Name: Don Hewitt on Later with Bob Costas, July 10, 1990 (Part 2)
Uploaded: 2018-02-25T03:58:21.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Don Hewitt on Later with Bob Costas, July 10, 1990 (Part 2)' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-02-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Don Hewitt on Later with Bob Costas, July 10, 1990 (Part 2)' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-02-25. Transcript available.

Don Hewitt on Later with Bob Costas, July 10, 1990 (Part 2)

That's the news. Douglas Edwards reporting coast to coast, saying good night
and happy weekend, everybody, for American Can Company, known as CanCo. Look
for this famous oval.
Thanks for staying up later. Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60 Minutes,
but before 60 Minutes debuted, in the late 60s, there was a long career and a
long resume before that, including being in on the very beginning of the first
network nightly newscast, right?
Yeah. Douglas Edwards with the news.
Nineteen...
For Oldsmobile.
Forty-eight?
Forty-eight. Yeah, and all I remember about that is that when I first went to
CBS, we were doing the news three nights a week, and somebody said, we ought to
do this every night.
We said, you can't do this every night. That's ridiculous.
Besides, there's only news three nights a week.
That's only three nights a week, and besides, you know, we don't have enough
facilities or people to do this thing five nights.
Good evening, everybody. Coast to coast, Douglas Edwards reporting a slow-motion
view of a fast-action crack-up and death in the Indianapolis 500, a Memorial
Day service in Arlington for two nameless American dead, and a campaign nears a
climax in pivotal California.
Those and other stories in just a moment. Tonight brought to you by American
Can Company, known as CanCo, leading developer and producer of metal, plastic,
and paper containers for over 2,000 different products.
And then eventually we went to five nights a week, and then it went to a half
hour, and eventually Doug got replaced by a fellow named Walter somebody or
other, Cronkite, I think.
Av Weston, who went on to great success at ABC 2020 and other achievements,
said about you, he invented the wheel of television news.
I've read that. I wish it were true. I don't know. First of all, in those early
days at CBS, all the talent was in the dramatic place.
Do you know the associate directors around there, all the young kids were guys
like Sidney Lumet, Johnny Frankenheimer, Bobby Mulligan.
One of the guys around there doing dramatic things in those days was a guy
named Frank Schaffner, who left and went to Hollywood and did Patton, and
Nicholas and Alexandra, and Papillon.
So there wasn't much talent in the news department.
So you could, you know, even if you were a little bit smart, you looked a lot
smarter than you were.
So people thought you invented the wheel, because there was no competition.
But early on, I would guess that in the early days of the technology, the first
thought was, okay, we've got a television newscast.
Essentially, it's just a radio newscast, and you can see the guy reading it,
and then it occurred to you, well, why not use some pictures?
Why not use some crude early graphics and spice this thing up a little bit?
Right, right, yeah. In those days, CBS didn't even have its own cameraman.
We bought a service from an outfit called Telenews.
Boy, it was really horse and buggy. It was all kind of, you were like Smiling
Jack.
You know, you're flying by the seat of your pants, and you're trying to hold
the plane together with chewing gum,
and I always figured that the Doug Edwards newscast was one of those things
that you look like you should go out and wind up the propeller every night to
get the thing off the ground.
As we circle, the Andrea Doria seems to be slowly easing over.
Our Navy skipper says she's going down in a very few minutes.
Now the swimming pools are in the water.
The ship is taking water fast.
It's a 50% list now with the funnels down.
Green foam looking for all the world like lifeblood of a great ship.
It's a terrible sight to see.
And eventually, all the things that you kind of did by the seat of your pants,
they now do electronically.
For instance, electronically you can superimpose names, anything you want to do.
They do too much of that.
They say, television is so full of supers.
You know, Joe Blow, a terror expert.
I used to say to myself, if there were any terror experts, there wouldn't be
any terror.
Supers.
In the old days, before they could do them electronically, we're at the 1952
Democratic Convention.
And the whole trick is, how can you identify people in the audience without
dipping the audio so Cronkite can say it was there?
You want to just put their name on it.
But it takes so long to set it up and photo stat type, and you can't do it
electronically.
Nobody had thought of it then.
And I'm figuring out, there's got to be a way to solve this problem.
And I'm having breakfast in a diner.
And the waitress says to me, what do you have?
At that moment, my eyes go up, and I see this board.
And it says, hamburgers, 35 cents.
Soup, 75 cents.
Pot roast.
And I said, how much do you want for that board?
She said, what do you mean?
I said, I can use that board.
I bought the board in the diner, because they had little white letters that you
put in black to spell out.
And I figured, if you can spell out pot roast, you can also spell out Tom Dewey.
You know, Everett Dirksen.
That was the first supers.
I brought the board back from the diner.
That's why people say I invented the wheel.
I didn't, I invented the sandwich board.
You had a knack for that kind of stuff.
For example, when the Russians launched Sputnik, how did you illustrate that
for the viewers?
This is like 1957 or something.
Yeah, I needed something to show the Sputnik going around the earth.
And I went down.
There was an outfit called De Vega.
They were an old sporting goods store that, out of business for years.
But they happened to be downstairs from where the studio was.
And I went down there, and I got a cotton golf ball.
You know, the kind you practice with in the living room?
Sure.
And I stuck it on the end of a spike, and I put it on a thing that worked.
And the cotton golf ball became the Sputnik going around the earth to explain
to people why it was going over certain parts of the earth while the earth was
turning.
I don't know.
You just took, like, a regular globe from a kid's classroom?
I took a globe from a kid's classroom.
And by doing some kind of television magic, I don't know what it was, but the
first Sputnik that America saw was a cotton golf ball.
There was another idea you had that didn't work out so well.
In fact, people laughed at you.
Braille.
Is that what you mean?
Yeah.
But that's not dumb.
That's a great idea.
There were no teleprompters.
No teleprompters.
Okay.
They hadn't been invented yet.
Yeah, and nobody thought about writing out cue cards.
That was a big deal.
I mean, who's got the time to write out cue cards?
So if you looked at those old things, a guy would be reading the news like this.
In Istanbul today.
Exactly.
And the head is going up and down.
So I said to Doug Edwards once, you know, if you learn Braille, and we type
your script in Braille, and we clip the shot here so we can't see your hand,
you can sit here and run your hand over the script and deliver the whole thing.
And everyone, ah, this guy's crazy.
That's not a bad idea.
But now they got, now you can look right into the camera and read your teleprompters.
See, but now an appreciation for chutzpah had to be something you brought to
any occasion because, especially in the early days.
I did things in the early days, Bob, that if a guy who worked for me today did
those, I'd fire him.
Like what?
Once a plane went down the East River, and it was a tugboat strike, so there
was only one boat out on the river.
And we all went down to where they were.
The boat had just come in doing rescue work on the river.
And it's one of these, and the captain is in his glory.
He's in a wheelhouse, and there is, you know, Gabe Pressman and all the local
guys, and he's telling this story.
And the oil is burning, and we're picking our bodies up out of the thing, and
he's in his glory.
He's really telling a story.
And all these guys, you know, oh, yes, Captain, right around.
And I'm looking around, I think.
And I stop and I say, hey, who owns this boat?
All these guys say, cut.
Hewitt, that's the stupid, who cares who owns the boat?
The man's telling the story of the rescue.
The guy's the New Haven Tugboat Company.
They say, okay, Captain, will you continue?
And Hewitt, will you shut up with your dumb questions?
So they won't continue again.
I sneak out, I go down on the dock, and I go to the phone, and I call this desk
at CBS News.
They say, call New Haven Tugboat Company, charter their boat, the only boat
they got out here on the river.
Okay.
Now I come back in, and as I come back, and all the guys go, I say, don't ask
any more dumb questions.
He's telling us a great story.
All of a sudden, the phone rings in the wheelhouse, and the guy says, hold on.
He said, okay, which one of you guys is Hewitt, CBS?
I said, it's me, sir.
He said, okay, the boat's under charter to you now.
What do you want to do?
I said, the first thing I'm going to do is throw all these guys off.
This is my boat.
They couldn't believe it.
Threw all the guys off.
Now we sail out to where the wreckage is.
It's getting to dawn.
Out comes, the only thing NBC could find was a rowboat with an outboard motor
on the back.
And they come out, and they got the dish, pointed at the Empire State Building
to get a signal out of there for the Today Show.
I say to the skipper, listen, if you maneuver the boat,
and you get between them and the Empire State Building, they can't get a signal
past you, right?
They're too low on the water.
I said, terrific, we'll do it.
The captain is now into the whole network rivalry.
He maneuvers the boat, and in maneuvering the boat, he rammed the NBC.
We didn't sink them, but we almost did, by accident.
Now I get back to CBS, and the first thing I get called in by the guy who was
then president of CBS News, Mickelson,
and he says to me, what in the hell did you do?
I said, what do you mean?
He said, Bill Paley got a call from David Sarnoff that you try to sink his boat
in the East River.
And the only thing I could think to say was, cry babies.
Great rejoinders in history, ladies and gentlemen.
Back after this.
Hello, San Francisco.
This is Ed Murrow in New York.
Just stand by.
We'll be with you in all but 90 seconds from now.
CBS Television, in cooperation with its affiliated television stations,
presents the distinguished reporter and news analyst, Edwin R. Murrow,
in See It Now, a document for television based on the week's news.
How great a man was Edwin R. Murrow?
He was a giant.
But Ed Murrow, this is a typical television story.
Ed Murrow had the very good fortune to be a very, very talented man
who happened to look like Walter Pidgeon, the actor, playing Ed Murrow.
How about the time when you were in the control room
and Edward R. Murrow showed America either coast simultaneously?
Well, I'm always amused by that because people are always talking about
in the days of Murrow, there was substance and they didn't go for gimmicks
and there's too many gimmicks today on television
and nobody is interested in substance.
But every time they drag out Murrow, they do the gimmick of the two oceans.
It's kind of funny.
We are, as newcomers to this medium, rather impressed by the whole thing.
Impressed, for example, that I can turn to Don Jewett here and say,
Don, will you push a button and bring in the Atlantic coast?
It was big gee whiz in those days.
It ain't much today when you had guys on the moon.
It doesn't mean much.
But it meant a lot then.
Now, San Francisco, could you use what you call, I think,
a zoomar lens and close in on the bridge a little?
Roger.
Roger.
Oh, that's fine.
Thank you, San Francisco.
Just stand by for a moment, will you?
Hello, New York.
Yes.
May we have the Brooklyn Bridge, please?
Coming right up, Mr. Murrow.
There she is.
Brooklyn Bridge.
Let me tell you a great Murrow story.
Murrow is in Israel, riding to an airstrip with Moshe Dayan, General Dayan.
And Diane talks about the McCarthy thing, and he says,
Murrow, that is one of the great services to the free world, what you did with
Joe McCarthy.
And Murrow