Video v. Housework

When Author John Steinbeck looks at television, he sees more than meets the eye. Says he: "It will take the place of most of the other arts because it combines all of them." Last January he set up an organization to visualize his vision. With Photographer Robert Capa, former United Artists Radio Director Henry S. White and RKO's Vice President Phil Reisman, he incorporated an outfit called World Video. Their aim: to build and film good shows, sell them to the television networks.

Last week the infant World Video was growing fast. Only one show, Paris Cavalcade of Fashion, which began last May, was on the air. But 60 other husky young ideas are in some stage of production, and Steinbeck & Co. are looking around for more. "We're the only people who are doing shows," he explains. "Everybody else is having lunch and talking about them."

Some examples of World Video's doings: Ilka Chase narrating a "Cook's Tour" of Paris' haute cuisine; the editors of Field &Stream collaborating on a Field & Stream of the Air; a five-year contract with the New York Herald Tribune for a weekly background of the news, a spot newscast backed up by canned shots of locales and personalities; contracts with Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford for their Actors Studio, and with Folksinger Alan Lomax, Mystifier Joseph Dunninger.

Says Steinbeck: "People become literate only by exposure to fairly literate things. We're making no soap operas at all ... When the radio's on, people only-half listen, but when your eyes are centered, your attention is centered ... the quality must be higher. I shudder to think of what we'll do to housework."

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