Rare footage of Johnny Carson's early Tonight Show episodes from the 1960s was discovered in the archives of the American Forces Network Broadcast Center in Riverside, California. The 8mm film reel, which should have been destroyed decades ago, contains portions of shows from before 1972 when very little footage was preserved. Johnny Carson's nephew and president of Carson Entertainment Group, Jeff Sotzing, was excited to receive the film as it depicts a period of the show they previously had no footage from and shows Carson and guests smoking and drinking on set. The film will be converted to a digital format and made available through Carson Entertainment Group.

1. Press-Enterprise: Rare Johnny Carson footage found
Wed Oct 03, 2012 11:11 am
RIVERSIDE: Rare Johnny Carson footage found
Archivists at the American Forces Network Broadcast Center in Riverside stumble on pre-1972
footage, likely the only film left
BY MARK MUCKENFUSS
STAFF WRITER
mmuckenfuss(at)pe.com
Published: 02 October 2012 03:40 PM
Somebody didn’t do their job. And Jeff Sotzing couldn’t be happier.
A kinescope film can, full of early footage of the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, should
have been destroyed decades ago. Instead, the film can — containing portions of shows long
thought lost — was found recently in the archives of the American Forces Network Broadcast
Center in Riverside.
On Monday, Oct. 1, on the 50th anniversary of Carson’s first appearance on the “Tonight Show,”
officials at the broadcast center turned the film over to Sotzing, Carson’s nephew and president
of Carson Entertainment Group.
“Johnny would appreciate it,” Sotzing said, accepting the film. “He would be thrilled.”
Very little material exists from the “Tonight Show” episodes earlier than 1972. The show was
recorded on tape, and because those tapes cost $100 apiece in those days, they were routinely
taped over, Sotzing said. It wasn’t until Carson wanted to do a retrospective show in 1972 that he
found out there was almost nothing to draw from.
From that point on, Sotzing said, Carson insisted that the tapes of his shows be preserved.
As a portion of the kinescope film fed through a table-top console, Sotzing stood smiling,
shaking his head. Black-and-white images of Carson and what appeared to be a young Jimmy
Breslin appeared on a small video screen. The audio was scratchy but discernable.
“Look,” he said, “They’re all smoking and drinking. It’s crazy. I know that we don’t have this.
I’ve never see this before.”
Mary Carnes, a program support manager, was the person who stumbled on the film in mid-June.
She was close to retirement and had been asked to go through some old boxes of archived
material to see if there was anything worth keeping.

2. “My stomach dropped with I saw the title on the can,” Carnes said. “I knew it was something
special.”
She took it to the center’s archivist, Pedro Loureiro.
“My eyes popped open,” Loureiro said. “These are the finds that make my work fulfilling.”
But he knew he couldn’t keep it.
The broadcast center is a conduit for television and radio programming that is fed to U.S.
military troops and their families around the world. An array of satellite dishes surrounds the
facility, which beams a mix of network and Pentagon programming to 1 million viewers in 175
countries.
“This is the biggest broadcast operation in the world,” said Lawrence Sichter, spokesman for the
center.
But the military has no rights to the material it broadcasts. With digital transfers today, that’s less
of a logistical problem. But in earlier years the center had to deal with video and audio tapes,
even vinyl records. Once it was finished with the material, it either had to be returned to the
networks it came from, or destroyed.
The broadcast center also houses the operations of the Defense Media Center, which processes
material from Combat Camera operations around the world. That material is housed in an
archive room that looks like an updated version of the warehouse scene at the end of “Raiders of
the Lost Ark.”
Instead of wooden crates, 30-foot-high stacks of metal boxes stretch toward a distant wall in the
climate-controlled vault. It was in one of these that the film can was found.
“We think this was an assembly of monologues that was sent to our affiliates for filler material,”
Sichter said.
Since the military network deletes commercials from the shows it broadcasts, there would be a
gap between the end of one show and the start of the next. Clips, such as those on the reel, were
used to fill that space.
“Someone along the line thought this was significant to preserve and put it in the archives,”
Sichter said. “And all these years later, we found it.”
Sotzing said the kinescope reel would be transferred into a digital format and made available
through his company.
“This is great stuff,” he said, “It should be available. It’s historically significant because it’s a
very clear representation of what the show was like in that period. We only need about 1,000
more of these.”

3. He told Sichter he would reward anyone with other such material with two roundtrip tickets to
New York.
“All we have to do,” he said, “is find someone else who didn’t do their job.”
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com