the provenance of the... - surviving Mercury and Campbell shows

[tadao]

Has there ever been any kind of investigation into the source of the surviving Mercury and Campbell programs? Is it correct to say that the surviving Mercury shows are generally off-air recordings, and that the Campbells are copied from transcription discs?

Were the tapes held at the Lilly Library copied from originals that were part of Welles' and Richard Wilson's collections, or were they obtained through OTR channels?

http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/guides/welles/welles1.html
The Lilly's collections guide says "The tape recordings are almost entirely of radio shows and were made from the original recordings", but supplies no further detail whether the "original recordings" were obtained from networks, sponsors, collectors etc.

Anyone got any ideas?

[Wilson]

The Lilly has transcription discs that came from Welles' own collection. He was presumably given copies for each of the broadcasts he worked on as producer for future reference and so on. This is presumably where their tape and reel to reel copies came from, though I can't tell you that with certainty. You could probably just send an email and I imagine they'd tell you if they knew.

[Glenn Anders]

Jeff is generally correct in matters like this, tadao. I might add that, in addition to personal collections like those of Welles and Richard Wilson, many, perhaps a majority of the radio shows preserved from this period, were saved because the FCC required that radio stations make "air-checks" of programs broadcast, so that the Commission might respond to complaints by local or network listeners about the content of shows. These "air-checks were usually small, later rather large, glass or metal disks covered with shellac or later vinyl. They often were recorded from the inside of the disk out. The early ones contained only a few minutes of sound, and a number of records were necessary to preserve a longer program. Because no need was recognized to keep the records, if no comments were received, periodically many stations purged their libraries. Still, in the 1950 and 1960's, when the value of the programs was recognized, amazingly large numbers of the records were found in cellars and garages. These were transferred to reel to reel tape, and though sometimes damaged or of inferior sound quality, became the basis for many of collections available today, commercially or in libraries.

Glenn

[tadao]

Thank you both for the informative answers.

Glenn, if I understand you correctly, "air-checks" would be recorded off-air, hence the name, and the crosstalk on some of the Mercury shows which (IIRC) is absent for the Campbell recordings, which are presumably transcription discs recorded from a line signal as the shows went to air, but not from an off air signal?

Also, have either of you come across any indication as to why the "missing" shows are missing? The Campbells in particular seem to be a relatively complete and well preserved set. Might certain transcription discs have been discarded if part of the recording became damaged? I'm perhaps wrongly assuming that an hour long program would require several sides-worth of recording time, so perhaps an incomplete program would be judged "not worth keeping"?

Have any/many domestic off-air recordings of 1930s/40s shows surfaced? Would well-off radio listeners then have had the ability to record full length programs? I seem to remember in "Death of a Salesman" that Lohman's boss boasts about having a wire recorder that he can have the maid use to record (I think) Jack Benny, while he is away from home. Might these or disc based formats (although probabably expensive and quite rare) be used by members of the general public to record shows? Presumably recording wire was reusable, but disc based formats would be write once?


By the way, if you have access to BBC Radio 4 via internet, on Saturday March 12th, 20:00 GMT, in the "Archive Hour" strand, there will be a program compiled from Kevin Brownlow's interviews with silent film actors and directors, recorded in the 1960s as research for his book "The Parade's Gone By". It will be available for listening online for one week after broadcast here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/archivehour.shtml

The strand is always usually entertaining and in depth, and Mr Brownlow is very probably Britain's foremost silent film historian, so this should be worth a listen.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, tadao, many of these recordings, a majority I should think, were simply made to be kept for a few months and thrown away, whether damaged or not. An hour program, a half or quarter-hour program (often the case in Radio, then) did require multi disks. They were large, one shot (as you suggest), bulky difficult to store. Their only purpose was to satisfy the new FCC. It is amazing that we have tens of thousands of hours preserved out of hundreds of thousands of hours of programming.

I should think that, aside from private collections of people involved (like Welles), few enthusiasts could afford or have the competence to record off-air. Such collections, though, no doubt do exist. Where, I would not begin to know.

The wire recorder, as I understand it, was perfected by Grundig or Deutchegramophone, some such, for communications in the German military. The wire was reusable, but they were almost impossible to edit, hence the superiority of magnetic tape when it was perfected. [I have recently reviewed the compelling new German picture, *DOWNFALL, and Bruno Ganz (Hitler in the film) told some of us at its San Francisco Premier that he studied a 7 1/2 minute recording taken of Hitler unawares for perfecting Hitler's more casual Austrian German accent. That may have been a wire recording.] The device was not known or used much in the West until well after World War II. When Arthur Miller has Willie Loman's boss demonstrating a wire recorder, it is real cutting edge stuff. [The text may have been updated since 1949 to make it a tape recorder (because audiences no longer will know what the hell a wire recorder is), but magnetic tape did not come in until the 1950's.] In any case, most of the programs under discussion, such as the Mercury Theater on the Air or the Campbell Playhouse, would have predated the use of wire recorders in America.

Thank you for the information about Kevin Brownlow's programme. I'm sure many of us have long appreciated his work in film preservation and restoration. Now if we could only get him together with Rick Schmidlin on Welles' films . . . .

Glenn

*BTW, Welles fans may be interested that in her superb performance as Magda Goebbels, the German actress, Corinna Harfouch, looks in a number of scenes uncannily like Agnes Moorhead, in her prime. It is a part Moorhead would have relished, I'm sure.

[Knowles Noel Shane]

Didn't Richard Wilson have a treasure of Welles' recordings in his garage? I think a selection of them served for Voyager's "Theatre of the Imagination" set. If I'm not mistaken, the Wilson collection wound up at The Lilly Library.

[jbrooks]

If I recall correctly, Wilson's set of recordings were the inspiration for the "Theater of the Imagination" set, but were not in fact used for the released recordings. I think the liner notes state that Voyager went back to the original disks as the source for the release. I think the notes also refer to not being able to use certain recordings -- like the radio version of Ambersons -- because the record was in such poor condition.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, Knowles and jbrooks: The album's producer, Frank Beacham, states that he and Richard Wilson made a selection from the garage tapes, and that Voyager went back to original discs stored at the Lily. These were transferred by a special process, using stylus tips of various shapes, to fresh tape by Sonic Solutions of San Francisco. He tells us that the discs were between five and fifteen minutes in length.

It's a good collection.

Glenn

[tadao]

Thanks again Glenn for your informative responses. I hope you were able to catch the Brownlow programme.

Sorry to labour a question, but if the surviving Mercury/Campbell shows are copies of originals from Welles'/Richard Wilson's collections, is there any indication as to why certain shows were missing from these collections?

I speak from a UK perspective, where a large majority of radio and TV shows up until the early 1970s are entirely missing from the archives, but perversely, detailed records of the duplication and destruction of both the original videotapes and of telerecorded (kinescope) copies which were made and later destroyed, exist in the BBC's written archives. Rare surviving copies of shows themselves that have since emerged have generally been returned from overseas broadcasters.

Have any detailed written archives survived at CBS or other broadcasters relating to the OTR period? Would copies of shows held by Welles or Richard Wilson have derived from airchecks, or would they have been seperate recordings made at the same time as part of the producers/CBS contracts? Would they simply have been given the aircheck discs at the time they were no longer needed to fulfill FCC requirements?

tadao

PS I should have realised that Miller's description of wire recording equipment in "Death of a Salesman" was from a decade (and a World War) later than the shows in question. I've seen ads for "Downfall" on the London Underground and will definitely try to check it out.

[Glenn Anders]

Well, tadao, I'm sure what are called logs were kept by every station, but for those kept in the late 1930's and early 1940's, it is hard to know how much help they would be in tracking down lost programs. They probably listed only the data concerning the programs and their transmission, not where recordings were filed.

The records stored in Wilson's garage, as I understand it, were Welles' personal copies. He was a pack rat but always on the move, and he left stashes all over the World. A large store of his work is said to have been lost in a fire when Robert Shaw and Mary Ure were renting his house in Spain.

The airchecks have been found all over the place because individual stations may have chosen or been required to make recordings of certain programs.

[There used to be huge amounts of this stuff around. I remember, as a kid, a man down the street wanted to give me several hundred shellac Jazz recordings, stuff like Wood Herman's Rooftop Orchestra, dating from San Francisco in the the late 1920's and early 1930's. My mother put the nix on that. Today, many of those would have be worth a fortune. So far as I know, the man took them all to the dump.]

Glenn

[Knowles Noel Shane]

Moms are the great enemy of history and academia. They also like to throw away your collection of comic books and Mad magazines.

[Glenn Anders]

Very true, Knowles. Your reply reminds me now that that I need to make a correction. The records I remember were of "Tom Guernevitch and His Rooftop Orchestra," but Woody Herman was featured.

Glenn