Birth of a Baby

When NBC's Board Chairman Pat Weaver thought up the idea of Wide, Wide World, he planned to put TV cameras in diving bells, on skis and surfboards, atop mountains and deep in caverns. In a creative frenzy, he cried: "Let's get the Sadler's Wells Ballet to do an outside original in an exciting locale, like on a fleet of barges being towed around Manhattan, with the symphony orchestra on the first barge, and cameras with telescopic lenses spotted ashore to zoom in from the Empire State, the Statue of Liberty, the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge on a particular scene and with a natural finish as it turns into a water ballet, and they all drown! Gad! What a 90 minutes we have here!"

America-Conscious. Wide, Wide World (Sun. 4 p.m., NBC) has never quite managed the splendor imagined by its creator, but its TV cameras have looked into the Grand Canyon, crossed the seas to Bimini and Cuba, and gone over the border to Mexico and Canada. Under the guidance of M.C. Dave Garroway, the show has penetrated Carlsbad Caverns, looked east and west from the Continental Divide, plunged underwater in Florida. Up to 60 TV cameras have been used on a single show. Inaccessible spots were joined to the network by 75,000 miles of circuit cables, and more than 100 temporary transmitter towers have lifted the TV signal over mountain ranges and across deserts.

WWW's executive producer is Barry Wood, an ex-baritone from radio's old Hit Parade who prepared for the job by handling the Kate Smith Show and being appointed NBC's director of special events. He has under him a team of three producers (Herbert Sussan, Bob Bendick, Norman Frank), each of whom has his own staff and is allowed about six weeks preparation for every show. This week they were at work on their twelfth program, encouraged by a contented sponsor (General Motors), a $125,000 weekly budget and the highest audience rating of any daytime show. Boasts Wood: "We have made more people conscious of what's in America than anything else on the air." By its very nature, WWW is in love with big effects. But some of its best moments have been small ones. The New Orleans Mardi gras parade seemed lifeless compared to the efforts of a few deaf children in Baltimore to comprehend the rhythms of music through their fingertips. Sometimes, the nation does not look quite the way the TVmen think it should. For a 30-second shot in Weekiwachee, WWW moved in and planted 26 palm trees to make Florida more readily identifiable as Florida. When the program people wanted to show a ballad-singing miner going about his work, they flew the man 200 miles to a completely different mine because it was more convenient to TV cameras.

The Great Outdoors. But in escaping from the studio to the great outdoors, WWW is in danger of becoming a captive of some of the nation's most rapacious inhabitants: civic pressagents. They help smooth the way for WWW's coverage of such events as the Hutchinson, Kans. pancake race and will even rearrange the date of an annual festival, e.g., the founders' day of Juarez, Mexico, was changed for the first time in nearly 300 years. But in return for their help, a deadening payment is often demanded: the TV camera must stand still while various civic dignitaries tell the viewing audience what lively little communities they represent. Even more dangerous, perhaps, is the tendency to let pressagents pay part of the program's bill.

Wood stoutly insists that he and his producers make the final decision on where the show should go and how long it should keep a segment on the air, but he does concede that it is necessary to put up with a lot of tub-thumping oratory. "After all," he explains, "if you have the governor of a state on the air, you can't very well cut him off."

This week, WWW deals with "The Birth of an American" and hopes to start with a newborn infant if any of the prospective mothers at New York Hospital will cooperate. Then Producer Sussan plans to hopscotch the map, showing what sort of childhood the new citizen might expect if he were raised in the north woods of Oregon, Wisconsin's dairy country, the ranchlands of Texas or on city streets. Sussan, whose childhood was spent in New York City, is stunned by the size and variety of the U.S. Says he: "We've all learned that people live much happier lives in the rest of the country. They work normal hours and play normal hours and have more opportunity to live a full life than we do in the Manhattan and Hollywood rat race." But he is not thinking of quitting. Not yet, anyway.

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