Olson's confidence in Jayne's abilities to pick movies
resulted in her first on-air triumphs. "They
started to let me book the movies for air and to title the program.
I named one of our movie programs "The Best of Hollywood" and
another "Two On The Aisle." Another
one I named was "Academy Award Theater" until the real Academy Award
people called and said I couldn't do that."
Jayne programmed WTVT's Friday night movie that bumped the
CBS network's programming. "The
Best of Hollywood" was the #1 program in its time slot except for the time
she got 'artsy craftsy' and booked an obscure art-house film, "Mon
Uncle." Jayne remembers
getting a long memo from Olson about that one.
WTVT was the first station to purchase the local rights to “Anatomy
of a Murder.” Jayne scheduled it for a
Friday night, and the received a long-distance phone call from Los Angeles the day before it was to
air. Jayne fielded the call and was
soon talking with an irate Otto Preminger, the film's director. Preminger was very upset that WTVT would be
putting commercials in the movie and might even edit portions to comply with
time constrictions. When Jayne
realized it really was Mr. Preminger yelling in full accent at her on the
phone, it took every bit of tact and graciousness she had to appease him.
“I don’t think he ever did understand the difference between how
movies shown in theaters and movies that are shown on television are paid
for.” The movie was aired and
Jayne heard no more from Preminger.
While serving as Film Director, Jayne was also monitoring
Channel 13's performance in regards to guidelines from the National Association
of Broadcasters (NAB). She was
given the added responsibility of Continuity Director, a job of writing format
and non-news copy for the films and overseeing preparation of the “Copy
books” as well as overseeing the scheduling of commercials and public service
spots appearing on the daily “op sheets” (operation logs). The station's
Traffic Department determined which clients would have commercials telecast each
day, the time they would run, and which particular spot would air (Budweiser #1
or #7 at 6:00:30 p.m., for example).
Channel 13's 16mm film chains and 35mm slide projectors were
manually loaded for programs and commercial breaks.
"I think there were around eight Op sheets produced each day that served as
the final bible on what ran when and the source of the on-air content….film,
Network, audio tape, live announcer, video tape etc.," explains Jayne.
"There were five copy books: One with copy for the announcers, one for
engineering, the director, stage manager, and the projectionist. However more
people had the op sheet. The final
copies of the op sheet were prepared by Traffic. They all had to be identical,
with the film reel numbers for commercials and programs, the announcer copy, and
what the announcer would say when WTVT went local out of the network or a filmed
program.
Jayne recalls the time that Traffic Manager Len Motykiewitz
scheduled a series of commercials in a particular order for his own amusement:
#1 Exlax
#2 Scott Toilet Tissue
#3 Sani-Flush