After nine decades in the business, the former collaborator of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles is still looking for his next great role. The earliest surviving footage of broadcast television in America is a fragment of "The Streets of New York," an adaptation of playwright Dion Boucicault's 19th-century drama, aired by the experimental New York NBC affiliate W2XBS on August 31, 1939. All that now remains of the hour-long program is a silent, 11-minute kinescope, filmed off a TV screen and archived at the Paley Center For Media. And there, in those primitive flickering images, you can catch...