(For Mojo Magazine, I interviewed celebrated Hollywood director Steve Binder to discuss his involvement in a 1964 concert/film called the T.A.M.I. show. The concert starred the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and many other greats. As the piece was quite short, the majority of the interview could not be used, but here is the meat of what we talked about. The actual piece can be viewed here).

Steve Binder Interview
Mojo: How did the idea for the Tami show originate?

Binder: basically, the TAMI show originated with a guy named Bill Sargeant. Sargeant was a flamboyant, Texan producer who was partnered with Oliver Unger, who was a film entrepreneur, I think he owned Commonwealth-United, an old film distribution company. And a guy named Bill Roden, who had brought a prize fighter from Sweden to American ,a guy named [inaudible].... it was a very unlikely trio, but they were film promoters, so to speak, and Sargeant came to me, trying to think how we actually met, I think over the same time frame the NAACP was having some kind of an anniversary, and they wanted to put together a big fund raising national tribute. So, a producer named Bob Banner, who came out of television in the early days, with Dinah Shore and Perry Como, I guess, produced the New York version, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were on fire. They had just gotten married, and they were the hot hot, front page story of the day. So, Bob got them to basically perform in an hour version in New York, and then the three of them came to me and said, would you do the West Coast version? So, I got Burt Lancaster, Nat Cole, and a whole slew of stars--it was Bill Cosby’s first appearance, I think, on film--and we did an hour basically variety show on the West Coast, y’know, Bob Banner did the East Coast coast show, and then they combined them together in this two hour closed circuit film extravaganza. And then, out of that, y’know, Bill Sargeant came to me and said, I want to do--I invented--somehow, he was involved in a thing I think called electronovision, which was basically--you know, television had just kind of discovered video tape, and so, before that, in order to record shows that weren’t on 35 millimeter film, or 16 millimeter, they went to what they called kinescope. So Bill Sargeant and a guy named Joseph Bluffe, who was an engineering expert, continued on in their research with this kinescope, which was basically filming electronic images. And they realized that on a small screen, there was no problem, but once you blow it up on a big screen--and I don’t want to get too technical, I don’t know too much about it myself anyway--but the way we receive television pictures through the air is through vertical and horizontal lines, and I think the American system at that time, I guess it is the standard to this day, before HDTV came in, is something like 525 lines to create this electronic picture. And those guys continued to try to add more lines to give more quality to the picture as it gets blown up on the screen. So basically, electronovision was, at the time, almost double the original 525 lines, and there was absolutely no problem when it came to close ups on the screen, but when it came to long shots, you could sort of see the quality start disintegrating, y’know, because of the spaces between the lines. So, with this new advent of being able to use electronic cameras to film things, Bill came to me and said, you know, he had an idea to do, I think what he wanted to do originally, had to do with his relationship with Richard Burton. Burton, I guess, always wanted to do Hamlet on film, so Sargeant talked him into doing Hamlet on electronovision, and they filmed it in New York right after the NAACP special that we all did, and Burton had total control over distribution, and evidently there’s a great story behind that story which I wasn’t a party to, bu I think Burton, when was alive, and his estate had the film, pulled the film and never let it be seen again. But it was a huge success. The film came out, it played for like 14 days, and it made a lot of money. So whatever the technical critique of it was, in any of the negative sense, it was made up more than enough by Burton’s performance. The film critics all over the country loved Burton in Hamlet. And then Sargeant, because of its success, needed a follow up for it. By that time, he was on a roll, because by that time, Warner Brothers and Jack Warner had taken an add out in Variety and Reporter and so forth,you know, saying electronovision was the greatest invention since sound, or something. Everybody was curious, especially critics, about what was electronovision. So, I was at the time directing the Late Night Show for Steve Allen, for Westinghouse, 90 minutes, 5 nights a week. And Bill said, I have this, y’know, what can we do? I’ve got these kind of packages I bought out of England, which includes Gerry & The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, and--I’d have to think of the cast list of the TAMI, look it up--