Starter of this subject: JB
Last post in this subject: 3/9/2002
Messages in this subject: 14
| JB | 3/9/2002 14 replies |
| Thanks to the internet I've become quite fond of OTR over the past month or so, mostly in the mystery and suspense vein. I also have a minor problem with it, which is that there is a certain sameness to the writing. The plot twists become predictable and are telegraphed half the time. It somewhat surprises me is that the writing isn't better. There were few really good scripts,--as opposed to ideas, performances and presentation--and dialogue and narration tends toward the generic even in the better episodes. Most of these shows are "saved", when they are, by the way they're put together and acted as much as by how they're written. Has anyone else noticed this or are my standards simply too high? What I'm getting at, or trying to, is that it seems to me the words themselves aren't memorable, as they should be, and one would expect them to be, at least some of the time. Radio as an aural medium I would have thought would have put a premium on language, eloquence, even elegance in prose, especially narrative prose, but for the most part it isn't there. |
| Elizabeth McLeod | 3/9/2002 11 replies |
|
Perhaps the best comment on this question was made by Arch Oboler, who was asked in 1948 why he had given up on radio:
"I do not believe there is an author alive, or dead, or in the womb who can satisfy this rapacious appetite of the radio medium without an eventual loss of values or integrities. For radio gives the serious writer no time for evaluation or considered choice; above all no time for the refilling of depleted inner creative reservoirs through study, and analysis, and quiet contemplation. "Radio for the dramatist is a huge insatiable sausage grinder into which he feeds his creative life to be converted into neatly packaged detergents. "The result of this depletion of radio's own playwrights has been a gradual formulaization of radio drama into a lazy form of narrative writing which permits the writers to keep up with the inexorable stopwatch deadlines at the lowest possible cost of creative effort; the hash and rehash of first-person-singular all over the dial is no writing accident. "Yes, even as the factual documentaries have shown tremendous improvement, fictional radio drama has changed from literature's poor relative to something that is neither literature nor part of experience, nor truly entertaining. The 'My name is Sam Simon, Private Eye -- her fingers running down my holster made sounds in my head like ice cubes in a tall glass' type of radio writing is the de-evolution of what was once radio's bright writing promise." |
| JB | 3/9/2002 10 replies |
| Thanks very much. Oboler said it all. The true potential of radio drama was never fully tapped. There are tantalizing glimpses of what it can do but little sustained creative effort. It's interesting how television writers tried and for a while succeeded in making TV a writer's medium,--for a few years anyway. I now understand the sometimes purple-prosed Rod Serling's tendencies to over-verbalize, both in his plays and as Twilight Zone's host. Radio never gave its writers the kind of freedom that Serling, Rose, Chayefsky and several others enjoyed in the fifties. Nowadays television's beneath contempt, hence my appetite for OTR to fill what is for me an enormous entertainment void. |
| Janet | 3/10/2002 0 replies |
| What you have stated is true, but only to a degree. Have you ever listened to the wonderful LUX RADIO THEATRE from the 1930's, 40's and 50's? They were so well done, had eloquent actors and actresses, and, in my opinion, were the very best of OTR. Yes, there was a sameness there, too, week after week, but they were so good . . . please, give them a try. |
| Jim Widner | 3/10/2002 8 replies |
|
You have to remember that radio like television was a "mass" medium and thus was certainly prone to being stretched very thinly in plots and prose.
Like television, there are certainly some highlights from a language perspective, but what has always intrigued me in Old Time Radio is the imagination factor. Does a particular program succeed in piquing my imagination? I think too, one has to consider the natural vocal talents of many radio actors. I don't think it is easy to make something sound like it is not being read. The best of that seem to be when a particular actor has grown into a character and ultimately becomes the character or vice versa and it is no longer acting. I think Oboler was speaking from a production point of view. He certainly had the talent to continue to write great radio. The problem was that he could not get it produced because like televsion later, much of radio had become pap for the ear and creativity was becoming an unpopular commodity. Oboler saw a new media in television and tried writing for it, but never really succeeded because despite his comments, his heart was still in radio. |
| JB | 3/10/2002 7 replies |
| I agree with you on the imagination factor. The ability of old-time radio to evoke a time and a place seems nearly magical, and an artistic plus whatever the script deficiencies. In some ways the moors, streets and haunted houses of OTR are as colorful as any in the movies,--and all because of sound effects and writing. There seemed to be a move toward first-person narratives toward the end of the forties, which Oboler decried and attributed to cost-cutting, but I think he was being overly cynical. There's something inherent in the medium of radio that lends itself to narration. I think of "War Of the Worlds", "narrated", as it were, as a newscast. The Wyllis Cooper "Quiet, Please" benefits considerably from its first-person narrative style. Yet there are episodes of many shows, such as "Suspense", that proceed largely through dialogue, and the effect can be riveting, almost surreal, and quite unlike anything else, on the tube, on stage or in print. And then there's that primal quality of OTR drama, which, because it's all words, makes it feel like one is sitting around a campfire or hearth listening to an elder of the tribe relate some ancient or cautionary tale. Television simply can't do this. The realism, especially of contemporary shows, which rely so much on naturalistic techniques, ruins any chance of the larger than life, the fantastic, the truly magical.(The older black and white TV shows were closer to radio in terms of style, as they did allow some narration, with anthology shows often hosted; while many, like the original Outer Limits, created their own, unique imaginative worlds,--like radio come to life, so to speak.) Much as I love OTR I'd love to see radio drama come back in a new form. There's so much that can be done with merely words and sound, and the loss of OTR is really the loss of an aesthetic choice that's no longer available to writers these days. |
| Geoff Loker | 3/11/2002 0 replies |
| Who says radio drama is gone? Here in Canada, the CBC radio produces some very good drama / comedy / mystery shows. In fact, throughout the months of January and February, the CBC participated in an event called "World Play 4", the 4th annual celebration of English-language radio plays, which had entries from New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia. Some of it was not to my taste, but all of it gave an interesting picture of where contemporary radio drama is. |
| Ted Hering | 3/11/2002 0 replies |
| This reminds me of a story Jack Benny's daughter Joan told about her late father: A radio reviewer praised one particular Benny show so highly, Jack sent the columnist a bound copy of the script. He was horrified the next day to read the reviewer saying something like, "Now that I've read the script over again, I take my comments back. The show wasn't really all that great." Jack then vowed never to distribute scripts again, realizing that it was the entire production -- actors, writers, music, sound effects -- that made the material "live." |
| Jim Widner | 3/12/2002 4 replies |
|
You mention Quiet, Please. For me, Quiet, Please was the essence of minimalist radio drama. It was very, very effective and, as you say, the first person narrative approach certainly helped. It at times reminds me of what Rod Serling attempted to do sometimes very successfully (othertimes not so) with his various television series.
When I sit back and listen to this show, I sometimes imagine a solitary stage with various spotlights that come up as the narrator interacts with the brief other characters that might appear. For me, this was one of the best of the aural medium and should be a required listening for any student of radio drama. |
| JB | 3/12/2002 3 replies |
|
Based on the polls I've read, as well as my own tastes, it seems to me that the most enduring OTR shows are in the horror-mystery-crime-detective format, which makes OTR like old movies, with film noir apparently the most popular genre of all. Radio noir? Well, anyway, there sure was a lot of it. Quiet Please is certainly right up there for me; Lights Out the biggest disappointment. Suspense is maybe the most elegant show of its type, and seems to be the precursor of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television. It's not surprising that Hitchcock actually directed the first Suspense episode. Escape is fine, too, and The Inner Sanctum, puns and all. Radio got a lock on the old dark house-domestic murder-ghosts and witches stuff in the early forties and didn't let go for over a decade. Television never quite got the hang of this sort of thing. Also, times changed, and viewers by the mid-fifties were looking for newer, more modern kinds of drama, even melodrama. As with film noir, these old-time shows evoke a world of their own, with their wind, rain, creaking doors and all the rest, almost at times feeling like they're coming from another world altogether, or maybe a parallel universe.
|
| Jim Widner | 3/14/2002 2 replies |
|
Perhaps it is my own disposition, but my preference in otr has always been in the horror/suspense/detective genre. I never really collected comedy much, though I will admit that there certainly could be some effective comedy otr whether serialized or more situational. I've laughed at some great Jack Benny and Great Gildersleeve, even an occasional Fibber McGee & Molly. But it is the dramatic, preferably the dark drama be it horror or strong suspense that always made it for me.
I guess it fits that I am a big fan of film noir even the cheesy noirs of the late forties/early fifties with their predictable plots. In my experience in otr for over 30 years I do find more people who have similar preferences though there are certainly a share who prefer comedy over the dramatic, but I think the scales weigh heavily on the side of the darker stories. Good thread by the way. |
| JB | 3/14/2002 1 replies |
|
Thanks for the kind words. It's interesting how the dark stuff seems to have legs, in films and radio. Only on television does lighter fare (I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Carol Burnett, etc.) seem to outlast the more somber stuff.
I go to a few other message boards and often discuss film with similar-minded people and have posted a fair amount on this topic lately. An episode of (I think it was) The Weird Circle, A Terrible Night, inspired me to initiate a film thread on horror in the woods. This show was so effective in building terror out of natural sounds and a superficially innocuous and even, arguably, pleasant environment, that I wondered why the forest wasn't used more often in films, as a character, the way old dark houses and castles were. The minimalism of OTR is actually one of its greatest assets, giving it an evocatitiveness that all the CGI expertise in the world can't match in the movies. |
| Elizabeth McLeod | 3/14/2002 0 replies |
|
I'm a big fan of "minimalism" in OTR myself -- in the most extreme sense of the word. My preferred format is the dialogue serial: small casts, no "first person" narration at all, no internal music bridges, minimal sound effects. The entire program is carried by dialogue, with the settings described offhand within that dialogue. This to me is the most challenging form of radio.
I think it's very easy to hide a mediocre script or a poor concept behind flashy presentation: elaborate sound effects, musical scoring, etc. But in the dialogue serial, the words must stand and fall on their own merits, and a dialogue serial's appeal depends to a very great extent on the skill of the writer. Significantly, the best dialogue serials -- "One Man's Family," "Lum and Abner," "Vic and Sade," "The Goldbergs," "Easy Aces," and the original 15-minute "Amos 'n' Andy," were consistently dominated by the vision of their creators rather than being farmed out to freelance writers or committees of writers whose scripts might be of variable quality. I'm probably in the minority, but I'm not all that big a fan of the suspense-mystery genre, for just the reasons touched upon in the first post in this thread: the amount of repetition in the genre. I also find that too many programs in that genre emphasize plot over characterization -- after a while, it becomes difficult to tell the Hard Boiled Detectives apart without a scorecard. I'll make an exception for "Dragnet" though -- not coincidentally another program dominated at every level by the vision of its creator. |
| Tony B. | 3/12/2002 0 replies |
| One show I've noticed that consistently has endings that might turn out, in essence, the way you think they're going to, but with a twist you might not expect, is The Whistler. Try one called "Career Man" from 1947. The ending is predictable to a point, and the guilty parties indeed get their just desserts, but I'll bet you won't guess the particulars of their downfall. The sameness factor does exist, I suppose. The "hit and run" theme is played over and over, but there are always little differences. For instance, there's a similarity between The Whistler's "Career Man," and a Suspense episode called "No Escape" with Jimmy Cagney from 1948. But the acting styles are different, and although the ending is just as predictable in the Suspense show, there too is a twist that I'll bet you weren't expecting. As far as aura, I think those old shows are awesome. The actors and actresses didn't just have to act out a 30-minute play, they also had to describe what they're doing to you without making it sound stilted. In many cases, I think they did it amazingly well. The thing is, you can't approach it like watching television and having a conversation at the same time. You have to let the theater of the mind have your full attention or it doesn't work as well. |
| Lois Lee | 5/24/2002 0 replies |
| You express a fondness for the mystery and suspense genre of Old time Radio, yet one is left with the feeling that you perhaps have not yet fully savored the vast riches available within the medium. If, as you contend, there are very few good scripts available, my advice would be to spread your wings and explore the multitude of possibilities! Appropos predictable plots: Are you conversant with "The Whistler" series? The primary tag of this show features a "shocking" double twist; this one is anything but predictable! A successful thirteen-year run is a testimony to quality programming. Also, "Suspense," which ran for twenty years, was well-known for its intriguing plots featuring at times the best of Hollywood's talent. If you relish the supernatural, "Dark Fantasy" fills the bill quite well. As to elegance in language, you need look no further than the genius of Orson Wells and Norman Corwin. Given full creative freedom by the radio stations, these two history-makers were more fortunate than the producers and writers of some of the private-eye series. Why? Because they were allowed to write for themselves instead of being under the gun to adhere to a rigid standard set by the sponsors. So if, as Arch Obler asserts, radio scripts became "formulated," it is likely they were aiming for a listenership consisting of the average Joe. The bills had to be paid; hence that old feeling of a "certain sameness," mostly observed in the private-eye genre. But to digress, even the "quality" scripts made use of a formula, which is nothing more than the "premise" employed by all good fiction writers. But, we would as reasonably expect Archie, the manager of Duffy's Tavern to address customers in eloquent King James English as to suppose that Sam Spade would quote Shakespeare. agreed? Nonetheless, generations of listeners were entertained week after week by these same shows. Apparently they are yet coveted, beloved treasures judging from the concensus of opinion on these boards and of the faithful, ded |