to illuminate our time: you are there friday, january 16, 1998: 6:30 pm saturday, january 17, 1998: 4 pm photo: THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

A panel discussion with Abraham Polonsky (Body and Soul, Force of Evil), Walter Bernstein (Fail Safe, The Front), and Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker) follows each screening of three episodes. John Schultheiss (editor, You Are There Teleplays) moderates the discussion. "What sort of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our time...and You Were There." You Are There was a weekly, live TV version (1953-1957) of a successful radio series (1947-1950) that attempted to faithfully reconstruct significant historical narratives-utilizing authentic primary sources and actual quotations, employing real CBS News reporters-as if they were live television events. program notes and times Important historical figures such as Galileo, Freud, Dreyfus, Socrates, or Beethoven were interviewed or discussed--as if they were contemporaries--by TV journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, or Mike Wallace. A profound political irony resides in the fact that this show was written under the cover of "front" names by men--Abraham Polonsky, Walter Bernstein, and Arnold Manoff--who had been denied their livelihood as screen and TV writers because their values, ideologies and interpretations of political events were labeled a threat to the American way of life by Communist witch-hunters. Abraham Polonsky notes that the show was "probably the only place where any guerrilla warfare against McCarthy was conducted in a public medium." "We tried our best," testifies Bernstein, "to celebrate the human spirit, to show the forces that throughout history tried to stunt and oppress that spirit, to explain as clearly as we could its victories and its defeats." Sidney Lumet, indomitable director of the You Are There shows, remembers that "one of the sadnesses was that I could not meet with any of the writers. The level of [sheer] writing was so high that to some degree the shows almost directed themselves. Good words were not to be found easily in TV scripts." Many shows focused on a single protagonist or incident in a specific place that provided a fertile context for the debate of relevant historical, philosophical, and ethical issues (events that often illuminated what was going on in Cold War America). To illustrate that approach, this retrospective includes "The Death of Socrates" (air date: 3 May 53) by Arnold Manoff (front name: Kate Nickerson); "The Torment of Beethoven" (2 Jan 55) by Abraham Polonsky (front name: Leo Davis); and "The Tragic Hour of Dr. Semmelweis" (13 Feb 55) by Walter Bernstein (front name: Howard Rodman). In the 50th anniversary year of the beginning of the investigations of Hollywood by the Committee on Un-American Activities, the You Are There adventure deserves reexamination. Program organized by Joanna Ney.