Radio Drama

[MikeKardec]

I know it's a book and not something on the air but if you are into this stuff, Two O'Clock, Eastern War Time by John Dunning has some great material in it about creating radio dramas. It's a hard boiled mystery novel but a lot of the action is set around a New Jersey radio station. It's written by someone who doesn't just know the history of radio drama but has some insight into it's creation. I've done a great number of productions myself and this novel is completely different from the typical "Olde Timey" approach that stresses the hokeyness of it all.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's a very well-done picture of the inner workings of radio in the era -- which was, as you say, a very far cry from the hokum-oriented "homages" that are usually done today. One of the things which has kept radio from ever having any kind of a resurgence is the persistent notion among latter-day people that it was nothing but masked avengers, decoder badges and overwrought organ music. Tell that to Arch Oboler or Norman Corwin.

 

[MikeKardec]

I think some of it was just the difference in acting styles the performing arts was working through at the time. Close up oriented "movie acting" versus play to the back row "theater acting." Today it is hard to find an unnaturally "big" performance on Broadway ... even in a big theater. In the glory years of radio drama there were plenty of actors who, compared to our tastes today, were over acting. If I remember correctly, in Gone With the Wind you can see old and new styles colliding in Clark Gable, a movie guy but not an actor that I ever feel "opens up," and Vivian Leigh, who is a very contemporary raw nerve.

On top of that there seems to have been a trend to try and make the radio actors voice physically embody the character. So a big guy has a deep voice, the bad guy sounds whiny or sneering, etc. There are good reasons for that, most radio productions were done by rep companies and, since the same group were playing different characters all the time perhaps they thought this made it seem like it wasn't the same actors every week ... but in my opinion it makes it sound like the same stereotypes are appearing every week. I've often wondered if that came from an insecurity about the fact there were no pictures, certainly there was plenty of really bad exposition in the dialogue in radio scripts. I almost always use a narrator so the actor's performance won't be ruined by trying to carry the weight of the "visuals" and "off screen" exposition. That way the actors can just say the sort of stuff that people really say. But if you give them old fashioned stuff as a writer the actors will give you an old fashioned performance.

It's such a cool medium. The less information the audience is given, the more their imagine is activated. In a novel the reader does a great deal of the work. I sort of think that's often more the case while reading the sparser prose of a "genre" novel than the sort of "literature" where the writer tells you every detail. Obviously, in a radio drama there is more information, so the audience's imagination is used less ... but it's a lot better than a movie. The film maker has to get everything right because there's that much less imagination activation in the audience to take up the slack.

One of the cool things Dunning gets into in "Two O'Clock" is how intimate the medium can be. I sometimes tell actors that, with a mic 2" from their lips, they have to play a part with great subtlety ... I can nearly hear their tongue move in their closed mouth!

If I could actually make a living at it I'd never do anything else.

I actually have a Thank You to pass along to this site. The show I'm working on takes place in Sarawak (Borneo) in the mid 1950s. I collected a lot of detail for the script and later what props to use from sites like this. Knowing the right cigarette lighter, name of a drink, or era specific vacation spot is the kind of detail that lets a show come to life. I actually just got finished doing some close up recordings of mosquitoes ... not as easy to find as I expected!

 

[LizzieMaine]

The best dramatic radio actor of all time, for my money, was Jack Webb. He was the quantum opposite of someone like Orson Welles, who would have been larger than life reading a station break. Webb made you really believe he was an overworked civil servant, and he did so without ever once "emoting."

*Intimacy* is the key to effective radio drama. Correll and Gosden understood and proved this in 1928, but once all the stage actors started to flood into radio, the lesson was largely overlooked. The key is not to make the audience feel like they're in an audience -- but to make them feel they're right in the room with the characters, listening in on their conversation. The minute you take them outside the story and make it sound like a "play," you've violated the main principle of radio drama. (That's one reason why I think studio audiences should never, ever be present for dramatic programs.)

 

[Philip Adams]

I really enjoy listening to old episodes of Dragnet on my internet radio.

Jack Webb really did have a presence on that show.


I've said it elsewhere on this site, but the dramatisation of 'I am Legend' read by Angus McInnes is the best radio drama I've ever heard.

 

[MikeKardec]

Webb was great, so "same sh-- different day." Many actors try to play every moment like it's exceptional, writers too. I do it all the time. That show had the attitude of of real police work with real attitudes toward it. James Ellroy's stuff is vastly more dramatic, operatic even, but I think he said he was inspired to create that amazing prose style of his that peaked with LA Confidential and White Jazz by listening/watching Jack Webb as Joe Friday. Dialog by Western Union.

I'll have to get I Am Legend, always looking for something that is really good. I always want to hear something that makes me go, "how did they do that?" I used to work with a couple of guys in NYC, David Rapkin and Charlie Potter, who kept me on my toes -- I still work with Rapkin doing single voice audio books -- but it was great when I could learn something one week and the try to one better the next.

 

[Wally_Hood]

The best dramatic radio actor of all time, for my money, was Jack Webb. He was the quantum opposite of someone like Orson Welles, who would have been larger than life reading a station break. Webb made you really believe he was an overworked civil servant, and he did so without ever once "emoting."

*Intimacy* is the key to effective radio drama. Correll and Gosden understood and proved this in 1928, but once all the stage actors started to flood into radio, the lesson was largely overlooked. The key is not to make the audience feel like they're in an audience -- but to make them feel they're right in the room with the characters, listening in on their conversation. The minute you take them outside the story and make it sound like a "play," you've violated the main principle of radio drama. (That's one reason why I think studio audiences should never, ever be present for dramatic programs.)

Evidently this was the approach of Arthur Godfrey, who presented his radio broadcasts as though he were talking to someone one on one. He acted as though he was having a conversation with just one other person; which, multiplied by hundreds of thousands or even millions of listeners, translated to lots of sales on the basis of Arthur's conversational endorsement.

 

[finalrune]

Hey all,

Wanted to check in to introduce myself as a contemporary audio drama producer... There's a good cadre of us out here producing low budget, in all sorts of different ways - I record on location like a film with actors in realistic sound environments. Not a bunch of noir stuff, per sey, but you may enjoy: http://www.finalrune.com/ there's also my weekly podcast: http://www.radiodramarevival.com/

I hear tons of new created productions that re-create the old days, but I still believe in the power of the medium and try to use it in interesting ways, with modern production methods. In today's age of iPods, there are plenty of ways to hear radio drama and a growing demand for non-music audio entertainment!

 

[MikeKardec]

I'm pretty new here too but Welcome ...

When I worked in NYC we did a fair number of shows with a sound effects guy actually in the studio with the actors. He had a table of props, a wall of doors, and was actually using coconuts for horse hooves ... stuff like that. It was fun but there were serious limitations to getting the quality I was after. I eventually started doing a full blown effects production like a feature film. I still record all my voices in the studio but then do effects in the field and edit with Pro Tools. Those are interesting websites, I've read radiodramarevival a few times but never seen finalrune ... it'll be cool to check through it.

I really admire the idea of doing a show on real locations ... I've done a bunch of westerns (the Louis L'Amour dramatized audio books) and though an outdoor location is a serious challenge it would be very cool to give it a try. The current show (set in Borneo) had us recording effects in the forests and rivers of Washington State and at my family's place in Colorado for a total of about 12 weeks ... but spread out over two years. When I started in the business, I did about six one hour shows a year but now, because it's more of a hobby, my business partner (in a different business) and I take off about a week a month between Feb and Oct to get as much done as we can. A two hour plus show can take four or five years. Anyway, second to working with the actors, the outdoor effects are my favorite part.

The project I have going has been a really cool to work on. We got to cast actors from Sarawak, Australia, Saudi Arabia, India, England, Korea, China and the US. It was a crazy casting session, 400 actors came to audition. Casting took 6 weeks about 6 days a week. TOTALLY exhausting. Internet casting calls are perhaps overly productive. It must've been the way we advertized but I think we read half the bit players from Mad Men. The final cast was sixteen or so. It's going to be a lengthy show but the publisher requires us to fill a minimum of 180 minutes with program (3 CDs) plus 'the making of' or whatever. There's a bunch of info on our previous show at sonofawantedman.com

Other than the Potter and Rapkin who I worked with in New York back in the '90s, I've never really known anyone else who did audio dramas regularly ... I sort of ended up operating in isolation.