Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
ROBERT HERRIDGE: TV’S FORGOTTEN AUTEUR
January 8 – January 12
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES, THE PALEY CENTER FOR MEDIA, AND THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS PRESENT:
ROBERT HERRIDGE: TV’S FORGOTTEN AUTEUR
Robert Herridge was a television revolutionary. In the 1950s and 60s, Herridge created scores of groundbreaking productions for the CBS and NBC networks, ranging from innovative and provocative dramatic adaptations of Dostoyevsky and Hemingway to premiere dance collaborations with George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille to the most important jazz programs in the history of TV, featuring Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington. As his colleague Nat Hentoff says, “Herridge created the single most original body of work in television history. Talking about television without talking about Robert Herridge is like producing a celebration of jazz and leaving out Charlie Parker.” And yet, for more than fifty years, the work of this brilliant producer-writer-director has been almost completely overlooked by cultural critics and historians.
Anthology Film Archives, the Paley Center for Media, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts are now collaborating on the first-ever Robert Herridge screening series: introducing Herridge’s extraordinary experiments in television – most of which have not been seen by the public for over half-a-century – to an audience that has much to discover and enjoy in the art of “Television’s Forgotten Auteur.” Through these select screenings from his most productive period (1953-64), Herridge proves how he adhered with a fervent devotion to his self-proclaimed credo that “The TV medium has a function and ability different from any other artistic form. The important thing is for television to find its own style, one that neither stems from Hollywood film nor the Broadway stage.”
Though Herridge rarely served as the director on his programs, he was clearly the primary creative force behind them: choosing the stories, working on the scripts, defining the stylistic approach, casting the actors, and, to a large extent, “directing the directors.” Indeed, he helped create a distinct method of television production in which the producer-writer would take precedence over the director – a tradition that would evolve in the work of later “television auteurs” such as Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Norman Lear, David Chase, and the like (though this dynamic would, of course, shift depending on the director – especially when rising talents such as Sidney Lumet were at the helm).
The New York Times described how “the Herridge style – a darkened stage illuminated by a single white light, an actor with script in hand, and a ladder and stool for props – became a television staple for programs aspiring to serious consideration.” And Herridge concluded, “What I wanted was a program where there was no area of human experience we couldn’t get into. An open-ended kind of show – an open sesame.”
This series has been curated by John Sorensen, who also contributed the introduction and descriptions for each program.
The retrospective is presented in collaboration with the Paley Center for Media and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The Paley Center will be screening several additional, music-themed Herridge programs from January 17-18 and 24-25; for more details, visit www.paleycenter.org. On February 5 at 6pm, two dance-themed programs will be screened in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center; for more details, visit www.nypl.org/locations/lpa.
Very special thanks to John Sorensen; Ron Simon & Maria Pagano (Paley Center); and David Callahan (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts); as well as to Terry Benson, Robert Carrington, Stephan Chodorov (Creative Arts Television Archive), Gemze de Lappe, Zan Dubin Scott, Nat Hentoff, Peter Herridge, Michal Herridge-Rusk, Stephen Herridge, Alexander Kogan Jr. (Films Around the World), Dona Marans, Maria Montas (CBS News Archives), Peter Murray (CBS Broadcasting Inc.), and Chiz Schultz.
ALL THE KING’S MEN, THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, and THREE PLAYS BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS are shown with the permission of Films Around the World, Inc., New York City.
