Season 21 • Episode 2
LatestExamining the golden years 1934 to 1964 of the Warner Bothers film cartoon department, which created cartoon characters known all over the world.
Camera Three is an American variety show devoted to the arts. It ran on CBS from January 22, 1956 to January 21, 1979, and moved to PBS in its final year to make way for the then-new CBS News Sunday Morning. The PBS version ran from October 4, 1979 to July 10, 1980. Camera Three featured programs showcasing drama, ballet, art, music, anything involving fine arts. One of its most notable presentations was a condensation of Marc Blitzstein's leftist opera The Cradle Will Rock. Presented on November 29, 1964, it was a dramatic demonstration of how far television had come since its early days, in its willingness to present a work that surely would have been banned from the airwaves during the era of Joseph McCarthy.
Production
Smuggled banned opera onto 1964 network television.
Direction
Television as legitimate art form, before it gave up.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Cradle Will Rock episode aired November 29, 1964—just thirteen years after the original 1947 production was shut down by the government, making its network broadcast a deliberate middle finger to McCarthy-era suppression.
Orson Welles directed the original 1937 Cradle Will Rock production that was shut down; the Camera Three version was hosted by James MacAndrew, who later became a CBS foreign correspondent.
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