Basking in His Own TV Land

The floor of Charles Schubert’s television production studio at Costa Mesa High School looks pretty much like any other floor.

But as students shuffle in for class, their feet pass within inches of a little-known treasure trove. Carefully stacked in the dusty crawl spaces beneath removable panels lies a rich stash of social history: every episode of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

The sitcom, which ran from 1952 to 1966, was Schubert’s favorite. “It was the values show of all values shows.”

The Nelson family isn’t the only gem under the 56-year-old Schubert’s floor. There are original prints of “One Step Beyond,” “Love That Bob” and “You Bet Your Life,” to name just a few -- all vintage shows. And Schubert has more than just an estimated 4,000 prints. A longtime business partner, whose TV syndication company owns the rights to many of the shows, has given him permission to show them on cable TV.

“I show them because people like me like remembering them,” he says. “I enjoy them more now than I did when I was young.”

Schubert’s interest in television began when he was very young indeed. Growing up in the 1950s, he spent hours arguing with his dad over which of the handful of available channels on the family’s newfangled “picture box” ought to be tuned in.

Finally, in 1961 at age 14, Schubert recalls, “I saved all my money -- from bottle [returns] and newspaper deliveries -- and bought my first black-and-white TV set so I could watch my own programs. It still works, though the tubes are a bit leaky.”

Among the programs he watched were “The Twilight Zone,” “Annie Oakley,” and, of course, “Ozzie and Harriet.” Years later, after beginning his career as a teacher, Schubert also began collecting old films featuring luminaries such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

For a time he hosted an Old Time Movie Club at a local junior high school where he was teaching.

In the early 1970s, two events turned him back toward television: He met Tim Cook, another film and video buff who became a lifelong friend and collaborator, and MGM went out of business.

The two men grabbed up much of that company’s stock of slightly used television programs at $1 to $4 per half-hour episode. Most of them came in the form of actual film reels used in the original broadcasts. But that didn’t give them the right to broadcast the shows.

Over the next several years, Cook formed a company that bought the TV rights to many of the shows.

Surprisingly, Schubert says, those rebroadcast rights are not worth much money because of the relatively small audience for such programming. But what they lack in monetary value, he says, they more than make up for in cultural significance.

“I probably have the only existing prints for many of these programs,” Schubert says. “Just like the arts, we’re losing them.”

To help stave off that eventuality, the teacher airs about five hours of the tapes each day on Channel 67, a cable station he operates for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District that’s available to 62,000 subscribers in Costa Mesa.

He also shows them frequently to his students as an educational tool.

“Some of the stuff is more theatrical than today’s sitcoms,” he says. “Most of them are nonviolent, not everyone gets killed, and the worst word in them is ‘darn.’ I want my students to learn basic production techniques, how to compose good shots and get the flow and aesthetics.”

Indeed, such lessons seem to resonate with the kids, some of whom say they prefer the old shows to today’s TV fare. “I’m an avid viewer,” said Matt Ramirez, 17. “It’s different watching something that was aired 40 years ago. Back then, there were no special effects to hide behind -- you had to have quality. These shows are not at all boring; they’re more creative and original than the shows of today.”

Reviews like that bring a glow to Costa Mesa’s broadcast maven. Modern sitcoms, Schubert says, are simply “brash and stupid. They have no meaning to me.”

Ah, but give him a week of “The Twilight Zone” reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel, and he’ll be stuck to the screen just like snow.

That, he says, is television.