20/20 Vision

Toward the end of an otherwise dreary season, two programs last week intelligently explored the past, and by extension, the imagination. Both were produced by one man, Donald Hyatt, 36, who heads NBC's consistently effective Project Twenty (past achievements: Meet Mr. Lincoln, The Coming of Christ). Hyatt knows that the movie camera, which is almost automatically taking over TV, is not necessarily TV's best instrument, and he can get effects out of photographs that make a lot of film footage seem at once overexcited and dull.

The great advantage of Hyatt's technique, as he demonstrated in last week's The Real West, is that it allows time for thought. Says he: "You can stop and pick out things. You can look deep in someone's eyes and say what he said." Aided by Gary Cooper's relaxed narration of a fine script, the program looked deep into the eyes of settlers, cowboys. Indians, Westerners of all conditions. With sure irony, it demolished the legends perpetuated on endless TV westerns as it showed the fabled desperadoes as greasy punks, the heroic sheriffs as smalltime officeholders, and the beautiful dance-hall girls a lot uglier than sin. It recalled the West's real life as well as its real death; one memorable picture showed a corpse so riddled with bullets that it looked--making the Bat Masterson kind of tough talk come true--like a sieve. Ranging over more than 300 still pictures, the TV camera showed the hardships of the "unmarried, unchurched, and unwashed'' miners, the dust and sweat of the cattle drives, the tragedy of the Indians, who fell, inevitably, to the restless, driving people that had lassoed the future.

The night before, Project Twenty presented The Story of Will Rogers, a man who found that future only slightly more orderly than the old West, considerably more baffling, and livable only with the help of humor. Originally, Producer Hyatt planned the Rogers show also as an animated photograph album, then found reels of dusty film of Will and could not resist using them, interspersed with stills. Narrated by Bob Hope, the show presented too little of the private Rogers, but seeing and hearing the old routines gave the audience a fascinating chance to compare the sharp, nervous, political humor of the present vith those slow, drawled lines ("The U.S. never lost a war or won a conference," "If they really want to honor the boys, why don't they let them sit in the stands and have the people march by?") that today are no longer jokes but honored marble cliches ranking second only to Lincoln's.

At times the show seemed to follow not so much the logic of Rogers' life as the available films. But most of it was a splendid recollection of the man who could say of himself, in Ogden Nash's version:

I worked with gun and grin and lariat

To entertain the proletariat,

And with my Oklahomely wit

I brightened up the earth a bit.

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