Film clip from Camera Three: Over the Top To BeBop

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

A strip of 16 mm motion picture film with an excerpt from "Over the Top to Bebop," an episode of the Camera Three television program aired on WCBS-TV. It consists of a single reel of positive, black-and-white, 16 mm acetate film with bilateral variable-area optical sound. It opens with jazz scholar Marshall Stearns and host James Macandrew engaging in a conversation about tap dancing. Stearns goes on to describe Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins as class acts and their soft-shoe tap routine as a "classic." Subsequently, he invites Coles and Atkins to perform their soft-shoe tap dance "to an incredibly slow tempo." The camera then cuts to both men dancing slowly on a slightly raised platform, mirroring each other's movements, as instrumental music plays in the background. At the end of their performance, the dancers join Macandrew and Stearns.

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