the
match they had an authentic light-bag mounted, and the
sequence opened with me hitting the bag. I had been a
boxer in my Marine division. I fought Jan in that one, and
later I had a wrestling match with Frank Sutton--- Eric
Rattison, the great rival of the Polaris unit. He was a
little heavy. That gave me some problems! As for creative
use of locations, I remember one show where there was a
camera pointing out a window on the 10th floor, trained down
to the street, where an announcer was interviewing people
passing by. But the angle of the shot was from 10 stories
up!
RR: What are some of the other TV programs you appeared in
before Tom and the cadets came your way?
FT: Many. There was a woman casting for DuMont in those
days, Elizabeth Meers, and her father produced a play I had
done, called "The First Legion," and maybe for that reason
she gave me a lot of calls, but I worked constantly. I was
on
Martin Kane, Private Eye,
Famous Jury Trials,
Studio One.
I did the only
Studio One play that was ever repeated, with
a wonderful cast, Bob Sterling and Ilona Massey. I was on
Philco Playhouse,
Celanese Playhouse, and a very interesting
program limited to six segments, called
Volume One, a
half-hour show, created by a famous radio director/writer,
Wyllis Cooper. He created
Lights Out and
Suspense. They
finally talked him into doing TV, and he agreed only to do
these six stories. [June 16 to July 21, 1949] For the first
broadcast, we did something called "The Bellhop's Story,"
with only three characters, played by myself, Jack Lescoulie
and Nancy Sheridan. Well, the next morning after the
broadcast at an ungodly hour Bill called me up. I worked a
great deal for him, so we were on friendly terms. I had
worked on
Quiet, Please, which is the show he did after
Lights Out. Anyway, he called and said, "Frank, have you
seen Variety, well of course you haven't seen it, I have an
advance copy, I wanta read this to you, kid, 'Television
Comes of Age, with Wyllis Cooper's
Volume One'." And that
was the review! It was indeed a very interesting script.
Cooper was the only director I knew who could give line
readings that were right. Generally the way directors read
a line was never going to be the way the actor would read
it, anyway, but Bill would give you these readings and you'd
assume he wasn't right and then you'd try it and realize he
was right! When they had his funeral, there weren't too
many of us there. But he was unique! He had been a
veteran, and when they folded up the flag, one guy got all
mixed up, and the flag got folded all wrong. I was sitting
next to Bill's wife and she turned to me and said, "You
know, Bill is upstairs laughing his head off!" And he
probably was.
RR: Did you know Larry Menkin, who was in at the creation of
Captain Video?
FT: No, we never met.
RR: You told me earlier that there was a connection between
Tom Corbett and NBC's live sf series
Tales Of Tomorrow.
What was that connection?
FT: The connection was Mort Abrams, of Rockhill Productions,
who was our first producer. It was Mort who got us the
large standing sets that made
Tom Corbett stand out among
the other 1950 sf adventure shows: the Polaris control deck,
the Academy spaceport with the big mockup of the Polaris
fins and engines, our bunkroom and our classroom at Space
Academy, Commander Arkwright's office, and so on. At some
point there was some dispute, I don't know about what, but
he was always fighting for more money for the production.
He left Rockhill and went to ABC where he was the
producer/director of
Tales Of Tomorrow. It was very well
done, with good sets and good people. My uncle worked that
show, and Corbett too. He was also an actor. Calvin
Thomas. One good broadcast he was involved in there was "A
Little Child Shall Lead Them," with Burt Lytell. My whole
family was in the business, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my
father. While doing Corbett, I was spending a lot more time
with the Corbett cast than with my own family, by the way.
A lot more. We were rehearsing for the radio show or the TV
show pretty much continuously. There was not a lot of spare
time.
RR: Abrams' presence explains why the
Tales Of Tomorrow sets are so impressive, in the few examples I have seen on
video tape. When
Tom Corbett moved to DuMont in 1954, it
seemed to us kids, and to me as an adult watching on video
tape, that the sets really got cramped. On the Polaris
control deck, there hardly seems to be room to move.
FT: I don't remember that. We brought a lot of the sets
along with us. I don't remember any particular budget
problems with the DuMont sponsor, either, that would have
required the sets to be downsized. Maybe we were just in a
smaller studio, and things had to be reduced to fit.
RR: The other thing that's noticable is that there are no
special effects at all on the DuMont run of the show.
FT: Ahh, well, we didn't have George Gould. He was the
guiding genius of our special effects, and he left us with
the end of the ABC run. He was bought away by CBS to do
Rod Brown Of The Rocket Rangers which did not succeed. George
was the man who used the matting amplifier so brilliantly,
to superimpose live action on one set onto live action onto
another, onto miniatures, onto artwork, anything.
Superimposition had been done before but the foreground was
transparent. George created an automatic travelling matte,
a black void, into which the foreground action fit
perfectly, so that there was no transparency. I remember a
shot with us out on the hull of the Polaris, and my God, the
Polaris looked as big as the aircraft carrier Lexington, and
of course it was a tiny wooden model. We were in our space
suits crawling around on a black set... it was very
effective!
RR: To change the subject, you told me also that there was
never the level of horsing around on Tom Corbett that
Charles Polacheck mentioned on
Captain Video.
FT: I think we were constrained by the fact that a major
sponsor, Kelloggs, was spending a lot of money on the show.
We didn't want to do anything on the air that would
jeopardize the quality of what we were doing. Now, on our
radio show, there was a lot more kidding around and pranks
and trying to break people up, because the audience couldn't
see what was happening. But on TV, I think the worst thing
that ever happened was the time Woodrow Parfrey, playing a
space pirate whom Tom had just blasted down, got up from the
floor and walked off the set just as the camera was moving
in for a closeup of him, and that was unintentional, not a
prank.
Kelloggs, by the way, had a history of supporting space
adventure that went back to the 1930s and the radio version
of Buck
Rogers.
Later, Rockhill produced a radio version of the comic strip
MARK TRAIL for them. We didn't want to jeopardize a good
thing! I think the public always deserves the best you can
give them.
