>> You must be. >> Tough wheat and puffed rice. >> The adventures of Nero Wolfe. Fred Allen. A Life of Writing. >> You're hearing the sound of the Golden Age of Radio, a sampler of some of the 12,000 programs created for broadcast between 1925 and 1976. >> Thank you. >> This is Audio Maverick, a celebration of the life and work of radio great Himan Brown. In our last episode, we followed Himan Brown. From the start of his career in entertainment radio.
>> I presented myself as an actor. Wouldn't they like to have me read some poetry. >> To his early successes as a producer and director? >> I engage you, I identify you, your imagination with all that's going on. Otherwise, what is the spoken word? What is radio? You have to do that. >> In this episode, we learn about the larger creative world Brown helped to shape and that helped shape him.
In fact, this remarkable era came to a close just as Brown launched his second career with CBS Mystery Theater. So the end of one era segued into the beginning of another. I'm Margot Avery. Stay tuned. >> Oh, I won't stop coming. >> In this episode, we're going to zoom out our lens so we can see the full landscape of Brown's early career, and so that you can feel and imagine and hear the world of entertainment radio at its height.
It teamed with creative geniuses, prolific producers and genre defining programs. This would soon catapult the industry to new creative heights and Brown along with it. We get the idea of the Golden age from the Greeks. Apparently it referred to some mythic time when everyone lived happily without ever having to work. Our broadcast Golden Age was a very different story. What made it golden was hard work and imagination and an audience hungry for content.
>> Again, the strains of Manhattan Serenade introduced the story of Mr. Ace and his wife, Jane. >> So who was Himan Brown sharing the airwaves with dozens of prolific producers like himself and a few geniuses. These contemporaries helped define a new sonic culture, and they explored some of the genres in which he flourished.
During its first 20 years, broadcast was a kind of stone soup, to which was added colorful characters, absurd plots, thrilling adventures, and weekly servings of love and marriage, among other ingredients. Who were the cooks? As Brown's early career demonstrates, there was no art for art's sake in this period. Advertising agencies were the primary content producers, and they assembled teams of creatives charged with linking content to products. People in advertising had been.
>> Quote, dramatizing a bar of soap for decades, which is when they wrote print advertising, they were often using all sorts of strategies of emotional appeal and drama. >> That's Cynthia myers, who chronicles the link between advertising companies and programming in her book A Word From Our Sponsor, she tells us that the bigger agencies created whole production teams. >> They hired people to join their radio department from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Some of them were novelists or journalists, some of them were theatrical producers, some of them were musicians and composers. And all those people then were brought in to kind of collaborate on these programs. >> Take, for example, Irwin Shaw, later a best selling novelist. But at this period a classmate of Brown's who had a turn for comic vignettes, so Brown hired him to write for the serial comedy The Gump's.
Myers points out that the talent was mostly uncredited because the agencies wanted the public's attention on the product. >> So to give specific attribution to a specific author was kind of beside the point it was to take away from the purpose of the program, which was to sell soap or to sell cheese.
>> Nevertheless, even if they were selling soap or cheese, this group of journalists, novelists and playwrights were still able to bring their inventiveness and charm to the table and to the ear. >> There was this thing in your house and you heard people singing. You heard people talking. People just couldn't wrap their heads around how and why that could be. And so the word miracle was used over and over.
>> That's Susan Douglas, she's the author of Listening in Radio and the American imagination. >> There were people who wanted to know where the little tiny people were inside the box, who were making the music and the voices. >> Who were they? They were the writers and directors and actors and sound effects technicians and engineers. They weren't, of course, inside the box, but they were still experimenting with the form. >> During the heyday of radio.
Every genre came to rely on certain formulas. >> That's broadcast historian Leonard Maltin. >> And the, uh, the cleverer writers or writer producers who fought that and tried to find ways to freshen the routine.
Others found that their their audience, whether it would be housewives on the soap operas or kids listening to daily adventure shows like Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy or a Little Orphan Annie or a Superman, The Adventures of Superman, you know, found that people were comfortable with formula. >> One of the other signs of radio's development, aside from more programming and more money, was the awareness of the audience.
While there was implicit acknowledgement that people were listening, the audience became important to agencies as soon as they were also identified as consumers. >> You know, there was enormous interest in the 1930s in what America was, who was in it. >> That's Susan Douglas again. In Listening In, she also explores the synergy between audiences and programmers. Understanding who was listening shaped choices about what they heard.
>> And, you know, some of this is the result of there had been, you know, serial waves of immigration. And then there was the Great Depression, which was catastrophic and trying to figure out Who was still rich? Who was still comfortable? Who was starving? Where were people? >> So the industry was groping to define a society that couldn't really define itself. >> And so radio performed kind of a dual and seemingly contradictory function.
On the one hand, it did help cultivate a sense of a national culture. When you had a hit show, what these conveyed, suggested, enforced is that despite everything, because 40 million people would be listening at the exact same time to the exact same show, and sharing in that culture that there was a national culture. At the same time, there were also local shows that could convey local culture.
>> In 1970, four years after the Golden Age had come and gone, Garrison Keillor launched a long running radio show called Prairie Home Companion. It was an homage to variety shows of the Golden Age, and it reached a national audience with folksy humor, fake commercials, and musical entertainment. >> Well, look who's coming through that door. I think we met somewhere before. Hello, love. Are you. Hello, love.
>> But at either the local or the national level, radio audiences were also individuals, and their hopes and dreams and expectations of what came out of the Magic box varied accordingly. If they were out of jobs, they needed to escape. If they were homemakers, they needed to be diverted, if they were part of the daily grind. They wanted to identify with others like themselves and radio's creators, even though they were in the service of commerce.
Invented characters and storylines that reflected very real concerns about becoming American without losing your past. >> There was a lot of ethnic humor on radio which drew from vaudeville. Vaudeville was replete with ethnic humor, Irish humor, Jewish and Yiddish humor, humor about Italians, um, humor about Greeks, you know, humor that drew from the immigrant experience. >> I do ethnic Tanya, so very, very happy. But of course, in my family you are so sweet. You make me want to cry.
>> About the gaps between the wealthy and the poor. >> I asked you not to wear those earrings and that cheap imitation necklace. You took them off your greed. And after we got there, you came out of the dressing room. >> Oh, Steven, I'm perfectly willing to let you tell me how to act, but please don't give me pointers on how to dress about. >> Love and marriage and family. >> Can't you honestly tell what I'm driving at.
>> I haven't the vaguest idea. And forget it. I'm not going to buy a television set. >> And the result of this confluence of product and programming was something for every taste and demographic. The shows were complete, self enclosed worlds, and while they were often defined by genre, the really successful ones combined formula with something that moved outside the box. >> That concept would be untied by Murphy and Levy.
>> All the ethnic comedies mentioned by Douglas included Abe's Irish Rose. Ann Nichols adapted her successful stage play about the marriage between a Jew and a Catholic, and the family tensions that followed. What do you. >> Mean by that great. >> Sense, I hope, without checking. I didn't mean anything, but I do miss them. >> My favorite craving adventure tune in The Lone Ranger.
The stock market crash drove creator George W trundle into radio, and he turned to one of America's enduring myths, the Wild West, to create the Ranger. John Reid is faithful Indian companion Tonto and his fiery steed over this heroic trio foiled bad guys in the canyons of Texas to the tune of the William Tell Overture.
A bit over the top, yes, but it was a great example of how radio invited mash ups of story and sound, and how their creators managed to hook audiences week after week, and radio went to the dogs for stories that combine courage and sentiment. Lassie, based on a popular movie about a collie, Lassie Come Home, and Rin Tin Tin, based on an actual dog rescued by a World War one soldier, represented gallant canines. >> The Lassie show.
>> By far the leading genre was the situation comedy, many of them situated in the home lives, marriages and families of their characters. >> The Columbia Broadcasting System presents a new. >> Comedy, My. >> Friend. >> Irma. >> Each sitcom was packaged almost identically a lush orchestral introduction, a sponsor message, and a hand off to the show. And that week's situation will be hot.
>> My friend Irma. >> In every sort of profession was celebrated lawyers, doctors, newspapermen, handymen, even photographers, to name just a few. And teachers around the country became devoted fans of our Miss Brooks, starring Eve Arden, who played a teacher who was actually nice. >> Although one day in the life of a. >> Schoolteacher is pretty much the same as the next. At night you wish you were dead? Not that I'm bored.
>> People were finding themselves in this programming, but they were also escaping their sometimes dreary day to day lives. In radio, Americans could hear themselves, and it allowed them to laugh at their own circumstances, weep when a beloved character was in trouble, and rejoice in hard earned happy endings. Most of these shows were weekly, employing dozens of writers, so of course there were formulas, but the best works morphed into independent creations that seemed almost alive.
Not to mention the fact that they were actually live, which contributed to their appealing spontaneity. >> Why did Davis and William Powell have just entered the stage from All right? The audience burst into applause. They acknowledged the greeting. Take their places at the microphones, and the play begins.
>> Audiences like to eavesdrop on the people next door, but were also fascinated by the remote and glamorous popular literature inspired shows featuring spies and sleuths like Sherlock Holmes and the Saint and the investigative lawyer Perry Mason, one of the Golden Age characters who endured into broadcast television a. >> Restriction to the weight that should be given Mr. Carlos testimony. Oh, come now, Mason, she has laryngitis. I'm not talking about her health, mister.
I'm certain she's as healthy as a horse. What? Yes. What are you getting at, then, Mr. Mason? Well, I think the jury should be informed that Mr. Calo is also a murder suspect. That was that. I'm sure you heard me, Mr. Rat. I said a murder suspect. >> Indeed. There was crime galore. Some shows were drawn from the lurid pulp magazines that had delivered riders to radio studios. Heroic policemen and hardboiled detectives solved crimes and roughed up miscreants with plenty of sound effects.
Hold it right. >> There. What are you doing here? Police officers, you're under arrest. >> I'm not going to tell you how it's done, because Himan Brown is going to share all the tricks of the trade in episode six. >> It won't be. >> No tough guys, thugs or malls for you. Want something classier? >> Born of a well-to-do family and a college man, he tried from childhood to live up to the name he bore. Chameleon.
>> There were also shows that mingle the upper crust on the lower orders, like Mr. Chameleon. >> Appearing in endless guises. >> They were influenced by detective novels featuring aristocratic sleuths like Dorothy Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey and SS Van Dynes. Philo Vance, who earned his own show. >> Abbey Lane. >> On a Night Like This. Vance. No Washington assignment for me. No ridiculous detecting for you, I love it.
>> And of course, The Shadow, the show my mother starred in. It was adapted from a series of pulp novels written by Walter Gibson. In the storyline, wealthy Playboy Lamont Cranston has traveled to the mysterious East. Old time radio was filled with cringe making tropes like this. There, he encounters a mystic who teaches him. >> The hypnotic power to cloud. >> Men's minds. >> So they cannot see him. >> This is useful if you decide to set up as a crime fighter.
The shadow reveals himself to lowlifes with a menacing laugh. >> Who know. >> What evil lurks in the hearts of men. The shadow knows. >> The show had a number of false starts with different actors, but established itself with the casting of Orson Welles as the main character, Cranston, and his mind penetrating alter ego. My mother's role. Have I made mention of this before was the lovely Margo Lane, the attractive confidante of the Playboy.
Those are the. >> Three men you tell me. >> About. Yes, Margo. They look like gangsters, all right. They aren't usually mortal enemies. But tonight it looks very much as if they're banding together. I wonder why. Because they're afraid of me. >> Of you? Then why do you come here and expose? >> They're only afraid of me as the shadow. I do not know Lamont Cranston. >> Who are they? >> Ma'am knew Welles already.
They both toured with the successful production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. They were buddies. They were friends. She thought highly of him and also sort of giggled at him a lot because she thought he was very full of himself. But mom wasn't the first Margo Lane, although the character was named for her. In an unusual example of reverse nepotism, her boyfriend at the time was one of the producers. So rather than appearing biased, he cast Agnes Moorehead. How do you.
>> Know his customers are bootlegs? >> And we saw coming out of Santini shop as we came in one Santino denied scene. >> He's an absolutely darling. What a memory. >> Veritable storehouse of vital statistics. >> Craft Music Hall, starring Bing Crosby with Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra, the Paul Taylor Choristers. And tonight, back from his two weeks fishing trip, Bob Byrne. And here's Bing Crosby. Just when romance got a start, you decided it was time to pass.
How could you? How could you? >> In addition to plot or situation based shows with characters created by and for radio, there were also variety shows drawn from the real world of entertainment. Leading stars, usually crooners or comics, would strut their stuff and banter with guests who would in turn strut their stuff. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra had shows, but the most successful was Jack Benny, a comic who completely embraced the form. >> Hey, close that door!
>> Don't worry. We will. Uh, what are you doing? Jack? >> What am I doing? What's this I got under my chin? >> Another chin? >> I mean, under both of them. I'm practicing the b. Say, I thought you said you could play the B when you were a kid. Well, I could, but a lot of honey has gone over the dam since then. >> There were also dramas that promised an entree into the glamorous world of the theater, like the First Nighter Program.
This was in the midst of the depression, a time when few listeners could afford real Broadway shows. So The First Nighter created Faux Productions and listeners got a front row seat. >> Good evening, Mr. Snyder. The ushers will show you to your seats. Thank you. We'll go right. >> Here. And, of course, the theater was also a great setting for an engrossing afternoon serial.
>> All right, ladies and gentlemen, they're all comfortably seated, and we just have time to look at the theater program. >> Laura Noble was the backstage wife, an ordinary girl from Iowa, meaning the sticks who marries a matinee idol. For 23 years, she coped with dilemmas, from her handsome husband's roving eye to temperamental stars to unreliable investors. >> Hello, Mary. Busy? >> Never too busy to talk to you, Peter.
>> The show was one of the earliest developed by Himan Brown's longtime clients and collaborators, Frank and Anne Humbert. >> Oh, what's your trouble today? You certainly look as if you had the weight of the world on your shoulders. >> I might return the compliment, Mary. >> In spite of your sunny smile and cheerful manner, I'm afraid you're doing a bit of an Atlas stunt yourself. Why do I sit on the desk? >> Of course not. That's what desks are made for.
Oh, excuse me a minute. >> Oh, go right ahead. My lovely. >> Hello? Yes, speaking. Oh, no, Mr. Wentworth, I'm sorry. I've nothing to say. No, I don't care to make a statement for your Broadway gossip column or anyone else's. >> Brown was justly proud of early projects like the romantic serial Mary the Little French Princess, and of strip cartoons brought to life like Dick Tracy, as well as later adaptations of crime series like Bulldog Drummond and The Thin Man.
But he also contributed one of the first soaps about a professional woman, Joyce Jordan. >> And now we're pleased to present a new series, Joyce Jordan Girl. In turn, the stirring modern story of a beautiful girl on her own in a man's world, a story that takes you behind grim hospital walls. >> We'll hear more about Jordan in our next episode.
As we've heard, radio shows were created from multiple sources, including vaudeville, a form of theatrical variety show that originated in France in the 19th century. Many successful American entertainers got their start in vaudeville. Among them the stars of one of the most problematic successes of the Golden Age. Amos and Andy. >> Show a full half hour of entertainment with all the Amos and Andy characters. >> This popular comedy was radio in blackface.
It was the creation of Charles J. Carroll and Freeman F Gosden, white working class men who, like many others, made the leap into show business as a vaudeville act, which they then translated to radio. Amos and Andy with a goofy, feckless owners of a down on its luck cab company. But early shows also offered thinly disguised political satire, with an irreverent wit that surely contributed to the show's wide following.
It's hard to wrap our minds around this racist concept and its many embedded assumptions, but it was, regrettably, among the most popular shows in broadcast at a time when few people of color had a significant presence in the industry. Today, we find racial and ethnic stereotyping abhorrent. It was, of course, the product of the society at large, not the medium itself. >> Does Dominique intrigue you, Monsieur Cobb? Oh, it's it's magnificent. >> I can hardly wait to paint it.
>> Ah, I did not know you were an artist. >> I haven't had a chance to tell you. I've covered most of the Caribbean, but where. >> Radio took a more forgivable shortcut was in the characters heard in genre programs. >> The first man they look for in the last they want to meet. >> There was a kind of sonic shorthand for many of them. >> It's a chancy job, and I make some man watchful.
>> Seductress society dames, policemen, hapless victims of deception populated many Golden Age staples, and many of them were voiced by the same actors. Your career in radio was guaranteed if you could pivot from a deep dyed villain to a concerned husband, from a housewife to a harridan. So hundreds of programs, thousands of plots delivering comedy, drama, suspense and merchandise entertaining, engaging, imaginative and seaworthy.
We'd still be calling it the Golden Age, even if that's all they wrote. But as much as the extended radio family, from advertisers to writers to performers, came to appreciate radio as a tool for selling as a dependable livelihood, perhaps no one anticipated the inviting fluidity, the artistic nuance of the form itself from a vehicle for commerce radio was becoming, in this prolific period, a true artistic medium.
So eventually it began to produce true artists, shaping both a more nuanced and bolder side of the Golden Age legacy. Arch, Nobler and Lucille Fletcher created and wrote for the growing suspense genre. Norman Corwin was a gifted fantasy writer who made CBS into his own personal fairytale kingdom, and Archibald MacLeish and Orson Welles created masterpieces with narratives that reflected on human destiny just as it was being reshaped in the real world.
>> And now, if you haven't already done so, turn off your lights now. >> Arch oblique was almost a man out of his time, an experimental playwright in an era of formulaic work. As a network producer, he inherited an already established thriller series called Lights Out. It was a horror show that invited the listener to submit to its brand of creepiness. >> It is later than you think. >> Blair made the show his own, and when his cautionary billboard is.
>> Heard, Lights. >> Out brings you stories of the. >> Supernatural and the supernormal. >> It sets the stage for plays that posed questions of morality. Here's a scene from revolt of the worms, in which a self-centered scientist has retreated from the war effort to grow the perfect rose. >> All I can do is sit. >> And think and wait. Wait for the floors to lift and the walls to crash. Facts, I think, are facts. Yes, a journal of facts. Think how it began.
Why it's happening. Journal of facts. Until a walls crash in the mythic flesh. >> Notice anything that queasy making slithery sound. That head voice filled with too late regrets. You're doubtless listening to this program in stereo, in your earbuds, on your computer, but most early radio drama was produced in mono, so these seemingly sound rich. Shows were adroit manipulations, not of technology but of our own psyches. Obama's genius was eventually rewarded.
He got his own radio drama series, Arch Obama's radio Plays at CBS, the most creatively venturesome of the networks. His output there included the first airing of Dalton Trumbo, celebrated Johnny, Get Your Gun. >> We tell You of Joe Bonham 22 years ago. He went to war. They carried him back from that war. They carried him back because he had no arms, no legs, no ears with which to hear, no eyes with which to see, no mouth with which to speak.
>> Some of the most famous moments of early broadcast radio came from the typewriter of Lucille Fletcher, a Vassar graduate who got in on the ground floor at CBS as a publicity writer. clerk, and music librarian. This latter role may have put her in the way of composer Bernard Herrmann, whom she later married. Herrmann was creating scores for CBS ambitious array of dramas showcased as the Columbia Workshop.
He went on to score several of Fletcher's works, including The Hitchhiker, starring Orson Welles, which aired in 1941. >> Sometimes you want your heart to be warmed, and sometimes you want your spine to tingle. The tingling is to be hoped, will be quite audible as you listen tonight. The hitchhiker. That's the name of our story. The hitchhiker.
>> Fletcher's brilliant audio play, which she later adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone, is both a road trip and an existential tone poem. >> I'm in an auto camp on route 66, just west of Gallup, New Mexico. >> Herrmann would go on to fame for his score for Hitchcock's Psycho. >> Keep me from going. >> Going crazy. >> Fletcher had her greatest success with an actor. Himan Brown was proud to have discovered Agnes Moorehead.
He cast her as Min Gump when he acquired the successful sitcom The Gump's. But Fletcher's riveting drama sorry, Wrong Number showed her range. Moorhead's character, the fretful invalid Mrs. Albert Stevenson, is trying to reach her husband's office, but a crossed phone line allows her to overhear plans for a murder. >> Your call please. Operator I've been dialing Murray Hill 70939. >> When she attempts to report it to the police, she's written off as a crackpot.
But it's soon revealed that not only is the plot real, but she herself is the intended victim. >> It makes a noise in case a window is open and she should scream. Oh, hello, what. >> Number is this, please? >> She's trapped and time is running out. It's one of the things that radio artists were discovering that time and space could be manipulated and pull us into the. >> Story as. >> Little blood as possible, because our client does not wish to make us suffer long.
>> That's right. You'll use a knife. >> Mrs. Stevenson is a petulant, high handed narcissist. Fletcher says she was based on a haughty woman in a supermarket checkout line. And yet our whole being is pulled towards her in this brilliant miniature. Don't worry. Everything's okay. Radio. That medium of vibrations has us vibrating in our seats. And Fletcher was a brilliant conductor. >> 70093 he is busy. I will call you an operator.
Operator. Operator. >> Another great radio conductor was Norman Corwin. Like Himan Brown, he got his start in radio, reading poetry, in his case on the Long Island station WQXR. He went on to become the most celebrated audio dramatist of the Golden Age, often called the form's Poet Laureate. He created dozens of joyful and inventive works. >> Is this the Department of Lost Dogs? Yeah, I'm looking for my. >> In the Odyssey of Runyon Jones, a favorite of Corwin's legion of fans.
A boy loses his dog, puts in a traffic accident, and insists that he deserves another chance at life. He makes his case to afterlife bureaucrats, various cranky gods, and even Father Time. >> When did you lose him? Yesterday morning. Where? Right outside my. >> House. Runyon Jones is a delicious combination of satire and fable. What happened? >> The car ran over him, and then he was killed, sir. And you're on the wrong floor. >> This is the Department of Lost Dogs.
>> What you. >> Want is the. >> Department of deceased dogs. Where is that, sir? Two flights up here. >> Take the slip. >> And hand it to the man at the desk. >> Corwin's plays are still produced all over the country. His admirers included classic fantasy writer Ray Bradbury, oral historian Studs Terkel, screenwriter and producer Norman Lear, and newscaster Charles Kuralt.
It was Kuralt who introduced National Public Radio's repeat broadcast of one of Corwin's most celebrated works, On a Note of Triumph. >> His victory, A Sweet Dish or Isn't It? >> At the close of World War Two. Corwin was commissioned by the white House to create a radio celebration of the Allied victory.
Instead, he crafted a complex work that anticipated modern narrative techniques, shifting back and forth in time and space, traveling from the depths of the ocean to the stratosphere, and using many voices from many imagined parts of the world. >> If you don't mind, there's some things we guys would like to ask. >> Far from being a jingoistic celebration, on a note of triumph questions the whole nature of war. >> First of all, who did we beat? >> How much did it cost.
>> To beat him? What have we learned? What do we know now that we didn't know before? What do we do now? >> Is it all gonna happen again? >> On a note of triumph. Responds ambivalent to the end of the war. Before the war had even begun, two other geniuses of the Golden Age, Archibald MacLeish and Orson Welles, crafted unforgettable works explosive prophetic pieces featuring worlds transformed by conquest and violence. One was meticulously planned.
One happened almost by accident. Both were profound examples of radios dramatic power and persuasion. Archibald MacLeish was a poet, lawyer and humanist, educated at Ivy League schools, but he was shaped by an interlude in Paris that allowed him to perceive the friction between what he saw as the close of the Old World and the start of the new. In 1937, CBS aired his powerful and disturbing The Fall of the city.
Mcleish's radio play was inspired by Hernan Cortez's conquest of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan, but The Fall of the city is also an allegory about the rise of fascism. Adolf Hitler had recently annexed Austria unchallenged, and McLeish feared that further passivity in Europe would result in a victory for the Nazis. The fall of the city comes to us in the form of a news report. >> Small wonder they feel fear. Before the murders of the famous kings, before imperial cities burned and fell.
The dead were said. >> To show themselves and speak. That's Orson Welles, my mom's former co-star, as the unnamed reporter in order to reinforce the play's central metaphor. Director Irwin Reese made the unusual decision to record on location at the Armory in New York City. At this time, almost all radio plays were recorded in a studio. >> And gave them voices Masterless men, when shall it be Masterless men will take a master. What has she said to us?
>> When shall it be, master? At the end. >> Of Mcleish's bleak drama, the city of Masterless men has found a master. Its citizens willing submission spells the end of their civilization. But what if the trouble finds you? Welles, merely a player in fall, had his own chance to end the world. A year later, on October 30th, 1938. If you were home at 755. You might have heard. >> This. >> With Annie and Zeke and Robert Armbruster and the Jason Sanborn Orchestra.
Heard on this program were two sleepy people from thanks for the memory and The Big Show by Jerome Kern. This is Wendell. >> That was the end of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's popular show featuring his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. I know a dummy on the radio. The show had a big following. Or if you tuned in to CBS at the top of the hour, you heard this.
>> Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliates stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in The War of the worlds by H.G. Wells. >> But if you tuned into CBS after turning the dial from Bergen, you heard this. >> We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings visit themselves about their various concerns.
They were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water, and with infinite complacency. People went to and fro of the earth about their little affairs, serene, and the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood, which, by chance or design man, has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space.
Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle. Intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. >> And if this is what you heard, you might have been one of the millions of people who imagined fleeing your home. And some actually did, after a gripping hour of news had reported the landing of Martians in Grover's Mills, new Jersey.
There's a plaque. >> Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News at 20 minutes before eight central time. Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory to Illinois reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity.
>> The next day, newspapers had a field day with headlines like Mars Invasion and Radio Set Terrifies Us. H.G. Wells book and Orson Welles acting bring prayers, tears, flight and the. >> Police. >> Radio Fake Scares Nation. And here's the story that scared us. Welles and the War of the worlds were news, all right, but newspapers were also happy to seize an opportunity to dirty the reputation of broadcasting a perceived rival for audience and advertisers.
The War of the worlds has been cited as one of the first examples of fake news, and as a deliberate prank by a notoriously Frankish wells, but most of all, it's a masterpiece of audio drama. H.G. Wells dystopian novel was a last minute choice for Orson Welles and co-writer Howard Koch, but it tapped into the growing apprehension about the state of Europe and memories of the recent crash of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, new Jersey. >> Oh, my. Get out of the way, please.
It's burning and bursting into flames. And it's falling on the morning pass. And all the folks for three. This is terrible. This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, is this the space. >> Is 2004 500ft. >> Into the sky. It's a terrific race, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and flames now. And the frame is rising to the ground. Not quite to the mooring mast.
>> All the easy enough to persuade people of imminent disaster when programming was frequently interrupted by bulletins like this. >> German aircraft carried out a number of attacks on Great Britain last night. The raids, which lasted for several hours, were scattered over many parts of the country, and enemy aircraft have been reported over tons on the south coast, the West of England, the North Midlands and the North West, as well as over the London area.
>> The War of the worlds was very much of its time, but is also timeless, with myriad productions for stage and film. Some were homages to the Golden Age, but others picked up on its transgressive dystopian narrative. So two of the greatest works of both Golden Age radio and of the form itself, bring us to the edge of catastrophe. And almost on cue, the actual world explodes. >> You're just turning on your radios. Great Britain is now at war with Germany.
>> And Himan Brown has to carry his conscience and his programs into war. Join us and him for episode five, where we follow Brown during the next stage of his career, share in new successes, and learn how he shaped his programs in response to the war. I'm Margot Avery. Audio Maverick is produced and directed by Sarah Montague, who also writes the scripts. Our executive producers are Melina Brown and Sarah Montague. CUNY TV's executive director is Chiqui Cartagena.
The director of production is Susan Iger, and Deborah Labadie is CUNY TV's chief operating opperating officer. The associate producer for Audio Maverick is Corinne Wallace, and our audio production intern is Lucia Funaro. Audio Maverick is narrated by Margot Avery. Our technical team at CUNY includes senior audio engineer Richard Kim and audio engineer and program mix engineer Lisa Gosselin. Our staff photographer is Laura Fuchs. Our archivists are David Rice and Catriona Schlosser.
Our closed caption coordinator is Amy Monte. And the script editor is Allison Behringer. Our theme was composed by Allison Layton-Brown. Sound design and final mixing are by John deLore and Bart Warshaw. Multitude productions handles our publicity and marketing. Audio Maverick is a production of CUNY TV.