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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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the mechanical part but on the consumer part, things that had to do with the convenience of the car and where the glove compartment was and what the fabrics were and so forth, Kettering had no use for at all. And in a discussion I had with him -- and he was way, way much older than I was, I was just a pipsqueak, dedicated, overly dedicated, I might say, to market research. He was very high on pure research -- and he shouted at me one time, I think, in a discussion or something that market research would never have developed the self-starter for the automobile. In 1912 as a young engineer for General Motors -- it wasn't even called General Motors at that time -- as a young engineer, he came up with the idea that instead of cranking a car to get it started, you had a little motor that you could attach to the car that would turn it over and start the car. In fact, I still remember as a kid, the first car I owned, didn't have a self-starter; you had to crank it. And why I mention that here is, I guess, no research would have turned that up, because I don't think consumers would have been sensitive enough to say, Gee, it would be nice if I had a starter on my engine. You just assumed that you had to get out there and crank the thing and sometimes break your arm. So it is with writing, and writing is the soul, of course, of the performing arts in television and radio. I don't think you can go into a laboratory and decide this is the way you're going to create a -- Now, it's done. And I think it shows, and they don't succeed. I think most of the successful Broadway plays start with an idea that a writer has and not with some consumer research person. I never tested -- there was no way I could, with the program analyzer -- I never tested an idea, because you can't take ten people off the street and say, What do you think of this as an idea? They'll have ten other ideas and the thing falls apart very quickly. Now, you can sit around with writers and say: What would you think of doing - - a particular situation comedy that's well-established -- let's have Lucy do this week, do you think it has any merit as an idea? Because you have to keep coming up with new situations. But that's twenty -- what is it? Twenty-two minutes of entertainment, and that's really what





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