Vratislav Rýpar

“There was a mess-up with Brezhnev. He was not in our television studio, but in the Prague Castle. When Leonid Ilyich arrived to Prague for a visit, a broadcast was prepared from the Vladislav Hall, I believe, and everything had a five-fold backup, but the problem was that transmission trucks need electricity. They allowed them to plug their systems to the Castle’s electric outlet. Obviously, everything there was under strict security, and they gave us a cable and said: ‘All right, plug your stuff in there, you will get electricity from us, there is sufficient protection, it’ll be enough for you, too.’ Of course, they had some lights plugged in to the Castle’s electric network, too, and during the TV broadcast there was a sudden crash, and then the screen went black. A circuit breaker tripped, but the breaker was so secured that it was locked with seven locks and nobody had access to it. The TV broadcast guys had their power unit there and they tried to start it. But the power unit just conked out and they could not start it. Before they managed to get it powered up, nearly half of Brezhnev’s speech was gone. I don’t know if they missed twenty minutes or half an hour, but it was simply horrible. At that time this was considered an act of sabotage, and our electrician, who was absolutely not to blame for it, got fired. Somebody else apparently recorded the speech on a film as well, and we therefore used what we had and we tried to patch something together from that. We were equipped with two new systems, ABR 2s, from Ampex company. A nice, pretty, flat-shaped device, but it has not been tested in the real operation conditions yet, and at the beginning this machine was very unreliable because its power source was prone to overheating. If the source got overheated, the machine would shut down and everything would stop and turn black and you could just go and make yourself a coffee. At that time the power sources still had many bugs, and we had some fans blowing air at them from the back, because we knew that the troubles were caused by overheating. This was due to the American school of construction, but that’s another story… Jirka Pleile and I were the ones who knew these machines best, because we had some experience on them from real work. We thus edited the recording on them. The magnetic tape editing is a complicated thing to do on Ampex, and it had to be done manually, so we had to count ‘ten, nine, eight, seven…’ and so on, and we had to work in unison and cut the film in a place where it would not get noticed on the screen, and the people who did the editing really had to have a knack for it and work simultaneously. Some strange gentlemen were standing in the hallway and we were warned that if there was even a single mess-up, a single hitch occurring in this film, we would be fired immediately and go behind the bars, to prison, because it would be considered an act of sabotage.”