>> [Radio Chatter] >> I surrender. >> Who are you working for? >> [Radio Chatter] >> '59. That was the death knell. Everything went off radio in the way of drama. >> That's radio producer Himan Brown. And this is "Audio Maverick," a celebration of his life and work. >> Come in. >> What does a driven creative do when the source of his creativity dries up? By 1959, radio drama on commercial networks had come to an end.
Its shows, its revenues, and its talent had migrated to television. It was not, however, the end of Himan Brown. 30 years in broadcast radio had given him a toolkit, and he was about to use it in the service of social issues. It's time to join him for two very different periods of his creative life. >> The door is open. Welcome. >> But remember, there was a 14-year period when there was no radio drama and I was as busy as possible doing many, many other things.
>> Brown became active as a philanthropist, a real estate investor, and a filmmaker. Brown took his social conscience and his skills as a storyteller into film and television. He produced documentary style films, docudramas, and social commentaries that were often commissioned by institutions he believed in and addressed issues he felt strongly about. >> Recorded in front of a live studio audience.
>> One example was "The Stars Salute," a seven-part television special to raise money for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Brown hired well-known stars to host segments profiling local charities that the federation supported, organizations that worked with the elderly, the disabled, children, and those challenged by poverty and mental illness. >> And you name the stars. There isn't a star alive from Bob Hope and Jack Benny and Danny Kaye and George Segal and Jack Lemmon.
>> They did not appear as performers but as ambassadors for the Federation's works. >> Well, I liked yours, and I hope you like mine. >> Here's a segment hosted by Barbra Streisand which was filmed at a children's home. >> The big bad wolf, the big bad wolf. >> The big bad wolf. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? >> In the early 1960s, Hebrew Union College commissioned Brown to produce "The Price of Silence."
It was a fictionalized take on the real-life oppression that Jews were facing in the Soviet Union, filmed entirely as a courtroom scene. The popular legal drama "Perry Mason" had moved from radio to television in the late 1950s, and Brown said this was the model for his structure. >> I had Edward G. Robinson, strangely enough, in the "Perry Mason" courtroom, and the Russians had a table, and we had a table, and it was a j'accuse. You are guilty of anti-Semitism, Russia.
And George Coulouris was the Russian voice. We never saw him. We just stayed on the table, and I brought in witnesses, all kinds of witnesses. [ Gavel bangs ] >> The witnesses for the Soviets' crimes had actually been recorded behind the Iron Curtain. And the project demonstrates Brown's gift for synergy, bringing together current events, the famous historical Alfred Dreyfus case, a Jewish officer wrongly tried, and Perry Mason, the quintessential Golden Age legal genius.
"The Price of Silence" made Brown persona non grata in the Soviet Union. >> Because they know what I did. >> Even though Brown's work during this period was primarily mission-driven, in some 100 films he created, he was innovative and pioneering in his subjects and approaches. For example, at a time when discussing mental health was taboo, he made one of the first such films on the subject, "You Are Not Alone."
And he was especially proud of "A Morning for Jimmy," created in 1960 for the Urban League, a national organization that advocates for justice for African Americans and against racial discrimination. >> Jimmy, what's the matter? >> I went downtown today, Mom, just to get a little part-time job in the shipping room, department store. I didn't want to tell you and Papa about it until I was sure I got the job. I stood in line with all those white people around me.
They took every white boy in line in front of me. When they came to me, they just told me I had no hope. I didn't pay it no mind. I just started to walk off. >> "A Morning for Jimmy" portrayed the struggles of a young African American in his pursuit of a career as an architect, using a dramatic story to reflect the challenges and prejudices that demonstrated less overt forms of racism in the professional realm.
The cast included Cicely Tyson at the start of her career, and groundbreaking Black producer Vinnette Carroll. >> There are plenty of good jobs you could take without putting your head against a stone wall. >> As I remember, you didn't always talk like that, John. >> Oh, Jim, look at me and the telephone company. Why, 20 years ago, that was just unheard of. They wouldn't even look at us, let alone hire us. I do my work, and when I do it well, I get a promotion.
You know, you can't push these people into doing things. You have to let them do it in their own time. Golly, you're a smart kid. I thought you were wise enough to know this. >> Somebody had to push. >> Even though he was reflecting real-life stories, Brown still saw his productions as dramas and himself as a sort of auteur. >> Oh, yes. I'm a one-man operation. I don't separate the producer from the director, and neither does Mr. Sidney Lumet.
Neither does Elia Kazan or any of the movie makers. >> Brown is making an interesting connection here. He was a man who always prided himself on his gumption and creative independence from the various systems he served, but here he's linking his maverick nature, the need to control every aspect of production, to his craft. >> The more of the creative effort that is centered in the one person, I think, the greater the result.
>> And even as a producer of charitable events, Brown was a showman. He staged an annual benefit concert at Madison Square Garden for 18 years for Bonds of Israel, an organization that encouraged investment in stock portfolios that would benefit this still-young nation, and he insisted that the event be presented in the round. >> I said, if a prizefight can sit all around the stage, I want to put a stage in the middle of Madison Square Garden and put everybody around there.
I would have a 70-, 80-piece orchestra, symphony orchestra. >> An echo of his old NBC days. >> I would have 22 to 30 ballet dancers who would create special ballets under my instructions. >> Over the years, the artists who participated included musical greats like Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and Leonard Bernstein. It was a true logistical and production feat to bring the concerts together, and Brown had to contend with Madison Square Garden's multi-purpose nature.
>> The night before they had hockey. On Monday night, I had to come in, the floor was still cold from the ice that they had taken off, and put a show together in three hours, a 2.5-hour show. >> Controlling as Brown was in a studio environment, you get the sense that he liked the chaos of live concert production. Sometimes messiness inspires creation. Just as he saw himself as a solo operator filmmaker, Brown was adamant about a similar approach to concert production.
>> But I did this absolutely single-handed. I did not have any stooges around me. I didn't have any assistants. >> Of course, there's no way that Brown actually produced these shows single handedly. Madison Square Garden is virtually a nation state in public entertainment, and there would have been a great many people involved in making these events happen. And radio itself is a fundamentally collaborative medium, something he acknowledges in many accounts and interviews.
But he was clearly suspicious of both toadies and glory hogs. It's possible that some of his sense of isolation had to do with his devastating early partnership with Gertrude Berg over "The Goldbergs" radio serial. He never really got over this betrayal, and it likely made him distrustful of partnerships that weren't creative. He seemed to trust his actors and engineers completely. The costs of the Madison Square Garden concert mounted, and eventually Brown stopped producing it.
But by then he calculated that $12 to $14 million worth of bonds had been sold. >> For 18 years, it was a ball. I loved it. I never got a penny for these. None of my philanthropic work has paid me one nickel, and I wouldn't want it any other way. >> Brown did flirt with some commercial entertainment during the same period. In the mid 1950s, he had a contract with RKO, the studio that produced Hollywood blockbusters like "King Kong" and "Citizen Kane."
>> I made no campaign promises. >> Brown had planned on doing a 12-part series of what today we'd call docudramas. >> I predicated all of these pictures on investigative reportage. I wanted to do true stories, which we dramatized. >> But he joined with this once-mighty studio in its decline. RKO ceased operations in 1957, so in the end, Brown made only two features, with a third waiting for release, "Women Without Shadow," about amnesia.
It was Rosemary Harris's screen debut. The experience and the aftermath of financial duplicity embittered Brown. >> I was very, very disillusioned by the production companies, that is, the distributing companies. I didn't want any part of it so that I immediately said, no, this isn't for me. >> Even in compromising circumstances, Brown was ahead of his time.
In 1957, he was given the complete files of the New York City Medical Examiner's office by a former medical examiner, Dr. Morris Halperin, and proposed a forensic show, presumably to RKO. But Brown only comments that "The stupid people I had to deal with said it won't go." But in 1976, NBC debuted a medical mystery television drama called "Quincy, M.E." it starred Jack Klugman, and it was an instant hit. >> Set up a central venous line. Dr. Kaplan will insert it. >> Right away.
>> And I need more silver sulfadiazine gauze. >> Brown, who generally thought with Annie Oakley that anything they could do, he could do better, dismissed it as paltry. Imagine what he would have thought of "CSI." After his not entirely satisfactory dip into television entertainment, Brown was searching for the next thing to dive into. As we've noted, what he liked was control. And so, perhaps most tellingly, he got into real estate and became a studio owner.
>> These buildings were reasonable. 26th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue and 55 was kind of a depressed neighborhood, but I knew that it was due for an upgrading. >> And his building of choice between East 25th and 26th streets has a colorful history. It originally housed the 69th Regiment Armory.
>> Horses were tethered here, and the two buildings together, so that it's an area of 200 by 100, and even the rings to which the horses were tethered are still in the basement. >> When the regiment moved out in 1914, the building became a studio for silent films, with early cinema producers like Jesse Lasky and Alfred Zucker among its tenants. As if preparing for its even more star-studded future, the studio hosted Hollywood legend Mary Pickford.
>> There is something. >> Nothing. >> Stanley Winfrith, what is it? What happened? >> The building's next incarnation was less romantic. It became a manufacturing space, and Brown purchased the building from the American Corrugated Box Company. On the outside, it was a handsome Beaux Arts building, but inside it's a different story. Brown wanted to create a comprehensive, state-of-the-art production studio that he could lease to others.
Even though the space had been studios at one time, they had served the relatively modest needs of silent film production. Brown wanted much more. >> On 26th Street in Manhattan, I created two stages, 100 by 100, uh, with all of the peripheral space, 17 dressing rooms, 12 different, uh, administrative offices, a dozen editing rooms, a carpentry shop, prop shops, everything that goes with a motion picture television effort.
>> Of what must have been a monumental renovation, Brown just notes wryly, "That took a certain amount of my time." His investment was rewarded. Among the shows that came to life in the studio are the Mel Brooks classic "The Producers," and a host of classic and contemporary celebrity television shows featuring personalities from Judy Garland to Patty Duke to Martha Stewart. In one room, there's a billboard that cites many of the studio's programs.
>> "12 Angry Men," 1957. >> "BUtterfield 8," 1960. >> "Long Day's Journey Into Night," 1962. >> "You're a Big Boy Now," 1967. >> "The Boys in the Band," 1970. >> "The Anderson Tapes," 1971. >> "Show of the Week." >> "The Patty Duke Show." >> "Inner Sanctum." >> "As the World Turns." >> "Love of Life." >> "Guiding Light." >> "Search for Tomorrow." >> "The Jon Stewart Show." >> "Ricki Lake."
>> "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" >> "Judge Hatchett." >> "Judge Karen." >> "The Wendy Williams Show." >> "Martha Stewart," 2005 to 2012. >> When we first moved in, it was absolutely an audio museum. This is something we found. >> Eric Duke and his son Steven run Chelsea Television Studios in Brown's old building, which they bought from CBS in 1989. The high ceilings that Brown was so proud of are still there.
>> There are 100-foot beams that if you go look in the ceiling, you'll see them. They floated them down the Hudson, and then they docked at 26th Street and had to come straight up 26th Street. Couldn't make any turns because -- >> It's like "Fitzcarraldo." >> Yeah. >> Stephen Duke shows us the main studio. >> And the studio is just through those doors right there.
>> Versatile enough to host everything from a cooking show to a "Castaways" reunion and to accommodate both real and projected sets. >> It's nice, wide open, accessible space. Basically, it's practical versus LED wall scenario. So this lets us put up... >> But there's a flavor of the past in Eric Duke's modest office, and Brown's old desk is still there. Although Brown boasted that he had no office, he did have one here.
Duke was a tenant of Brown's before buying the studio outright, and over the years he and Brown developed a comfortable relationship. >> He would call me the first of every month, because we did a net lease on the building towards a purchase with Mr. Brown, and he would call me the first of the month and say that the check hadn't gotten there. "Eric, where is the check?" And I said, no, it's coming, Hi. It's going to be there.
And then we'd catch up and everything had already kind of been done, you know, when we started talking about the newer shows. And he says, "Oh, I did that. That was 'Airport' back in 1952. I did that. You know, I had that same show." And, you know, what was being done on television had been done on radio already. So, no, it was interesting hearing those stories. And he was also a passionate collector of fine art. He had quite an extensive art collection.
I came in here when we were meeting and he'd say, you see that? And I said, yeah. And it was just a painting, like just sort of hanging out in the corner. He goes, that's a Monet. >> Granddaughter, Melina Brown, remembers visiting the studio with her sister, Barrie. >> They were shooting a soap opera. We were little girls, and we would take the wheelchairs and push them up and down the halls as fast as we could, with one of us riding them.
>> But Brown's creative life and creative life's blood was in radio. So for all that he was busy and productive and doing good works in the years after 1959, for him, it felt like 14 years of wandering in the wilderness. In all that time, what he wanted most was to be back on the air creating radio dramas. >> So I began a systematic plotting. I listed all the networks, of course. No go. I went to all the advertising agencies. I went to station groups.
Nothing would happen, but I couldn't give it up. >> And finally, his persistence paid off, just as it always had. An old friend, Sam Diggs, was appointed president of CBS, and Brown was finally able to persuade him to give radio drama and Himan Brown a new lease on life. They had a prolonged, though genial, negotiation about just how much airtime was available. Like most executives, Diggs was cautious. Like most visionaries, Brown was persistent.
>> Over a period of four or five lunches, I evolved seven hours every single night, seven hours a week, so that people would know it. >> So, 14 years after Brown heard the death knell of radio and after his personal theater went dark at the end of NBC Playhouse, Brown was back on the air. And what he created was the "CBS Radio Mystery Theater." >> The word mystery becomes occult, gothic suspense detective story, science fiction.
It is the whole world of storytelling under an umbrella which is very, very flexible. >> Brown's new series took him to the new CBS headquarters at 51 West 52nd. Elegant, imposing and known as Black Rock, it was designed by Eero Saarinen, best known for strikingly minimal contemporary furniture. Imposing as the exterior is, it was the studios that framed Brown's experience.
In the building's radio annex, he did his real creative work, even while he was establishing an entrepreneurial presence in Chelsea. And because he had a marquee deal with CBS, Brown wasn't always having to chase after sponsors and create custom material for them. It freed him up to become more of a creative force, but with the same efficiency. >> The radio that I do, I'm totally, totally unhampered, unheckled and left alone, which is wonderful.
>> Here's Brown's maverick nature surfacing. In this interview with the Directors Guild of America, he wants to go on record as someone who didn't have to operate with constraints. But again, he wasn't, of course, alone. >> Come in. Welcome. I am E.G. Marshall. Welcome to the world of terrifying imagination.
>> Host E.G. Marshall was a product of the famed Actor's Studio, and his decisive voice carried him to Broadway in "12 Angry Men," a successful courtroom series, "The Defenders" and to the creaking door of "CBS Mystery Theatre," which he hosted for nearly a decade.
And to perform the plays themselves, Brown created what we might think of as an informal ensemble made up of venerable Golden Age stars whom he'd worked with in the past, and newcomers he sensed had what it takes to perform in radio. >> Ours was sort of a secondary golden age. >> That's Paul Hecht, a distinguished theater and television veteran who met Brown when he was in his early 30s. >> Hi and I got on right away. He liked me.
I don't know why, because I would just pretty much do what I wanted. >> I had met him when I was about 9 or 10 years old, thanks to the fact that my father was a radio announcer in the '40s on many of the most popular programs on the radio. "Quick as a Flash." "It Pays to Be Ignorant." Many others. Anyway, he used to take me to the studio when he was doing his announcing, and somewhere in the course of events I was introduced to Hi Brown.
>> Tony Roberts, another distinguished Broadway veteran. >> So when I was in my 20s and I was starting my career on Broadway and whatnot, somehow, maybe through Paul Hecht, even, he started hiring me to do these radio scripts. >> Here's how Brown remembered Tony Roberts. >> Tony Roberts is a bright, sharp, wonderful young actor who'd never been in radio, and I gave him his first radio job, and he was so enthralled and he worked so hard.
>> Brown's radio theater coterie also included legendary actors like Tammy Grimes, Marian Seldes, and Mercedes McCambridge. Brown also built up a cadre of practiced writers, some of whom he knew from the Golden Age. They included Jerome Coopersmith, Ian Martin, Sam, Dan, and Henry Slesser, a "Twilight Zone" writer. Over the course of the series' eight years, from 1974 to 1982, they scripted thousands of plays. >> In the old days we used to do 30-minute shows.
Television has taught us that working a one-hour pattern is a heck of a lot more successful, and has proven that for me. So seven one-hour shows a week is something that had never been done in radio. >> And Brown felt that his combination of intuition and efficiency, the gifts that had sustained him during the Golden Age, were what made it possible. >> First off, I don't believe that one can walk into a studio unprepared.
I read my scripts very, very carefully ahead of time, and I mark many, many cuts ahead of time. But actually, when you're sitting there and listening after all these years of experience, it makes it a little easier for me to believe a line should go out because it's not moving, that reactions aren't smooth. And I also hear what is superfluous and make more cuts. But it's a very, very intuitive skill.
And I can say with complete immodesty, I'm one of the fastest cutters, editors, on that level in the business. >> In fact, the average length of a play minus commercials was about 45 minutes. Here's Tony Roberts.
>> There would usually be about four or five actors in the studio, and we would sit around and we would read through it, and there would usually be quite a bit of joking and laughing and wisecracking because, you know, it's all let's pretend time and people are making up their characters and listening very intently to the other actors standing around the microphone or sitting at the reading table to try and figure out how to make a good story.
>> As Brown noted, by the time the actors got into the studio, he would already have worked through the script, making revisions and cuts. First, because time was money, but also because he liked his actors to have creative license, to work quickly and intuitively, just as he had always done. And they also enjoyed the freedom it gave them to develop their own characters. >> And Hi would then make a series of cuts in the script in order to get it into the right time.
I don't know how he ever used to do that, but he held a stopwatch and knew exactly what needed to be cut after we'd read through it, and we would get the cuts and take a break for ten minutes or something, and then we would all stand up and say hello to the sound man behind the window of the control room or whatever, and to proceed to record it. And we were finished by noon.
And then he would come out of the booth and hand everybody their check, which was like $71 after taxes and things had been removed from it, and everybody would go home happy. It was more or less a social party where the grown-ups got to play "let's pretend," and you might be a cowboy one week, and you'd be a sheriff the next week, and you'd be a criminal, a mafioso or something. Whatever the stories were.
>> Paul Hecht had the same affectionate recollection of Brown's creative intuition and his fiscal constraint. >> It was very important that whoever came in to work on this didn't ask questions like, you know, what is my motivation here? There were rarely any rewrites. There were only cuts. I don't know about other people, but if I didn't like something, I would say, "Oh, Hi, I'm going to say this instead." And Hi wasn't really interested or listening.
He kind of knew that whatever I did would be fine with him. He was mostly interested in his time. >> And 40 years after the heyday of Golden Age radio, Hecht's memories attest to the fact that the medium was still able to captivate a new generation of performers. >> There is something about putting a whole character into your voice that is so appealing. You don't have to worry about your costume. You don't have to worry about getting to the sofa in time.
You don't have to worry about props. There's something very pure about it. And one of the things about radio is that once you've developed the knack, the facility, you know, you can give me a piece of paper and I can do it. So one of the wonderful things for an actor is you don't really have to rehearse. You just do it. We just did the work and giggled and carried on and got it done in the two hours and said, "Aren't we lucky?" and went off and had soup.
>> Brown died in 2010, and many of his friends and colleagues from "CBS Radio Mystery Theater," his second golden age, gathered to record a tribute. It was produced by CUNY TV and directed by Hecht. >> When we planned this tribute, we wondered what Hi would want us to say. We think if we asked him for his advice, he would say... >> Can't you speed things up a little? It's okay to get a laugh once in a while.
>> We'll try our best, Hi. It won't be easy without hearing the telephone ring and that bellowing voice saying... >> I hope you're free December 10th. There are people coming over and I want you to tell them about my life and my work. >> He would need our help for that. He was so modest, so withdrawn.
>> It's easy to view Brown just as someone who successfully shoehorned one era's genre product into another, but he consistently brings up another vision, that of melding the artists of legitimate theater and radio. It's a model common to the BBC and other European radio systems, but one of American radio's real lapses has been its failure to engage serious non-genre writers in the form. Brown would have liked to change that.
>> I would like to see Sunday devoted for two hours or 2.5 hours to the great American plays, American playwrights, Maxwell Anderson, Sherwood Anderson, Lillian Hellman, O'Neill, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Elmer Rice. >> It should be noted that the surge of remarkable women playwrights was only just beginning in the late 1970s.
Throughout his creative life, Brown, the producer, after all, of the pioneering "Joyce Jordan, Girl Intern," was proud of recognizing and reflecting social change. He would surely have embraced the likes of Beth Henley, Lynn Nottage, and Marsha Norman and added them to his vision of a cultural revolution in radio. As he got older, Himan Brown became conscious of the need to inspire the next generation.
>> One of the very exciting things that has been happening to me over the years since we started again with radio drama, has been the continuing requests I have gotten from colleges to come and speak to their schools of communication. It is unbelievable the interest that exists with young people at colleges. >> In his 1974 interview with the Directors Guild of America, Brown was proud to share the fact that he might speak to as many as 50 colleges in a year.
But among his favorite gigs were career days for younger students. >> I love to say to these young people it's a little boy climbing up on the lap of his mother or father and asking for a story. It's the storyteller who came into the square 5,000 years ago and sat down in the townspeople gathered around him, and he told them a story. >> So back to core values.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brown had a chance to revisit his old documentary territory in a special production for Voice of America. It began as a 26-part series called "Americans All." >> These were stories which I said would take the Bill of Rights and show that only in America could you have a Truman, a LaGuardia, a George Washington Carver, an Edgar Allan Poe.
I picked 26 Americans, some very well known, some not so well known who made it because we are a democracy, because we do have a Bill of Rights. >> I'm Charlton Heston, your host and narrator for "Americans All," inviting you again to share the unusual lives of Americans all. They mark the pages of our history. Some are born on farms, some in the wilderness, some in cities. They came from all over the world to contribute to the American experience.
>> In 1991, the year Brown was interviewed by broadcaster and historian Chuck Schaden, he'd been off the air for over a decade, and was clearly hoping that there would be a third wave for radio drama, and that he would be at its crest. >> But it's becoming more and more. And this gives me hope that the drama will come back into its own. We live cyclically, and cyclically, it will come back.
I only hope that I'm given the years to go forward with all of this, because it's a cinch for me to produce. >> Brown often describes himself as sort of an audio equivalent of Superman, no office, just a life conducted from phone call to phone call, production to production, working to maintain and later rescue his cherished medium. But he had another side to his life as a family man with a house in the country and all that implies. Next up, the family Brown. I'm Margot Avery. Stay tuned.
♪♪ "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 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 Leyton-Brown. Sound design and final mixing are by John DeLore and Bart Warshaw.
Excerpts from the Himan Brown oral history courtesy of the Directors Guild of America, Inc. www.dga.org. All rights reserved. Multitude Productions handles our publicity and marketing. "Audio Maverick" is a production of CUNY TV. ♪♪