Screen and Radio Weekly (Feb 28, 1937)

Quick. Change We dug up quite a story in Chicago about Lum ‘n’ Abner for you, but it’s a &: good thing that we didn’t write it there. _ Everything is so changed now that the *boys have gotten out here in Holly wood. ; Our Chicago story had to do with the Jast minute rush with which everything Lum connected with the program was done. All hurry-scurry and ramble-scramble. We arrived in Hollywood and talked to Norris Goff — whose nickname is Tuffy — and learned, to our immensé) surprise, that scripts are now being written the day before instead of 15 minutes before the show: that the boys are in the studio a good 19 or 15 minutes before they go on the air and that they don’t Miss Chicago much. Lum ’n’ Abner are two interesting radio personalities, at that. Well liked by everyone — and so well liked by Don Ameche, another Chicago radio guy who has been transplanted to Hollywood, that Don took them into camp for plenty at cards the first week they arrived just to show that Hollywood hadn’t gone to his head. They work like most collaborators work: Chet Lauck, who is Lum, types as Tuffy paces the floor. They don’t actually have to have a script, because they never turn it in to the NBC censorial board for okay, as other program leads must, and never rehearse or time it either. They don’t time because they know just how long each page will take pa and because they don’t have to time, eee they don’t have to rehearse. The censors ae aren’t interested in seeing the boys’ scripts because they’re pretty sure there will be nothing wrong with them. Tuffy told us some interesting things about the way he and Chet work. For instance, they have never given a good audition when trying to get a job. a Always a poor one. Tuffy explains that a great many shows last only 13 weeks because their first audition is so funny Bec _ that they can’t possibly keep up the ee pace. When Lum 'n’ Abner try out be Abner fore prospective sponsors, they like to ad-lib for 15 minutes and do it pretty badly at that. Then, should the sponsor buy their act, he’s sure not to be disappointed. | __.. They remember the classic story that goes around about W C. Fields and radio. Seems that Fields was asked py _a sponsor to do a full-hour series of programs at a tremendous amount of oI e,” said Fiel “bu ees wet Mr. Stuart is spending several weeks on the West Coast to bring you gossip and highlights of the radio_ programs broadcast there. TOO BAD—Had we been able to, « during our cross-country jaunt, we would certainly have stopped in Milwaukee long enough to look in the Down by Herman’s program which is — originated there for the Columbia network. It concerns, appropriately enough, life in a German beer garden and has a lot of zest. Herman himself is Eric Karll. He’s a native of Milwaukee and a whole flock of the incidents he writes into the script are actual happenings of another generation in his home town. He'll often stop a rehearsal to tell a cast reminiscently, “You know, this happened to an uncle of mine.” August, the head waiter, is Larry Hall, and his script character, too, is modeled after an old-time waiter in a famous Milwaukee beer garden that, disappeared when prohibition came in. Larry and Eric used to work together in an act that was the inspiration for their present program. They’re both from German families, speak the language fluently, and are pleased with Elmer Krebs, who arranges the music and plays the tuba in the band. Krebs is musical director of WISN, the local CBS station, and was once in the Coon-Sanders dance orchestra. Biggest tongue-twister on that cast is Lizzie Schimmelpfennig. The name sort of stopped the fans, because one wrote tn to say stubborniy that there had never been such a name and never would be. But then another listener wrote in a few days later to say there certainly was such @ name, inasmuch as it belonged to a very good friend of hers, so every‘thing was all right. Just goes to show. * No Planes As we said last week, radio is full of unusual people in Hollywood — persons who came out to crack into the cinema and found radio more to their liking. One is J. W. Cody, relative’ of Buffalo Bill Cody and part Indian. He came to Hollywood from Arizona to become a writer and found himself playing in movie serials and doing sound effects on the air for both CBS and NBC. He's another one of these young men who don’t use mechanical aids in reproducing sounds 2nd is most proud of his airplane no‘se. He did it for us and you actually wouldn't have been able to tell him from a plane if he had had a propeller on his nose. Explained airplane sounds come from the midriff and are exceedingly tough on the vocal cords. He can do a plane two miles high or 20 feet high— which is the biggest effort of all—and ean also reproduce the noises they make when they loop-the-loop, barrel-roll and” everything. : . Funny thing happened ic him a couple of months ago, he says. He’s taking vocal lessons and his teacher always used to look at him kind of funny after he’s been going over scales. Finally, the teacher asked him what he was doing for a living and Cody answered that he was imitating things for the air a lot and riaing hosses for pictures. The teacher had him do some of the imitations and said, “There,” sort of angrily when he started on the airplane. “That,” said the teacher, “will ruin your voice faster *han anything.” So Mr. Cody no longer does airplanes. * * * CLOSING QUOTE — Although we don’t know how Jack Oakie got his first job, we do sort of know how he lost it. When he was 17, and several tons lighter, he announced closings over the loudspeaker system of the New York stock exchange. Jack, however, was far more inter‘ested in baseball than he was in stocks and bonds. The fact crept into his work. One busy summer afternoon, when the floor of the exchange was _crowded, Oakie’s voice boomed out with the exultant information that Ping Bodie, a baseball hero of the season, had just laced out a home run, It was the third strike for Jack, ho collected hi. final pay check that — Oe ae Movie Habit We have noticed one thing since we arrived here in Hollywood that is’ exceedingly interesting, inasmuch as the movies have such a great part of the picture, and that it is the movie habits some programs have picked up. Bing Crosby’s program has taken a cue from the films and much of what you hear is not read from a script: It’s acted out by people who know how to act without glancing down at words on paper. Fred Astaire’s program is put together exactlyas one of his movies is. Everything on the program that comes under one heading is rehearsed in a separate place. For instance, while Fred is singing and dancing with the orchestra, Conrad Thibault is in another studio going over his songs, Charlie Butterworth is in still another going over his comedy and Francia White is in still another going ove. her songs. The show is finally put together much as a movie. cutter puts together those oddments of film he gets from the director. Ceeil B. De Mille’s Radio Theater has abandoned those musical bridges you find between the scenes in dramas like those of Helen Hayes and Grand Hotel. It used te be that all radio programs used music to denote a chanze in scene ' or time, but De Mille has t»*ken a tip from the movies and just fades a radio Francia White. scene out, as a movie scene is faded, then replaced by another. * * * PROVERB BEATEN—One old saw that has been cutting into our lives for the past several hundred years has finally found radio its master. It’s the one about birds of a feather flocking together. “ Listen to any of the shows on the air and you will see what I mean. Jack Oakie’s is a very good example. Each of the people you hear is a different type from Oakie and the others on the program. ‘The same is true of Eddie Cantor’s show. You have the suavity of Wallington, the excitability of Eddie, the dialects of Herman Bing, whom they say is set to take Parkyakarkas’ place, and the childish reactions of Bobby Breen and Deanna Durbin. The reason, of course, is that contrast is the stuff from which drama is made, * * Clearing Houses West Coast radio is a neat little device for moving picture actors who are not getting the sort of parts they want and feel like getting sorie other type of work until they can make the proper re-entry into their chosen profession. For instance, both Conrad Nagel and Ben Alexander dropped out of pictures awhile, took over local network programs and prepared the ground for a different sort of movie career, Nagel became the master of ceremonies of the California Hour, which is heard only in California, but could stand any competition across the country. Nagel is very ingratiating, and, what witk his dramatic trainng, has built an admirable show out of a bunch of college __ kids whom he digs up off of California. ‘opped. out of the movie _ Be og ie Spe Sale _ toga into directing pictures and it looks as though he is now a director. However, the radio business has so intrigued him that he’s going to keep right on with it. Ben Alexander dropped out of pictures for awhile to grow out of the adolescent parts they were beginning to put him into all the time. He hasn’t told us that, but we imagine that must have been the reason. Anyway, he became a sports announcer — and a good one — and is, like Nagel, continuing it even though his movie parts are beginning to be more to his style. : x * * GAG—Sid Silvers, who is working with Al Jolson and Martha Raye out here over NBC each Tuesday evening, says he’s never much impressed by laughter during his broadcast because he was part of the biggest laugh he has ever heard. The loudest and longest, he insists, of all time. lt happened in Washington when Phil Baker’s vaudeville act was playing the leading theater there. Sid was Phil’s “man in the box’ at the time and found himself seated in a box direcily in front of that occupied ~by Warren G. Harding, then Prestdent of the United States. Baker threw S:d a little off his cues when he tossed in an ad-lib_ line. “Who is that fellow in the box be-— hind you?” he yelled up. “Dunno,” Silvers yelled back, and turning to the President, thrust out his hand. “My name’s Silvers,’ he “What's yours?” “Harding,” said the President. “Glad to know you,” Silvers said. Then he went on with sudden interest, “What's your business?” * Additions You possibly know that both Joan Banks and Gogo DeLys have been signed permanently by Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd. Sort of a surprise to everyone out here. because the two comics have never before had a girl as a part of their act, although Gogo did appear with them on a sustaining series some months ago. chirped. Joan is a little eighteen year old blond who was selected by the madmen after they had auditioned about 20 tal ented radio actresses. She’s a New York _ girl who had had little to do in radio _ until she won this chance and she surprised the boys by giving them the gun on ad-libs when they had been a little afraid that their penchant for spur of the moment stuff might upset her. As a matter of fact, she sort of upset them. Of course you know about Gogo. She's fiery and temperamental and the people around here — she’s a California gir] — say that her temperament is the cause for her unusual radio career. know. They say you would be enormously amused to see the show in rehearsal now, J understand. Until Joan came on _ the show, rehearsals were all men stuff, an, Joan Banks with not only Stoop and ‘Budd perpe trating gags, but Harry Von Zell and Don Voorhees getting in their little bit | The first rehearsal at which — as well. Joan appeared was like a Sunday School picnic and Stoop and Budd finally wan| dered off into another studio to let off steam. : The first rehearsal in which both Joan and Gogo appeared was even more— I wouldn’t te et as