(December 7, 1907 — March 19, 1987)
Article by Matt Rovner
Matt Rovner brings you the first part of a special three part series on the radio drama, filmmaking, and life of writer-producer-director, Arch Oboler. This first part focuses primarily on Oboler’s early career and “ … the vanished mystique of radio … ”
It is the dead of night, and you are enveloped in the rich chiaroscuro of black and white film noir cinematography. You hear Bronisław Kaper’s eerie score as a door swings open and the camera creeps into a bedroom. You see that a bed has been slept in, but is now empty. The camera prowls to an open window with billowing curtains, and an optical fade transports you to a strangely depopulated city block. You notice that the spherical heads of the street lamps provide pinpoints of light in an otherwise shadowy mise-en-scène. With the camera, you crane down to street level and find a forlorn woman in a trench coat hiding in a darkened doorway. The woman is Joan Ellis (Phyllis Thaxter), and you and she are startled by the sound of a voice: “You little fool! Did you think you could run away from me?”
The voice belongs to Karen (Audrey Totter), an alternate personality that lives inside of Joan’s head. Joan runs to escape the voice and bumps into a sleazy man who makes a pass at her. A police officer intervenes on her behalf, but she flees. As Joan walks down another lonely street, she hears Karen again, “I’ll never talk again. I’ll make you a bargain. Just go away!” Joan begins to run as if she could escape this voice, but her efforts are futile. Karen’s voice follows in hot pursuit, taunting her by repeating the word “crazy!” The more Joan resists, the more Karen’s mean-spirited voice multiplies in different rhythms the word “crazy!” Finally, the music and the chorus of madness reach a crescendo, thunder strikes, and Joan ducks into a music hall.
Inside the music hall, you see a woman on stage bathed in a single spotlight, as she sings “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” You hear the singer segue into “My Old Kentucky Home,” 1 as you watch Joan seated in a stairway, finding relief in the lyrics “weep no more, my lady.” As soon as her face relaxes, you hear Karen’s voice again: “Did you think you could run away?” and “You’ve got to go away alone!” repeating and overlapping. You watch Joan raise her hands to her head in a gesture of mental anguish.
This is a sequence from Arch Oboler’s first feature, Bewitched (1945). The movie adapts his radio play “Alter Ego” (1938), which starred Bette Davis in dual roles as the innocent Joan and her evil personality. Author and critic James Agee was qualifiedly impressed with Bewitched, “ … it uses mental voices and dialogue as profusely as if it were on the air. When these interior voices are expressive, carefully timed, and counterpointed with any discretion whatever, Oboler manages the first persuasive imitations of stream of consciousness I know of in a movie.” 2
In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris included Arch Oboler, “if only as a reminder of the vanished mystique of radio in the motion picture industry.” 3 The mystique of radio as a dramatic art form has vanished altogether from public consciousness, and with it Arch Oboler, his radio plays and his filmmaking. Sarris’s entry largely dismisses Oboler, but he doesn’t deserve such a pat assessment. Instead, he deserves a serious reappraisal. In the 1940s, Arch Oboler was one of the world’s highest paid writers and the most successful radio dramatist in America. His collections of radio plays boast forewords by eminent writers such as Irving Stone and Thomas Mann. On radio, his socially conscious and controversial “weird tales” prefigured the unconventional television work of Rod Serling. As a writer-producer-director, Oboler was a pioneering independent, whose film Five (1951) was not only the first feature to depict life after global nuclear war, but exerted a profound influence on crucial auteurs and film critics Francois Truffaut 4 and Bertrand Tavernier. 5 For Five alone, Andrew Sarris, the American champion of the auteur, could have appreciated Oboler’s contributions to cinema and the film theory that Sarris himself promoted. He could also have noted that Oboler made America’s first three-dimensional color feature, Bwana Devil (1952), again as an independent. Oboler’s Bwana Devil will never be a classic, but a restoration finally reveals a respectable low-budget adventure film with outstanding stereoscopic cinematography. Like Bwana Devil, most of Arch Oboler’s filmmaking falls far short of the high quality of his radio drama, yet his films are interesting as idiosyncratic expressions of a nonconformist and technical innovator. Oboler not only brought atomic warfare and 3-D to cinema, he also introduced radio techniques such as multi-layered, stream-of-consciousness sound. On radio and in film, his works reveal a Manichaean and fatalistic preoccupation with psychological struggle and a penchant for tackling controversial subjects. In view of these facts, critics cannot disentangle Oboler’s radio drama from his cinema, even though he was far more successful at the former. To return Oboler from oblivion, we have to take into account the whole artist, his brilliant radio dramaturgy and his erratic filmmaking. Lastly, Oboler’s work and life were often intertwined in uncanny ways. Therefore, in this overview of Oboler’s oeuvre, we must also take into account the biographical as well as the critical.
In what was to become his final interview, Oboler recalled, “[w]hen I was very young, I was given my first movie camera by my father. It was one of the first cameras that Bell and Howell, 6 a Chicago firm, put out for home use. The film was pretty expensive … ” 7 The memory serves as an emblem of Arch Oboler’s underfinanced motion picture career—he receives the gift of a movie camera from a beloved parent, but he can barely afford the film. It’s the kind of situation that O. Henry describes in his twisting short stories, stories that Oboler loved as a child and emulated in his pulp fiction and later in his radio dramas. Blessed (or cursed) with a wild imagination and insatiable curiosity, Arch embraced radio from its inception, first as a hobbyist, then as a salesman, and finally as a dramatist. He is remembered—if at all—for his radio plays, yet he was making amateur movies before he was
writing professional dramas for “the theatre of the mind.” According to his older sister Minnie, Arch’s childhood knack for oratory nearly got him hired as an actor by Chicago’s Essanay film studio. 8 However, his father objected because he wanted his son—a future surrealist and polyamorist—to have a normal life. Almost from the beginning then, Arch Oboler’s world was intertwined with radio, the movies, and ironic twists of fate.
Oboler preserved a home movie from the 1920s. The footage offers a portrait of his parents Leon and Clara with their dog, his kid brother Eli, his big sister Minnie, and of the artist as a young man. As an adult, Oboler’s work is often moody, gloomy, and just plain dark; yet, on this reel of celluloid we see a youth clowning and laughing. Minnie, at a luncheon honoring Arch, joked that she did not know exactly when her precocious younger brother started writing, but she was certain that he did not sign his own birth certificate. 9 Clearly he did not, because his birth certificate misspells his last name, “O-b-l-e-r”. 10 Throughout his life, his surname was frequently misspelled, leading Oboler to quip, “ … I’d hate to have to change my tombstone just to match their version … ” 11 Although Oboler’s obituaries do spell his name correctly, every single one incorrectly states his birth year as 1909. Fortunately, his birth certificate records the Chicago native’s birthdate correctly as December 7, 1907. 12
Disillusionment and the cruel surprise twist is the stuff that Oboler’s first grown-up short story is made of. Appearing in Breezy Stories, “A Chap Named Paul” (1927) is about a naive young woman named ‘Pinky’ who falls for a seemingly gentle and earnest fellow named Paul. However, Pinky’s internal monologue about her new flame is at odds with a cold reality and her dream is soon gone with the wind:
And you too, Paul, are different. You love me, and I love you! I’m yours and you’re mine. Tomorrow night—priest—marriage—Paul!
As the light-haired fellow turned toward his room, he stopped for a moment before the door of the landlady and rapped. A sleepy “What is it?” came through the door.
“When that girl called ‘Pinky’ calls up after this, tell her I’ve left town ‘n you don’t know when I’ll be back. She’ll catch on after she calls up a few times. Thanks. ‘Night.”
And the clean-faced fellow called Paul went into his room whistling an over-popular little love ballad. 13
In 1927, the year this story was published, Arch was nineteen, and he was a chap named Archie. According to an article in Movie-Radio Guide, while at the University of Chicago, an instructor returned one of Archie’s short stories “marked ‘D,’ the lowest passing grade.” 14 Unpleasantly surprised, he quit school. This episode is telling of Archie’s lifelong fragile ego. Oboler, unwittingly, revealed this character flaw in an unpublished story called “From a Diary at 19”, “I suppose what I need most of all, right now, is directed knowledge. Yet what do I mean by directed knowledge? The knowledge of some pin-headed, platitude-mouthing instructor? Or the will of me? Is that not enough?” 15 Apparently, the will of Archie was enough. Between 1926 and 1933, he wrote approximately one hundred forty short stories and published twenty-one in pulp magazines. In addition to distinguishing himself as a real writer, Archie may have wanted to distinguish himself from a fictional writer named Archy, spelled with the letter ‘y’. This Archy, created in 1916 by columnist Don Marquis, though beloved by readers, was not only a free verse poet but also a cockroach. Perhaps Archie Oboler’s homophonic first name, his hobby of collecting insects, his writing career, and his fondness for the vers libre of Walt Whitman attracted too many unwanted comparisons to a loathsome pest. It’s also possible that Archibald “Arch” Oboler was imitating Walter “Walt” Whitman. This much is certain: by the time he broke into radio in late 1933, he identified himself as Arch on the plays he submitted to NBC. 16
Arch was hungry for real success, and he believed that he had more to offer than the average radio writer, “I listened to radio, and I said ‘I can do better than that’ … So I wore out the seat of my pants in the reception rooms of NBC trying to get … someone to read some of my plays … ” 17 Arch was also hungry for real food, “I was seriously down to living on O. Henry bars, which were a nickel a piece in those days.” 18 For many months, Oboler pursued various NBC executives with his radio plays, until finally he was given his first big break: “one of these executives…called me and said “You wrote a play called ‘Futuristics’ … NBC is going to open up new studios in a place called Radio City, since it’s a building of the future, your play is about the world of the future, we will give you seventy-five dollars for your play for all rights.” 19 Oboler spent months writing “Futuristics” (1933), so the seventy-five dollars seemed like an insufficient sum to him, “I managed to talk myself into playing a part on my own play so I could get another seventeen dollars and fifty cents, it was terribly important for the room rent.” 20
“Futuristics” consists of a series of satirical blackout sketches taking place in the year 2437, and one of these sketches mocks an effete and misguided academic. This professor is perhaps a caricature of Oboler’s allegedly foolish University of Chicago instructor, and he offers a wrongheaded explanation for the slang “drag a femme to a hop, and then crash a party.”
PROFESSOR: Well, that’s undoubtedly a code, but it’s really very simple. In fact almost elementary. ‘Drag a femme to a hop.’ The young man merely states that he is going to participate in some athletic event of that time. Wrestling, perhaps. By crashing a party he means colliding with another individual! 21
Oboler, with his anti-authoritarian leanings and sense of humor, irritated his corporate overlords from the beginning, albeit unintentionally:
in that world of the future I happened to mention something slightly, slightly derogatory about cigarettes … And, when we got off the live air, I was called in, and … I was told in loud tones that the commercials were holy on the network, and any comment, even oblique, that downgraded the value of the product was taboo. 22
For the record, Oboler’s lampoon of advertising and cigarettes is amusing if you are familiar with the sales tropes of radio’s commercial sponsors from this era:
ANOTHER VOICE: This program comes to you through the courtesy of the Everlasting Irritable Cigarettes. Be a man and smoke Irritable, the rough, tough, harsh cigarette. Can you take it? Then take Irritables and prove it. In explosives—it’s nitro-glycerin. Boom! In woodworking, it’s sand paper. But in cigarettes—ah!—It’s IRRITABLE! 23
Arch knew whereof he joked. For a time in his life, he was a smoker. As a personality, he was also frequently irritable and self-aggrandizing. In the 1920s, he supported himself, in part, as a radio salesman for the Chicago music store B.F. Carr & Son, and as a writer of advertising copy, “every once in a while, when some ordinary mortal thrusts out his chin a little further and begins to do obvious things just a little differently, and, incidentally, with phenomenal success, there is lusty applause from the rest and much wonder.” 24
Despite his heresy, the radio gods were buying Arch Oboler and his way of doing things “just a little differently.” He played it safe for a while, writing sentimental and comic plays for programs that are now obscure to all but the most avid fans of the Golden Age of Radio— Lady Counselor for former silent film star Irene Rich, and Grand Hotel for up and coming film star Don Ameche. Although he had kind words for his actors, he did not have kind words for this period of his own radio writing, “they were terrible potboilers, and I hated them, but I needed the money so badly … the value of those days, of course, was that I learned the techniques of radio by listening to those fine actors.” 25
Oboler’s plays from this period were not all “terrible potboilers.” For example, one of Oboler’s more well-known stories for radio, “The Chinese Gong,” was first broadcast on May 5, 1935, on Grand Hotel. This story contains a characteristic Oboler twist and an effective use of sound. The action of Oboler’s radio play hangs entirely upon the reverberating tone of the cursed titular object. In the world of Arch’s story, when the gong is struck three times by the same person, misfortune immediately announces itself with a heart-stopping knock at the door. Compared with other radio plays of this era, Oboler’s radio writing is remarkably clear because the sound effects are focused and minimal, and because we seldom hear more than three voices in any scene. Oboler understood that the listener has great difficulty following the action when overwhelmed by sound effects, and even greater difficulty differentiating between speakers once they hear more than four characters in any scene. Early stories such as “The Chinese Gong” reveal how Oboler yearned to capitalize on the unique attributes of the radio medium. Rather than just use radio as an “imitation of motion pictures and an echo of the stage,” he viewed it, as a “theatre of the mind.” 26 He wanted to transport his listeners “to any corner of the world” and “evoke emotions that were deep in the consciousness of the listener.” 27 Arch finally received this opportunity with a late night horror program called Lights Out. Originally created by Wyllis Cooper, Lights Out signaled its scene changes with the striking of a gong; however, unlike “The Chinese Gong,” this program’s ominous note heralded fortune knocking on Oboler’s door.
In 1936, an NBC vice president named Clarence “C.L.” Menser gave Arch Oboler his second big break by assigning him sole writing duties for Lights Out after Wyllis Cooper departed for opportunities in Hollywood. Oboler praised Cooper as “the unsung pioneer of radio dramatic techniques,” and he disclosed the artistic debt that he owed to him: “ … his was the first mind in American radio broadcasting which sought, in a sustained series of plays, to make use of the spoken word and the subtlety of sound effects, not in imitation of the theatre, but with the wonderful intimacy of approach that is unique to ‘blind’ broadcasting.” 28 Oboler also noted that it was a challenge to follow Cooper, even if Lights Out was “not exactly [his] idea of a writing Shangri-La.” 29 He wisely realized that, like Cooper, he would be able to experiment with this series because “the vice president who was in charge of all that wouldn’t be awake at … eleven-thirty [pm] when it went on, so I could really get away with quote murder unquote.” 30 Oboler wrote one “out and out horror play” for every two of “the idea plays that [he] felt radio was ready for.” 31 He had many of these idea plays already written and at the ready: “they’d been turned down [previously] because I was told that radio was a purely entertainment medium and they didn’t need any of these thought provoking ideas, but on Lights Out I got away with them.” 32
On Lights Out, Oboler made his name as a master of the macabre with lurid tales that dovetailed with the pulp fiction that he’d written. Few of Oboler’s broadcasts from the 1930s Lights Out were recorded, and those that were transcribed would benefit from audio restoration. Nonetheless, nearly all of his radio scripts from this program survive. 33 Some of his “out and out horror” plays are fascinating because of their bizarre plots and utter sadism. For example, in Oboler’s “Halloween Horror” (1936), an elderly Chicago vampire not only lures children in order to drink their blood, he also goads them into playing dangerous games, one of which results in a child burning to death—now, that is getting away with murder. Oboler’s idea plays also snuck in risky political attacks on authoritarianism. In “The Last War” (1936), Oboler attacks Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Stalinist Russia:
ENGLISHMAN: … The dictators of the nations took away the people’s freedom and promised them bread. But there is no bread to give, so now they give them war … When I was very young there still was hope—freedom of man, liberty—they were glorious living things. But the people listened to the lies of their leaders—and now they must pay. 34
Another play, “Homo Primus” (1937), is a time travel critique of the appeasement of Hitler.
C.L. Menser’s early bedtime was one reason that Oboler sustained little interference with his political and idea content on Lights Out. Another reason for his relative freedom was that, in the 1930s, this program had no conservative commercial sponsors or advertisers to inadvertently offend. Nonetheless, his very first radio play for the series “Burial Services” almost buried Oboler’s career:
ARCH OBOLER: I almost was taken off the air permanently after the first program … called “Burial Services” … A family standing around an open grave, a sixteen-year-old daughter has died suddenly. And, I go to the mind of each of these people. What they’re thinking, the father, the mother, the brother, the sister. And, then I go down into the mind of the person buried and she’s not dead. She’s alive in the coffin … and screaming in her mind “mother, I’m alive, I can hear you, let me out, let me out.” And they’re throwing the dirt in, shovel by shovel … Fifty thousand letters came in—an unprecedented outpouring … 35
Oboler’s “Burial Services” is strong stuff even now, because we know from the beginning that the girl is alive in the coffin, and we expect that she’ll be saved. When she is buried alive, the dread and suspense that Oboler made us endure for the length of the play become unbearable:
UNDERTAKER: Put the lid back on, Joe.
SOUND: (LID OF COFFIN BEING PUT BACK ON)
JEANIE: (PLEADING PITEOUSLY—FADING BACK AND MUFFLED TOWARD END OF SPEECH AS COFFIN LID GOES ON). Mother!, Mother, I’m afraid! Mother help me! Mother! (FADEOUT) Mother! Mother, I’m afraid!
MINISTER: Mr. Undertaker, you’d better lower the casket at once. 36
Fortunately, the lid was not put on Oboler’s career, and his words still reach us from beyond the grave:
ARCH OBOLER: Well … you would think that as a result of the horror of what went on at the network as a result of that mailing that I would have been thrown off … Ah, but the executive mind doesn’t think that way. They said, if Mister Oboler can get fifty thousand letters on a program that he shouldn’t have written, think of what he can get on a program that he should have written. So, suddenly I was given a free hand. It was a very exciting length of time … 37
During this exciting time, Oboler also wrote several bizarre episodes for The Shadow, and some shortened versions of his unconventional tales were heard on The Rudy Vallée Show. On that wildly popular program, Rudy Vallée named Lights Out as his favorite series, and his support did much to bolster Oboler’s reputation as a major talent. 38 While writing for Lights Out, he wrote for other programs such as Irene Rich Dramas and the star studded, Your Hollywood Parade, which required
Oboler to be onsite in Hollywood.
During this first Hollywood journey, Oboler attracted controversy again, this time with a comic sketch written for Don Ameche and Mae West. In his telling of the story, Oboler’s involvement commenced when he was contacted by George Gruskin, the West Coast radio head of the William Morris Agency, which also represented Oboler. Gruskin told Oboler that a WMA client, Mae West, “had been signed for her first radio appearance on what was the highest ranking radio show of the time—the coffee-sponsored variety show headed by the triumvirate of Don Ameche, Edgar Bergen, and his animated splinter [Charlie] McCarthy.” 39 Oboler learned that Mae West “was to receive the amazing sum of $10,000 for this broadcast, but the material originally written for her—an adaptation of John Erskine’s book on Adam, Eve, and Lilith 40 —had turned out to be entirely too bawdy for air use.” The broadcast was only four days away, so Gruskin asked Oboler to help write “an original ten-minute comedy concerning Adam and his Eve.” 41
Arch Oboler pitched in and got to work. The Mae West broadcast of his skit “Mrs. Eve” (1937) resulted in a public furor. West was barred from radio for over a decade. Mae West read the following lines with her trademark suggestiveness:
SNAKE: But forbidden fruit.
EVE: Are you a snake or are you a mouse?
SNAKE: I’ll—I’ll do it. (hissing laugh)
EVE: Oh—shake your hips. There, there now, you’re through.
SNAKE: I shouldn’t be doing this.
EVE: Yeh, but you’re doing all right now. Get me a big one … I feel like doin’ a big apple. 42
According to Oboler:
In the days that followed, network vice-presidents began to run for cover, advertising-agency men were laid on the guillotine block; the Federal Communications Commission, under pressure from Congress, rumbled dire threats, Miss West and her assorted ah’s and oo’s were barred off the air, and I—I reread my innocent little paraphrase, watched the entire process in wonder and vowed never to cut another drama to order. 43
Unlike the biblical tale, and unlike Mae West, Arch Oboler was not expelled from the Eden of radio. However, this incident was a close shave for Oboler, and it impressed upon him the need to have more control over his radio career. Further, he wanted to leave Lights Out because he did not want to stay confined to a time slot that aired his plays too late to “reach the people that [he] wanted to reach.” 44 To realize his ambitions, Oboler gathered a group of “very fine actors” in New York, and he purchased an unwieldy machine that made recordings using sixteen inch transcription discs. With these actors and his machine, Oboler “did a play that [he] felt the network should do.” 45 The name of his play was “The Ugliest Man in the World.” The story is a poetic, surreal, stream-of-consciousness tale about the titular man and his quest for love and belonging. With the fragile transcription disc and cumbersome record player in tow, Oboler went to Radio City to pay a call on
a man named Lewis Titterton 46 who was in charge of writers. A very erudite, charming man . . . You can imagine little me toting this huge apparatus because there was no such thing as a portable sixteen inch player, and his eyebrows went up, and I put it on his desk, and I said, “please listen.” 47
Lewis Titterton listened, and what he heard were the rhythmic thoughts of the protagonist, another chap named Paul, contemplating suicide:
PAUL in a “stream-of-consciousness” semi-monotone:
… gun in my hand gun in my hand in all my life I never had a gun in my hand smooth gun hard gun cold gun in my hand bullet won’t be cold warm bullet hot bullet burning hot hot as the blood—no, can’t think of that lift the muzzle of the gun up hole as black as where I’m going turn the muzzle up and press the trigger trigger cold against my finger cold as death but life is colder—rhythm to that—poet dies with final rhythm poet dies who never wrote a poem—headline for the tabloids—Poet Dies with Final Rhythm.
VOICE in distant background; it has a thin, rasping quality:
Ugliest Man in the World a Suicide!
PAUL firmly—spacing words as if to drive the previous thought out: Poet-Dies-with-Final-Rhythm!
VOICE in close: Ugliest Man in the World a Suicide!
PAUL louder, in anguish: Poet Dies in Final Rhythm!
VOICE in close-shouting: Ugliest Man in the World a Suicide! 48
On radio, in 1939, suicide was a taboo topic:
ARCH OBOLER: [Lewis Titterton] didn’t say a word to me, he just took the record off the turn table and disappeared. Not a word, and I sat there for an hour and he came back and he looked at me, and he said “you’re going on the full network at 8:30 to 9:00 on Friday starting in a month.” It was a magic moment, it was a magic moment … It was prime time. 49
Not only was this prime time, but Lewis Titterton gave Arch Oboler his own radio series with his name in the title and complete creative control— Arch Oboler’s Plays (1939-40). A publicity photograph for this series depicts Oboler in a radio studio standing on a ladder above his actors as he directs them. In the photo, he looks like a puppeteer of marionettes: complete creative control. It was an almost unheard of honor and opportunity, and he became NBC’s answer to CBS’s Orson Welles.
As writer-director of his own series, Oboler proved to be a tireless and original innovator. He wrote most of his plays from the first person perspective, focusing on the thoughts, memories, and imaginings of his protagonists. Particularly memorable is his adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, starring James Cagney as Joe Bonham, a World War I casualty without eyes, ears, tongue, or limbs. Oboler was a minimalist who never used a sound effect or piece of music when the spoken word could better create an image in the mind of his listeners. Nonetheless, the sound effects that he did use are remembered for their audacity and creativity such as the eerie vibration of bed springs, which Joe Bonham learns to recognize as the movement of people entering and exiting his hospital room.
Oboler’s series was successful enough to attract the commercial sponsorship of Proctor & Gamble and the regular participation of Hollywood movies stars such as Joan Crawford, Charles Laughton, and Norma Shearer. However, the writer’s now enormous salary came with a price-tag. Arch Oboler’s Plays became the generally and collectively named Everyman’s Theatre (1940), but in reality, it belonged to the product—Oxydol soap. As far as Oboler was concerned, it might as well have been called Everysoap’s Theatre because Oxydol was hawked during three commercial interruptions. The product itself was associated with the soap operas that Oboler loathed. The commercial interruption in the middle of his plays was, to Oboler, pollution:
ARCH OBOLER: It was wrong from the beginning. In those days there were no detergents but they were needed badly to expunge my bad language in the control rooms when the interference began from the sponsors. And, not from Mr. Gamble and Mr. Proctor, but rather the usual source, the advertising agency contact man who was trying to make an impression … And, I wasn’t accustomed to wearing anybody’s collar or being told how … because I was naive enough then and naive enough now to think the best things are done not out of committee but out of the heart and mind of a creator. 50
Despite his discontent with the direction of his radio career, Oboler remained a radio stalwart through the end of its so called “Golden Age” in 1945. During all this time on radio, Oboler aspired to become a film director, and to some degree, break free of radio: “it did become a chore. The hamburger grinder of radio was almost as bad as the hamburger grinder of television. Again, and again, and again.” 51 In 1940, MGM gave Oboler an opportunity to break with routine and try a new medium: “I was asked to write a motion picture for Bob [Robert] Taylor and Norma Shearer, and I found the … medium very exciting.” 52 The name of the motion picture, Escape (1940).
Coming Soon at CineSavant: part two of this special three-part series on the radio drama, filmmaking, and life of writer-producer-director Arch Oboler. Part two, Radio Pictures takes us from the wilds of the Hollywood studio system to the adventure of filmmaking in Central and East Africa.
End Notes:
1 The singer is clearly not Marian Anderson, but these two songs were staples of her repertoire and bring to mind the celebrated African-American contralto.
2 Agee, James. Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies. New York, Modern Library. (2000), p. 159.
3 Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York, E.F. Dutton & Co., Inc. (1968), p. 264.
4 Dixon, Wheeler, Winston. Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut. Bloomington, IN. Indiana University Press. (1993), p. 39.
5 Miller, Earl. “Independent Filmmaker: An Interview with Arch Oboler.” Focus! Chicago’s Movie Journal. Issue Number 1, p. 10.
6 Arch Oboler is speaking about the Filmo movie cameras, which Bell and Howell introduced in 1923.
7 Bell, Douglas. “Arch Oboler, Chicago and New York:1907-1941” Five Directors: The Golden Years of Radio. Edited by Ira Skutch. Lanham, MD. Scarecrow Press. (1998), p. 138.
8 “Pacific Pioneer Broadcasting Luncheon for Arch Oboler.” January 19, 1979. RXF 8648. Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
9 Id.
10 Certified Copy of Birth Certificate for Archibald Oboler, December 7, 1907, Chicago, Illinois.
11 Arch Oboler to Saul Shiffrin. March 21, 1972. Box 74. Folder 2. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
12 Certified Copy of Birth Certificate for Archibald Oboler, December 7, 1907, Chicago, Illinois.
13 Oboler, Archie. “A Chap Named Paul.” Breezy Stories, C.H. Young Publishing Co., Inc, October 1927, pgs 369-370.
14 Mahoney, Tom. “Tumult in the Night.” Movie-Radio Guide. Sept. 28 – October 4, 1940. Vol 9, No. 51, p. 35.
15 Oboler, Archie. “From a Diary at 19.” “Unpublished manuscript,” Chicago, Il. circa 1927, p. 5. Box 157. Folder 8. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
16 Oboler, Arch. “Futuristics” November 11, 1933. Box 221. Folder 15. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
17 Same Time, Same Station. “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
18 Id.
19 Id.
20 Id.
21 Oboler, Arch. “Futuristics” November 11, 1933. Box 221. Folder 15. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
22 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
23 Oboler, Arch. “Futuristics” November 11, 1933. Box 221. Folder 15. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
24 Oboler, Archie. “Why Rush Around Trying to Be Different?” “Unpublished manuscript,” Chicago, Il. circa 1927, Box 135. Folder 13. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
25 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
26 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
27 Id.
28 Oboler, Arch. Oboler Omnibus: Radio Plays and Personalities. New York. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. (1945), pgs. 21-22.
29 Id.
30 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
31 Id.
32 Id.
33 The Arch Oboler Collection at the Library of Congress holds a treasure trove of these broadcast scripts.
34 Oboler, Arch. “The Last War” September 2, 1936. Box 239. Folder 2. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
35 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
36 Oboler, Arch. “Burial Services” June 3, 1936. Box 207. Folder 4. Arch Oboler Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
37 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
38 The Royal Gelatin Hour. “Danse Macabre.” NBC. May 5, 1938. Radio. “ … Arch Oboler, whose delightful imaginings on the Lights Out program, which happens to be my favorite program, have chilled millions of spines.” Rudy Vallée.
39 This program was known as The Chase and Sanborn Hour.
40 John Erskine’s novel is Adam and Eve: Though He Knew Better (1927).
41 Oboler, Arch. Oboler Omnibus: Radio Plays and Personalities. New York. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. (1945), p. 44
42 “Mrs. Eve.” The Chase and Sanborn Hour, NBC. December 12, 1937. Radio.
43 Oboler, Arch. Oboler Omnibus: Radio Plays and Personalities. New York. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. (1945), p. 45
44 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
45 Id.
46 Lewis Titterton was the manager of the script division at NBC.
47 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
48 “The Ugliest Man in the World.” Arch Oboler’s Plays, NBC. March 25, 1939. Radio.
49 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part I.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 16, 1972. Radio.
50 “An Oboler Omnibus, Part II.” Same Time, Same Station, KRLA, Pasadena. April 23, 1972. Radio.
51 Id.
52 Id.
March, 2025
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