DVDs of fifty programs of William F. Buckley's Firing Line television series are available for $10 each at Amazon.com. Most of the programs date from 1966 to 1968, with such guests as Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Hugh Hefner, Timothy Leary, Clare Booth Luce, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ronald Reagan, and Dame Rebecca West. A list of the fifty titles is available.
Firing Line was broadcast from 1966 to 1999, first as an hour-long show and later as a half-hour program. The Firing Line collection at the Hoover Institution Archives includes videotapes of about 1,500 shows, as well as transcripts, still photographs, program preparation materials, and other items. A searchable database of all Firing Line programs is available.
Most of the fifty programs on Amazon.com were remastered from obsolete 2-inch open-reel quad videotapes, the original broadcast masters. Each tape was cleaned, stabilized, and transferred to a modern, broadcast-quality digital tape format at a specialized laboratory. Grants from the Mericos Foundation and the National Television and Video Preservation Foundation supported this work. CreateSpace, an Amazon.com subsidiary, then digitized these programs and will create DVDs as orders are placed through either CreateSpace or Amazon.com.
The Hoover Archives hopes to make more programs available through this service. Meanwhile, for Firing Line programs that are not available through Amazon.com, please contact Janel Quirante to purchase copies from the Hoover Archives.
