The Ed Sullivan Show
The Ed Sullivan Show is an American television variety show that ran on CBS from June 20, 1948, to March 28, 1971, and was hosted by New York entertainment columnist Ed Sullivan. It was replaced in September 1971 by the CBS Sunday Night Movie.
In 2002, The Ed Sullivan Show was ranked No. 15 on TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, the series finished No. 31 in TV Guide Magazine's 60 Best Series of All Time.
History
From 1948 until its cancellation in 1971, the show ran on CBS every Sunday night from 8–9 p.m. Eastern Time, and it is one of the few entertainment shows to have run in the same weekly time slot on the same network for more than two decades. Virtually every type of entertainment appeared on the show; classical musicians, opera singers, popular recording artists, songwriters, comedians, ballet dancers, dramatic actors performing monologues from plays, and circus acts were regularly featured. The format was essentially the same as vaudeville and, although vaudeville had undergone a slow demise for a generation, Sullivan presented many ex-vaudevillians on his show.Originally co-created and produced by Marlo Lewis, the show was first titled Toast of the Town, but was widely referred to as The Ed Sullivan Show for years before September 25, 1955, when that became its official name. In the show's June 20, 1948, debut, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed along with singer Monica Lewis and Broadway composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II previewing the score to their then-new show South Pacific, which opened on Broadway in 1949.
From 1948 through 1962, the program's primary sponsor was the Lincoln-Mercury Division of the Ford Motor Company; Sullivan read many commercials for Mercury vehicles live on the air during this period.
The Ed Sullivan Show was originally broadcast via live television from CBS-TV Studio 51, the Maxine Elliott Theatre, at Broadway and 39th Street, before moving to its permanent home at CBS-TV Studio 50 in New York City, which was renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater on the occasion of the program's 20th anniversary in June 1968. The last original Sullivan show telecast was on March 28, 1971, with guests Melanie, Joanna Simon, Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass, and Sandler and Young. It was one of many older shows with followings in undesirable key demographics that were purged from the network lineups that summer. The purge led into the Prime Time Access Rule taking effect that fall. Repeats were scheduled through June 6, 1971.
Background
Along with the new talent Sullivan booked each week, he also had recurring characters appear many times a season, such as his "Little Italian Mouse" puppet sidekick Topo Gigio, who debuted December 9, 1962, and ventriloquist Señor Wences debuted December 31, 1950. While most of the episodes aired live from New York City, the show also aired live on occasion from other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. For many years, Ed Sullivan was a national event each Sunday evening and was the first exposure for foreign performers to the American public.On the occasion of the show's tenth anniversary telecast, Sullivan commented on how the show had changed during a June 1958 interview syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association :
The show enjoyed phenomenal popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. As it had occurred with the annual telecasts of The Wizard of Oz in the 1960s and the 1970s, the family ritual of gathering around the television set to watch Ed Sullivan became almost a U.S. cultural universal. He was regarded as a kingmaker, and performers considered an appearance on his program as a guarantee of stardom, although this sometimes did not turn out to be the case. The show's status at the turn of the decade is illustrated by its use as the backdrop of the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie. The musical's plot revolves around an ordinary teen girl's chance to kiss a rock star live on the Sullivan show, and in the song "Hymn for a Sunday Evening," her family expresses their regard for the program in worshipful tones. Sullivan appeared as himself in the musical's 1963 film adaptation.
In September 1965, CBS started televising the program in compatible color, as all three major networks began to switch to 100 percent color prime time schedules. CBS had once backed its own color system, developed by Peter Goldmark, and resisted using RCA's compatible process until 1954. At that time, it built its first New York City color TV studio, Studio 72, in a former RKO movie theater at 2248 Broadway. One Ed Sullivan Show was broadcast on August 22, 1954, from the new studio, but it was mostly used for one-time-only specials such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's March 31, 1957 Cinderella. CBS Studio 72 was demolished in 1986 and replaced by an apartment house. CBS Studio 50 was finally modernized for color broadcasts in 1965. The 1965–66 season premiere starred the Beatles in an episode airing on September 12, which was the last episode to air in black and white. This occurred because the episode was taped at the Beatles' convenience on August 14, the eve of their Shea Stadium performance and a two-week tour of North America, slightly before the program was ready for color transmission.
In the late 1960s, Sullivan remarked that his program was waning as the decade went on. He realized that to keep viewers, the best and brightest in entertainment had to be seen, or else the viewers were going to keep on changing the channel. Along with declining viewership, Ed Sullivan attracted a higher median age for the average viewer as the seasons went on. Younger viewers were growing to actively dislike the program; in 1970, Sullivan's compilation special Ed Sullivan's Swinging Sixties drew widely negative reviews. These factors were the reason the show was cancelled by CBS on March 16, 1971, as part of a mass cancellation of advertiser-averse programming. While Sullivan's landmark program ended without a proper finale, Sullivan produced one-off specials for CBS until his death in 1974, including an Ed Sullivan Show 25th-anniversary special in 1973.
In 1990, television documentary producer Andrew Solt formed SOFA Entertainment, Inc. and purchased the exclusive rights to the complete library of The Ed Sullivan Show from Ed Sullivan's daughter Elizabeth and her husband Bob Precht. The collection consists of 1,087 hours of kinescopes and videotapes broadcast by CBS on Sunday nights from 1948 to 1971.
Since acquiring the rights to The Ed Sullivan Show library, SOFA Entertainment has catalogued, organized and cleared performance rights for the original shows. Starting in 1991, SOFA Entertainment has re-introduced The Ed Sullivan Show to the American public by producing numerous network specials, syndicating a half-hour series and home video compilations. Some of these compilations include The 4 Complete Ed Sullivan Shows Starring The Beatles, All 6 Ed Sullivan Shows Starring The Rolling Stones, Elvis: The Ed Sullivan Shows, Motown Gold from the Ed Sullivan Show, Ed Sullivan's Rock 'n Roll Classics, and 115 half-hour The Best of The Ed Sullivan Show specials, among others. Performances of this show are also available as video and audio downloads and as an app on iTunes." In 2021, MeTV began airing on Sunday nights half hour packages of performances from the show.
The Ed Sullivan Show Orchestra
In the early years of television, both CBS and NBC networks had their own symphony orchestras. NBC's was conducted by Arturo Toscanini and CBS's by Alfredo Antonini. The Ed Sullivan Show was basically a musical variety show, and thus members of the CBS orchestra were folded into the Ed Sullivan Show Orchestra, conducted by Ray Bloch. During the early days of television, the demands on studio musicians were many-tiered. They needed to be proficient in all genres of music, from classical, to jazz and to rock and roll. The Ed Sullivan Show would regularly feature singers from the Metropolitan Opera and the staff orchestra would accompany divas such as Eileen Farrell, Maria Callas or Joan Sutherland. The musicians needed to be prepared to switch gears for Ella Fitzgerald, Diahann Carroll or Sammy Davis Jr. and then onto The Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder or Tom Jones. They also needed to perform with some of the greatest dancers and ballerinas at the time, from Gregory Hines, Juliet Prowse, Maria Tallchief or Margo Fonteyn to the Peter Gennaro dancers.In the process, the musicians collaborated with several internationally recognized ballet troupes including: Ruth Page's Chicago Opera Ballet, the London Festival Ballet, Roland Petit's Ballets de Paris and Russia's Igor Moiseyev Ballet. Few musicians are capable of crossing over from one genre to another. However, each member of the Ed Sullivan Show Orchestra was a specialist and more than capable of covering the complete spectrum of music.
The lead trumpet player is the "concert master" of a studio orchestra. Chris Griffin was Ray Bloch's lead trumpet player for the many radio and television shows that he conducted, including the Ed Sullivan Show and The Jackie Gleason Show. Chris remained the lead trumpet player with The Ed Sullivan show from the first show in 1948 to the last show in 1971.
Band configuration
Trumpets: Chris Griffin, Bernie Privin, Jimmy Nottingham, and Thad Jones; Chris's son, was a regular substitute trumpeter.Trombones: Roland Dupont, Joe Bennet, Morton Bullman, Frank Rehak, and Cliff Heather
Saxophones: Toots Mondello, Bernie Kaufman, Artie Drellinger, Hymie Schertzer, Ed Zuhlke, et al
Piano: Hank Jones
Drums: Specs Powell/Howard Smith
Percussion: Milton Schlesinger
Unlike NBC's The Tonight Show, which celebrated the notoriety of their musicians in Skitch Henderson's or Doc Severinsen's "Tonight Show Band", the CBS producers of The Ed Sullivan Show decided to hide their famed musicians behind a curtain. Occasionally, CBS would broadcast specials and call upon the orchestra to perform. When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, music was hastily composed for the orchestra in a special tribute that also featured jazz pianist Bill Evans, who had recently composed an elegy to his father.