September 5, 2000

The Emmy War: A half-century of coast-to-­coast feuding

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

As you watch the battle royal for this year's top Emmy awards between "The Sopranos" (an East Coast show) and "The West Wing" (a show filmed mainly in Hollywood, with some location stuff in Washington, D.C.), just remember that you're witnessing the latest round in an East Coast vs. West Coast conflict that goes back to the days when Harry Truman was president.

That's 1949, the first year the awards were given out (for shows broadcast in '48), by a fledgling, L.A.-based academy - a process that got righteously stuck in Ed Sullivan's craw.

Here Sullivan's program - "Toast of the Town," broadcast live from New York - was cutting the template for TV variety and turning Ed himself into a national icon, and he and the show couldn't even get nominated for a prize, let alone win one. That was because to qualify a show had to be not just broadcast but produced in Los Angeles County.

More than half a century later, the awards categories are bewilderingly divvied up between academy organizations based respectively in New York (awards for daytime, sports and news programming) and L.A. (prime-time awards).

If you think this sounds a bit silly, you're not alone.

"The fact that we have two organizations essentially bestowing the same awards is patently absurd," says TV industry veteran Thomas O'Neil, whose book, "The Emmys" (Perigee), offers a gripping account of the matter.

As with so many things, you could blame it all on the phone company. Back when the Emmys were taking wing, AT&T hadn't yet developed the technology that could instantaneously beam signals from one coast to another. Indeed, the "networks" that were then based in New York couldn't beam anything further west than St. Louis.

By the second year of the awards, in 1950, the requirements had loosened to the point where a show didn't have to be produced in L.A. - it merely had to be aired there.

In those days, if you were a New York TV producer and you wanted your show to air in L.A., here's what you did.

- You produced and broadcast your show live in New York.

- While it was airing, you stuck a camera in front of a TV monitor and captured the live program on film, producing what was known as a kinescope. (Remember, videotape hadn't been invented.)

When the show was over, you stuck the kinescope film on a red-eye flight to the West Coast.

- Perhaps as early as the next evening, your counterparts in L.A. put your kinescope program on the air.

Thus you had one Emmy category for Outstanding Live Personality (won in 1950 by vaudevillian Ed Wynn) and another for Outstanding Kinescope Personality (won by a 30-year-old Milton Berle).

Kinescope let the New York TV wizards in for a bit of Emmy play, but it didn't mollify Sullivan and his cohorts. By 1955, regional insurrection was afoot as the former sports columnist convened a “Committee of 50” - personages as weighty as Walter Cronkite, Fred Allen, Edward R. Morrow and Neil Simon - bent on hijacking the industry honors by means of a New York-based academy.

By the time this rebel faction had grown to 100 members, the plan was to create a whole new organization called the Academy of Radio and Television Arts and Sciences, which would hand out awards called the Michaels (as in radio and TV microphones, or "mikes").

The revolt fizzled, however, and the matter simmered for decades. Finally, in the mid-'70s, a slew of lawsuits went around, the upshot being the delineation of two separate academies: in L.A., the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS); In New York, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).

The coastal tug-of-war for dominance, for prestige and for air time was dramatized in a more or less amicable fashion from 1955 to 1971 by the airing of Emmy Award "simulcasts," whereby the proceedings switched back and forth between ceremonies In New York and L.A., with much attendant dead air and snafu-related confusion.

Maybe the strangest battle was fought after the 1958-59 awards, at which a special program titled "An Evening with Fred Astaire" won the prize for Outstanding Single Program of the Year. That was fine with everybody, but when Astaire also garnered an award for Best Single Performance by an Actor there was a hue and cry.

Ugliness flew as East Coasters, incensed that THEIR boy, Mickey Rooney, hadn't won for a teleplay he appeared in, publicly decried the award to Astaire, and Ed Sullivan even demanded that the Emmy ballots be impounded and recounted. Astaire, obviously embarrassed, tried to return the award, but the academy wouldn't let him.

These days, everyone is a bit more civilized, but still there's bad blood.

"Whenever the Daytime Emmys are announced," O'Neil observes, "everyone on the West Coast complains that too many New York shows got nominated."

When, one wonders, will this Balkanization of Emmy come to a long-overdue end?

O'Neil has a prediction: "When the people in power at both of the TV academies put aside their show-business-size egos and resolve this historic problem."

So don't hold your breath.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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