"The Tomorrow Show" with Tom Snyder is NOT AVAILABLE FOR SALE.
October 15, 1973-January 28, 1982.
This was the "Making of a Star" broadcast which explores the subject of what goes into the making of a star?
The peculiar special breed of make up it takes for a person to become an actor who really makes it big.
Appearing on this broadcast, Joanne Baron, an aspiring actress from New York, Budd Friedman, owner and founder of the improvisational East & West, Juliette Taylor, director of East Coast casting for Paramount Pictures, Robert Moss, president of the off, off Broadway theater alliance, and David Graham, an independent casting director from Los Angeles.
An hour-long talk show hosted by Tom Snyder. Network television's first entry into late-late-night programming on weeknights Monday thru Thursday, usually broadcasting on tape 1 AM to 2 AM. "Tomorrow" was expanded to 90 minutes on September 16, 1980.
Established as more of an intimate talk show, Tomorrow differed from Tonight and later late-night fare, with host Snyder conducting one-on-one interviews sans audience, cigarette in hand, no writing staff or scripted pieces, alternating between asking hard-hitting questions and offering personal observations that made the interview closer to a genuine conversation.
Topics covered
Although eventually best known for hosting writers, authors, film directors, actors, musicians, etc. for in-depth conversations, on most nights during its first year on the air Tomorrow assumed the framing of a news program with newsmagazine-type generalized panel discussions focused around a single social/lifestyle issue or otherwise interesting topic. These included illegitimate children, UFO sightings, suicide, male prostitution, pickup artists, child abuse, race and intelligence, film censorship, bisexuality, witchcraft, Vietnamese orphans fathered by U.S. soldiers, consumerism, lives of single persons, exorcism, police brutality, transsexuals, Bermuda Triangle, gambling, Catholicism in U.S. society, professional team sports, teenage alcoholism, weekly newspapers, trucking, rape, ageing, crime, divorce, cosmetic surgery, etc. as well as on-location shows featuring Snyder's reportages from the Elysium Fields Institute nudist colony in Topanga, California and Tennessee State Penitentiary. It also hosted somewhat unusual and atypical guests for the corporate-owned nationally-televised U.S. network talk-shows such as sixteen-year-old spiritual leader Guru Maharaj Ji, authoritative Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, Playgirl editor Marin Milan, actress Sue Lyon who had just married an imprisoned convict, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana David Duke, etc. According to Tomorrow associate producer Sonny Fox, the decision to often go after the unconventional, even bordering on bizarre, content was made in part due to the 1 a.m. time slot—with the show's producers feeling that the audience staying up that late would be receptive to a slightly odd subject matter; the decision also had to do with the strict guidelines set by Carson's Tonight Show whose host and producers wanted to ensure that newly-launched Tomorrow had no overlap with their show, limiting its showbiz-adjacent pool of guests to those Carson was not interested in hosting.
NOTE:
Wiping, is a colloquial term for action taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies, in which old audiotapes, videotapes, and kinescopes, were erased and reused, or destroyed. Although the practice was once very common, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, wiping programing was for the most part discontinued after1980 by all three networks (CBS -1972, ABC - 1978, NBC- 1980).
Prior to 1978 a great percentage of Tomorrow Shows were wiped by NBC. Currently extant are only forty three 1973-1977 broadcasts which are archived by NBC and Getty. A few dozen bootleg copies have been uploaded to you tube. And there have been three DVD collections of musical guests appearing on The Tomorrow Show, distributed commercially by The Shout Factory.
Other shows representing The Tomorrow Show's first four plus years of broadcasting have been erased, and no longer exit in any broadcast form.
Older video and audio formats were both much more expensive (relative to the amount of material that could be stored) and took up much more storage space than modern digital video or audio files, making their retention more costly, and there was more incentive to recycle the media for reuse. A 2" quadraplex one hour video tape weighed 13 pounds and cost $500 in 1960 which is the equivalent of $5,000 today.