Rare Color Film…5 “Colgate Comedy Hour” Stars At El Capitan

Rare Color Film…5 “Colgate Comedy Hour” Stars At El Capitan

At the link, you will see Eddie Cantor, Bud Abbott & Lou Costello and Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis arriving at NBC’s El Capitan Theater in Hollywood in 1953.

This is a short, but sweet color home movie shot on the south side of the theater, as they arrive for rehearsal. Because the hosts rotated on a weekly basis, it would be rare for all of them to be there at the same time, but I looks like that may have been the case.

In the film, you can see the stairs pictured below. If the building looks familiar, in ’63, ABC took over the lease and called this, The Hollywood Palace.

The El Capitan is at 1735 North Vine Street, just a couple of blocks north of where NBC’s Radio City West was located, and was NBC’s first “spill-over” location for television once AT&T linked the coast with the rest of the country in 1951.

On April 1, 1951 the El Capitan Theatre was leased to NBC for fifteen years at a cost of $30,500 per year. On Sunday, September 30, 1951, “The Colgate Comedy Hour” became NBC’s first regularly scheduled west-to-east television broadcast, and it came from The El Capitan, on a bi-weekly basis, with the other weeks done in New York. Thanks to our friend Rick Scheckman for sharing this clip. Enjoy! -Bobby Ellerbee

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