The Mike Wallace Interview is a series of 30-minute television interviews conducted by host Mike Wallace from 1957 to 1960. From 1957 to 1959, they were carried by the ABC American Broadcasting Company television network, and in 1959–1960, they were offered by the NTA Film Network.
Before The Mike Wallace Interview was televised nationally on prime-time in 1957, Wallace had risen to prominence a year earlier with Night-Beat, a television interview program that aired in New York City.
The Ransom Center Collection
In the early 1960s, Wallace donated kinescopes of these programs and related materials, including his prepared questions, research material, and correspondence, to the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.
On November 4, 2007, the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin hosted online 65 of the interviews from 1957 to 1958. Sixty of the interviews in the Ransom Center's collection are kinescopes, 16mm recordings of the television programs made by filming the picture from a video monitor, with the remaining five on audio tape.
The 16mm films were transferred to video and, along with the audio tapes, subsequently digitized. The interviews were then transcribed and were embedded in the video files in the form of subtitles. Also included on the website are text files of the transcripts of each program.
The interviews hosted by The Ransom Center Collection include:[1]
In December 1957, ABC Film Syndication acquired 26 episodes of the series to distribute in Canada and Great Britain. The company also planned to dub those episodes in French, German, and Spanish for distribution in other countries.[2]
