Several of you have written me about this. The International Jack Benny Fan Club has been attempting to gain access to about 25 old episodes of The Jack Benny Program that exist in the CBS vaults and, perhaps, nowhere else. They are apparently in the public domain and the fan club was willing to undertake the cost and responsibility of transferring the shows to digital format and making them available in some way to the world. At one point, the network folks seemed to think it would be no problem…but now it's somehow become a problem. Here's the story from the fan club's point-of-view.
This kind of thing is, alas, all too typical. I don't know precisely what happened here but I'd bet the request reached some lawyer who said, "Hmm…we stand to gain nothing from allowing this. On the other hand, we may start getting angry calls and legal threats from unions or the families of people who worked on these shows. If they feel their rights have been violated and that there's money due them, they're not going to go after The International Jack Benny Fan Club. They have no money. They're going to go after CBS. And so if I okay this and there's trouble later on, my bosses are going to think I didn't do my job very well. My job, after all, is protecting the interests of CBS, not protecting the interests of Jack Benny's legacy." I've seen folks in Business Affairs think that way even admitting that there was less than a 1% chance of such a thing happening.
The answer to this kind of stalemate is usually to get the material in question to a third party that can assume responsibility. For example, CBS could donate the shows in question to some university or museum. Back in the late sixties though, I dealt briefly with a person in the CBS Archives who would have solved it an even easier way. He would have gotten the necessary parties at his network to sign off on disposing of the films in question and once they did, he would have thrown them out…
…but he would have made sure that certain people knew which dumpster and when. Maybe you've seen the episode of Mr. Benny's show that guest-starred Humphrey Bogart, in which Benny and Bogey did a parody of old crime movies and Bogart sang the jingle for Lucky Strike cigarettes. In 1968, that was one of many I helped a friend fish out of some big trash cans behind CBS Television City in Hollywood. It was a 16mm print and it wouldn't surprise me if all the copies in circulation today were duped, several generations removed, from that 16mm print.
Anyway, I hope someone at CBS some day does the right thing and lets these episodes out. In the meantime, we can at least enjoy Jack Benny's memorable performance in the movie, Casablanca. (Or can we? The vote in our little poll as to whether or not it's him has hardly been a landslide one way or another. Right now, 38% of you think he's in the movie and 30% think he isn't. I'm thinking he isn't but darned if there isn't a Nazi in the background of one scene who's a dead ringer for my old gym teacher.)