Welcome to what could be the first edition of SNAPSHOTS – the segment in which we talk to the people who helped shape the entertainment world. On this edition of SNAPSHOTS, it’s not every day that you have a conversation with someone who made such an impact on your life that you pursue a dream because of them.
As a young boy growing up in the DMV, I loved watching the local news. The NBC affiliate WRC-TV had the ultimate dream team back in the 80s including today’s guest.
He reported on movies, theatre, and entertainment in DC and nationally since the 1970s. The Washington Post calls him a “local legend.” His career includes 32 years at NBC and NBC4 , as well as eight years with ABC affiliate WJLA 7 and sister station News Channel 8. His movie and entertainment reports continue as co-host of “At the Movies with Arch and Ann,” a weekly podcast with Washington Post lead film critic Ann Hornaday.
Now, he recalls the “Happy Talk” days of local television news, when stations discovered the value of assembling a news “team” in his new book “The Accidental Critic” and for our fellow Washingtonians, you can see him give a talk about his book at DC’s premier independent bookstore Politics & Prose this Sunday, February 2nd at Connecticut Avenue store at 5:00pm.
My friends, it’s with the greatest honor that I get to talk with one of my idols, the legendary, the amazing Arch Campbell!
Thank you so much for having me. You’ve it’s always been such a pleasure to run into you. You’ve always got a smile, and a good word, and this is very kind of you. I’m an old guy. Now I’ve been retired, and for the past few years, I’ve been writing a memoir, and it’s an oral history of television news from the 70s until the internet age.
Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned, a crew and a couple of my friends said that this was a book I could not afford to put down because it delved into the history of Washington News before I was born. I was reading one of the chapters and saw some of the old names clicked. I remember Davey (Marlin-Jones), Maureen (Bunyan), Gordon (Peterson), and Max (Robinson). I remember Jim (Vance). It felt like a time machine and a history lesson for anybody who grew up in Washington but watched these legendary reporters, anchormen who filled our news waves over the last few decades, or so.
Well, I call my book “The Accidental Critic”, because it starts in 1973 when I was working in a newsroom in Dallas, and our new boss stormed into the office, into the newsroom, and said, “I want a movie reviewer who wants to do it”, the place went silent. So, I raised my hand and said, “I’ll do it”. And a new movie had opened that weekend, “American Graffiti”. That was the first movie I ever reviewed on television, 1973 more than 50 years ago, and that is how I got to be a movie reviewer.
I was working in television news. I was the feature guy. I did the funny stories at the end of the news. I got this gig reviewing movies, and that’s what got me to Washington, the feature stories. And then after a time of struggle in the 70s, movies became very prominent here, partly because of the premiere night of “Star Trek” the first film, they had the premiere here to tie in with Smithsonian. And I went out and covered it, and the people I worked for Channel 4 said, “Well, you used to review movies down there in Texas, right?” I said, “Yeah, I did.” He said, “Well, why don’t you start doing it again?” And here we are, all these years later.
That is amazing, especially since you mentioned “Star Trek” because as you see right here, there’s a Star Trek Voyager plaque behind me. I’m a huge Star Trek fan, and I could not believe it when I read about that premiere in Washington, DC at the MacArthur Theater, which is no longer here.
Right, And it was so early in the premiere days that nobody set up a press line or anything. We were just all standing around there with our cameras. Somebody would show up, we would rush them. There was this big scrim of people around Leonard Nimoy and the other stars. And later, things changed.
The thing I miss most of all is the days of the Uptown Theater, which held so many premieres, there’d be one every month, and celebrities and stars. And now, to drive by and see the Uptown empty is something that makes me sad, but it also reminds me of how much great stuff happened there. The Uptown hosted Kevin Costner’s first print of “Dances with Wolves”, and the people who were in charge of the premiere got a hold of the projectionist. And you know, these were the days when film was projected with this extremely hot bulb onto a screen hundreds of feet away. Everything’s digital now. They said you got to put a new projection bulb in there. And the guy said, “No, no, if you do that, it might blow out because they take some time to get to track in.” They said, “No, no, we want a new bulb.”
So they put the new bulb in. The premiere starts, they interview and then introduce “Dances with Wolves”. And sure enough, the bulb blew out on the third reel. The middle of the premiere stops. Costner and all the executives run upstairs. This poor guy is trying to change a hot projection bulb. He gets the new bulb in. They start back up again. He’s put the wrong reel. I have a chapter called “The Worst Premiere of the Best Movie.” Yes because it went on to win the Oscar, but that premiere night was a disaster.
So, I wanted to put together a collection of stories about those days starting with that, the kind of the era where we would try anything, where the boss would come in and say, “Who wants to be the movie reviewer?” And now things are very different, especially in television, and that’s because of streaming, the Internet, COVID and the passage of time. I’m not saying that we were better back then. I’m just saying that times were different and I am also giving you a little backstage peek at some of the things that went on.
The heart of my book is the friendship between me, Jim Vance, Doreen Gentzler, Bob Ryan and George Michael. And not only you know, a lot of people retire from television having worked there, Bill like been the anchor 20 years or something. We were put together as a team and stayed as a team for almost 30 years. And that’s that was the unusual secret sauce of Channel 4. The thing that made us unique over probably most of the other TV stations in America,
You’re right. You’re giving me a lot that there were so many things I wanted to talk to you about. And the first thing I want to ask you is I read in your book that you had a teacher back in high school who inspired you to pursue a career in radio & television. Tell us about your teacher that inspired you.
I had two teachers at high school. One was a speech teacher who encouraged and taught me how to get up and give a speech. She’s the one at the end of the year who said, “You have the gift of gab”, which is not a phrase used much these days, but she says you ought to go into radio. The other teacher was the drama teacher. A friend and I decided to try out for the talent show. We did a little two-man, back-and-forth comedy act. She calls us out into the audience, gets up, and says, “Boys, you stink. You’re not going to be in my talent show”. But then turned to me and said, “You, I want you to emcee my talent show.”
Suddenly, both teachers got together. They changed my schedule; I started meeting with this teacher and a group of kids every morning and wrote the script. It was like being on a show in L.A. I mean, we were it was like the writers’ room. I was 17 years old, experiencing this and it sent me on the path I wanted to go. And that one teacher told me to go into radio. The other teacher, the dramatic teacher, moved to a community college to teach radio and television. I thought, “I’m going with her”. Incidentally, I’m a fan of community colleges for that. For that reason, I went to San Antonio Junior College for two years, and then I went on to the University of Texas and got a degree, then I stayed for another, but the community college is the thing that gave me the base I needed. So those two teachers are the reason for it all, and I stayed in touch with them for the rest of their lives.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the things I love about your book is the history it presents, especially the DC news teams when it started. When I read the names, it clicked that these were the people from whom I learned about the world of news. Now that you have transitioned from WFAA-TV in Dallas to WRC-TV in DC, what were your initial impressions of going from one of the top 10 markets to one of the bigger media markets in the country?
I didn’t particularly want to go, my wife did. I could have stayed in Texas the rest of my life, because that’s where I grew up, and the station where I worked was beginning to find itself and getting on a roll. When I came up to Washington, it didn’t compare. It wasn’t as loose and easy as the place I had come from. Gradually, Channel 4 struggled all during the 70s. They went through a lot of people. They made a lot of wrong decisions. Well. What was so encouraging and satisfying was, after six years of struggle, suddenly, a great general manager came in and began to say, “We can compete”. We can win the television news race if we compete as a team, and the idea of a team took hold.
So he’s the one who found George Michael and Bob Ryan. He put George, Bob and Jim on the 6 and the 11 o’clock news. He called me in and said, “I want you on the end of the news every night, six and 11”. I said, “Gee, well, how am I going to do that?” And the guy I work for said, “Review movies, go to the theater. Do your feature stories I had done, like, funny stories.” There are a lot of stories in there about some of the things I did. At one point, I trained a miniature pig as a pet because it had been invented for scientists, and then they decided they didn’t want to deal with it. My boss told me to “get one”, and that was a long-running series, “Spot the Pig.”
When he put us together, we stayed together. And once we got together, we all supported each other. I think the thing that made Channel 4 unique was doing news, weather, and sports, and then also including entertainment every night. Then, after my segment, Johnny Carson. Those were the days when people would turn on their TV and not change the channel, and we were a great lead into those days. Now, that doesn’t go on so much because of streaming, but that was our world back then.
And it was such a great world in that, I remember back in the day, when I was a very young….
I know where you’re going,
Channel 4 had the amazing “We’re the Team” campaign.
Courtesy of NW Directions
Those commercials show up on YouTube now, and people are looking at them again. We would go out. We did these commercials “We’re the team”. Doing the commercials is one of the things that made us a team. There was one where we were playing football. There was one where we were in the kitchen cooking crabs or something. The pinnacle was they put us all out on a sailboat in the Chesapeake Bay, and we all stayed overnight with our spouses. We still talk about that.
The other people at the other stations said “They’re selling you guys like a can of beer”, and of course, they were. But the point is, it worked. It became a team, and there’s nothing you know. Television stations back then were full of people with gigantic egos, and we were able to get past our egos and support each other. I think that’s what you see every night. You saw support. I would get on the very end, and then I’d say something you’d hear, which is just the best sound in the world. The team idea is what made us what we were.
Absolutely and when you hear the laugh from Jim Vance, I know you’re having a good time.
Be sure to look out for Part II of my interview with Arch Campbell on Wednesday, January 29th!
In the meantime, dont forget this Sunday you can meet Arch along with his News4 colleague Doreen Gentzler as they talk about his new book, “The Accidental Critic” at Politics * Prose at 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in DC. Click HERE for more details!
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