Short Take on Scott Schachter, Audio Engineer

by G. Jack Urso

 

In our ongoing exploration of the top talent NBC employed for Hot Hero Sandwich, we turn our attention to Scott Schachter who shared duties with Joel Spector as audio engineer for the series. They also shared a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1980 for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming for Hot Hero Sandwich, episode 4. In fact, 1980 seems to have been a good year for Schachter as he also won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement — Creative Technical Crafts for Live from Studio 8H: A Tribute to Toscanini.

Spector was the audio engineer for the first two episodes after which Schachter takes over for Spector beginning in episode 3, and they both join forces for episode 10 and the finale episode 11. Schachter, who had a few years on Spector, had a career dating back to the late 1950s and the legendary Steve Allen Plymouth Show, which introduced the world to Allen’s regular cast of zanies such as Don Knotts, Louis Nye, Gene Rayburn, Pat Harrington Jr., and Tom Poston. The Internet Movie Database’s credits listings are woefully short for technical personnel (and sometimes not so great for those in front of the camera either), so we don’t have a complete list of the other shows from the Golden Era of Television Schachter worked on, but, without doubt, the Hot Hero Sandwich sound benefitted from the experienced and steady hand Schachter brought with him.

Scott Schachter, 1977.

According to Joel Spector in his interview with the Hot Hero Sandwich Project, Schachter left broadcasting for a while during the 1960s to work in his family’s millinery business. Millinery encompasses the women’s hat trade, which, along with men’s hat sales, took a big hit in the 1960s as fashions changed dramatically, as noted in the New York Times article, “The '60s Changed Everything in American Style,” April 22, 1990. Indeed, the entire market for women’s hats bottomed out in the 1960s. Except for some high-fashionistas and older women, Baby Boomers weren’t wearing hats like their parents did. Considering this, Schachter must have found his work challenging. Nevertheless, it was a far cry from being the audio engineer for a national network working on some of the most important shows in television history. Yet, Schachter wasn’t quite done with television and by the mid-1970s he returned to NBC and began working on Saturday Night Live beginning with Season 1, Episode 1, in 1975 and for another 186 episodes over the next ten years.

With Hot Hero Sandwich and Saturday Night Live both being taped in Studio 8H, using the same equipment, and sharing a similarity in the presentation of its music performances on stage, Schachter, Spector, and other members of the crew who also worked on SNL, easily adapted to the HHS format and gave the show a polished, professional look and sound other live-action children’s entertainment variety shows could not easily emulate.

Scott Schachter behind the sound board in Hot Hero Sandwich episode 11.

Ironically, I had been listening to Schachter’s handiwork all the way back to that first season of SNL. That Christmas of 1975, my parents bought me and my siblings our own small black and white televisions. One of the first uses my brother and I had for our sets was to retire to our bedroom after watching The Carol Burnett Show with our parents and wait for Saturday Night Live to come on. Many times in the course of my research for the Hot Hero Sandwich Project have I discovered that someone connected to the show I thought I was just learning about for the first time, I actually had been watching or listening to all along. Scott Schachter’s work is a good example of that.

Schachter, 1981.

Being a Saturday Night Live fan, it was to my surprise that Schachter turns up as a minor character in the 2024 biopic Saturday Night, which chronicles the events leading up to the first episode of Saturday Night Live. In it, Schachter, portrayed by actor Jeff Pope, is called “Scotty.” This was the first I ever read of Schachter being referred to as “Scotty,” so I asked Joel Spector about it and he confirms that Schachter preferred Scott. Spector reports that when the credits for Hot Hero were being prepared, Schachter was asked if he wanted to be identified as “Scott” or “Scotty,” and Schachter specified the former.

[Note: One other Hot Hero Sandwich production team member, Bob Pook, graphic designer, also appears as a minor character in Saturday Night.]

Scott Schachter’s New York Times Obituary, Sep. 2, 2000.

According to his obituary in The New York Times, Schachter died after surgery on Aug. 31, 2000, at age 74. Married for 51 years, he spent his retirement traveling the world with his wife and doing The New York Times crossword puzzle — in ink. Hot Hero Sandwich was just one show he worked on for a few weeks out of a long career, but the show’s sound, as proven by the Emmy nominations for Schachter and Spector, is a defining element of the series’ legacy. Schachter brought the same level of quality to Saturday mornings as he did to Saturday nights.

Note: Headshot photos of Scott Schachter courtesy of Joel Spector.

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