Mark Villano - Insight, the Series--A Hollywood Priests Groundbreaking Contribution to Television History

INSIGHT 2022 Mark A. Villano All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored, and/or copied electronically (except for academic use as a source), nor transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and/or author. Published in the United States of America by: BearManor Media 4700 Millenia Blvd.
Suite 175 PMB 90497
Orlando, FL 32839 bearmanormedia.com Printed in the United States. Typesetting and layout by BearManor Media ISBN978-1-62933-902-3 ContentsAcknowledgements Compiling the list of episodes, relevant data, and production photos for the twenty-three-year history of Insight was only possible because of the support of the staff at Paulist Productions. Im grateful to Michael Sullivan, President at Paulist Productions, Fr.

Tom Gibbons, C.S.P., Vice President, and David Moore, Director of Development and Production. All pictures are from the Paulist Productions collection, and most of the quotes presented in the episode section are from interviews conducted by Fr. Tom Gibbons or the author. Others are excerpted from Television Academy Foundation interviews. Completion of the filmography could not have proceeded without the assistance of Mark Quigley, the John H. Mitchell Television Curator at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

His interest in preserving Insight has been vital in making the series accessible to future viewers and researchers. The Archives online catalogue was a significant research resource for this project. Im happy that Pierre Patrick and Ben Ohmart of Bear Manor Media agreed that Insight deserves a book. The ongoing mission of Paulist Productions is the true legacy of Fr. Ellwood (Bud) Kieser, C.S.P., who founded the company in 1960, and who died on December 16, 2000, at the age of 71. His many co-workers over the years were a foundational support for his vision.

These include longtime collaborators like Joseph Connelly, Jack Shea, Jane Murray, John Furia, John Meredyth Lucas, Lan OKun, Terry Sweeney, Judy Greening, and Mike Rhodes. I especially want to recognize Fr. Buds Paulist brothers who joined him in this work, before and after his death: Jack Mulhall, C.S.P., Tom Hollahan, C.S.P., Gregory Apparcel, C.S.P., Frank Desiderio, C.S.P., Eric Andrews, C.S.P., Thomas Gibbons, C.S.P. Foreword If St. Clare of Assisi is the patron saint of television, Fr. Ellwood Kieser is the patron saint of 4 AM televisionthe lonely, mostly pre-24-hour cable, predawn broadcast landscape, once populated by a captive audience of barflies, insomniacs, and the dispossessed and distressed.

Such non-Nielsen, way-past primetime viewers were Fr. Kiesers cathode-ray tube parishioners, and I became one of them by a chance flip of the TV dial. Fr. Kieser, a.k.a., the Hollywood Priest, launched his long-running syndicated religious series Insight in 1960, the same year CBS acclaimed anthology drama Playhouse 90 ceased production, symbolically marking the end of the golden age of television. Over the following decades, however, Fr. Kieser would keep the once-venerated television anthology genre alive with Insighthosting, producing, and occasionally writing his outr humanist series that had more in common with The Twilight Zone than a Sunday morning TV sermon.

Unfortunately, after several brief but successful forays into primetime, by the latter half of the 1970s and onward, Fr. Kiesers experimentally minded, low-budget Insight series was mainly relegated to the wee hours of the Sunday morning programming ghetto, alongside other broadcast ephemera nearing extinction, such as test patterns and national anthem sign-offs. Within this twilight television netherworld, my involvement with the Insight series began. In the winter of 1994, jolted awake at an ungodly hour by an unnerving aftershock to Californias severe Northridge earthquake, I turned to my television for the reassuring local omniscience of Channel 7s Eyewitness News. Surprisingly, I found instead an eerie, obviously vintage teledrama featuring familiar actor Brian Keith hulking around a sparsely decorated set, devastated that his estranged sons bad LSD trip may have contributed to a tragic murder. The series was Insight.

The episode, The Sandalmaker (1968), was complex in its social issue messaging and overtly grim tone its 4 AM broadcast slot unsettling yet somehow appropriate given the storys gravitas. Fast forward: working as a moving image archivist nearly a decade after my chance encounter with the hauntingly compelling Sandalmaker, professional curiosity (compounded by an absence of detailed reference resources) prompted me to cold-call Paulist Productions, the company behind Insight, to inquire as to the fate of their ambitious series, which by 2003 had been driven from the airwaves altogether by all-night infomercials. To my surprise, the kind staff at Paulist headquarters indicated that Insight holdings did survive, though entombed in the unlikeliest of placesthe dank recesses of film director Roland Wests infamous, historic oceanfront property on the Pacific Coast Highway. On that fateful site in 1935, under suspicious circumstances, Wests lover and business partner, screen star Thelma Todd (a.k.a. Hot Toddy, featured with the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers) was found in the garage, slumped over the steering wheel of her convertible, dead at age thirty. The storied Pacific Palisades, California building with a dark past ultimately found its way to the Paulists via Wests second wife, actress Lola Lane of the singing Lane Sisters (and costar alongside Bette Davis in 1937s Marked Woman).

After remarrying and converting to Catholicism, Lane and her husband Robert Hanlon became taken with Fr. Kieser. They allowed the priest to utilize the ground floor for production offices, eventually selling the entire property to the Paulists at a fraction of market cost. The irony of the site of Todds scandalous death as the setting for a religious TV production company was not lost on the notoriously resourceful Fr. Kieser, who only half-jokingly told a reporter that the Paulists exorcised the place before we moved in. After decades in television production, the Paulists adapted several sections of the humid underbelly of Todds former haunt for storage of their master and circulation film and tape elements.

Through these dark, damp, expansive catacombs, a Paulist Productions staff member led UCLAs Television Archivist Dan Einstein and me to the Holy Grailhundreds of kinescopes and videoreels of Insight. Our first assessment of the find brought both relief and concern. On the positive side, Paulist staff and volunteers had done an admirable job of shelving and organizing many of the legacy holdingsrow after row of rusty 16mm cans and weathered but sturdy 1-and 2-inch videoreel cases. More worrisome was the lack of suitability of the physical spacedusty, balmy, with exposed pipes snaking through the basement area and a saggy, water-stained ceiling overhead. Only a small home-use dehumidifier chugged away in a corner for environmental control. Thankfully, our initial inspection of the films and magnetic media revealed no signs of mold or other severe condition issues. As befits a religious nonprofit, these improvised vault spaces were the only fiscal option available to the Paulists for their collections substantial storage needs.