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Show Basin scenery shown on PM Magazine TV show By (limly Robvrlsoii ' Vernal scenes filmed by ; PM Magazine Utah during their five day , visit here two weeks ago, are appearing on the channel 2 show this week. The . scenes will provide tie-ins for the two ; stories and three departments that -make up each night's program. Full-; Full-; length stories from this area were film-: film-: ed as well, but they will not be seen for ? another two or three months. : Though the tie-ins for PM Magazine : are filmed locally, not all the stories ; originate in Utah. The program is part of a Westinghouse syndication involv- ; ing 100 stations. Westinghouse supplies I the stories and departments for all of them. About five or six years ago, ' Westinghouse tried its first magazine j concept show, called "Evening", on its j station in San Francisco. It worked so ; well, they extended it to their other four 5 stations under the title PM Magaine. It I eventually grew to the 100 stations air-! air-! ing it today. "There are local features on PM ; Magazine Utah," explained Peter Lenz, . the show's executive producer, i "because the individual stations are J free to replace any department or story from Westinghouse 's tapes with one of their own." : "PM Utah produces five to six of ; their own departments now out of a total of fifteen different ones available, and by mid-winter will have eight to ten ; local ones," Lenz said explaining the the station also tries to film their own . feature stories as much as possible. "We average two local stories a week," he said, "and fifteen of these were accepted for national distribution when sent into the head office." Utah's program, which has been on the air about a year, is able to use many of the regional stories submitted by the other member stations. Viewers frequently offer good suggestions sug-gestions for ideas, and those selected for use are filmed on location. A six to seven minute story takes an average of ten hours to shoot, and from 16 to 24 hours to edit. Michele Russell and Jim Montgomery, the co-hosts, then weave the stories and departments together with local comments and scenes. "Jim Montgomery was already part of the PM staff when he was chosen to co-host," Lenz said, "but Michele was selected the hard way. She was one of 300 people auditioning for the job." Each had to ad-lib to an imaginary TV audience for 60 to 90 seconds, and the 10 to 15 applicants still under consideration con-sideration after this had to produce an actual show on location. Not only was Michele chosen to co-host, co-host, but her trial show, a fiddle contest, was good enough to appear on the air. The co-hosts and PM crew film in as many different sections of Utah as possible to highlight various communities, com-munities, and this week Michele and Jim will greet Utah viewers of PM Magazine from our community. |