Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Hucksters,’ on Radio Advertising)

Victor Albee Norman [played by Clark Gable]: “Miss Hammer, take a memorandum. To Mr. Kimberly: Dear Kim, For four years I haven't been listening to the radio much. Paragraph. Kim, in that time, it's gotten worse, if possible. More irritating, more commercials per minute, more spelling out of words, as if no one in the audience had gotten past the first grade. Paragraph. I know how tough Evans is, and some of the other sponsors, but I think we make a great mistake in letting them have their own way. We're paid to advise them. Why can't we advise them that people are grateful for what free entertainment they get on the air, grateful enough to buy the product that provides good shows. But, they have some rights, Kim, it's their homes we go into, and they're not grateful to people who get one foot in the door by pretending to offer them music and drama, and then take too much time in corny sales talk. Paragraph. I want to go on record as saying that I think radio has to turn over a new leaf. We've pushed and badgered the listeners, we've sung to them and screamed at them, we've insulted them, cheated them and angered them, turned their homes into a combination grocery store, crap game and midway. Kim, someday, 50 million people are going to just reach out and turn off their radios [snaps fingers], snap, just like that—and that's the end of the gravy, for you, and me, and Evans. Sign it love and kisses, Vic.”—The Hucksters (1947), screenplay by Luther Davis, adaptation of Frederic Wakeman’s novel by Edward Chodorov and George Wells, directed by Jack Conway

Review: Orson Welles’ ‘The War of the Worlds,’ (Re)staged Live at Barrymore Film Center, Fort Lee NJ

In a way, it was natural that Barrymore Film Center would follow the 1953 movie adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds with an even more unusual event: a live stage reading of the notorious 1938 radio broadcast that propelled its 23-year-old wunderkind director, Orson Welles, into the national consciousness.

Eighty-five years after radio listeners heard that Martians had landed in rural Grover’s Mill, NJ, would you believe it happened all over again in another part of the state Saturday night? Only this time it wasn’t millions of listeners unnerved, but a more select group of a few hundred attendees in suburban Fort Lee.

Over the years, several plausible reasons have been suggested for why the CBS broadcast became such a sensation, including an announcement at the start of the show noting that this was a dramatization of the Wells novel that was missed by listeners switching from another station, as well as the air of verisimilitude created by Welles through faux news reports on the invaders and the names of real New Jersey locations (instead of the British ones in Wells’ novel).

But, as I listened to the actors reading with gusto the original radio script by Howard Koch (who would secure even greater fame in a few years with his work on the movie Casablanca), I couldn’t help feeling that Welles had tapped into contemporary fears to an extent that he and his Mercury Theater company of actors didn’t remotely anticipate.

Director Ray Faiola, assuming Welles’ original role in setting the stage for the terror, somberly intoned that “Business was better; the war scare was over”—clear references to America finally easing out of the Great Depression and to the false “peace in our time” proclaimed a month earlier by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich.

Within a few short years, terror was coming not from a fictional War of the Worlds but an actual World War II, with devastation engulfing entire nations rather than simply patches of the Garden State.

At the same time, I felt my own sense of unease about the script’s application to human beings of our time unaware of what they were doing to the climate as I heard the lines, “With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.”

Throughout, Faiola—a retired director of audience services for CBS, and currently appearing on the small screen in “The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student,” “Darcy,” and “Confession”—ably read Welles’ lines from decades ago, even as he monitored the effects from technical supervisor Eldric Etra.

 (An extra thrill of the proceedings was hearing once again the incidental music of composer Bernard Herrmann, who would go on to score Welles’ Citizen Kane and much of Alfred Hitchcock’s best work from the Fifties and Sixties.)

At the end of the show, after all the terror of the events he narrated, Faiola seemed particularly amused as he read Welles’ non-apology apology after CBS urged him to make a statement on the hullabaloo:

“Of course we are deeply shocked and deeply regretful about the results of last night’s broadcast. It came as rather a great surprise to us that the H. G. Welles classic—which is the original for many fantasies about invasions by mythical monsters from the planet Mars—I was extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect on radio listeners.

Faiola and the quartet of actors with him onstage—Sean Marrinan, Wayne Pyle, Craig Marin and Kevin Miller—have had considerable experience with bringing back to life the world of radio drama, as they have been longtime participants in Halloween “Terror at the Mike” thriller series that have been staged in Ellenville, NY. The audience on Saturday night was the great beneficiary of their feeling and reverence for the medium.

It appears that this might have been the first time that the Barrymore—which opened a little over a year ago—has tried this kind of experiment. Judging from the healthy attendance and the appreciative response of the crowd, I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of re-staged radio dramatization becomes an annual event—maybe even around Halloween again?

Radio Quote of the Day (Bob and Ray, on a Corrupt Mayor of 'Skunk Haven, New Jersey')

Journalist [played by Bob Elliott]: “The story of this man’s trial has been front-page news of most newspapers across the country for the past several weeks. He is the corrupt mayor of Skunk Haven, New Jersey, Mayor Ralph ‘Moody’ Thayer. Mayor Thayer…?”

Mayor Thayer [played by Ray Goulding]: “Thank you…”

Journalist: “…Down through the years, through your various administrations, you've managed to riddle each and every department with corruption, from the top all the way through even to the visiting nurse association. I’d like to ask you a question, and don’t answer right away. Give it a little thought. Would you say it's easier to be corrupt now than it was, oh, ten or fifteen years ago?”

Thayer: “Oh, my, yes! Here ten or fifteen years ago it was a disgrace to be corrupt. Now it's a rich, fertile field. I would recommend it to anyone with a devious mind, who is willing to put in long, long hours without working hard.”—Bob Elliott (1923–2016) and Ray Goulding (1922–1990​), “Corrupt Mayor” routine, in their Bob and Ray: The Two and Only LP (1970)

I came across a transcript of this skit (which I have only reproduced in part) while leafing through Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, Tom Davis’ 2009 memoir of serving as a writer and occasional on-air performance in the early years of Saturday Night Live. I did a double-take when Davis wrote that he and his SNL partner Al Franken “owe no greater debt than to Bob and Ray.”

I was so surprised because SNL humor, especially in its formative years, has tended towards an edgy, irreverent brand of humor seemingly at odds with the older Boston-originating radio comedy legends. (Indeed, in a 1984 interview with Bill Wedo of The Morning Call, Goulding, in a none-too-subtle slap at this style of humor, noted, “You watch them doing jokes about cripples. I don't see anything funny about a cripple.")

Nevertheless, in an appearance on the TV show, the initially reluctant Bob and Ray were convinced by Franken and Davis to perform a skit mocking Rod Stewart’s “"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

I have another reason for liking Bob and Ray’s “Corrupt Mayor” skit: It evokes knowing chuckles and nods of recognition from anyone hailing from New Jersey. Despite its small size, the state enjoys a well-earned reputation as one of the most corrupt states in the nation. In fact, a 2019 review of political scandals in the Garden State referred to “A Jersey Tradition,” and Steven Malanga’s article from the same year in City Journal castigated “The ‘Miserable’ State.”

What makes this tradition so long-lasting—and such a rich source of comedy for the likes of Bob and Ray—is its bipartisan. In a 2014 post on the burgeoning “Bridgegate” scandal, I took note not only of the culture of contempt that then-Governor Chris Christie imparted to his aides, but also to the arrogance of his Democratic predecessors over the prior decade, Jim McGreevy and Jon Corzine.

“Skunk Haven,” indeed! Pick any spot on the map and you won’t be far from the home and power base of today’s counterpart to Mayor Thayer!

This Day in TV History (William S. Paley, Broadcast Titan and Philanthropist, Dies)

Oct. 26, 1990— Not merely in declining health but something worse for him—growing irrelevancy—longtime CBS chair, philanthropist and socialite William S. Paley died at age 89 of kidney failure in New York City.

For nearly six decades, this son of a Jewish cigar-maker was the broadcasting equivalent of the 19^th-century robber barons: leveraging an initially small operation into a multi-unit empire, charming when he could get his way easily and ruthless when he couldn’t, then late in life lavishing cultural institutions with sizable donations that burnished his reputation (in his case, money given to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Broadcasting, renamed the Paley Center for Media in his honor).  

With an assist from his father, Paley assumed control of CBS in 1928. Contrary to the myth he created, he did not initially see the value of the financially ailing radio stations he was buying, but had to be persuaded to make the transaction. Two decades later, the same pattern of coming around reluctantly to a new medium repeated itself when he had to be convinced that TV would not threaten his radio interests but complement them.

In terms of vision, Paley was no match for RCA/NBC archrival David Sarnoff, who as early as 1916 had predicted in a memo that music, news, sports, and even lectures would be someday be broadcast through "radio music boxes." But NBC’s “General” inadequately defended his network against Paley’s 1950 “talent raids” that brought Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen over to CBS.

Paley built his empire through charisma yet maintained it through caprice. He responded to the passionate advocacy of talented figures but could also leave them so guessing about his intentions that he alienated them. One example was newsman Edward R. Murrow, who became a CBS star with his reports from London early in WWII but left the network over its wavering commitment to the news.

Murrow’s was just case of someone who enjoyed the media mogul’s warm companionship only to see him turn cold. Another such figure was In Cold Blood writer Truman Capote, who would not only enjoy holidays abroad with Paley and his second wife, the glamorous socialite Barbara or “Babe,” but once even had them once transport his beloved bulldog to Europe on their private jet, according to an interview with Kansas FBI agent included in George Plimpton’s 1997 oral biography, Truman Capote.

That all changed in 1975, when the author retailed scandalous gossip about Paley in a notorious Esquire preview of his projected novel Answered Prayers. The CBS head’s claim that he had fallen asleep while reading the article was almost surely false, but it deprived Capote of the attention he craved—and then he followed it up by never having anything to do with the writer again.

Before Capote fell out with his friend, he colorfully put his finger on the acquisitive instinct that dominated Paley from youth to old age: “He looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.” An avid modernist art aficionado, Paley collected female conquests as much as he did modernist paintings. He could be generous, even gallant (financially supporting an old love, actress Louise Brooks, when she fell on hard times), but also cold enough to drive another to suicide.

It was Capote’s revelation of another liaison by Paley (thinly fictionalized as “Sidney Dillon,” a “conglomateur, adviser to Presidents”) in a hotel room that precipitated the end of their friendship and darkened the last days of Babe Paley, who was dying of cancer at that point.

Like an aging monarch, Paley was unwilling to relinquish his power and perquisites, successively forcing out a pair of men most felt were being groomed to take the helm from him: Frank Stanton, CBS president for 27 years, then anointed successor Thomas Wyman. But the September 1986 coup against Wyman proved disastrous, as Paley’s ally, Laurence Tisch, subsequently embarked on cost-cutting measures that undercut the “Tiffany Network” aura of class it had taken the chairman years to cultivate.

By the end of his life, this once-vital corporate titan owned less than nine percent of stock in the company he had built, so he could not influence events as he once did. By then, too, Sally Bedell Smith’s biography In All His Glory had questioned his pretension to business visions while exposing his aloofness and cunning.

But, if he wasn’t what he wanted the world to think he was, Paley had managed for years to sustain a media empire that, unlike the one overseen by Rupert Murdoch, did not debase Americans’ cultural tastes or undermine their belief in verifiable fact.

Essay: Death of a Rock Radio Station: How WPLJ Became WOLD

“Those call letters [WPLJ-FM] are a legacy in the New York market and to see them disappear along with a whole staff of talented people is sad and disappointing for the future of New York radio. The replacement will be syndicated programming not connected to NY at all."— Jimmy Fink, former WPLJ disc jockey, quoted in Rodrigo Torrejon, “WPLJ Announcement: Legendary New York Radio Station's Last Broadcast Date,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), May 9, 2019

The other morning, listening to a lifelong friend broadcast from a local college radio station, I stopped in my tracks when he said that WPLJ was coming to an end. In one fell swoop, a part of my youth—really, for me and thousands of others in the tristate area, even an indelible cultural influence—would be no more.

I hadn’t heard that PLJ—95.5 FM, around these parts—had been acquired from Cumulus by Educational Media Foundation (EMF), a Christian radio broadcaster, less than three months ago, as part of a package of six stations for the ungodly sum of $103 million.  I was all the more surprised, then, to read that the station’s format (most recently, “adult contemporary”) and letters ("a legacy," in Fink's words) would vanish.

Over the years, the King and Queen of Adult Contemporary, it can be said, are Michael Bolton and Celine Dion. Programmers have tried to make the AC market younger in recent years, as outlined in this Rolling Stone article, but the tendency remains the same: safe and boring.

When I compare the “adult contemporary” format to the rock music coming to me over the airwaves as a teen, what comes to mind is a phrase from Bob Seger’s mid-Seventies hit, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Never Forgets”: “a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be.” If I became discontented with what I heard on my first choice in rock ‘n’ roll, WNEW-FM, I’d move left on the dial to PLJ.

WPLJ—which, I’ve just learned, took its letters from “White Port and Lemon Juice,” a 1950’s rhythm-and-blues song covered by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention—did not have the extended run in free-form radio enjoyed by WNEW. 

But, when I first started listening to the station 45 years ago, DJs like Fink, Pat St. John, Jim Kerr, Tony Pigg, John Zacherle, and Carol Miller used the then-new album-oriented radio (AOR) format to air “deep album cuts” that could go considerably beyond the top 40 hits by artists like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles,  Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Elton John,  Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, The Allman Brothers, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder and Carly Simon.

What another local DJ, WQXR's Paul Calvaconte, called the station’s Seventies-era “loose underground vibe” became history, resulting from the same forces that would overtake WNEW in the 1990s: consultants and program directors who micromanaged deejays and set lists to a fare-thee-well. They didn’t trust audiences to reach across genres and burst out of their preconceptions. They didn’t credit listeners with enough intelligence to connect the new music with the old. 

Whether the form was adult contemporary or “classic rock” (WNEW’s final incarnation), the puppetmasters of the airwaves left audiences with increasingly confined musical tastes, not terribly far removed from the conservative inclinations of the older generation they had once rebelled against.

Sometimes over the years, I have felt that my own exposure to new music stopped not long after college. In the case of WPLJ, I might catch, while out in my car on a Saturday night, an “oldies” show—meaning, in this case, the 1980s. But I felt further and further removed from it all. 

The sense of discovery and experimentation once fostered by WPLJ and WNEW  had slipped irretrievably into the past, like a long-lost chord.

Quote of the Day (Steven Hyden, on Classic Rock as a Continuing Force)

“[T]his generation from the ‘60s and ‘70s…has stayed around for a really long time, in a way that rock stars don't typically stick around. Before classic-rock radio, you were on the radio because you had hits, and once you didn’t have hits you were gone. Classic rock introduced this idea that you could stay on the radio forever without having any new songs. It created this situation where classic bands were competing with new bands. It was like rock history being split in two.” —Critic-historian Steven Hyden quoted in John Williams, “Five Things About Your Book: Steven Hyden—Drafting a Eulogy for Classic Rock,” The New York Times, June 18, 2018

(The image accompanying this post is from the Rolling Stones’ video for their single “Waiting for a Friend.”)

Quote of the Day (David Sarnoff, on Competition)

"Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”—U.S. broadcasting pioneer David Sarnoff (1891-1971), attributed in Montgomery Van Wart, Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice (2011)

Happy 75th Birthday, Garrison Keillor!

“Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is. "—Garrison Keillor, “Cowboy Librarians" skit on A Prairie Home Companion, December 13, 1997

Well, it wasn’t enough that Garrison Keillor—born 75 years ago today in Anoka, Minn.— is a radio legend. No, I also see, from the above quote, that he has a very healthy appreciation of librarians. And, judging by the number of his books on shelves in my neck of the woods, I’d say that the admiration is mutual.

Oh, and one other thing: Keillor had the smarts to lead the movement to rename the World Theater in St. Paul, Minn., after my favorite author, hometown boy F. Scott Fitzgerald—and he broadcast his radio show A Prairie Home Companion for nearly 40 years in this performance venue before retiring a year ago.