Switch Man

Man on a White Horse rode into view last week on NBC's Kaiser Aluminum Hour (alternating Tues. 9:30 p.m.. E.D.T.) looking like that familiar figure, the good guy. Strong, silent, and loaded with six-shooters, the good guy (Barton MacLane) had come to ventilate a villain and thereby enable the town's good citizens to live happily ever after. The setting, story and characters were familiar but Man on a White Horse took a surprise turn. The good guy, though he wore a sheriff's badge, and shot bad men in the name of the law, proved to be a killer who believed only in the self-righteous rule of the gun. The townspeople who had asked for a savior had got a dictator, an affliction no less oppressive than the one they had been rescued from.

The Unexpected. Such plays, which trap a viewer with the unexpected, are a specialty of cherubic, gravel-voiced Worthington ("Tony") Miner, 55, executive producer of the Kaiser Aluminum Hour and one of the most knowledgeable hands with a dramatic show in the television business. "An audience tunes in because we have led them to expect something," says Miner. "Then we hit them and they say, 'This is different,' and they like it that way too." In a dramatic series, Miner's technique is to do a row of more or less commercial plays, until the audience thinks it knows what to expect. Then he throws in Turgenev's Smoke, the Jewish folk drama The Dybbuk, or Julius Caesar in modern dress. "The result," says Miner, "is that the so-called surefire comedies like June Moon and Boy Meets Girl drop dead. But The Dybbuk, Turgenev and Shakespeare turn out to be the most popular shows of the series."

Yaleman Tony Miner has provided viewers with TV plays about adultery and Lesbianism, introduced them to such new faces as those of Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint and John Forsythe, developed such programs as the prizewinning Medic. He was a producer-director-writer in the legitimate theater until CBS signed him up for TV in 1939 and gave him a clear-cut assignment: to develop the technique of TV direction and find out how to produce a good TV play. He produced Studio One, TV's first good hour-long dramatic show, and pioneered a variety of directorial techniques that now are standard, e.g., achieving variety by sliding from closeups of a face to long shots of a room and back again without a break.

Three for Pattern. For the Kaiser Alumimum Hour Miner has gathered round him three of TV's best directors: Franklin Schaffner (The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial), George Roy Hill (A Night to Remember), Fielder Cook (Patterns). To keep things lively and viewers expectant in the Miner manner, he plans to alternate psychological thrillers and musicals with such high-level plays as Jean Anouilh's Antigone. But his biggest problem is how to beat the opposition, which happens to be, on the show's second half-hour, The $64,000 Question. Says Miner hopefully: "There is an audience that's plenty big and won't go for quiz shows. They'll stick with you if you just manage to surprise them the way they like it. That's what we aim to do."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.