Imaginary Worlds - Theater for the Mind

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

The "golden age of radio drama" may have been a stellar period for storytelling -- but the stories weren't all golden bright. Science fiction and horror were the ideal genres to explore the deep anxieties people felt from the Depression through the Cold War. And these radio dramas set the stage for fantastical stories that couldn't be told yet without advanced special effects. Dallas Taylor of the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz co-hosts this episode as we hear from radio historians Neil Verma and Richard J. Hand, and radio drama veterans Dirk Maggs and Richard Toscan. Plus Emory Braswell recalls the day he thought Martians had invaded New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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When Emery Braswell was growing up in the 1930s, he used to love listening to radio drama serials. Well, I listened to The Shadow. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, the old American boy? I've got the dragon's eye ring on my finger, Uncle Jim. But Emery's parents restricted the amount of radio he could listen to, especially at night. Although, they made exceptions if Joe Louis was boxing, or if the president was addressing the nation.

or if the president was addressing the nation. Then one night, in October of 1938, Emery heard his father's Model A Ford pull up to the house, and he thought he heard Franklin Roosevelt on the radio. Citizens of the nation, I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country. So I ran down and got in the car, and my mother was sitting there too. And I said, what's happening? And he said, well, there's some kind of story going on about an invasion. We're being invaded by Mars or something. My father sounded skeptical. calm and resourceful action. So I listened to it, and sure enough, there was somebody supposedly from either the State Department

or the government, as my family would say, talking about a meteor that had crashed in New Jersey. And there were beings coming out of it, and they were destroying all the local militia and stuff. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has were destroying all the local militia and stuff. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut the state through its center. Communication lines are down from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean. One of the fascinating parts about the program was it was a music program,

and they would interrupt the music for bulletins coming from Jersey. Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. You said your father was skeptical. Was he skeptical throughout the whole thing, and were you skeptical throughout the whole thing? No, I was just wide-eyed, you know, listening to it, trying to decide, well, is this all happening or not?

My father was kind of skeptical, because when it was over with, he says, I think it's a hoax. As I said, the business about the music going on and bulletins coming made it seem much more real. Near Columbus Circle, I noticed models of 1939 motor cars in the showrooms facing empty streets. Then when the program was over, it seemed to go back to regular programming, and we couldn't understand, and we listened for further announcements, and nothing came. So my father said, that proves it's a hoax. And, you know, I took it seriously. Eventually, they learned that they had been listening to War of the Worlds, adapted by Orson Welles. Neil Verma teaches radio history at Northwestern University, and he says there's a reason why young Emery Braswell thought he heard Franklin Roosevelt during that show.

There's a moment in the War of the Worlds broadcast where the Secretary of the Interior comes on the microphone in the world of the fiction. And originally that piece was written to be not the Secretary of the Interior, but President Roosevelt. But the CBS network said, no, no, no, you can't have President Roosevelt's voice if it's not actually President Roosevelt. People will get confused. We'll get in trouble. We can't do it. And so Orson Welles says, OK, well, we'll change it to the secretary of the interior. And then the actor who portrayed the role goes up to Welles, according to legend, and says, well, I don't know how the secretary of the interior sounds. And Welles says, don't worry, he sounds just like Roosevelt. I mean, that's the achievement award the world's, I think, is it sounds like the weather forecast.

It sounds like a radio show playing music. And then gradually it shifts. Richard J. Hand teaches radio drama at the University of East Anglia in the UK. And I think that's one reason it had such impact, is that understanding we can take a genre and then jump a form and use the structures and formula and conventions of another form in order to tell a story. You know, when we think about pop culture in the 20th century, we tend to focus on movies, TV shows, or pop music.

It's easy to forget that radio was the dominant form of entertainment for decades. I mean, there were huge hit shows in every genre, but science fiction kept pushing the boundaries of what the medium could do. And these kind of radio dramas actually laid the groundwork for stories that couldn't be done on film for decades because special effects weren't good enough. I mean, in some ways, they're like the missing cultural link

between genre fiction and the movies and shows that we watch today. But they're also standalone works of audio art that can play with the human imagination in ways that the printed word and the visual image never could. Well, we're going to take a trip back in time to when radio dramas had a hold on the public imagination. Today's episode is actually a co-production with the excellent podcast 20,000 Hertz. In fact, I am co-piloting this episode with the host of that show, Dallas Taylor. So Dallas, how would you describe 20,000 Hertz?

Well, 20,000 Hertz is a podcast all about the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. And I assume old radio dramas and serials fit into that. all about the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. And I assume old radio dramas and serials fit into that. Absolutely. There's such a rich audio history throughout this era, and most people aren't really familiar with it. So let's start by zooming out and looking at the big picture. So when did the golden age of radio dramas really start? They really seem to have taken off in 1934 when the FCC was created, which is the Federal Communications Commission, which is still around today.

And that's around the time that the network started forming too, like CBS and NBC. Which are also still around today, but mostly in the form of television. Yeah. And Neil Verma says that, you know, when the networks got into the business of making these highly produced radio dramas, they were not exactly motivated by noble reasons. If they couldn't demonstrate a level of public service that they were giving to the listeners out there, then they ran the risk of further government regulation and intrusion. And so all of the money they were making out of selling all that boot black and soup and yeast and tea would be taken away. So they enshrined in their mandate the idea of creating high cultural content. And for a lot of them, that meant making radio drama.

And interestingly, if we look at the big picture, each decade of radio drama had its own style. Like the radio dramas in the 30s were very ambitious. They grappled with big nationalistic ideas because it was the Depression. And then in the 40s, the anxiety around the war got channeled into radio dramas that were more like film noirs, or I guess you could call them radio noirs.

Neil Verma actually had a good way of putting it. In the 1930s, radio is kind of a theater in the mind. So it's a big kind of theatrical space that you're supposed to imagine your mind. And in the 1940s, it becomes of a theater in the mind. So it's a big kind of theatrical space that you're supposed to imagine your mind. And in the 1940s, it becomes really a theater about the mind. And then, you know, in the 1950s, radio dramas are very influenced by the Cold War with the aliens standing in for the Soviets. Like there's a really famous radio drama called Zero Hour from 1955, which was written by Ray Bradbury. Actually, a lot of famous sci-fi writers got their start in radio.

And the alien invasion is told from the point of view of a woman who discovers that the kids in her neighborhood, including her daughter, have been co-opted by these interdimensional beings. And the parents think at first that the kids are playing a game, but slowly this woman begins to realize the truth. Ming, who are you talking to? The rosebush, Mom. Only it's not really a rosebush.

That's Drill. Who's Drill? He's planning the invasion. What an imagination. You'd better come in, dear, and clean up for supper. In just a second, Mom. The main character, played by Isa Ashdown, is immobile. Almost all of this play takes place in her kitchen or living room.

Most of the interplay between her and her daughter, the ones where she comes to suspect that the daughter is collaborating with this evil alien, happen at just outside the edge of our earshot. Mom? Dad? Are you in the attic? Henry, listen.

It's Mink. It's Mink. We've got to save her. Henry, don't you understand? She's leading them. What? She's leading them. She's on their side, Henry. Oh, please, God, forgive them. The children on their side? She told us, but we wouldn't believe her.

Shh, listen. They're coming up. Oh, God. Mom, Dad, we know you're in there. God, it's so eerie. I love it. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people have a misconception that radio dramas from this era were really goofy or naive.

Yeah. I mean, I used to think that it was just like two guys banging coconuts together in front of a microphone being like, look, the horse is coming. Yeah, exactly. And that was true for some radio serials, especially the ones aimed at kids. But when I listened to these shows, I couldn't believe how dark and weird they were. Well, for that era, how exactly was the FCC OK with that? Well, it's funny because the FCC was more concerned with like obscenity or overt political messages. Or as we heard earlier, you can't have someone impersonate Franklin Roosevelt. But radio was not under the same kind of like moralistic code that Hollywood

was back then, where they were really restricted by what kind of stories they could tell or couldn't tell. And Neil Verma thinks it's because censors really feared the power of visual images, but they underestimated the power of audio to create images in our mind. Almost everyone talks about radio as a blind medium, which is a kind of peculiar way of thinking about a medium. Like no one talks about sculpture as a deaf medium. But whenever you hear anything about radio, the first thing people say is it's blind. And so it's strange to characterize or essentialize a medium by something it can't provide.

People who kind of are boosters for the medium will say, don't talk about what radio doesn't have, an image, and talk about how its images can be more malleable than images that take on some kind of physical visual form. So now I'm really intrigued. So you have to give me some more examples of this really dark stuff. Okay. Well, thrillers were the dominant format, especially in the 40s, but they weren't just sort of spy thrillers

or detective shows. A lot of these radio dramas are what we would categorize as horror today. Some things that we might think of post-George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, this kind of unhappy ending, you're getting it in the 30s and 40s. Again, that's Richard Hand.

You know, and one great example of that was Arch Obler's play Burial Services, which is about, you know, a very Edgar Allan Poe-esque story about a young woman being buried alive in a coffin. And we hear the inside of her head, a kind of stream of consciousness because she's not dead. She's in a catatonic fit or whatever it might be. But no one rescues her. Unfortunately, there's no recording of that particular piece. But the response was phenomenal. You know, there's lots of letters of complaint and shock and disgust. And Arch Obler thought he'd get sacked. But actually, the station were happy saying, wow, there's this many people complaining, how many people are listening? This

is fantastic. You know, a lot of these shows, especially in the 30s and 40s, were live. So if people really were disgusted and the FCC clamped down on them, they'd say, oh, okay, well, we won't do that again. In fact, we can't. It was live. Yeah. Wow. In fact, the most famous horror story from this era was a radio drama called The Thing on the Forble Board, which was from an anthology series called Quiet Please. So what year was this?

This was 1948. And it's mostly a monologue from an oil field worker. And he's telling the story about he and his friend found an alien creature on a forbel board, which is like a catwalk on an oil rig. And he describes this creature as having the head and torso of a girl, but the body of a giant spider. Ugh. But I knew where it came from. It had come from the bowels of the earth, come riding up on the drill pipe as we yanked it out of the well. Come to an alien world and was lost.

It stood there dripping with red paint, blood red from head to foot like some horrible dream. And it put its hand on my arm. Its hand was stone, living, moving stone. And as this character is talking, he's waiting for his wife to come out. And eventually we realize his wife is the creature. We're not a passive listener. We're her next meal. I'm afraid maybe I've fallen.

But it's very beautiful. I can disguise the body in long dresses. She can't hear very well. And when she's hungry, I have to stay out of her way. I found out what she likes to eat, remember? No, no, sit still. Sit still, do. Sit still or I'll have to shoot you.

I want you to meet my wife. Or rather, my wife wants to meet you. There she is. Come on in, dear. Oh, my goodness. So it's like the difference between reading a book and watching a movie. There's always something that's lost because these words are being tapped into a different part of your brain that are triggering kind of this deeper intellect about the way that something is being communicated to you. This whole clip is like the perfect example of how I don't want to see any of this stuff. And

even if it was visual, you'd lose a lot of this deep inner thoughts being tapped into your brain into these totally different ways. So this whole like audio only communicating this sort of this scene, I don't think could be done the same way visually because it's hitting me in a totally different place in my brain than if I was absorbing that through my eyes and then going through typical visual receptors in the brain and then processing it the same way. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because when I was listening to this as well, I started imagining, okay, this was a live action movie in the 70s or 80s. It would have been some kind of stop motion creature, which may have seemed scary or a puppet, but I mean, it would have gotten dated. Today,

the creature would be CG, which I have a big issue against a lot of CG stuff. I think it looks so fake. But yeah, either way, something would have been lost. And the other thing to keep in mind is like horror films in the 1940s were nothing like this. Like when this episode came out in 1948, the big kind of quote horror movie that year was Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. One of the things that's just incredibly fascinating

about the history of radio dramas is just how people listen to them. Yeah, and I think that's another misconception. I mean, typically we imagine an entire family sitting in the living room staring at a radio, waiting for it to eventually evolve into becoming a television set. Which is true to some extent, but in this era, there were already car radios. People were used to listening to the radio in the car. And there were these little devices called crystal sets, which were not made out of crystal.

They were these jerry-rigged pieces of technology with a copper wire that acted as an earbud. So these people were listening on portable devices just like we do. And that makes it such a unique experience. It's not cinema, is it? You know, it's not these other cultural forms. It's something that's invading your domestic space. And I think that's why science fiction and horror understood that on radio.

It's also fascinating how they use sound effects to stimulate the listener's imagination. Neil Verma talked about a pioneer in the field named Ora Nichols. She worked with Orson Welles for years. In the War of the Worlds, there's this famous scene where you can hear the Martian vessel cooling, and she did that by taking a cast iron pot and rubbing its two sides together to make that really specific grindy voice. Do you hear it? It's a curious humming sound that seems to come from inside the object. I'll move the microphone nearer. Here. Now, we're not more than 25 feet away. Can you hear it now? She also built machines, and there were companies that would put together, you know,

what we would think of as sound effects libraries on transcription disks. And Richard Hand says audio engineers had all sorts of shortcuts ready to go like that. So, say, if you wanted to simulate a gunshot... Sometimes they'd use a metal rod and hit a leather seat, and you'd get that crisp bang sound, and that would work really well. I've got a gun! Not to you, chavist! And this is one of my favourite things I demonstrate if I'm doing a practical session on radio,

where you can take a cork and wet it and squeak it against the side of a bottle or a saucer and that was the effect they used for the sound of rats because you get this squeaky squeaky sound. But none of this mattered if the mic wasn't placed properly. That may sound like a minor detail, but Neil Verma says mic placement was crucial, not only with props, but with actors too. The world that is the off-mic environment, that's where radio drama happens. And that's how you create really important relationships, like what character are you close to? What character do you listen to?

In the 30s and 40s, radio dramas were performed live. So there was a limit to how many tricks you could do. But in the 1950s, they moved over to pre-recorded magnetic tape, which gave the audio engineers a lot more creative freedom. And radios themselves became more sophisticated. So listeners could hear this subtler sound design. Speaking of advances in technology, the conventional wisdom of the time is that radio dramas went out of fashion because TV came along. And that's true to some extent. The networks did move a ton of money and talent over television,

but something else pushed radio dramas off the air. It was rock and roll. Remember, these were commercial radio stations, and they catered to the marketplace. But radio dramas kept going off the air. It was rock and roll. Remember, these were commercial radio stations and they catered to the marketplace. But radio dramas kept going in the UK. Well, that's because the BBC is government funded and that's not really something that happens in the States as much. And they also have multiple outlets so they could play rock on one channel and radio dramas on the other. And on top of all of that, they could create a television network and multiple television networks. So it wasn't like

a zero-sum game. Yeah, no. And you talked with someone who worked with the BBC then. Yeah, I mean, Dirk Maggs, he's been directing radio dramas for decades. I try and think through

the sequence of events of even the shortest, quickest sound. I mean, he's mostly worked with the BBC, but he's been working with Audible lately. Like he did this adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, you know, this big flat world on the back of a group of elephants

that are the back of a giant turtle that's swimming through space. You know, you're thinking, how the hell do you do that? But, you know, take it sequentially, describe the turtle, describe the elephants, describe the world that's on there, and then go into the world. That would be my way of going at it.

But when Dirk Maggs got to the BBC in the late 1970s, he says that radio dramas were still going, but they were feeling a little stale creatively. And there were a lot of legacy shows that had been on the air for years. And then in 1978, Douglas Adams, who was a writer on Doctor Who, created this really unusual radio drama called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, it wasn't even a drama. It was an epic science fiction comedy, which is a genre that had

just never been done before, at least on the radio. They really didn't think it was going to get much of a listenership, so they put it on at half past ten at night. It was not expected to do much business, and by the third week, the listening figures they were getting back were through the roof. For myself, going into the BBC as a technician, it was the only thing everybody was talking about. As you will no doubt be aware,

the plans for the development of the outlying regions of the western spiral arm of the galaxy require the building of a hyperspace express route through your star system. And, regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you very much.

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. And the radio show was such a hit, Douglas Adams, of course, adapted it into a best-selling novel, actually a series of novels, and then the BBC adapted those novels back into radio. And eventually, Douglas Adams chose Dirk Maggs to work on the later radio shows. I think Hitchhiker's worked as a radio drama for the reasons that it really didn't quite come off either as a television series or as a movie. If you have a story that the very beginning of it is the end of everything.

I mean, that's the conceit. Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy destroys the Earth and everybody on it, and it leaves just two humans, actually only one human, in the first episode alive. That is so vast and so ambitious an idea that, well, for a start, you're going to listen to the next week's episode to know where does this go from there. But secondly, the enormityity of it if you are in that imaginative state where all these these images are coming to you and you combine that with writing which says the vogon ships hung in the air in in precisely the way that bricks don't you know it could only be born in an audio medium it's it. It's too big in a way to combine those elements. And that was Douglas's achievement.

And radio drama got a second life in the U.S. too. Yeah, thanks to science fiction again. This is around the same time, late 1970s. NPR was struggling, which is hard to imagine because NPR is a powerhouse today, but it was still pretty new back then. And the president of NPR, Frank Mankiewicz, thought that a radio drama event could bring in new listeners. So he asked John Houseman for advice. And this is the actor John Houseman? Yeah. And one of the founders of Juilliard. I mean, he also worked with Orson Welles back on War of the Worlds. And so Houseman recommended that they hire an audio engineer named Richard Toscan to create this huge radio drama event.

OK, you got me this job. How do you think I could develop an audience for public radio in America? How would you do that? And it is sort of Professor Kingsford voice. He after thinking a moment, he said, create a scandal. But again, this is the late 70s. I mean, at that point, what is still shocking? And then a friend of Richard's said kind of jokingly, why don't you do Star Wars on the radio? And he thought, huh. possible. And I think the other thing that was feeding into that is everybody at NPR under Frank Mankiewicz, that is anybody below Frank, was scandalized by the idea. This was seen as the most lowbrow, boring kind of thing. The result, of course, was that after the 13 episodes aired, despite all the sniping and whatever from NPR,

the measurements that then came in showed, according to NPR, that it had raised the audience for NPR by 40%. NPR's Star Wars was groundbreaking in other ways. It was also in stereo, which was not at all common back then. They got Lucasfilm to lend them Ben Burtt's sound effects and John Williams' score. They had to recast most of the actors except Mark Hamill, but Richard Toscan says the recasting worked in their favor. Part of the idea is that we didn't want the series,

or at least I didn't want the series, to be a clone of the film. You know, I didn't want people to sit down in front of their radio and say, oh, this is, you know, I remember this from three years ago or whatever. Remember, Star Wars was a two hour movie. This was a six hour, 13 part radio drama. So they got the late writer Brian Daly, who had written Star Wars spinoff novels to add additional scenes that were not in the movie. Are you prepared to kill? So we got to hear all about Leia's relationship with her father on Alderaan. And we got to hear Luke's training with Obi-Wan Kenobi. home gave us his information. The Empire has a secret project underway.

And we got to hear Luke's training with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Now, your blade. Boy, this lightsaber feels kind of like it's alive. It is in a way, through you. Ready? First defensive posture. And Neil Verma says that NPR's Star Wars actually had a huge influence on the generation coming of age in the 70s and 80s that may have seen radio dramas as passé. You know, a lot of people who make audio dramas today look back at this as the gold standard. But I think it's not just the gold standard because of the great score or the great sound effects

or any of those sorts of things, but I think because it really creates these deep senses of character out of what had been relatively two-dimensional characters. And that's something that a lot of audio dramas these days like to explore. It's become a much more writerly medium. By the way, most of these old radio dramas are available online. So it's kind of like a hidden world to discover. And we can binge on them, which people couldn't do back then. Yeah, it's funny that this thing that was kind of built in the analog world is perfect for the digital age. Yeah. Well, Dallas, thanks for

helping me out. Thank you, Eric. Dallas Taylor is the host of 20,000 Hertz, a podcast about the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. Special thanks this week to Richard J. Hand, Richard Toscan, Dirk Maggs, Emery Braswell, and Neil Verma, who says that binging on episodes of classic radio shows like Inner Sanctum Mysteries had a strange effect on him. Not the show itself, but just hearing all those ads for Lipton's Soup. And I hate Lipton's soup, but I listened to so many episodes of this show that I went to the kitchen one day

and I opened up the cupboard and what did I see? Like a row of Lipton's soup because I just heard the ads so many times. I'm sure the advertisers must have been thrilled. I'll tell you, buddy, 50 years later, we'll all be dead and somebody's gonna buy buy Lipton Soup. I know, right? Imaginary Worlds is part of the PandaPlay Network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. And if you really like the show, leave a good word in iTunes.

I tweet at emolinski and imagineworldspod. And my website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.