Carl,
I had heard that the match was orchestrated in that bad shots were allowed to be replayed.
Is that what you were alluding to ?
Pat, well, since you've asked. To answer your question about the orchestration and bad shots being replayed, according to the book, "No." However, I can see that what did happen in the filming (according to the book) could be morphed into such an account. The gist of the "controversy" was this.
The PV match was the first filmed and the TV people had no experience in filming golf and knew little about the game. Nelson hit the first drive, a good one, but the cameraman picked up the ball and threw it back to Nelson, asking him to hit another because the camera did not catch the ball flight and landing. Instead, Nelson invoked the "outside agency" rule, put the ball back in the fairway as best he could where it had stopped, and moved on. This was the only time something like that happened (according to the book, again).
However, the cameramen continued to be unable to follow the ball in the air. After the match was finished, the TV people decided they needed more film. Leo Fraser, who owned the Atlantic City Country Club, was then brought in to hit drivers (only from the tees) to the approximate spots where Herb Wind's notes indicated the drives had landed (Wind was the expert consultant hired for the series). The cameramen got the knack of following those shots, and it is those ball flights, and landings, or most of them, that are shown in the film. The same make-up treatment did not happen to approach shots.
When sportswriter Joe Williams of the New York
World-Telegram learned what had happened, he made a big fuss in his column about how the whole match was illegitimate, that you couldn't trust TV guys and so on, all on account of the "ex post facto" filming of ball flights. According to the authors, Williams and other sportswriters felt threatened by TV. (Personally, I never heard of Williams.) Nelson defended the match against this charge, saying it had all been played strictly according to the rules. As some of the TV people say today, "You decide."
I also recall reading that the match took two full days. They only had a couple of large cameras (early days), which had to be moved and reset for each shot. Littler and Nelson had very long waits from shot to shot.
Finally, all I know is what this book says. I wasn't there, of course, and haven't really been interested in getting into the situation further.
By the way, the book has lots of other interesting stories about the Shell series, but it is by no means a history of the Shell series, or even close to it. Rather, it is essentially a book of memories of her dad by Mary Ann Sarazen, many of which involve his job of hosting the Shell shows.