KHOU-TV Film Collection

Part 9 of 14: January - July 1971

Scope and Content Note

The material in this collection represents the accumulation of films used in the presentation of Channel 11 news shows for the period 1960-1975. A minor part of the collection consists of feature material as opposed to general news. In total, the collection contains over 13,000 individual items.

The subject matter focuses mainly on news events in the Channel 11 viewing area, roughly a 100-mile radius centered around Houston. To a lesser extent there is coverage of state and national news. The vast majority of the coverage was filmed within the city of Houston.

The news mix broadly includes crime, disasters, politics, government, and other community activities. Weather and sports are included to the extent that they are a part of a story which justified on-the-spot coverage by a film crew and reporter. The daily studio reporting of weather and sports is not included.

Individual news stories range in length from about 30 seconds to several minutes. Feature material on human-interest subjects is generally longer. Several specials of a documentary nature are over an hour in length.

Although the collection is extensive, the prospective user needs to understand that it is incomplete in several respects. There are gaps in the dates for which stories are available, which interrupt the comprehensiveness of daily coverage. Days, weeks, and even entire months are sometimes skipped. The early years of the 1960's are very sketchy, and the year 1973 is almost totally absent.

Another form of incompleteness exists in the lack of the remarks to a news item supplied by the anchor person in the traditional format of a television news show. Neither the sound track or the film visual contain on-camera anchor material. Also missing is the anchor voice-over that describes action while the viewer watches a segment of previously recorded film.

What remains is a series of film clips literally spliced together end-to-end without the benefit of the transitional commentary supplied by the anchor. This eliminates introductory summaries as well as entire news stories narrated live by the anchor during a broadcast.

The physical condition of the films range from excellent to very poor.

The film reels in the collection are each stored in individual boxes. Each box has a number; in most cases, the first 2 digits of the box number indicate the year the film it contains was created, and the second two digits indicate the sequence the box is in for that year. Thus, box 6703 is the third box containing material from 1967. Within each box, each reel is numbered. Individual film clips are spliced together on each reel. Whenever possible, the date the the clips aired is included; sometimes, only partial dates are given. In a few cases, no date is available. The titles that have been assigned to each film clip were created by people working at KHOU-TV, probably the camera operators or editors. In many cases, they are not very descriptive of what is actually on the film, and actually tell more about the biases of those working at the station.

In some places, the titles of the films, or portions of the titles, were illegible to the processors. This is noted in the finding aid by the presence of brackets []. In some places, the processors were not sure of what the words were, but attempted to interpret them; in these cases, the words they tried to decipher are in brackets. In other cases, a question mark appears within brackets following parts of a title, indicating that they were not sure of what the title actually was.

Restrictions

Access Restrictions:

None

Use Restrictions:

Written permission from KHOU-TV is required for any copying and broadcasting of film.

Related Material

Administrative Information

Donated By:

KHOU-TV

Processed By:

Frank Gregg, Milton Johnson, 1989

 Additional Note 

The titles to the films were created by staff at KHOU-TV, most likely the camera operators or the editors working at the station. The titles were not intended to provide long-term access to the film; this is a reflection of the news business, in which the focus is on constantly finding new news stories, while old clips were stored and generally forgotten about. Thus, the titles may or may not accurately reflect what is actually on the film.

Occasionally, the titles given to film clips have a flippant or disrespectful tone. While staff at the station were very professional in how they persented the news to the public, their internal documents at times reflect a different, irreverent attitude on their part. Thus, for example, a story about Houston Mayor Fred Hofheinz was titled "Mayor Fred", while another film was given the title "D.O.A. Bullshit Film".

Another dimension of the collection is apparent through the use of offensive language in some of the titles; specifically, racial and ethnic slurs and derogatory terms for certain groups of people were occasionally used in the titles. While only a tiny fraction of the film titles in the collection actually have such language (8 titles out of approximately 14,000 in the collection have been found to contain derogatory language), this is reflection of the makeup of the staff of the news department at the time the films were made.

When viewed in isolation within the body of the finding aid, without any sort of explanatory note, patrons could find such language distracting. In light of this, HMRC staff changed the titles of this small handful of films to prevent any misunderstandings. So as not to lose this dimension to the collection, however, the original titles of the films are listed here:

Detailed Description of the Collection