If you are a filmmaker or a documentary producer or anyone else
telling a story based on the events of the last half-century, then you may
find yourself one day in a warehouse elevator in midtown Manhattan, taking in
the unmistakable aroma of Chanel No. 5.
Kansas City Star 1/7/99
CBS newscasts, documentaries and more become a boon for network and its cable
clients
By AARON BARNHART - The Kansas City Star
Date: 01/06/99 22:15
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NEW YORK -- If you are a filmmaker or a documentary producer or anyone else
telling a story based on the events of the last half-century, then you may
find yourself one day in a warehouse elevator in midtown Manhattan, taking in
the unmistakable aroma of Chanel No. 5.
You are inside the International Flavors & Fragrances Building, named for the
billion-dollar chemical concern that mixes ingredients for the world's top
perfume makers here (and every morning perfumes the lifts). On the second and
third floors is stored one of the great treasure troves in all of television:
the CBS News Archives, the largest broadcast news repository in the world.
In this 60,000-square-foot refrigerated space, across the street from the CBS
Broadcast Center on West 57th, you'll find every newscast, every documentary,
every "60 Minutes" ever produced by the network's news division.
In the days following the Kennedy assassination, CBS crews shot 400 reels of
tape; they're all here. So is the network's coverage of the 1968 Democratic
convention, when an angry Walter Cronkite denounced Chicago Mayor Richard
Daley's "thugs" for pummeling reporter Dan Rather on the convention floor. The
fall of Saigon, the Challenger explosion, the bombing of Oklahoma City --
they're also here, stored with more than 2 million videotapes and 66 million
feet of film, including outtakes and other footage that never made it on the
air.
For most of its 45 years of existence, CBS News Archives was known to few
outside the network. But in the 1990s, it opened its doors to anyone wanting
to use its clips (at $1,000 to $2,000 per use). Today, CBS News Archives
handles 2,000 orders a week. Its clips are now used around the world in
documentaries, motion pictures, theme parks and educational materials.
CBS News remains the archive's biggest client, and its programming unit, CBS
News Productions, has become one of the biggest players in cable. Last year it
created 400 hours of programming for the Discovery Channel, A&E, Nick at Nite,
VH1, Travel Channel and TLC. Two cable networks -- The History Channel and Eye
on People -- are practically built on old CBS video. (CBS, which started Eye
on People in 1997, recently sold off the network to Discovery.)
Joe Garner relied heavily on the CBS News Archives in compiling his CD of
memorable breaking-news events, We Interrupt This Broadcast (see box). He
thinks the public's appetite for old TV newscasts reflects, ironically, a
yearning for the days before cable, when Americans had fewer channels but more
shared moments.
"I think 50, 60 years from now this is going to be a very hard concept to
explain to our children, the collective experience we can all remember,"
Garner said. "When Oswald was shot, there were only three networks."
Life in pictures
The archive has a history of its own. It started in 1954 when two TV news
legends, reporter Edward R. Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly, convinced
their bosses that it would be economical if CBS reused news film instead of
discarding it after each program aired.
Some material cried out to be archived -- an interview with Harry S. Truman,
for instance. But CBS saved it all, a decision that proved to be crucial. As
it turned out, the outtakes and the discards would become as valuable to
future generations as material seen by the public. A few examples:
• As the first baby-boom president, Bill Clinton has seen his life practically
retold through old TV news film -- from his handshake with President Kennedy
at a Boys Nation event in 1963 to his two on-camera hugs with Monica Lewinsky
at campaign rallies. When "60 Minutes" produced a segment last year on new
charges of infidelity against the president, it relied heavily on previously
unaired portions of its 1992 interview with then-candidate Clinton.
• Within three minutes of the death of Mother Teresa in 1997, CBS had located
a clip of an earlier appearance she had made in the Bronx with Princess Diana,
who had died one week earlier.
• Hollywood has used old video to research scenes for movies set in earlier
times. Spike Lee, for instance, has used the archive to view raw footage of
the streets of Harlem in the 1950s.
A growing enterprise
Where to put all of that stock posed a problem, especially when videotape
replaced film as the format of choice in the 1970s. Tape was cheaper than film
and more portable, so cameramen began shooting with abandon. As a result, the
archive mushroomed and by the 1980s had outgrown its space, forcing the move
across the street. Today the archive takes in 245 hours per week of raw video,
according to archive director Dan DiPierro.
About the time videotape came along, CBS installed a computer database to keep
track of the millions of cassettes and film reels. Each database entry
contained not only the story being reported but notes about each individual
shot, so that future Bill Clintons (and Monica Lewinskys) could be instantly
located and retrieved from the archive with a simple keyword search.
Last year CBS installed the next generation of archiving, an IBM system that
will allow video clips to be stored on the computer and replayed by the
researcher. This means that as video is put online, it can be moved off-site
to someplace where storage space is a lot cheaper.
DiPierro offered a what-if: "Envision me taking this (archive) to themiddle of
Kansas City. Someone makes a request for a tape. I digitize it in Kansas City
and zap it back to New York. At that point I've preserved it, and I have it in
a digital format."
Digitizing the video also relieves one of DiPierro's longterm headaches: the
relatively short lifespan of videotape (25 years, compared with 75 years for
film).
In the early 1990s, looking for new sources of revenue, CBS realized it was
sitting on a gold mine. The Travel Channel had just approached the network to
buy the rights to Charles Kuralt's old "On the Road" segments.
Cable channels needed to keep costs down -- way down -- yet give people a
compelling reason to watch. CBS needed the money and had miles of high-quality
historical stock. It was a match waiting to happen.
And so far, it has borne fruit for everyone, especially CBS News Productions,
which has produced 60 hours of "Biography" for A&E and hundreds of hours for
The History Channel and Eye on People.
"People who watch archival documentary programming tend to be passionate about
history," said Margery Baker, executive producer of CBS News Productions.
"Those people are not only supportive, they ask us where they can see more of
it. They say, `I remember the stories, and I remember the people who covered
them.' "
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