Two - Assembling Victory's Production Team, Preparing an Episode

Summary

Having received the Navy's cooperation and a production budget from NBC, Henry Salomon selected his Victory staff, subject to Robert Sarnoff's approval. Nearly all were military veterans, with the eldest, Robert Russell Bennett, included by virtue of his WWI service. A good many were Harvard graduates, some known to Salomon since his campus days, and the unit took shape in spring and summer 1951, as did its working methods. Though Salomon's outlines for series coverage would be periodically revised, the wild-card variable was always available WWII film. As Victory's director M. Clay Adams later explained, “I continually kept pressing Pete Salomon, trying to make him understand that in documentary film making everything must stem from the pictorial material, and not the other way around.”

Captain Walter Karig, the Navy's Special Deputy of Information, served Salomon as Victory's technical advisor. Though Karig (1898–1956) contributed little to the series’ scripts directly, he was a seasoned writer. He had just completed the fifth of his Battle Report studies of WWII which joined the HUSNO histories in becoming Victory's fundamental references. Among Karig's wide-ranging 1930s–50s publications were novels and non-fiction military studies, while his later-revealed prewar ghostwriting had included Nancy Drew, Perry Pierce, and Doris Force volumes.

One of Salomon's earliest hires, in April 1951, was editor Isaac Kleinerman (1916–2004). While studying at New York's City College, Kleinerman had worked with a small film-production firm doing photography, film editing, and sound work. During the war, he served at the Army Signal Corps Photographic Center at Astoria, Long Island, editing training films. Kleinerman later worked at the Pentagon and then edited films for the Army Ordinance Branch. After the war, several years at RKO-Pathe in New York preceded Salomon's job offer: “it seemed like the greatest possible chance for television… . the case was so exciting I could hardly wait to get home to tell my wife.”

The same month, Salomon lobbied NBC to hire Hollywood veteran Thomas J. Andre as his associate producer. Salmon had gained plenty of writing and media experience with The Victory Hour, but wasn't an experienced film maker—thus his enthusiasm for Andre who, Salomon wrote, had “worked on many of the finest motion pictures and is used to coping with large production problems.”