Sunday, May 6, 2007

Begging for More




Long before the cable and satellite TV industry entered the broadcast game with major and lesser studios and gobbled up rights to most cinematic gems, commercial TV stations all over the country routinely showed great movies regularly on their late-late, morning or afternoon schedules. That's how I happened to see the 1956 United Artists documentary movie, "U.F.O." In later years, I researched the movie, interviewed major participants and wrote a series of articles about it (see the NICAP link above, go to the site search engine and type in my name -- the NICAP site carries my two original magazine articles).

Central NY station WHEN-TV (now WTVH-TV) first showed "U.F.O." in 1964 and, as a teenager highly impressed with the movie, I would write letters to the station often, literally begging them to run it again. For my New York readers, I'll offer three WHEN-TV responses here for old times' sake. The two earliest were signed by Gordon Alderman, a very respected Syracuse broadcast industry member who possessed a wonderful voice that any broadcaster would crave. I hope it wasn't because I made a letter-writing pest of myself, but Mr. Alderman died a month after his May, 1965 letter, and thus his successor inherited my annoying and ongoing requests to screen "U.F.O." again.