Saroyan on Screen - Saroyan in Omnibus

Variety Shows were a favorite of early television networks. Shows like Cavalcade of Stars and The Original Amateur Hour were popular and tended to focus on skits, songs, and other light entertainments. This format was simple to stage, making it ideal for the early days of television. Many saw these shows as lightweight, pandering to shorter attention spans. This led producers to look for ways to add more high-brow work. One major proponent of that idea was ad man James Webb Young, who hired a producer to make the show happen: Robert Saudek.

Saudek had been the Vice-President of Public Programming at ABC, but had left to take a job as the Director of the Radio-Television Workshop of The Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation, founded in 1936, was the charitable branch created by Henry and Edsel Ford in 1936. After World War II, the Foundation funded many programs in Europe, but increasingly funded more programs for Americans in the Arts as the 1950s dawned. With Saudek on-board as Director, they began funding television and radio initiatives, including National Educational Television, NET, which launched in 1952. Saudek believed that there was high potential for cultural dissemination through the medium of television.

Now, there had been other attempts at bringing traditionally ‘high culture’ to television, even the insanely popular Toast of the Town (The Ed Sullivan Show) featured classical music and opera singers from time-to-time. The idea of a show whose goal was to advance those sorts of presentations as a rule might have been a break-through at the time, but it was also an experiment that a group like the Ford Foundation could afford to undertake. Saudek perfectly encapsulated the idea in a piece that ran in Jack Gaver’s entertainment column: “In this hour and a half we are going to try and present all that is best in all of the various fields of entertainment as well as certain educational and public service features. There will be no rigid format that is followed every week. For example, our features will be of a length required for their best presentation. If a drama needs twenty minutes, that’s what we will give it, instead of trying to cut it to 15 minutes or stretch it to 30. There will even be five-minute items at times.”

Saudek brought together a fascinating team of producers. Fred Rickey was a producer known for his work on television specials for CBS, including the initial meetings of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and Premiere, the first color television program for CBS in 1951. William Spier was a writer and producer who had worked on The Clock on both radio and television. Director Alex Segal had won a Peabody Award for his work on The Celanese Theatre. Mary Ahearn had worked as a script supervisor and worked her way up to producer. A pioneering woman in television production, her role in the project would become vital.

William Saroyan himself had a long history of interactions with Ford Motor Company. He regularly wrote for The Ford Times, the official magazine of Ford. In fact, he had exchanged writing for the magazine for a new car. By 1952, he had ten pre-written plays, each thirty minutes, that he had created for the William Saroyan Theatre project. He had shopped them around and they came to the attention of producers at CBS.

The gathering of personnel was a major undertaking, and the selection of a host was seen as crucial consideration, because the material was going to be of a particularly high-art nature. The choice was Alistair Cooke. Cooke had made his name as a radio presenter, first in the UK, but came to the US in the 1930s. He became well-known in America for his dispatches covering the Abdication of Edward VIII for Americans. He was also well-known as an author and for serving as editor of the long-running magazine Granta. He was a widely-known cultural figure in the US, and thus perfect for the most significant television arts program yet attempted

Omnibus debuted on November 9, 1952. Host Cooke opened the episode with a portion of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado. It was a light-hearted way to start the first episode, and it was followed by The Trial of Anne Boleyn, based on Maxwell Anderson’s play, starring Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer. This was incredibly well-received, with columnist Harry MacArthur saying:

“To Mr. Anderson, Miss Palmer, Mr. Harrison, Mr. Segal and “Omnibus,” a special vote of thanks for demonstrating what can be done with adult drama on television. A most exciting work, this “Trial of Anne Boleyn.” A most exciting woman is this Lilli Palmer, too, for that matter.”

The rest of the 90-minute episode included a look at x-rays, a short film about a Haitian ‘witch doctor’ and an Armistice Day tribute, along with William Saroyan’s The Bad Men.

The Bad Men was the first piece he completed for the William Saroyan Theatre project, although he had it written well before that project came to form. As would become typical of Saroyan’s plays shown on Omnibus, the author himself appeared as narrator and provided an introduction where he talked with a little girl. The story is described by Greensboro Daily News  “Today’s premiere performance marks the first time that a dramatic work has been written specially for television by the distinguished American playwright, William Saroyan. It will be a one-act play called “The Bad Men.”

In typical Saroyan introspective fashion, “The Bad Men” concerns an odd assortment of characters who come and go in a small railroad station in the Southwest. There is wistful contemplation as each of the itinerants gives his own views, by word or deed, on what really constitutes a “bad man.”

The characters move in and out, delivering dialogue and interactions that employ Saroyan’s legendary outlook on the world. None of them are truly ‘bad men’ but all of them are at least somewhat outside what would be considered ‘regular’ society.

The reaction to the Saroyan play was typical of all Saroyan’s works.

Swing magazine said, "The Bad Men," which probably took the individual honors of the afternoon, had Mr. Saroyan's fingerprints all over it. It dealt lovingly on a couple of vaguely intoxicated Indians who were the bad men of the title but actually the good men of life. The theme, I gather, was that all men should love one another, a theme with which Mr. Saroyan has toyed before and finds inexhaustible. It was marked by that childlike grace and manic charm which is Mr. Saroyan's specialty.”

Billboard was slightly less enthusiastic about the program, saying, “The Saroyan piece was Saroyan all over again, full of the cock-eyed. wonderful people that delighted so many readers and playgoers 15 or so years ago.”

The New Yorker’s reviewer Philip Hamburger said that the comedy morphed into forced whimsy, while The New York Times only briefly touched on it while heaping praise on the Anderson historical piece. The Staten Island Advance said it “wasn’t one of the Armenian authors better works.”

The overall reviews for the first episode were exceptionally positive, with the New York Times saying “Bravo!” as the open of their positive review. Every major news group seemed to give acclaim to the first episode, including The New Yorker, Billboard, and The Los Angeles Times. Entertainment columnist Sherley Uhl called on CBS to move it into their regular prime time schedule.

Omnibus was clearly about to make a splash on the kind of programming that television could present, but it also wasn’t a significant mover of ratings. The ratings were steady but did not approach those garnered by more traditional variety programs like The Philco Television Playhouse or the powerhouse that was Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theatre. Ratings, though, may not have been the primary goal. Saudek and the Ford Foundation were far more interested in innovating within the world of content. Opera, ballet, classical music, and even silent films were featured. Of course, educational fare was a regular feature, and Leonard Bernstein would not only present classical music, but explanatory pieces on theory and history of orchestral music. The show certainly did change what television could do and would continue to do so on various networks and at various times through 1961. The format would influence much of what would be presented on NET, and later PBS.

Saroyan’s plays, and the author himself, would appear several times across the entire run. Some were highly regarded, and some not so much. The next two episodes will look at a few of the individual plays Saroyan presented, starting next time with The California Boyhood of William Saroyan and The Best Year in History. So stay tuned.