EMERGENCY! : Watch the budget

[johnbasalla]

I read that one of the reasons that the NBC series "EMERGENCY!" had some segments done in the hospital is that those parts were significantly cheaper to shoot then many of the rescues the Paramedics performed. Overall, I think it helped the show quality wise to as it gave the drama added diversity instead of one rescue after another. However, it appears to me that episodes that spend much of their time on the hospital sets were budget conscious episodes. I saw one very recently where the bulk of the show was in the hospital. Add to that that there were no fires to fight on this episode, and one of the 3 rescues occurred conveniently on a soundstage of a movie studio, it all added up to being purposely easy on the budget.

I know that Jack Webb endeavored to humanize police, fire fighters and the like, but I couldn't help thinking that the "Emergency!" episode where the entire last act was a basketball game done in a small gym between two fire departments was, maybe , partially done as a budget conscious effort.

I wonder if the writers were occasionally told to come up with episodes that, let's say, wouldn't 'break the bank'.

 

[vjm]

I read that one of the reasons that the NBC series "EMERGENCY!" had some segments done in the hospital is that those parts were significantly cheaper to shoot then many of the rescues the Paramedics performed. Overall, I think it helped the show quality wise to as it gave the drama added diversity instead of one rescue after another. However, it appears to me that episodes that spend much of their time on the hospital sets were budget conscious episodes. I saw one very recently where the bulk of the show was in the hospital. Add to that that there were no fires to fight on this episode, and one of the 3 rescues occurred conveniently on a soundstage of a movie studio, it all added up to being purposely easy on the budget.

I know that Jack Webb endeavored to humanize police, fire fighters and the like, but I couldn't help thinking that the "Emergency!" episode where the entire last act was a basketball game done in a small gym between two fire departments was, maybe , partially done as a budget conscious effort.

I wonder if the writers were occasionally told to come up with episodes that, let's say, wouldn't 'break the bank'.

I don't know if it was bugetary as much as being realistic.

Paramedics don't have spectacular rescues every day...a lot of the time it's average, mundane stuff.

And they do have lives outside the job, so stuff like the basketball game, or shooting the breeze at the hospital with the nurses is within the realm of reality for paramedics

 

[michael hagerty]

Rule 1: If Jack Webb was producing, everything was budgetary.

While Jack genuinely respected what we now call first responders, a major motivator for him was that the characters wore uniforms, and thus didn't require a wardrobe.

Even his plainclothes show, Dragnet, had himself and Harry Morgan wearing the same outfits every episode for three seasons. Not only did they save on initial outlay, but it enabled Jack to set a day aside at the beginning of production to shoot himself and Harry walking down hallways, in and out of offices, businesses, homes, getting in and out of their car...all of which was used for the next three years in different episodes. Same with shots of them driving around L.A. Instead of a weekly location budget, he had a two-day location budget. Everything else was on a soundstage.

He couldn't be quite that stingy with location shoots and have Adam-12 or Emergency work, but Webb was never going to blow half a day on a location shoot for 90 seconds of dialog if the characters could say the same words when they got back to headquarters or the hospital.

 

[BD Sullivan]

Dragnet had plenty of episodes that ONLY took place in a single room with one guest star, the better to keep costs down to the absolute minimum.

 

[landtuna]

In my 30+ year career in IT I never had a project that wasn't constrained by budget. A business that does not budget is bound for failure no matter what business it is in. We've all read about motion picture studios that broke the bank not watching their cash flow and debt.

Not only it is responsible (in regards to Jack Webb) but it was mandatory as the big syndicated bucks were not available back in those days. And it did show that quality programming could be done fiscally responsibly.

 

[johnbasalla]

On "Emergency!" it seemed to me that there were a good number of intricate shoots. The fires were usually done very well. While acknowleding that I have not seen every episode, I can only recall one time that I could tell that there was fake smoke added in post production on one of the fires. On most rescues, the mixing of location and studio footage was quite seemless and believable. One exception was the episode I mentioned that spent most of the time on the hospital sets. The final rescue was of a boy trapped in a portion of an abandoned building likely to collapse. They had the outdoor long shots of what was probably a street and building on the Universal lot. The medium range shots of the specific area outside of where the boy was stuck looked like a cheap soundstage facade set. Inside the building looked more realistic.

 

[RadioMan203]

If I'm not mistaken I think I saw a documentary on Jack Webb a long time ago on C-band satellite that explained the budget concerns along with a great deal of Jack's life. I didn't have a VTR/VCR back then or else I would have rolled on it. It was well done and covered quite a bit of the shows like Emergency and other shows he and his production arm, Mark VII Limited, had their hands in.