Orson Welles on the Air: Radio Recordings and Scripts, 1938-1946 “My big inventions were in radio and the theatre. Much more than in movies.” — Orson Welles “Seeing the original scripts of the Mercury Theatre on the Air programs and the disks that transcribed them was like gazing upon a Rosetta Stone of broadcast radio.” — Paul Heyer Indiana University proposes to digitize and preserve 324 original sound recordings and accompanying scripts of radio programs produced by Orson Welles and to present the digitized materials in a free web site with enhanced metadata and contextual essays by leading scholars of Welles’s radio work. Orson Welles was a major creative force in the American theatrical and media arts of the mid-twentieth century. Through his work as an actor, director, writer, and producer, he was responsible for some of the era’s most critically acclaimed innovations not just within a single medium, but in a body of work that spanned film, live theater, and radio. Through the series known as First Person Singular, Mercury Theatre on the Air, and Campbell Playhouse in turn, Welles is widely recognized as having raised the bar for radio drama, pioneering and honing narrative techniques that he would later carry over into his acclaimed film work. Among other things, he emphasized the value of narration—something at which he excelled—rejecting the notion that radio drama should simply involve broadcasting the kind of sounds someone might have heard while watching a stage play. One episode of the Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The War of the Worlds,” arguably became the most famous (or infamous) broadcast in history, thanks to the panic it’s alleged to have caused among listeners who mistook its dramatization of H. G. Wells’s story using the format of radio news for reports of an actual Martian invasion. Although Welles’s radio broadcasts of the 1930s are best known today, he remained active in the medium well into the following decade—during World War Two, for instance, he produced broadcasts in a variety of formats in support of the war effort. IU Orson Welles on the Air proposal - Narrative 1 The audio materials to be digitized and preserved are held in Indiana University’s Lilly Library, and consist of master, original recordings of numerous episodes of such canonical Welles series as Mercury Theatre on the Air, Campbell Playhouse, Ceiling Unlimited, Hello Americans, This Is My Best, and various incarnations of the Orson Welles Almanac, including a prospective eight-part series for the Eversharp Pen Company that was never broadcast. Other highlights include an irreverent spoof of Macbeth recorded privately during a rehearsal in April 1940; a broadcast made shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, during which Welles was interrupted by a government blackout notice; and the most complete known set of The Doorway to Life, a Peabody Award winning program about the challenges of raising children produced by William Robson and scripted by William Alland and Virginia Mullen—all close collaborators of Welles. Collectively, these discs constitute a unique audio record of the seminal broadcast work of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre. The project will also digitize related manuscript radio scripts in the collection, whose pages show evidence of Welles’ creative process in their dramatic deletions and seemingly last-minute rewrites. See Appendix A for sample images. Much of Welles’s success in radio was rooted in aural characteristics that can’t be conveyed very effectively in print: qualities of voice, subtleties of timing, layering of sound effects and music, and so forth. The ability of today’s scholars, students, and general public to understand and appreciate his contributions to radio thus hinges on them having access to audio recordings of the broadcasts themselves. The materials described above are held in the IU Lilly Library, as part of the Orson Welles manuscripts [1] and are described in the series Radio (scripts), Bound Radio Scripts, and Audio (recordings on disc). The Welles-related collections at the Lilly Library consist of more than 19,875 items relating to the life and work of Orson Welles, and are of great interest to students, scholars, and the general public. In the past three years ninety researchers have used the Welles manuscripts, with users coming from nineteen states (including twenty-one users from Indiana) and eleven countries, including IU Orson Welles on the Air proposal - Narrative 2 Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Indiana University also hosted a series of events honoring Orson Welles in the spring of 2015. Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration, Symposium and Exhibition was a multi-disciplinary series of events that included a major exhibition at the Lilly Library titled 100 Years of Orson Welles: Master of Stage, Sound, and Screen, a 12-program film screening series, and a symposium that included 2 keynote addresses and nearly 30 paper presentations attended by eighty-six registrants (44 from outside Indiana, 8 international). For some years critical attention neglected Welles’s radio work in favor of his other contributions, but that has changed in light of newer scholarship that places his broadcast accomplishments front and center, such as Paul Heyer’s The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952, published in 2005. Work by scholars Neil Verma, Jacob Smith, and Darlene Sadlier has also addressed Welles’s radio production. (Appendix B includes a bibliography of this and other work based on the Welles collection.) Despite renewed interest in Welles’s radio innovation, the corpus of recordings available for study and enjoyment has remained incomplete and of dubious quality. A portion of the material we proposed to digitize is already available through other channels, including key Mercury Theatre and Campbell Playhouse broadcasts, which may be accessed via sites such as Archive.org. However, the quality of available recordings is uneven and often quite poor, apparently reflecting multiple generations of copying by amateur tape-traders. By contrast, the recordings in the Welles mss. at the Lilly Library are, in most cases, originals cut directly from the broadcasts as they aired. Moreover, many specific episodes found in this collection of series don’t appear to survive anywhere else. Of the Orson Welles Show of 1941-42, for example, Wikipedia states: “Nineteen broadcasts were produced; only eight shows have survived.” In fact, the Welles mss. contains fourteen episodes of that show, and many supposedly “lost” episodes of Ceiling Unlimited and Orson Welles Commentaries are found there as well. IU Orson Welles on the Air proposal - Narrative 3 Overall, the recordings in the Welles mss. are the most complete original source of audio for Welles’s radio work during the late 1930s and early-to-mid 1940s, with the highest extant sound quality. Welles radio scholar Neil Verma writes, “not only are the publicly available recordings of Welles’s works spotty, but they are often mislabeled and misattributed. … The problem is that, right now, only a smattering of Welles broadcasts exist in digital format, and these are poorly spread across a set of websites that provide little contextual information to help frame the material.” By making these materials widely accessible in their best available form and fully contextualized, we will enable scholars, teachers, students, and the interested public to experience Welles’s groundbreaking contributions to the radio field more comprehensively and more enchantingly than would otherwise be possible. LILLY LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES Since its founding in 1960, the Lilly Library has been a premier destination for scholars, students, and the interested public, providing open access to research-level collections in over fifty areas. Collection strengths include American and British literature, Latin Americana, children’s literature, mechanical puzzles, the history of radio, television, and film, and many other areas. Beginning with J.K. Lilly's gift of more than 20,000 books, 17,000 manuscripts, paintings and other objects, the Lilly Library's collection has grown to include more than 400,000 books and 7.5 million items in 2,633 manuscript collections. Holdings included major rare books such as the New Testament of the Gutenberg Bible, and Audubon's Birds of America, and important manuscript collections such as the papers of poet Sylvia Plath and novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Collections related to the history of radio include scripts for more than 800 BBC "Third Programme" broadcasts from the mid-1940s through the early 1970s. The Library also holds the papers of BBC pioneers Douglas Cleverdon, Lance Sieveking and D.G. Bridson, and radio scripts by the IU Orson Welles on the Air proposal - Narrative 4 American television writer John McGreevy. The Library continues to collect Orson Welles materials, with new acquisitions as recently as September 2015. The Lilly Library staff prides itself on making the collections available to users of all types. New manuscript collections are initially processed using MPLP guidelines (more product, less process) and a collection description and inventory is placed on our web site. This enables us to make collections appropriately available for use while awaiting more complete processing. Every year scholars and researchers come from around the campus and around the world to use the Lilly Library's extensive resources. Annually, the Library has about 50,000 visitors, conducts nearly 250 class sessions for IU students and other learners, hosts 50 other lectures and events, and curates three major exhibitions and numerous smaller displays. In online interactions each year, the Library has reference inquiries from a majority of the US states and multiple international sources and creates more than 10,000 high quality digital images in response to researcher requests. THE MEDIA DIGITIZATION AND PRESERVATION INITIATIVE (MDPI) IU President Michael McRobbie charged MDPI [2] with preserving and providing access to significant audio and video recordings on all IU campuses by the University’s Bicentennial in 2020.