You Can Teleprompter, But You Can’t Tell It Much

We had a busy day in the studio yesterday, with the usual mishaps- a light burning out right before we start rolling tape, and the teleprompter having a cable issue (no, not a problem with its cable bill…) This taping marked the return of a former crew member, Bill, who had worked with us for a few years, then moved on to some duties for which he was needed. If you saw our “Ghost Breakers” show mail segment, you might have seen us say good bye to our co-worker and member of the Sven studio crew Jessica, who has decided on a change in career (and this is NOT a result of having been forced to work with me!) Jessica had been brought in to assist us when Bill was re-assigned- but now, with her gone, we are fortunate that the workloads here have shifted enough to allow Bill to return to our studio crew. Bill has worked on a variety of shows here, over many years, and always has some great stories to tell us. While we were dealing with the teleprompter problem, we got around to the subject of cue cards- the predecessor to the prompter in TV work. Cue cards have basically been long thin cards with the script hand-written on them- you might notice guys like Dave Letterman still use them for their monologues, etc. Bill made us laugh recounting how, back when our channel 26 had a lot of brokered ethnic shows that he worked on, one German newscaster would write up his scripts on huge poster boards, way larger than the conventional cue cards- with two or three inch lettering! The person holding the cue cards felt like they were grappling with a billboard! Fortunately, the whole show wasn’t on the cards- the newscaster used a script for many of the news stories. He would mainly use the cue cards for the commercials he had to read! I’ve gone through a few generations of these things- when I first started, we had cue cards, that I’d have to write up personally many times. Then, we moved on to a unique system- the script would be written out on sheets of paper(not typed- we had to print the letters fairly large, though not the size of our German newscaster’s cue-card lettering)that were then taped together in a long long roll, which was put on a sort of conveyor belt that would run the paper under a camera that would transfer the picture to a monitor that was mounted face-up in front of the camera lens- and reflected on a two–way mirror that was in front of the lens- so the person in front of the camera would be able to read it while looking straight at the lens, while, on the other side of the mirror, the camera lens did not see the reflected words! There were sometimes problems with the paper getting caught and bunching up on the conveyor belt, or, the speed control going crazy and zipping the words flying by far too fast for anybody to read them! (I have to point out- this will happen occasionally with the teleprompter as well- the computer it runs on will glitch, or the wacky little controller will suddenly be stuck!) The teleprompter controller will vary as well- we had one that was like a small UFO , with a glowing blinking blow light coming from it; we ‘ve had others that look like an oversized Magic Marker with a rotating cap on top that you could use to make the words go back or forward- or, a switch you could hit that made it roll at a constant speed- that sometimes would not work with normal speech patterns that include pauses! Wouldn’t everything be easier if we had photographic memories and could just memorize all our lines?