Charles Kuralt Taught Me How To Narrate A Piece

It’s old, but there are still lessons to be learnt

There has been a lot of discussion here of late about narration.

How to do it best.

I learned how to narrate a piece from Charles Kuralt, who will be an unkown to many on this site – he died in 1990. But he was once the best correpondent on TV.

So good, in fact, that Dan Rather (another unknow, but once anchor on The CBS Evening News) had it written into his contract that Kuralt could only substitute anchor for him one night, not two or three in a row, for fear he might become too popular. (or so I was told).

I looked in vain for piece I produced for Kuralt, both at home and on Youtube.  There isn’t a lot – either in m closet or sadly on Youtube. Too bad.

But I found this one, which is old, but still makes the point.

I first met Kuralt when I went to work for Sunday Morning, the CBS News show in the mid 1980s.

I had been a producer at WNET, the local PBS station, and had won an astonishing 11 Emmys (local, so trust me, no big deal).  So they hired me to produce for Kuralt.

I was young and didn’t know much, really.

The first piece I did was about Frank Lloyd Wright. I had gone up to Racine, Wisconsin, where there was the Johnson Wax Building that he designed. Then I went to LA where there was an opening of a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit.  Kuralt went to neither. That’s how TV reall works, sad to say.  I shot and produced the piece and gave Kuralt the script I had written. He was supposed to go into a narration booth and record it and then an editor would marry the two bits together – the film and his narration.  The final work would air that Sunday on the show.

As it was my first piece, I went into CBS on Sunday morning to watch it broadcast.

They used to do the show live, from a studio in the basement.

I went in and sat in the control room.

As we got close to my Frank Lloyd Wright piece I made sure with the director that Kuralt had in fact recorded the narration and it had been laid in.

“Don’t think he did” said the Director.

I turned white as a sheet.

This was my first piece and it was going to run without narration!

“Stop. You can’t run it”.

“Too late” said the Director.

I could see my career in ruins. My first shot at a network job, over. And live on TV no less.

Kuralt was on the set, sitting on one of those little stools.

He intro’d my piece.

Then he sat back and lit up a cigarette and took a long drag.

He was watching the piece on a monitor on the set.

As the piece began to roll, he had my script in his hands.

When we got to the part where he was supposed to lay in the narration, he started to read –

or at least to read, but more to explain.

He was watching the piece at exactly the same time and place as a few million Americans were watching it at home.

He was with them, in feeling.

And when it was his turn to narrate, he simply explained to them what they were watching – as though they were all there together in the room.

If his timing was a bit off (which it wasn’t) he would fill in with things like “just look at this”.

It was wonderful to watch.

Unlike the other reporters who would read their scripts in a sound room to a microphone, line after line, he was the consumate story-teller.

That was what made him so good.

Now, with FCP, you can work in exactly the same way.

Tell me a story.

Don’t read me a script.