The American Vein: Directors and Directions in Television

New York: E.P. Dutton. Very Good+. 1979. First Paperback Edition. Softcover. [modest edgewear to covers, light soiling to bottom edge, slight bending at lower corners of last few pages and very slight curling in rear cover]. Trade PB A groundbreaking work in TV history, thsi was the "first comprehensive work to consider films that have been made especially for the small screen, either as TV movies or as series segments." Quite blatantly modeled after Andrew Sarris's "The American Cinema," it places the 280 directors discussed into categories based on "their importance, their fame, and their achievement." The upper echelon -- equivalent to Sarris's "Pantheon" -- is dubbed "Kings of the Stardust Ballroom," and the lesser categories include "I Also Do the Catering" and "How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?". (My favorite is "Elephants' Graveyard," which focuses on the television work of once-prominent feature film directors such as Jack Arnold, John Brahm, Stuart Heisler, Tay Garnett, Jacques Tourneur, etc.) It may be hard to comprehend in the age of ImDB and Wikipedia, but back in the 1970s it was next to impossible to even nail down basic credits for individual TV directors, and in that respect alone this is probably a book that launched hundreds of "subjects for further research." .