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Transcript of Theater for the Mind

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Transcript of Theater for the Mind 1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, I’m Eric Molinsky. When Emory Braswell was growing up, he used to love listening to radio drama serials. EMORY: I listened to The Shadow and The Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy. Now Emory’s parents restricted the amount of radio he could listen to – especially at night -- but they always made exceptions if Joe Louis was boxing, or if Franklin Roosevelt was on the radio. One night in October 1938, Emory heard his father’s Model-A Ford pull up to the house, and he thought he heard the President addressing the nation. CLIP: WAR OF THE WORLDS EMORY: So I ran down and got in the car and my mother was sitting there too. I said, "What's happening?" He said, "Well, there's some kind of story going on about an invasion. We're being invaded by Mars or something." My father sounded skeptical. So I listened to it, and sure enough there was somebody supposedly from either the state department or the guv-mint, as my family would say, talking about a meteor that had crashed in New Jersey and there were beings coming out of it and they were destroying all the local militia and stuff. One of the fascinating parts about the program was it was a music program and they would interrupt the music for many bulletins coming from Jersey. ME: You said your father was skeptical. Was he skeptical throughout the whole thing and were you skeptical throughout the whole thing? EMORY: No, I was just wide eyed listening to it, trying to decide, is this all happening or not? My father was kind of skeptical because when it was over with, he says, "I think it's a hoax." As I said, the business about the music going on and bulletins coming made it seem much more real. Then when the program was over, it seemed to go back to regular programming, and we could understand, and we listened for further announcements and nothing came. So my father said, "That proves it's a hoax." I took it seriously. They eventually learned that they were listening to War of the Worlds from Orson Welles. 2 Neil Verma teaches radio history at Northwestern University. He says there’s a reason why young Emory Braswell thought he heard FDR during the show. NEIL: There's a moment in the War of the World's broadcast where the Secretary of the Interior comes on the microphone on the world of the fiction and gives a little speech to buck up the troops and let everyone know that civilization will continue no matter what. Originally, that piece was written to be not the Secretary of the Interior, but President Roosevelt. The CBS Network said, "No, no, no, you can't have President Roosevelt's voice if it's not actually President Roosevelt. People will get confused; we'll get in trouble. We can't do it." Orson Welles says, "Okay, well, we'll change it to the Secretary of the Interior." Then, the actor who portrayed the role goes up to Welles, according to legend and says, "Well, I don't know how the Secretary of the Interior sounds." Welles says, "Don't worry. He sounds just like Roosevelt." RICHARD HAND: I mean that's the achievement of War of the Worlds, it sounds like the weather forecast, it sounds like a radio show playing music and then gradually it shifts. Richard J. Hand teaches radio drama at The University of East Anglia in the UK. RICHARD HAND: And I think that's one reason it had such impact, is that understanding, we can take a genre and jump a form, and use the structures, and formula, and conventions of another form in order to tell a story. When we look back at pop culture in the 20th century, we tend to focus on movies, TV or pop music. It’s easy to forget that radio was the dominant form of entertainment for decades. There were hit shows in every genre but sci-fi kept pushing the boundaries of what the medium could do. A lot of famous sci-fi writers got their start in radio, like Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. And these radio dramas laid the groundwork for stories that couldn’t be done on film for decades because special effects weren’t good enough. In some ways, these radio shows are the missing cultural link between genre fiction, and the movies and shows we watch today. But they’re also stand-alone works of audio art that could play with our imagination in ways that the printed word and the visual image never could. We’re going to take a trip back in time just after the break. ➢ BREAK 3 EM: So today’s episode is a co-production with the excellent podcast, Twenty Thousand Hertz. In fact, I’m co-piloting this episode with the host of that show, Dallas Taylor. Dallas, how would you describe Twenty Thousand Hertz? DT: We’re produced out of the Defacto sound studio just outside Washington DC, and we like to say it’s a show about the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. EM: And old radio dramas and serial fit into that. DT: Absolutely. Since a lot of people aren’t very familiar with this era, let’s zoom out and look at the big picture. When did the golden age of radio dramas start? EM: It really took off in 1934 when the FCC was created. DT: The Federal Communications Commission – which is still around today. EM: Very much. That’s around the time when the big networks starting forming like CBS and NBC. DT: Also still around today, but mostly for TV. EM: Yeah. Neil Verma says when the networks got into the business of making highly produced radio dramas, they were not motivated by noble reasons. NEIL: If they couldn't demonstrate a level of public service that they were giving to the listeners out there, then they ran the risk of further government regulation and intrusion, so all of the money they were making out of selling all the bootblack and soup and yeast and tea, they would be taken away. So they enshrined in their mandate to create high culture content, and for a lot of them that meant radio drama. EM: And interestingly, if we look at the big picture, each decade of radio drama had its own style. The ones in the ‘30s were ambitious. They grappled with big nationalistic ideas because it was the Depression. Then in the ‘40s, anxiety around the war got channeled into radio dramas that were like film noirs, or I guess you could call them “radio noirs.” Or as Neil Verma put it: NEIL: In the 1930s, radio is kind of a theater in the mind, so it's a big theatrical space that you're supposed to imagine in your mind. In the 1940s, it becomes really a theater about the mind. 4 EM: And then in the ‘50s, radio dramas are very influenced by the Cold War with aliens standing in for the Russians. DT: Wasn’t that the same thing with Hollywood movies at the time? DT: Yeah, but on radio it played out on a much more intimate scale. Like there was a radio drama in 1955 called Zero Hour, written by Ray Bradbury. The alien invasion is told from the point of view of a woman who discovers the children in her neighborhood, including her daughter, have been co-opted by these inner- dimensional beings. The parents think the kids are playing a game, but this one woman begins to realize the truth. CLIP 1: ZERO HOUR NEIL The main character, played by Esa Ashdown, is immobile. Almost all of this play takes place in her kitchen or living room. Most of the interplay between her and her daughter the ones where she comes to suspect the daughter is collaborating with this evil alien happen at just outside the edge of our earshot. CLIP 2: ZERO HOUR DT: I think a lot of people have a misconception that radio dramas from this era were goofy or naïve. EM: Yeah, I used to think it was just two guys banging coconuts behind a microphone to sound like a horse. That was true for the radio serials aimed at kids. But when I listened to these shows, I couldn’t believe how dark and weird they were. DT: And the FCC was okay with that? EM: Well, they were more concerned with obscenity, or overt political messages. But radio wasn’t under the same kind of restrictive code that Hollywood was back then. Neil Verma thinks the censors feared the power of visual images, and they underestimated the power of audio to create images in your mind. NEIL: Almost everyone talks about radio as a blind medium, which is a particular way of talking about a medium, no one talks about sculpture as a deaf medium, but whenever 5 you hear anything about radio, the first thing people say is it's blind. It's strange to characterize or essentialize a medium by something it can't provide. DT: What are some more examples of this really dark stuff? EM: Well, thrillers were the dominant format. But they weren’t just spy thrillers or detective shows. A lot of these shows were what we would call “horror.” RICHARD HAND: Some things that we might think of post George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, this kind of unhappy ending, you're getting it in the '30s and '40s.
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