Ernie Kovacs - Lost and Surviving Work

Lost and Surviving Work

Most of Kovacs' early television work was done live and has survived only in the form of a very few short film clips or kinescopes. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, exist only in short videotape segments. After his death, Edie Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a lot of money, but also that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs' shows or literally dumping the kinescopes and videotapes in New York Bay. She succeeded in buying the rights to the surviving footage and tapes with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and with her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. Most of Kovacs' salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections, and there is also some material available at both locations of the Paley Center for Media.

"The first time I was made aware of the willful destruction of videotapes was in 1962, after the sudden death of my husband, Ernie Kovacs. He had been working on two shows for ABC here in Hollywood.

"Three months after his death, several members of his ABC crew came to see me at home and asked if I couldn't do something about the fact that ABC was using the wall of Kovacs's master tapes as used tape to tape over the news, the weather, public service blurbs, or anything, to recoup some of the moneys owed to them by Ernie."

"So, I called up my lawyer and told him to use the modest insurance policy to pay them off and buy back the 12-foot wall of Kovacs' tapes they were "saving money" by using. In all, about 40 hours was there, and by the time it was transferred to my storage facility, only 15 hours of it showed up."

"In the earlier '70's, the Dumont network was being bought by another company, and the lawyers were in heavy negotiation as to who would be responsible for the library of the Dumont shows currently being stored at the facility, who would bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of the copyright renewal, et cetera."

"One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem."

–Edie Adams, National Film Preservation Board testimony, 1996

The 1984 television movie, Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter, helped return Kovacs to the public eye, though the focus was on his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts are still available in a five volume VHS or two disc DVD set (released in 1992 and 2000 respectively); since these are out of print copies usually have to be acquired used. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series, which was narrated by Ernie's close friend Jack Lemmon, was distributed by Kultur Films (formerly White Star Video).

In the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The package included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels airing any of Kovacs' television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.

On April 19, 2011 Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs with over 13 hours of material spanning Kovacs' television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute, 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD.

Ernie Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.