don
hewitt
for the
record:
don
hewitt
“....I went to CBS and I said, in all those minutes of entertainment, couldn't you find 60 minutes for some kind of newsmagazine?”
D
on Hewitt is one of television's foremost news and
documentary producers. Among his many duties, he served as
producer and director of “Douglas Edwards with the
News” (1948-1962) and executive producer of CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite (1963-1964). He is best known for creating
and producing “60 Minutes.” He was interviewed on May
19, 1996 in New York by Michael Rosen.
On coining “anchorman.”
Somebody said, and I always thought it was me, Sig Mickelson
thought it was him, “well it will be like a relay team. Each
guy will run a leg but Cronkite will run the anchor leg. That's
where the word anchorman came from. Anchorman has nothing to do
with boats....It's the guy who runs the last leg on a relay
team.”
On the first use of graphics.
We're at the 1952 Democratic or Republican Political
Convention, both in Chicago. Now this was always a problem: when
someone was speaking if you took a cutaway shot, you had to dip
the track for Cronkite to say “that was senator
Taft....” And I figured, gee I wish we could superimpose
those names, but ...there was no way the artist could make the
supers fast enough. And I'm sitting at a diner one morning
pondering this problem, in Chicago, and the waitress says,
“what will you have?” I looked up at her and I looked
at the board over her head that said soup 35 cents...I'll take
that board. She said “what?” I'll take that board with
the little white letters on a black background, which is what you
super, white on black. She calls the boss over....And I said you
have to throw in the little white letters....So I took the board
off the wall and went out in the hall and said here's what we can
super. When you see a guy, you put up a blackboard and you grab
the letters.
Creating “60 Minutes.”
I said there has got to be a better way to move information
than the hour documentary. I said you know if we went
multi-subject and did three stories in the hour, if we packaged
reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction, and if we
made it personal journalism, not advocacy journalism, I don't
want to advocate anything....I went to CBS and I said, in all
those minutes of entertainment, couldn't you find 60 minutes for
some kind of newsmagazine? And when they said yeah we'll try it,
I couldn't think of a title. I went back and I wrote the memo, 60
Minutes. That's not a bad title. That stopwatch, which is the
most recognizable logo on Earth, that was the credits for the
first show, the first pilot. I looked at that and I said this is
too good to put it at the end. I'm going to use the stopwatch at
the beginning. And the tick-tick tick-tick, which became sort of
an arresting sound that brought people in from the kitchen to
see. It all worked. It's like most things that happen by dumb
luck.
On good writing.
What I learned from Fred Friendly is the most valuable thing I
ever learned in television. It is the thing which I think can
take credit for, the success of “60 Minutes” – and
that it's your ear more than your eye that keeps you at a
television set. It's what you hear. The picture brings you there,
and what you hear keeps you there. I learned from [Edward R.]
Murrow and Friendly that good writing is the most important thing
in television.
On television's role in Vietnam.
The Vietnam war probably would have gone on a lot more years
than it did had it not been for television. Every guy that went
out there, either from newspapers, radio or TV, had a note of
disgust in his copy...It was one of TV's proudest moments, the
Vietnam war.
On TV news' role.
I'm not sure TV news should be a watchdog to society...I don't
think that's our job. I think our job is to chronicle the times
in which we live, and let somebody else take that chronicle and
decide what needs to be watchdogged and what doesn't.
– Compiled by Sunny Parich
