Broadcasting Telecasting (Jan-Mar 1962)

from TED HUSTON, Lennen & Newell, Los Angeles MONDAY MEMO To dismiss radio as out of date is to cheat the imagination The jet will land in Los Angeles in an hour. Stewardesses have completed their swift, purposeful clearing of dinner trays; dim cabin lights shimmer in the amber glow of brandy. The greyhaired man stares into black emptiness beyond the wing, then turns to say, "I used to come out to the Coast twice a year to cover our shows. Always looked forward to those days on the 'Super Chief.' Yeh, I remember how great radio used to be. Oh well " He looks out again at the dark world below him. " those days are gone forever." Thus, with a gentle — if slightly alcoholic— nostalgia, our Man of Advertising dismisses two great American ways of life — railroads and radio. He may recall with a certain mistiness the lonely cry of a train across a snowcovered valley; he may smile in warm remembrance of the brash antics of Charlie McCarthy. But those are things of the past. Now he can fly across the country in five hours, and blend pictures with sound to make television. In this great, dynamic America, nothing can interfere with progress. That is as it should be. Or is it? Are we sure that all the men and materials and institutions we have discarded in the name of progress are really outmoded and without further use? A Criminal Waste ■ There will of course be many a successful owner of a radio operation who will quickly reply, "So who says radio is discarded and without further use!" Admittedly there is still plenty of money to be made in the medium, but its days of glory, when it was the darling of the entertainment and advertising world, are indeed gone. To one observer, at least, this seems like a criminal waste. In the earliest days of civilization, the man who was the best storyteller held a position of importance and respect in the tribe. He might describe a hunt he had witnessed, or the news from the next village, or some purely fictitious legend or story. But no matter how eloquent his tongue or dramatic his acting, the real success of his effort was measured in his ability to make his listeners contribute their share to the contact — the use of their imaginations. Throughout all the centuries, in spite of books, plays and a host of other forms of entertainment, we have never lost our instinctive love for the man who can make us use this most striking of human capabilities. To enhance a simple tale with the brilliant, many 22 hued spectrum of our own fantasy. In modern times, what method of expression has made better use of this technique than radio? Can you remember when Arch Obeler spun us a tale of a scientist who tossed out of his window a chemical mixture which caused living things to grow to fantastic size? Before the end of the half hour, we heard, we imagined, we "saw" the house engulfed by giant worms that oozed and scraped and pulsated and finally crushed the building. No illustration in a book, not all the traveling mattes in Hollywood, could have created the mental picture that each of us had. And best of all, it was our own, perfectly designed to satisfy — and scare — us. The moment when someone tried to force his mental picture on us, he destroyed half the pleasure we had found. Letdown ■ Can you remember the delightfully absurd vision which Jack Benny created with a sequence of sounds while he penetrated the depths of his vault? (I don't think his television version of this same gag is half as funny; the vault doesn't look at all as I thought it should.) Can you remember the wonderful intellectual fantasies of the Columbia Workshop, the probing portraits of Allen's Alley, the impenetrable fog that seemed to muffle his very footsteps as Bulldog Drummond walked into another American adventure? In these, and countless other programs, we used that most priceless and rewarding of our faculties: imagination. Of course, the public has now deserted radio in overwhelming numbers to have their thinking and their "seeing" done for them by television . . . just as the primitive villagers must have deserted their storyteller when the first group of traveling players appeared. But the storyteller didn't give up his talent and turn to rock-and-roll dances or wild shoutings in an empty barrel to attract attention. He knew the power of this new attraction, but he also knew his own strength. And so he set about making his narratives more persuasive, his legends more fantastic, and his presentation of them more compelling. The Return ■ In the end, the villagers who had flocked to the "theatre" got tired of seeing the same stories over and over again in different dress. They returned to their storyteller. As the centuries passed, audiences achieved greater sophistication and the art of entertainment strove constantly for an increased mechanical ingenuity necessary to the weaving of its spell. Within the past 30 years, these skills of stagecraft have reached their full power with the revolving stages and intricate lighting of Broadway, with the special effects departments and film technicians of Hollywood. Audiences were enchanted with these new devices and illusions. But three of the most impelling dramatic presentations of this period have been Orson Welles' production of "Julius Caesar," Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and "John Brown's Body," each presented on a bare stage, allowing the audience to create and hold forever its own image of joy and tragedy. Television is change. It is progress. It has brought a new excitement and dimension to our lives; it has enraptured even its critics. But let us not consign radio to the trash-heap of obsolescence. Let us not demean it by reducing it to the role of town crier or village band. There was a stature, an unforgettable magic in the way it enriched our lives. If radio again gives to us a full measure of its unique creative genius, in both its programs and its advertising, will we not in the end return to its special delights? Theodore Huston joined WRGB (TV) Schenectady in 1941. He wrote and directed the first weekly commercial series in tv on WABD (TV). He directed the Lanny Ross Show on NBC-TV for Swift in 1949. He produced the commercials for Westinghouse Studio One for four years. He joined L&N in 1953, and starting in 1955 served as head of tv commercial production in Los Angeles, creative director of the San Francisco office and now is vice president and manager of the L. A. office. BROADCASTING, March 12, 1962