And Now, A Word from the Sponsor

One of the Most Terrifying sequences in 1984, George Orwell's prophetic novel about Big Brother and the dictatorship of the future, concerns the governmental department that rewrites history. Whenever facts or the truth conflict with the official opinion or line of the State or the Ruler, those facts are changed, the truth is destroyed, lies are substituted, history is rewritten.

To a great many of the people working in television — writers, producers and directors — Big Brother isn't a fictional bogeyman. He exists. He's here. He manufactures breakfast foods, deodorants, automobiles or soaps.

He's a sponsor.

In a quiet, unspectacular way, this particular Big Brother has taken over the picture tube of the TV set in your living room. He has more power over what you see or don't see than any censor in history. He has, whenever he wants to use it, enough power to control, for his own special interest, what comes into the 44 million homes in America with TV sets. That's enough power for even a Kubla Khan.

On Playhouse 90 not long ago, the sound portion of the program was blotted out when the words "gas chamber" were spoken in a drama called Judgment at Niirnberg. The sickening, historical facts of Belsen, Dachau and Buchen-wald were secondary when balanced against the fact that Playhouse 90, that week, was sponsored in part by a gas company. History was rewritten and rearranged because, presumably, the sponsor didn't want the public to be re-minded that this great servant of the people, gas, could be used to exterminate them.

The opening shot of the New York skyline in a recent TV spectacular may have looked a little strange to a native New Yorker. Something was missing. The something was the Chrysler Building. The program was sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. The Chrysler Building was simply blotted out and removed from the skyline.

Viewed in one light, these two examples are amusing anecdotes to trade across a dinner table. Looked at from another point of view, they are only two examples of the kind of censorship, control and stranglehold that sponsors, aided and abetted — or passively tolerated — by their advertising agencies, exercise on the greatest mass medium in history.

As one TV producer explained it to me, "It's the nature of the beast. It's the only art form I know where art and commerce climb so quickly and shamelessly into the same bed. And you know who winds up getting seduced." He didn't say "seduced" either.

To underline his point, he threw a letter across the desk at me. The letter was from the sponsor of the dramatic show he was currently producing. There had been an argument about the climax of the show and the sponsor had demanded drastic changes because the writer's ending conflicted with the sponsor's point of view and might possibly offend some viewers. The letter is worth quoting because it has some historical pertinence. It sums up the position of the man who pays the bill and, by default, has taken over the right to dictate content.

"We are aiming at a corporate image," the letter said. "We want to create the friendliest image possible. We want to avoid controversy. We do not want to give offense or build up, in the mind of the viewer, an unfriendly attitude toward our product. In other words, I don't give a good goddam what the ending I want does to your show dramatically. Your ending is controversial. That makes it wrong. If it offends just one slob, somewhere, with a half a buck in his pocket for my product, it's wrong and it goes out. End of argument."

Admittedly, some of the instances of client interference border on the hilarious and sound like something out of Alice in Wonderland. How about the poor ball player who had the misfortune to be nicknamed "Lucky"? He'd earned the name while in the bush leagues when the bus he was riding collided with a railroad train and left him as the only survivor. The nickname didn't survive one ball game in the majors. It seems his team's broadcasts were sponsored by Chesterfield. "Lucky" summarily had his nickname changed by the sponsor to "Larky."

Or take the case of the TV director who had the misfortune to invent a piece of business for his hero in a drama sponsored by a cigarette company. To show his nonchalance, he had his hero tap the end of his cigarette on his cigarette case before lighting it. The sponsor hit the roof. This might suggest to the (continued on page 98)From the Sponsor(continued from page 95) audience that his cigarettes weren't well packed.

Richard A. R. Pinkham, senior vice-president of the Ted Bates ad agency, testifying before the Federal Communications Commission, noted that a manufacturer of non-filter cigarettes wanted the villains in a drama he sponsored to smoke only filter cigarettes.

Reginald Rose, one of TV's top writers, wrote a powerfully moving story for the Alcoa Theatre called Tragedy in a Temporary Town. One scene detailed an attempted rape in a trailer camp. When publicity about the show was released, the sponsor was besieged with mail, but not about the rape scene. (One critic contends that in any given week on TV there is more blood and violence than could be found in any similar week on World War II's battlefields.) The complaints were from trailer manufacturers. Alcoa makes aluminum and sells quite a lot of it to trailer manufacturers. Mr. Rose changed the locale of his attempted rape to a construction camp. You see, Alcoa does not make lumber and we can assume construction camps have no effective lobby.

Another TV writer, Dale Wasserman, made an adaptation for the Kraft Theatre of Bret Harte's classic, The Luck of Roaring Camp. In one scene, a group of miners got together and agreed that they would share equally in any ore that came out of the mine they were working. The sponsor read the script. "Communism!" he cried. It was changed, and another classic bit the dust.

Mr. Wasserman, who told me, "You cannot write for television without the constant awareness of someone looking over your shoulder," has had more than his share of troubles with advertising agencies and sponsors. One of his shows, The Fog, has become TV's equivalent of the Dreyfus Case. The Fog, according to Mr. Wasserman, who should know, was originally conceived as an allegorical drama about man's destructive tendencies toward himself. It chronicled one evening in the life of a town upon which a mysterious and deadly fog descended. In that original draft, it was apparent that the source of the fog was the chimney of a manufacturing plant, which released poisonous waste products on the community in the form of a gas. Mr. Wasserman's script was bought immediately by Studio One for $7500, a rather large fee for an hour show. Westinghouse, the sponsor, turned thumbs down on the script. Playhouse 90 rejected it and it was finally sold to Climax, which was sponsored by Chrysler. Wasserman was called to the West Coast, where Climax originated and, by direct dictation of the sponsor and the agency,he rewrote over 40 pages of the script. In his opinion, the changes were so drastic and so unrealistic that the purpose, power and effectiveness of the script was being destroyed. When they asked him to change the source of the fog, he walked out. His walkout had no effect on the production at all. Chrysler owned the script. They could make any changes they wanted to, with or without Wasserman's help and approval. He insisted that his name be removed from the credits and lodged a protest with the Writer's Guild. The version that went on the air bore very little resemblance to the original script Dale Wasserman had written. The source of the fog, in the final, telecast version, was a swamp, and the hero was a nice young scientist employed by a nice large corporation who tracked down the brand-new and nice safe villain: Mother Nature.

Wasserman's trouble with Climax was not unique. In talking to other TV writers, directors and producers who worked the show, I heard hundreds of examples of interference and pressure. John Frankenheimer, one of the industry's most creative directors, has a whole batch of scars on his back labeled Climax. "It got to the point," he told me, "where the producers weren't producing it any more. The agency and the sponsor were. They were dictating what types of scripts had to be on the show, they had cast approval, script approval and if they didn't want to offend anybody — as they kept saying — that didn't include the creative people involved in the show. They offended hell out of us."

Even a show with the quality and week-in-week-out excellence of Playhouse 90 is not without its taboos, as evidenced by the Judgment at Niirnberg incident. Another of its sponsors is Allstate Insurance, and suicides can never happen on a Playhouse 90 show when they are sponsoring the show. One rather wry joke among some Playhouse 90 writers goes like this: "It would be unfortunate if anyone wrote about a guy who committed suicide by putting his head in a gas oven. Then he'd have both sponsors on his neck."

If some of the changes and deletions seem ridiculous and petty, the basic reason behind them isn't. This is an industry that may have the all-time patent on timidity and fear. It wasn't too long ago that five anonymous phone calls were enough to blacklist a performer and make him unemployable. A supermarket owner in upstate New York was able to set himself up as a one-man vigilante committee by threatening sponsors with that most dire of punishments, removing their products from the shelves of his stores, unless they fired the people he wanted fired or stayed away from themes he considered taboo. Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the sponsors want to be liked, well liked. They don't want to offend anybody and it is one of the odd axioms of this world that if you start out not to offend anybody you frequently wind up not pleasing anybody either.

At the moment, as any aware American will admit, one of our most pressing domestic issues is the integration fight. You would never know it from watching your television screen. Any drama that in any way touched on integration would, almost inevitably, offend some segment of the Southern market. Reginald Rose told me that it would be absolutely hopeless to try getting a drama about integration on a sponsored program in America today. Most of the writers and producers have faced up to the inevitable and stopped submitting scripts about the problem.

Rod Serling, who has won more Emmys and more fame than any other TV writer, thought he had enough national reputation and prestige and was enough in demand to make a try at exploring one facet of this vital problem. He wrote a play called Noon on Doomsday, which dealt with the Emmett Till case. This, you will remember, was the case involving a young Negro boy from Chicago who went to visit relatives in the South, whistled at a white woman, and was murdered for it. It seemed to Serling that this was a valid story, a valid experience to be appraised and dramatized. The script, as Serling wrote it, never got on the air. The locale was changed to New England. The sponsor issued a release to Southern newspapers disavowing any connection with a Southern locale. No Negroes appeared in the play and to avoid offending anybody, anywhere, a scene in which a character was to drink Coca-Cola was cut because, according to the sponsor, Coca-Cola might be regarded as a "Southern drink."

An example of how far the sponsor will go to placate even one irate listener or viewer was told to me by one of the top brass at the Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn Agency. "We had a show a couple of years ago that got the damndest letter from a viewer in the South," he said. "He wrote directly to the client so we didn't have a chance to smooth things over. It seems that this viewer claimed that in this show we showed a Negro man kissing a white woman. He vowed that as long as he lived he would never buy our sponsor's product. You have no idea how one little guy, somewhere, hating your product can burn into the gut of a client. Anyway, we investigated. You know (continued on page 111) From the Sponsor (continued from page 98) what happened? The kinescope print that had run on this Southern station was defective and the hero looked a little dark. You know what the client made us do? He sent one of our account executives down South to see this one man. The account executive took along a projector and a new kinescope print of the show and held a private screening for him. That slob was so grateful that he promised to use the product twice a day and four times on Sunday." He quickly added, "I'm just trying to show you the sense of responsibility our client had toward his audience."

That, I suppose, is one explanation of the situation.

In June and July of 1959, the Federal Communications Commission set up a hearing in New York City to investigate, among other things, the control of the advertisers over TV. As agency executive followed agency executive into the witness chair, a clear, sharp picture began to emerge. Jack Gould, TV critic of The New York Times, summed up the hearings this way: "What was made abundantly clear and evident was that advertising agencies, which never solicit billings on the screen, in practice may be virtually the actual producers. The Theatre Guild, David Susskind and Desi Arnaz may take the public bows but they don't make an important move without an approving nod from the agency men. If the taboos, apprehensions and anxieties of sponsors and agency men may have application in the market place, it does not follow that such a set of mores should govern one of the country's major platforms for human expression."

During the same testimony in that FCC hearing room, the reasons for the situation were spelled out. Dan Seymour, a reformed quizmaster and m.c. who is now vice-president of J. Walter Thompson, testified that on dramatic show after dramatic show the advertising agencies delete material deemed contrary to a sponsor's interest. Any political mention is prohibited in drama supervised by his agency.

C. Terence Clyne, senior vice-president of McCann-Erickson, said as a matter of policy a sponsor is not in the business of displeasing the viewer and wants to leave him with a pleasant and favorable impression. Robert L. Foreman, executive vice-president of BBD&O added that even a small segment of audience mail can make a sponsor "apprehensive." He recalled seeing the head of a large corporation reading every letter received concerning the program he sponsored.

Richard A. R. Pinkham chimed in with a mild justification for a sponsor's fondness for tried and true material, for the TV cycles that currently include Westerns, private eye whodunnits and drama on the mass magazine level. Said Mr. Pinkham, "There isn't a company that wouldn't love to sponsor Hamlet, the Sadler's Wells Ballet or the Chicago Symphony, if it was consistent with good business practice. Such choices are not possible for package goods products like soap, cigarettes and drugs which must have a mass circulation advertising." Mr. Pinkham, striking a blow for his clients, took a sideswipe at his old alma mater, the networks. "It is up to the networks to see that continuing vitality is injected into television. I don't think an advertiser or his agency can have this uppermost in his mind. We are businessmen, buying for business reasons."

Mr.Pinkham's statement puts the finger on one of the vital reasons for the purechase, season after season , of the safe, pallid pap that will appeal to a mass market. Last year more than one billion, three hundred and 15 million dollars was invested in television advertising. That means, actually, that one out of every 10 advertising dollars went into TV. In their own defense, sponsors say that they are not patrons of the arts. They are, simply and logically, businessmen trying to sell their products. And in huckstering that product, the sponsor and his agency have their own bible. It is something called "The Cost Per Thousand Index." In simple terms, it means how much the advertising actually costs to reach one thousand members of the audience. The real guidepost is not: does it sell products? That is hard to determine. The cost per thousand is not. A rating, presumably, tells you how many people saw your program. You prorate the cost and find out the magic number, the cost per thousand. Obviously, the greater the audience, the lower the cost per thousand, and, theoretically, the more effective the advertising. To borrow an old campaign slogan, the lower the cost per thousand, "the bigger the bang for the buck."

Bill Ewald, former radio and TV critic for the United Press and currently holding down the critic's chair at Newsweek, talks about the "ten million second-class citizens in the viewing audience." "Take, let's say, Sid Caesar," he told me, illustrating his point. "After one of his programs, a rating is taken and it is ascertained that ten million people watched him. That's a whale of an audience, ten million people watching a show and hearing a commercial message. It is not so impressive if a Western on another network opposite it has an audience of twenty-five million. Eventually, the program that has pleased and attracted ten million people disappears. The ten million that watched it may have, in gratitude, rushed right out and bought the product; the twenty-five million may have been too busy switching the dial to another Western to bother. Nobody can find that out. Ten million viewers brings the cost per thousand up higher than twenty-five million viewers do. So the show goes off the air. This, understandable though it may be, gives a sponsor control of what the audience gets in the way of programs." Mr. Ewald has very little sympathy for the argument that sponsors give the public what it wants.

"If you feed somebody garbage over a period of time," he says, "he eventually works up a tolerance for garbage, particularly if you ketchup it up with big names, but it is still garbage. It's like saying, 'My son likes opium and I'm a good parent because I give him only the best opium.' "

John Crosby, the York Herald Tribune's syndicated TV critic, is even more vehement about what has been happening to television. Faced with the argument that sponsors have a perfect right to give the public what it seems to want, he counters with the argument that there must be a sense of responsibility involved.

"In every newspaper survey on readership, the comic strips come out way ahead of any other feature for popularity," he said. "If we ran a newspaper the way these people run broadcasting, we'd have nothing but comic strips. What's happening to television is the worst national scandal since Teapot Dome. Nobody accepts the sense of responsibility. Nobody leads the way. The idea is to make money and the public comes absolutely last."

Popularity, the sponsor's greatest aim, is determined for the most part by rating systems. Even the experts in the field differ on the value of one system over another. An agency will usually believe the one that shows the best results for his clients.

John Crosby remembers the case of one comedian who had a meteoric rise and fall. At one point in his career, he was number one on one survey, the top-rated performer in the country. He wasn't in the top 40 in any of the others!

Guess which survey that comedian and his sponsor believed?

The newest rating system along Madison Avenue, one that most of the top advertising executives think is a major step forward, is "a qualitative measuring rod rather than a quantitative one." Dehucksterizing that phrase, it works like this: In addition to asking their small sampling whether they watched the program in question, they ask if they liked it and if they liked it more or less than usual.

Major step forward!

Another interesting example of sponsor and network shenanigans is a program that was kept off the air for two years, Project 20's production called Back in the Thirties. Project 20 is a separate production unit within the corporate framework of NBC. It produced such excellent documentaries as Victory at Sea and The Jazz Age. Back in the Thirties was a portrait of one of the most important, vital eras in American history, a period of Depression, war scares and fear.

Because of Project 20's track record, it is safe to assume that it was a good job. It was shown, to critical acclaim, in England, the Scandinavian countries, France and Germany. It won a prize at the Edinburgh Festival, but it was not shown in the U.S.

Why? No sponsor would touch it.

Trade observers contend that sponsors pulled back because a good portion of the original 90-minute program was concerned with the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his leadership during the Depression years. That was not, in the words of one observer, an image that major advertisers wanted to be associated with. Nobody with even the most cursory knowledge of Project 20 and its staff would suspect that there was any distortion or glamorization of F.D.R. They were dealing with history; and covering the Thirties without devoting considerable footage to F.D.R. would be like covering a coronation without showing the king. In a remarkable show of disinterest in their public service obligations, they put Thirties back on the shelf where it gathered dust for two years. Then, in October of this year, it was debuted in this country, in prime evening time — but unsponsored. However, it was not quite the same show. It was called Life in the Thirties. It had been cut to 60 minutes. It gave equal time to Alfred A. Landon, whom some of you may remember as a heroic figure of the Thirties famous for having grown sunflowers in Kansas.

The emphasis had been shifted from the Roosevelt administration and become, in the words of NBC, a more "warm and humanistic view." With the de-emphasis of F.D.R. and a quiet rewrite of history, it became at least acceptable and pure, if not quite marketable.

If television has become, in the words of Bill Ewald, "a sort of visual marijuana," there is more than enough blame to go around.

Some of it belongs to networks that refuse to lead, refuse to face up to their responsibility to present programing for that small minority, the intelligent, discriminating viewer; networks which dump their public service programs into the Sunday-afternoon ghetto and networks which refuse to take the kind of hands-off stand on editorial material that reputable newspaper and magazine publishers insist on with their advertisers.

Some of the blame belongs to the public for sitting still and taking the ketchuped garbage that is fed to them. If sponsors are so sensitive to mail, and we have it on the word of one of the High Priests of the advertising world that they are, it would seem sensible to deluge them with letters when the iron fist is seen slipping out of the velvet glove.

It seems to many of us that the major share of the blame belongs to the nut-and-bolt, detergent, cigarette, soap, automobile or soup manufacturer who feels because he is paying the check he has also inherited the mantle of David Belasco and Joseph Goebbels. If any government official or agency exercised the control, practiced the distortion or censored our major mass medium the way sponsors do there would be screams of "Throw the Rascals Out!" And out they would go.

The sad, realistic truth is that all of us on the audience side of the picture tube are being short-changed and cheated by the Big Brother who is picking up the tab.