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  • The Lost Studio of Atlantis: Norman Bel Geddes’s Failed Revolution in Television Form
  • Joshua Gleich (bio)

My approach to the technique of staging television programs is so direct that it completely bypasses the whole subject of scene shifters and the stage crew. It can be the major contribution of my life with your support.

—Norman Bel Geddes, proposed letter to NBC, 4 July 1953

Through the 1940s and 1950s, industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes helped to modernize myriad industries such as automobiles, frozen food, Broadway, and cinema.1 He never realized his ambitious designs to revolutionize television, the defining media industry of the 1950s. Employed as an NBC consultant between 1951 and 1956, Bel Geddes designed three studio prototypes: Atlantis, the Pilot Studio, and the Horizontal Studio. The scale of these facilities was monumental, particularly for downtown Manhattan, where the first two studios would be built. Atlantis would house the fourteen largest theaters in America, while the Pilot Studio would approach the size of Madison Square Garden (Bel Geddes, Atlantis 4, Pilot 43).

While Bel Geddes developed his top secret Atlantis studio for NBC, CBS began promoting its own new studio: Television City, completed in 1953 in Los Angeles. As Lynn Spigel details in TV by Design, CBS and its architect, Charles Luckman, emphasized modern innovation (121–25), but the actual facilities paled in comparison to Bel Geddes’s designs. NBC executives found the CBS studio quite conventional, lacking nearly all of the ideas expressed in Luckman’s interviews (Bel Geddes, letter to George Gruskin, 26 May 1952). Bel Geddes referred to it as “just short of a joke” (report of meeting, 3 July 1952). If Television City provided a better space for existing production techniques, Bel Geddes’s proposals endeavored to overhaul the entire process and spatial configuration of the television industry. By basing broadcast production on factory line production, Bel Geddes sought to change the fundamental economics and aesthetics of television production. Mechanization would increase the speed and value of productions at a lower cost, allowing NBC to potentially produce almost all of its content in-house. If the classical Hollywood studio system modeled itself organizationally on factory production, Bel Geddes would model his television studios physically and technologically on industrial mass production.

While elements of his designs appear fantastical today, NBC came remarkably close to adopting them. Five executives approved pursuing the Atlantis studio after a secret meeting in Bermuda (Bel Geddes, Atlantis Presentation Book insert). RCA president David Sarnoff approved Bel Geddes’s theater plans for a Pilot Studio in May 1955, and by September Bel Geddes was scouting potential construction sites (Bel Geddes, memo to Weaver, 3 Aug. 1955). These facilities could potentially economize and embellish Pat Weaver’s expensive spectaculars while meeting the daily demands of a growing schedule of live programs. However, by the time Bel Geddes completed his design for a horizontal mega-complex, Weaver had left NBC, and David Sarnoff’s son Robert had taken control of the network.2 NBC began to cut costs, accelerating the move from internally produced live programs to externally produced telefilms (Kepley 47–52). NBC rejected Bel Geddes’s final plans in 1957, ending his six-year engagement as a consultant.

Bel Geddes’s failed aspirations appear to follow the master narrative of 1950s TV critics, who chastised the networks for abandoning prestigious live productions (Boddy 187–208). Yet his detailed plans and regular correspondence with NBC executives and performers reveal far more about changing network ambitions during the tumultuous early era of television.3 NBC wanted to control [End Page 3] the industry not only through centralized broadcasting but also through intensive, in-house live production, attempting to vertically integrate production and distribution. But executives hesitated to build new facilities because they could not anticipate a seemingly limitless future for new program formats and aesthetics. Nor could they commit to basing their studios in New York or Los Angeles. Speculations about the amazing future of television forestalled Bel Geddes’s attempts to build it.

With the transition from Weaver to Robert Sarnoff, NBC shifted its business strategy from experimenting with form and aesthetics to stabilizing program formats and schedules (Gomery 158–62). This...

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