You probably saw this around the blogs on Friday, but I didn’t until after I’d done my posts for the day, and I would be incredibly remiss not to post about it given my own background with broadcasting history.
The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which collects cultural materials in a wide variety of disciplines, has recently made available most of its collection of kinescopes and videotapes of “The Mike Wallace Interview”. “The Mike Wallace Interview” was the national network version of Wallace’s first prime-time interview showon local New York TV, “Night Beat” (you can see clips from “NightBeat” on YouTube). It catapulted Wallace into celebrity and established the heavy-hitting no-holds-barred interviewing style that became his trademark and which he carried over a few years later to “60 Minutes”.
The interviews, which are mostly from 1957, feature a number of prominent people of the time — TV personalities like Steve Allen and Dagmar, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, political figures like Orval Faubus and Adlai Stevenson, and many others. Wallace recently donated a number of his own recordings of the program to the collection, along with his own production notes, interview questions and other materials. That the university has opted to share them online is an increidble bonanza for anyone interested in television or TV news or historical figures of the mid-20th century.
And if that’s not necessarily your cup of tea, the Harry Ransom Center is also the home of the David O. Selznick Archive (which is not yet really online, though you can search an online database of the materials), and collections of materials from noted actors such as Gloria Swanson, Robert DeNiro and Steve Martin.
