Restoration of infamous Joe Pyne talk show (video geeks & Zappa fans take note)

Joe Pyne Was America's First Shock Jock | History | Smithsonian

[Most of the article deals with Pyne's politics, which we need to avoid in this thread]

Joe Pyne Was America’s First Shock Jock
Newly discovered tapes resurrect the angry ghost of Joe Pyne, the original outrageous talk show host

By Kevin Cook

Charles Churchman throws a switch on a half-ton video console in a converted barn in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania. “Well, that won’t do,” he says. The oversized reel-to-reel console, complete with wave-form monitors and oscilloscopes, looks like a relic of the Gemini program. Churchman, 69, restores obsolete videotapes in his cluttered workshop. Twisting dials and pushing buttons, he reverses the crinkly 50-year-old tape in the machine, clears a dot of rust from it, restarts the tape, color-corrects the image. “That’s better,” he says. “I mean, Joe Pyne was a lot of things, but he wasn’t green.”

Churchman is one of several techies, archivists and vintage-TV fans who hope to save “The Joe Pyne Show” from history’s scrapheap. He’s the mad scientist of the bunch, a self-taught engineer who can transform strips of moldy, decades-old videotape into crisp digital images. He first heard about Pyne from his client Alexander Kogan Jr., president of Films Around the World, a decade ago. Kogan, whose firm restores and markets classic movies and TV programs, had discovered a trove of long-lost tapes in his collection: more than 100 episodes of Pyne’s once-famous talk show on reels of two-inch videotape that weighed 28 pounds apiece. Many were in bad shape, the iron oxide that fixed the image to its acetate base flaking off. Churchman, the video savant, restored a few at a time. He has yet to work on dozens of tapes that feature interviews with some of the most polarizing figures of the 1960s.

Today he’s working on a rust-specked reel recorded in a Los Angeles TV studio 50 years ago.

Churchman starts by warming the tape in an incubator he bought secondhand. The incubator bakes out moisture that can ruin old videotapes. Another machine removes dust, rust and mold. “We treat each tape as if it’s a final ‘suicide run’ through the tape machine,” his client Kogan says of the transfer from decaying acetate to digital files, a process that preserves the image and sound before the tape can self-destruct. Why bother? “Because he was important,” says Kogan. “Pyne set the tone for so much of what we see on our ‘news’ channels every day and night. The confrontation, the anger, the yelling. But who remembers his name?”

---

Yet his show disappeared after Pyne died. Because videotape was expensive, producers taped over “Pyne Show” episodes or cut them into one- and two-minute strips to use for commercials—the same process that destroyed the first decade of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” “It was a shame, and not just because he invented the sort of angry TV talk we see so much today. He was a masterful interviewer,” says Kogan of Films Around the World. Kogan’s New York City warehouse holds film, video and digital versions of everything from Nosferatu to 1940s musicals to cheesy soft porn to Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. After he found hundreds of Pyne tapes in a collection he’d bought from another firm, he pulled a handful and salvaged them. The rest—including potentially valuable releases signed by Pyne’s celebrity guests—wound up in filing cabinets and cardboard boxes in Providence, Rhode Island. “Then we shipped them to a storage space in the basement of the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. We also had tractor-trailers full of stuff in Long Island City.” All those moldering tapes and documents represented a unique slice of ’60s America: Pyne’s talks with American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey, authors Tom Wolfe and Jacqueline Susann, wrestling kingpin Freddie Blassie, stripper Candy Barr, segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox, and many more.

It’s hard telling who else might be squaring off with Pyne in the stack of tapes in Churchman’s workshop, near Philadelphia. Many are unmarked, unwatched for half a century.

With help from Churchman and another tech whiz, Jim Markovic, Kogan intends to save as many Pyne shows as he can. After that he’ll sell them on DVD, or maybe stream them. His fondest hope is to resurrect Pyne on TV Land or another cable channel. “He deserves it,” Kogan says, “and I want to be the guy who saved Joe Pyne for a new generation of people who watch TV.”

He would love to come across a fabled exchange between Pyne and Frank Zappa. According to Pyne lore, he invited his audience to “Say hello to a musician—and I use that term loosely—representing a rock ’n’ roll band known as the Mothers of Invention.”

Zappa, 24, nodded to the booing crowd. Pyne looked him over and said, “I guess your long hair makes you a woman.”

Zappa shrugged. “I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.”

If they find that one, it’ll be news. Meanwhile Kogan, Churchman and a loyal crowd of Pyne fans hope to keep Killer Joe’s memory alive. “People ask me if he was like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly,” says Levy, who produced Pyne shows half a century ago. “I say yes—but Joe got there first.”
​

Pyne's interview w/Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey is on YT. Not linking b/c I want to avoid a religious discussion, but it's worth watching for Pyne's hilarious last line.

 

One of the funnier things I've ever seen on TV was when Joe Pyne had a guest on that claimed to have invented a robot that reproduced and had baby robots. The inventor's robots did nothing useful. They were just going to reproduce. It was hilarious how Joe belittled this guy.

 

Hopefully some more full episodes will eventually get released. I've watched a few excerpts on YT and they usually cut off just when the exchange is getting interesting.

Funny how completely Pyne has disappeared from the pop culture memory, too. I'd never heard of him until a few years ago when the film mag Shock Cinema reviewed a grey market DVD of the show.

 

My folks watched his show religiously just for his screwball guests. The in studio commercials were a hoot.

 

Another article about Joe Pyne tapes.

Physical Materials

 

I'm amazed that something from Metromedia survvies - I remember when they trashed the Winchell-Mahoney Time tapes in a contractual dispute.

 

Pyne once described himself as an "overly compensating introvert."

 

This guy Kogan is an interesting and strange guy. Never been able to get a fix on what he does exactly but I think he's a rich eccentric. He apparently went to NBC and claimed rights on all of these live shows from the 50s, which everyone always have assumed were public domain. As the shows have virtually no value and NBC would never have any interest in doing anything with them, they gave him rights to things like Producer's Showcase and others rather than bother getting into a dispute with him.

As for the Pyne show, wasn't it a weekly show for maybe 2 years or so? If so, then there wouldn't be "hundreds" of tapes, unless there were many multiple copies of episodes. In any event, I seriously doubt there is any market for these things but I would love to somehow see them. The other show which was similar and which I have more of a memory of was The Alan Burke Show. As far as I know, nothing has been found to exist on that one.

 

Some of those "live" dramas have been donated to UCLA Film & Television Archive as they have quite a storage/restoration facility in Santa Clarita, CA. Saw a complete & restored version of Sinatra's "Our Town" from their collection year ago. This Kogan guy may have position of the NBC shows, but not the rights to distribute same.

 

As for value, clips could be licensed for use in documentaries

A few years ago I read (in an article about the alleged exchange w/Zappa) that there were at least a couple hundred unmarked tapes in existence, and that just to play them in order to copy them would cost at least $2oo apiece. Also this could only be done once, as the playback would permanently damage the tape.

 

I remember a short-lived show on either channel 11, 9 or 5 (Los Angeles stations) back in the mid-60s called "Duggan and Dolan". It must have been a response to the Joe Pyne show, as it was the same style of brash outspoken political discussions as Joe Pyne offered. I haven't heard a thing about it since and there's nothing on the internet about it, but I'm sure I didn't dream it!

 

REMINISCING (Column)

Tom Duggan Enlivens KCOP 13

 

Oh, snap! PLEASE, somebody confirm this was an actual quote, and not just one of those, "when-he-said-that-I-should've-said..." memories!​

 

In the The Love-Ins (5:00 in)

 

Don't forget Bill Needle

​

 

I think it wasn't a contractual dispute. Winchell claims he was paying them X dollars as a storage fee, but somebody at KTTV wound up trashing all the kinescopes and videotapes anyway because they needed the room. That case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Winchell won a fortune:

In retaliation for a lawsuit brought by Paul Winchell, who sought the rights to his children's television program "Winchell-Mahoney Time," which was produced at KTTV in Los Angeles during the middle 1960s, it is believed that KTTV management destroyed the program's video tapes. In 1989 Winchell was awarded nearly $18 million as compensation for Metromedia's capricious behavior.

Paul Winchell Gets Last Word and $17.8 Million

 

That was great how he stuck it to those bastards. Of course no money can replace a lost legacy as those shows now only exist in the minds of those of us who grew up watching them every day in the mid-60s. Not that anything would be done with them now anyway even if they still did exist. Haven't seen Wonderama, the Sandy Becker Show or Let's Have Fun with Chuck McCann running anywhere lately.

 

I think the sad truth is that the shows were worth very little money, because the rerun potential was damn near zero. I think the best that Winch could've hoped for was maybe a couple of "Best of" specials for syndication and home video, and maybe he would've cleared $100K or something on those. But they certainly weren't worth millions.

The problem with Metromedia's position is that when you hire somebody to store your stuff, they have the responsibility not to lie to you and not to screw it up, and they did both. I think a big part of the $18 million Winchell got was because of punitive damages and because KTTV fought him so hard. This was a pivotal case, and I can remember meetings going on in LA that basically warned the staff, "do not ever erase anything unless we have a piece of paper signed by three executives and the client." BTW, Winchell was an angry, bitter, neurotic man in the last 20 years of his life, and I think part of it was he felt his legacy was being ignored and his name was kind of being forgotten. He had a very traumatic childhood (which he wrote about extensively in his autobiography), but had fractured relationships with his family, particularly his daughter April (who still works as a voice over actor).

I think the Joe Pyne shows are kind of in that "forgotten" category. They're historical curiosities, but nobody would sit still to watch whole shows for hundreds of hours. It might be interesting to go through whatever survives and then edit them down to a couple of hours of "The Best of Joe Pyne" as a retrospective. Short clips can work, especially if you frame it with modern interviews and people to analyze what Pyne did.

 

Reminds me of how Milton Berle asked NBC for all of his Texaco Star Theater shows that they were entrusted to archive for him and they told him they were gone. So he sued them for 30 million dollars. That got their attention and miraculously they then found all but five of them. Its too bad but that seems to be the only way anything gets found is by threats.

Speaking of Metromedia, Fox when the bought them out, didn't even make any mention of programming. They don't even know or care about anything they inherited from Metromedia or MPC. When those things turn up, people have been treating them as PD. As for local Metormedia programming, there was not one word in the agreement giving Fox rights to any of those shows, like Wonderama or Midday Live for instance. Fox is lucky if they are aware of their ownership of their own older shows.

 

Speaking of Alex Kogan, he died earlier this year, so what happened to his stuff?

 

Texaco Star Theater exists? Are they accessible?

The Three Stooges were on there once or twice.

I remember hearing that a few episodes of "Winchell-Mahoney Time" did exist, but the only reason they were kept was because the tapes were damaged and couldn't be re-used. I don't know if this is true or not. WFLD-TV Channel 32 ran the show in Chicago, replacing it with locally-produced Cartoon Town with Bill Jackson (later known as The BJ & Dirty Dragon Show) in 1968.

I probably would have liked Joe Pyne. Remember Wally George?