Dragnet

All you had to do was read your cue cards as fast as you can.

When you watch old episodes of Dragnet and see those actors standing there reading their teleprompters as fast as they can, you feel like maybe YOU could be an actor, too!

The show went from radio to television in the 1950s. Unlike most shows that made this switch, it kept the same cast.

On the radio, actors don't memorize lines. They stand in front of the microphone reading their script. Webb preferred this, so when the show went to television, pretty much all the dialog was on cue cards and teleprompters. Actors rarely had to remember lines.

If you watch the show, at least the color episodes, you can see that all the dialog scenes are shot in a studio. There is an establishing shot with a voice over narration, then the dialog is done in a studio in front of a rear screen projection. It worked pretty well most of the time. Could be done fairly easily now in front of a green screen.

It seems like it would be a good approach. You could get better performances both from stage actors who tend to over do it, and non-actors who usually talk very, very slow.

B movies vs. television

I watched a couple of Edgar Ulmer movies. One was one of his better works, The Man From Planet X, the other was his directoral debut, Damaged Lives made in 1933, an exploitation film about venereal disease in the days before antibiotics.

Neither was very good. I'm a little disappointed after hearing the French gushing over Ulmer.

I still say TV shows are the new B movies. It made sense for the French New Wave to look to B movies of the '30s and '40s, but for independent filmmakers today, it's TV of the '60s and '70s.

I was watching an episode of Charlies Angels. One of the Angels goes undercover in a women's prison. The scene where she's brought into prison for the first time seemed to have been filmed in the waiting room of a dentist's office. A scene in the prison yard was filmed at a public swimming pool----swimming pools have fences with barbed wire, so it looks sort of like a prison. Except for the swimming pool.

The show stunk. But such economy!