Legendary Make-up Artist Howard Smit Has Died at age 98-- Archive interview online

Howard Smit helped found IATSE Local 706 and had a fifty year career in the make-up field, starting in television in the mid-1930s at experimental station W6XAO. He was profiled earlier this year by Byrd Holland in the Make-Up & Hair Stylists Guild's journal The Artisan. Holland also conducted the Archive of American Television interview with Smit in 1997 (photo, right).

I will tell you that we all read and heard about this infant television. And those of us who knew what could happen, were very interested in getting involved in it to see if we could help to make it happen. And I feel that, well for instance, there was a love scene in one of these little skits, they were all little minute, two-minute skits. There was a love scene and in those days you could put red on any part of a human body and you couldn’t see it at all. So we tried lipstick, in those days, lipsticks were red. You put it on red, absolute washout. So I finally went to black. And the producer, I will never forget, raked me over the coals. How’s this man gonna kiss a woman with black lips? And I said if you want to see it on the screen, that’s what it’s gonna have to be. And I will tell you that very shortly thereafter, whatever they did in their transmission, we were able to get by with a little bit of red and, and it would pick up. But those were the things and the problems that we had in the early days of television.— from Part 2 of Howard Smit's Archive interview