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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Q:

-- right, okay --

Stanton:

-- in the day to make the transition. And I think we were off stride in converting at that time, and another factor that influenced that I believe was the heavy cost of going into color. And I believe, as I indicated, Aubrey wasn't very interested in color, and certainly the chairman wasn't interested in color. And I was facing heavy costs because of color. We did not have the offset that NBC had because RCA was perfectly willing to finance NBC's color, because they would benefit from the sale of receivers. So it was a -- we stumbled a little bit at the outset of color. Not that I didn't believe in it and a lot of our people didn't believe in it. But our stride was broken when we had the delay growing out the whole controversy over which system of color was going to be adopted.

But once Schneider came in to his job, I gave him, and so did Paley, all the encouragement that he needed to try to get the schedule converted to color.

The early part of the schedule -- I mean, the early part of color on CBS, as I believe it was true on NBC -- came in the prime time hours in the evening. It spread throughout the entire schedule, and everything was in color -- I don't know by what date. It went from black and white to color pretty rapidly. And any old film that was in black and white was shunned by the audience and the critics spoke of it as “black and white,” which was sort of the kiss of death at that time.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, color wasn't that essential because the play is still the thing and whether it's in color or black and white wasn't all that critical. One little footnote: I played with the idea and we did some experimental work, of doing our news in black and





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