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This story appeared in the Spring 2019 Letters & Science magazine.

The sky has gone dark, but the show host is lighting up television screens around the country. First, with quick-witted humor. Then with a biting critique of politics before moving on to a celebrity interview.

But this isn’t Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah or another present-day titan of late-night television.

It’s Faye Emerson, the first star of the late-night talk show. Never heard of her? Neither had Maureen Mauk, a former television executive who’s now a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Arts.

When Mauk took note of contemporary TV hosts using their platforms not just for jokes and celebrity chit-chat, but also to lend their voices to issues of social justice and reform, she wondered who did it first.

It turns out, Emerson did back in the 1950s as the host of her own talk shows. On air, she interviewed artists and international journalists, offered opinions on politics and war and responded to viewers’ letters, often while wearing a glamorous evening gown.

Amy Sloper and Mary Huelsbeck of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research clued Mauk in on Emerson, who boasts two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — one for movies, the other for television — but is now mostly unknown.

“She was very, very, very famous,” Sloper says. “But now she’s a forgotten part of television history.”

The Center for Film and Theater Research, managed by the Department of Communication Arts, holds roughly 30,000 films and videotapes related to the entertainment industry — including nearly 150 16mm film prints of Emerson’s shows. However, many of these kinescopes have serious condition issues, which meant that Mauk and other researchers couldn’t watch them.

Thankfully, that’s all changing thanks to the vision of key Comm Arts alumni who recognized the importance of preserving film.


A Rescue Mission

In the mid-1990s, the Communication Arts department purchased a telecine, a machine that transfers motion-picture film to the more stable format of video. While high-tech in its day, the machine had limitations. “If a film had warped or shrunk, we couldn’t run it,” says media technician Boyd Hillestad.

As digital editing became more popular and technology improved, the telecine teetered on obsolescence. At the same time, the Center for Film and Theater Research was running out of archival space at the Wisconsin Historical Society and losing the race of transferring its films to video format before materials were too deteriorated.

“The archives were stuck on the shelf,” says faculty associate Erik Gunneson.

Both the department and center were interested in digital scanning to preserve and improve films, as well as make them more accessible to users. They relayed this to the Communication Arts Partners, the department’s advisory and support board, when it met in the fall of 2017.

Kelly Kahl, a 1989 Communication Arts graduate and president of CBS Entertainment, says he and fellow board members perked up when they heard about the pressing need for a scanner to rescue decaying films.

“Many of the films are one of only a few known copies or even perhaps the only copy — and they are degrading by the day,”he says. “There is demand to see many of these films, but they are far too fragile to loan out. With this new piece of state-of-the-art equipment, Comm Arts can make pristine digital copies that can not only preserve these amazing works, but also be shared with film enthusiasts both at UW and around the world.”

Kahl and fellow alumni Sean Hanish, president of Cannonball Productions, and Erik Hellum, chief operating officer of local media at Townsquare Media, took the lead in raising money to purchase a scanner for the department.

“For those who work in entertainment — as many on our Comm Arts board do — it feels like it’s our duty to make sure the important movies and TV shows of the past are around for future generations to experience and enjoy,” Kahl says.


Restoring and Preserving

Given all it can do, the Lasergraphics ScanStation scanner is surprisingly small. The sleek black board with two large reels and a collection of knobs occupies its own tiny room in Vilas Hall. Once Gunneson or Hillestad loads a film — 8mm, 16mm and a wide variety of 35mm formats are all compatible — the machine starts humming and its reels begin spinning.

At a nearby computer, footage appears on two screens. With quick clicks of the keyboard, Gunneson and Hillestad can correct a reddish or greenish cast, crop a scene, even reverse lettering if words appear backwards. They can save different versions of their edits and replicate their settings quickly — just a few of the joys of working in digital.

Films needn’t be in pristine condition to be run through the scanner, and the originals won’t be damaged — a real concern when working with the telecine. And everything that comes out is saved in a high-quality, high-resolution digital format.

“Whenever something comes to us, whether it was made last week or 110 years ago, it will be viable for a long time,” Gunneson says.

The challenge now is tackling the backlog of films that would bene t from a digital transfer. Gunneson and Hillestad are starting with requests from faculty, grad students and the Center for Film and Theater Research.

“When someone requests something, we’re starting to digitize it so it’s ready for the next person,” Sloper says. “Our users want things digitally now. We’re meeting researchers where their needs are.”

That includes Mauk, who’s about a fifth of the way through Emerson’s talk show recordings. She’s already written a paper, which won first place in the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ student writing awards earlier this year.

Mauk is working to turn her research into a documentary and scripted series. “The Hollywood in me wants to make sure her story is told across as many platforms as possible,” she says.

“She was the first lady of television, and she deserves to have her crown back.”

This story appears in the spring 2019 issue of Letters & Science magazine. 
Read the full issue here.