TV
Posted 11/16/07; originally published in Variety in the late 1990s
THE REAL 30 ROCK
By Eric Rudolph
In the epicenter of midtown Manhattan, where real estate prices are the highest in the country and space often seems counted in inches instead of square-feet, there is a large and thriving Big Three television studio complex that was born, improbably, in the age of radio and the Model-T Ford.
NBC's New York headquarters broadcast facility, 25,000 square-feet of television production space spread over eight studios on three floors, has been located in a landmark skyscraper complex at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (aka 30 Rock) since the days when radio was King.
However this facility is far from a white elephant. The one-of-a-kind space was deemed so essential that NBC purchased it (as a condominium) in July 1996 for $440 million, along with 1.5 million square feet of leased office space.
Lorne Michaels, producer of Saturday Night Live, likes to quip that working at the 30 Rock studios is like "doing television in a skyscraper," NBC executives say. Another executive quipped that a midtown Manhattan skyscraper is “a hell of a place for a factory.”
The eight midtown studios, ranging in size from 902 to 6,339 square-feet, were completed in 1932 as venues for NBC's then-booming radio network.
Conversion to television use began 16 years later, in 1948. Just five years after that the first-ever (commercial and compatible) color television broadcasts originated from 30 Rock. And the technical facilities underwent a major upgrading for the digital era in the late 1990s.
The 30 Rock studios are available for use by outside producers on a spot or ongoing basis. (NBC also has 9,649 and 11,234 square-foot street-level studios in Midwood, Brooklyn; the former Vitagraph stages. These huge studios were home to NBC hit shows The Cosby Show and early sixites musical oddity Mitch Miller’s Sing Along with Mitch, among many others.)*
So how is it that rooms built for radio were big enough to become major network television studios?
Steve Fastook (director entertainment and news studio operations, maintenance and engineering for NBC) explains that the radio studios were designed to facilitate music, production and an audience. Perhaps most importantly, they were all built at least two stories high. (And to accommodate the much greater space needs of television, non-studio space was converted, over the years, to house technical facilities, Fastook adds.)
The portrayals of the NBC TV studio facility in the films My Favorite Year and Quiz Show, which show elaborate, stylish art deco surroundings, were actually quite accurate says Lou Vinci, director of staging, who has been with NBC since the 1950s. Vinci explains that the need for more working space resulted in the gradual elimination of those elaborate surroundings.
Of course the fact that the rooms are in midtown Manhattan, and were originally built for radio, does set some limitations. Most of the studios are smallish by television standards and all scenery and equipment must fit into a large elevator with an 8'7" maximum door opening.
While not as busy as during the Golden Age of television in the 1950s, when in addition to the eight Rockefeller Center TV studios NBC produced live shows from scores of theaters around town ("We had 20 to 30 studio managers then," Vinci notes) NBC Studios today is a busy place.
Late Night With Conan O'Brien, Saturday Night Live, NBC Nightly News, Dateline NBC, various local WNBC news broadcasts all originate from the skyscraper studios. (The Today Show has been broadcast since 1994 from a street-level studio, much as it was in the program’s early days.)
NBC's most famous television studio, and the one that seems most unlikely to be found in a midtown Manhattan office building, is the 6,339 square-foot 8-H, Saturday Night Live's home for almost a quarter of a century. 8-H was built to accommodate NBC Symphony radio broadcasts conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini's original conductor’s podium now resides in the 8-H announcer's booth.
One of the first prime-time television programs to originate from the 115 x 58-foot 8-H (which features a 22-foot high cyclorama) was the Philco TV Playhouse, which debuted on October 1949. Philco TV Playhouse mounted ambitious productions such as Cyranno de Bergerac, using a half-dozen sets including recreations of 17th century Parisian streets. During the same era Robert Montgomery Presents used 8-H for live adaptations of motion pictures such as Rebecca and A Star is Born (according to book The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows).
Other memorable programs originating from 8-H were the rock music classic Hullabaloo, the earlier pop music show Your Hit Parade, satirical news recap That Was the Week That Was (a precursor to The Daily Show) and NBC News's national election and Apollo moon landing coverage.
While 8-H is the best known of NBC's studios in the sky, rivals exist on the sixth floor. The Texaco Star Theater (better known as The Milton Berle Show, widely credited with jump starting the TV industry due to its immense popularity) was broadcast from the 2,920 square-foot Studio 6-B. starting in 1948.
But that’s not all. Studio 6-B later housed The Tonight Show (hosted by first Steve Allen, later by Jack Paar and then, most famously, by Johnny Carson) prior to that show’s early 1970s move to Los Angeles. (6-B has a 16-foot cyclorama.)
David Letterman worked across the hall for a decade in the 3,108 square-foot Studio 6-A, as has Conan O'Brien for the past five years.
The former longtime home of The Tonight Show (Studio 6-B) now hosts NBC's Flagship station’s (WNBC) local news show, News 4 New York. A high-tech Doppler weather center sits near where Tonight Show guests made their entrances, and of course, the audience bleachers are long gone.
The 73 x 40-foot Studio 6-B now seems impossibly small and unglamorous to have hosted such seminal programs in the history of television.
However, vestiges of the illustrious past have shown up fairly recently. Steve Fastook was supervising some late-night renovations in 6-B some years ago when a workman brought him a sparkly, multi-colored curtain, an item he probably should have recognized. "It was late and I'm not a night person, so I said 'throw it away,'" Fastook explains. "When my boss heard that we'd thrown out a central Tonight Show artifact there was hell to pay. He even brought me into his office so Ed McMahon could give me a stern talking-to over the phone!" Fastook recalls with a cringe.
* The Brooklyn facilities were sold by NBC, and are now called JC Studios, and are used for soap opera production.
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Photo by Eric Rudolph