Welles as Guest Star

[Store Hadji]

Our Boy Wonder guesting on a bunch of variety shows of the day.

Of note is the Request Performance appearance, featuring Welles in his only sci-fi story other than War of the Worlds (it's debatable whether Donovan's Brain is sci-fi; I think it's horror.)

Glenn should like Orson and John Barrymore playing Duelling Egos and Tony can listen for Orson attempting to one-up Milton Berle.

http://www.archive.org/details/OrsonWelles-GuestStar

[Glenn Anders]

Hadji: It takes me a long time to work through your treasures, some of which, like the Welles/Barrymore exchanges, I've heard in their time or since, but others I have not.

[I can't overemphasize how satisfying much of Radio was, "in the moment," especially when utilizing talents like Welles. If the writing and production matched such people, it was often memorable. Unlike most Television today, there was a sense of something intimate and living, something brought to ones home from far places, in a time when that sensation was a phenomenon.]

Here (so far), I've particularly enjoyed the Request Performance, a show directed by William N. Robson, in many ways Welles successor in medium as far as artistic innovation was concerned. What a pleasure to have Welles, Eddie Bracken, Johnny Mercer and Virginia O'Brien in the same program! I particularly liked the deadpan dramatization of "The Rover Boys." It was fitting that Miss O'Brien played the heroine.

She brought back such memories that I looked her up on the IMDb, and discovered that this show-stopping, zombie-like beauty was not only a niece of Director Lloyd Bacon, but she also married Kirk Alyn, one of the legendary portrayers of Superman!

Thanks, Hadji.

Glenn

[Store Hadji]

Since I found a way to upload en masse files of over 10 megs, I'm trying to preserve the public domain portion of my collection in a place where it will survive after I shuffle off this mortal coil. I'm sure there are more shows than most people will find time or even interest in listening to.

[Store Hadji]

I've also been enjoying the Doctor Who audio dramas produced by Big Finish over the past several years, some of which have been broadcast on radio by the BBC (though they're all licensed by the Beeb.) They feature four of the past Doctors, namely Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann. As befitting the greatly visual medium radio is, sometimes I can't differentiate between which episodes I've watched on TV and which I visualized in my head. Rather stupid to have to sit and ponder whether I watched or listened to something, but there you are.

Thank the Gods that the BBC has kept radio dramas alive for 50 years past their sell date. The Above the Title series of four of Douglas Adams' novels which have been adapted over the past few years are worth mentioning as well.

Radio drama (or just audio drama, since much of it is released straight to cd or cassette) is a tenacious beastie. Instead of dying out with the dawn of television, I found a broadcast of Joseph Cotten starring in The Fall of the House of Usher from the 1960s and even a week of William Shatner guest-starring on Zero Hour in the 1970s. Though the genre has now withered in the US (to be replaced by Top-40 radio and political talk shows) it's in full health on the Beeb (and if you like such things, spend some time over on bbc.co.uk/radio.)

I even listen to shortwave more than I watch television, even though there's little left of interest on it (primarily since the BBC gutted the once-mighty World Service a few years ago.) Still, I'd much rather listen to some Afropop from Gabon than see the unseemly array of expressions which play over the chubby face of some enraged, puling and soiled infant on one of those political intolerance cable "news" programs.

[mteal]

That's alot of great stuff you're putting online, Hadji. Is this related to that project to gather all of Welles's radio programs together that you mentioned awhile ago? There should be a website devoted exclusively to Welles's radio/audio career. I've slapped together a crude webpage to illustrate what I'm talking about. It should be redone better of course, but the links do work:

http://web.mac.com/mmt6460/iWeb/Site/OW%20Radio.html

[Store Hadji]

That looks good to me. I was thinking of compiling all the links in this foum onto a single thread and asking someone to make it into a sticky, but your way looks better, providing it pops up on a google search as readily as Wellesnet does.

Since Wikipedia contains to be extremely popular, that's a good place to add a link to your page. One show that can't be included is The Shadow as the copyright has apparently been renewed. I'm not sure about the Shakespeare records either - seems like something the estate would lay an ownership claim to.

There are also pages on archive.org for This Is My Best, Harry Lime and Black Museum, if you want to add links to those.

[mteal]

Great, thanks. I've gone ahead and made the updates. Now I'll have to figure out some way to make the page more Googleable. Might be easier said then done.

The remarkable thing is not in how much Michael Teal does in “2007: A New York Odyssey,'' but in how little. This is the work of an artist so confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to make use of an iMac technological function. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on the laptop long enough for us to contemplate it, to instill it in our imaginations. Almost alone among travel documentaries, “2007'' is not concerned with thrilling us, but with stimulating our imaginations.
No little part of his effect comes from the music. Although Teal originally commissioned an original score from composer Frike Twealters, he instead employed classical recordings as background material. This was a crucial decision. The ethereal sounds employed for his narrative segments, for example, serve to give a sense of Mysteries only now unfolding, of new horizons and discoveries in far-off lands.

The music is associated in the film with the entry of the consciousness one Midwestern man (we may call him "the Traveller") into portions of Ontario and the U.S. Northeast. The theme is the essentially cyclical struggle to make that passage to consciousness on a higher level. These repeating cycles are symbolized first by the difficulties in escaping the congestion of the Chicago-area traffic, then of temporary, Zen-like repose at the awesome Niagara Falls, then again encountering spiritual (and literal) ups and downs in the Catskill Mountains, amid scenes of awesome natural beauty dotted with the remains of vanished civilizations. The subsequent encounter with the legacy of Roosevelt is crucial: The Traveller notes how FDR's subjective rejection of the materialism latent in the Vanderbilt Monolith shaped much of U.S. history. However, this insight does not go untested, for the Traveller later experiences the existential agonies of Materialism, symbolized by the soul-searing stasis on the George Washington Bridge.
I attended the Queens, NY, premiere of the film, in 2008, at the Kew Gardens Cinema. It is impossible to describe the anticipation in the audience adequately. Teal had been working on the film in secrecy for some months, in collaboration, the audience knew, with iMac Tech Support consultants who advised him on special-effects. Now it finally was ready to be seen.

Toward the end comes the famous “5 Pointz'' sequence, a sound and light journey in which protagonist Teal travels around what we might now call an abandoned factory, whose complex, variegated, graffiti-like splashes of cinematic color invite the movie-goer to contemplate the larger shapes of reality. Like the provocative "MoMA" sequence before it, which Teal-as-narrator aptly describes as "a head trip," this portion of the Traveller's odyssey sums up the entire journey, symbolizing multiple, yet curiously unitary, pathways to higher states of human existence, as well as insights into the U.S. historical experience.