Don Mischer: The Master Of Live Television

Donald Mischer is an internationally acclaimed producer and director of television and live events, including numerous Super Bowl halftime shows, Primetime Emmy Awards ceremonies, and the annual Academy Award ceremonies. He also directed the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, the Centennial Olympic Summer Games and the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

Over his 35-year career Mischer has captured an invaluable wealth of historic moments that were televised to millions of viewers around the world. These include Michael Jackson performing his first moonwalk, Muhammad Ali lighting the torch at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and Prince performing Purple Rain in a downpour at the Super Bowl halftime show. He served as producer/director of We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, several Kennedy Center Honors broadcasts, and dozens of specials featuring such superstars as Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears, James Taylor, Taylor Swift, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Garth Brooks, Elton John and Carrie Underwood.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Mischer says he was fascinated by the nascent television industry when he was seven or eight years old. “When television came to San Antonio I was swept off my feet,” he said in an extensive Directors Guild interview in 2013. “I had fantasies of being a television cameraman. I would dream that someday maybe I would be able to run camera on a show that would be broadcast nationally.” When Mischer turned 13 his father gave him an 8 mm Bell & Howell camera, and he started making short films at football games and local parades.

Mischer graduated from the University of Texas and was well on the way to earning a Ph.D. when the television bug hit him. Through a Ford Foundation grant in 1962 he got into TV on the very bottom rung of the corporate ladder — and he loved it. “I got to paint scenery, I pulled cable for the cameras, hung lights, ran tape machines, all in the course of a year,” he recalls. “It was the perfect place to really learn the medium. I was AD-ing by the time I got to the end of the year, and I was offered a job to stay there. And it was also a time I kind of look at as television’s coming-of-age in America.”

Following the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 he became a runner for the news networks that descended on Texas to do follow-up stories. Caught up in the passion of the moment and the power of this still-evolving medium, he abandoned his intention to become a teacher or an academic in favor of getting into television. In the months that followed he met the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Bob Squier and engaged in an extensive apprenticeship with the United States Information Agency. Squier became his mentor and Mischer went on to do what he calls “soft propaganda” pieces on the U.S. A few years later he started working with Charlie Guggenheim, a filmmaker who focused on political campaigns and documentaries.

“I kind of got sucked into the political thing,” Mischer said in the DGA interview. “I was in Chicago in 1968 at the Democratic National Convention working for Hubert Humphrey, and ended up directing some of Humphrey’s town-hall meetings, which ran live to the nation. That was the first time I had ever directed anything that was a nationwide live broadcast.”It also was where he met Al Perlmutter, the New York-based journalist who went on to create the PBS magazine show The Great American Dream Machine.

“It was really cool and kind of edgy,” Mischer says. “A lot of interesting people worked on this show: Sheila Nevins was a producer, Barbara Gordon, who wrote the book I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can was one of the producers, Bob Shanks who later ran ABC and wrote the book Cool Fire was one of the producers.” Almost predictably, the program was canceled after only two years because of extreme political pressure that was put on PBS, but the opportunity brought Mischer to New York.

His first major television director role was on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell — not to be confused with the late-night comedy series bearing the same name. “After doing two or three years of latenight television, I got two great phone calls in one week,” Mischer told the DGA. “One was from Roone Arledge, who was like a god in television at the time. He said, ‘I’ve got a new show coming up with Howard Cosell.’

“He guaranteed me 18 shows at $3,000 a show, which was big money. Then I got a call from a guy named Lorne Michaels who said, ‘I’m starting a show called Saturday Night. It’s latenight, and I’ll guarantee you eight shows.’ It paid $1,100 per show. So I chose Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, and I regretted that decision for a long, long time.”

Despite lukewarm reviews, the Cosell show led to a progression of directing jobs with primetime specials, including The Goldie Hawn Special (CBS 1978), The Third Barry Manilow Special (ABC 1979) and Goldie and Liza Together (CBS 1980), as well as directing and producing the annual The Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts (1978-2002).

Mischer formed his own production company in 1981 and produced and/or directed numerous high-profile live variety and entertainment programs. These included Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever (NBC 1983), the legendary special on which Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk, Motown Returns to the Apollo (NBC 1985), and Liza in London (HBO 1986). A particular high note in his career was the Super Bowl XXVII Halftime Show (NBC 1993) starring Michael Jackson. It was the first of the many aforementioned Super Bowl halftime shows in which he directed such artists as Prince, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.

Mischer also directed some episodic television, from Murder, She Wrote to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, but live programming and music specials became his forte. “When I first came out to Los Angeles, variety and music specials were my strong point,” he says. “I loved the different concepts and people that you dealt with in variety. I’m sure that in the long run, I would have been more successful financially in series television. But there were times when I would work with Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp, and then six weeks later be riding on Willie Nelson’s bus in Texas. That variety appealed to me, and I have never regretted that decision.”

Mischer quickly built a reputation for excellence in directing and producing live programming, and his name became synonymous with directing the Oscar and Emmy Awards shows. “With live television, you have to be ready for any unforeseen circumstance,” he says. “The best way to be able to do that was to prepare, have the game plan and know what you want to do. If you find yourself in a situation where the artist walks the wrong way or a light falls down or you lose a camera, you’re better prepared to wing it. When you go through that week after week after week, you learn to roll with the punches.”

For those who like to count such things, Mischer has been honored with 15 Emmy Awards and a record 10 Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. He also has received two NAACP Image Awards, a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, the 2012 Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television from the Producers Guild of America, and the Governors’ Award from the National Association of Choreographers. Last December Mischer received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But all those awards are recognition for past achievements, and Don Mischer is all about the future — and its creative promise to audiences around the globe. “New technology — and I’m now talking about social networking and all the rest of it — has been wonderful in many, many ways,” he says. “In creating the things that we do for television, I really do think the second screen experience is as important as what we do on the actual show. That’s another reason I like live television. If you’re watching the Oscars live, and you’re my son who’s a junior at NYU, you are socializing with your network of friends during the show, and that enhances the viewing experience. If my son Tivos the Oscars and watches them the next night, he doesn’t have that. And I really do think that’s helping to make live television even more relevant.”

The Library of American Broadcasting will honor this year’s Giants of Broadcasting & Electronic Arts at a luncheon at New York’s Gotham Hall on Oct. 15. For tickets, congratulatory ads and other information, please contact Joyce Tudyrn at [email protected]. The luncheon is presented by the International Radio and Television Society Foundation. TVNewsCheck is publishing these profiles as an in-kind contribution to the library. You may read other profiles in the series by clicking here.