A LONG OVERDUE HISTORY AND APPRECIATION OF ABC RADIO'S 1964-1965 AUDIO SERIES
(This blog presents the chronological history of T5 and is best enjoyed by reading the very first post and proceeding to the next one, and then the next one, etc.)
NOTE: THIS POST IS BEING REVIEWED FOR CORRECTION AND ENHANCEMENT as of 2/14/2022 -- PLEASE CHECK BACK AT THE END OF FEB 2022
Wyllis Cooper, creator of Lights Out and Quiet, Please, carved out a special place in the history of radio's golden age. He died in 1955... so how could he play a role in T5 nine years after his passing?
T5 exec producer Ed Byron worked for AFRS at the same time Wyllis Cooper did for 1943's series This is the Army.They
stayed in touch all those years. Copper died in 1955. As we're doing the
T5 research on episodes we found ourselves at the good website OTR Plot Spot and found this note for episode 80 "A Nothing Place"...
Actor Frank Thomas's script brazenly steals its plot and three characters from a 1949 TV play by Wyllis Cooper that got rave reviews in Variety and Billboard.
Thomas, who played the bellhop role in the original and a 1950
rebroadcast, changes the dialogue, incidents, and ending enough so that
it's not a direct plagiarism, but the result is pedestrian and
uninvolving. Given that Cooper used to write for NBC's Empire Builders,
among the first coast-to-coast drama series, it seems fitting to find a
story of his hidden away in one of network radio's last anthology
programs. --- Anonymous
(Frank Thomas, btw, is "Frankie Thomas" of TV Tom Corbett, Space Cadet fame, who wrote 8 T5 scripts and acted in 7 episodes).
Okay,
so Frankie Thomas remembered a Cooper TV play he was in, needed an idea
for a script, and used some plot aspects to write a T5 play. We now know he probably did so with Ed Byron's urging or at least his blessing!
Researcher Karl Schadow mentioned he saw an article in a 1964 trade mag that says Ed Byron was looking for unused Quiet, Please scripts and the TV show Volume One that Wyllis Cooper did.
I tried to find as much information as I could about Volume One. There were 6 episodes, and we only have plotlines for 1 and 6. They had no titles but were called "Number 1" or "Number 6". The program was seen only in the New York metropolitan area, and should be considered "experimental." It was originally intended to be the TV version of Quiet, Please but the title was changed. When V1 started, it overlapped the end of QP's final season by about two weeks.
Karl
located the trade mag clip, and here's the essential paragraph.
Byron was at an April 1964 trade event and had just been hired to be EP
for the brand new T5 that was months away.
1964-04-08 Radio-Television Daily
Now we get suspicious. It was not Frankie T ripping off Cooper, it
was Bryon who probably started the conversation with Thomas that led to
the script. It turns out not to be a "brazen steal" but a Byron interest and a subtle homage to Cooper! The small magazine clip was the key that opened the door to this new perspective. Considering the notes to T5 writers (graciously supplied by Generic Radio Workshop and script collector Larry Groebe), it's clear that Byron is looking for scripts that can use the techniques and style of Cooper to mix in with the more traditional scripting, such as using stream-of-consciousness and creative use of narration.
Thomas performed the Bell Hop script TWICE, once on Volume One and then as the fourth episode on the TV version of Escape that Wyllis Cooper ran. Yes, Escape had a TV version that people forget perhaps because it was not memorable and was not on the air for long.
Therefore, Thomas knew the Bell Hop script very well, even if it was more than a decade ago, and could come up with a plotline inspired by the story.
The BIG question -- were other Cooper-inspired plotlines that found their way into T5 scripts? We are suspicious but may never know...
One of the six Volume One episodes
was recently put on YouTube. It's "Number Four." Cooper is on camera
and introduces the program. If you've never seen him or heard him before,
here's your chance! https://youtu.be/7Ed-P_VmQwI (MANY THANKS to David Rosenfield who brough this to our attention at the Old Time Radio Researchers Facebook page)
The script used in this video was a Quiet, Please script from just a few weeks earlier. The
V1 show was very experimental and from what we can tell was only in the
NY metro area. This gave them the ability to use the same scripts on
shows with wider geographic coverage, if not national, as Escape and also the Cooper TV series Stage 13.
We're doing our best to find plot descriptions of all of these series and match them up with T5.
It could be just this one episode. Byron was obviously familiar with
the series and his late old friend's work, and if he told the press that
Cooper's work could inspire scripts, he probably told many, many
others in the T5 range of writers. You never know what inspires some of these radio scripters, and if
they saw a Cooper endeavor and were inspired, they could have meandered
a different direction by the time they got to page 3, but it was Cooper who helped get their creative juices flowing.
Wyllis Cooper resources
Wyllis Cooper Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyllis_Cooper Wyllis Cooper IMDB https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0178459/?ref_=tt_ov_st Quiet Please tribute site https://www.quietplease.org/ Volume One log http://ctva.biz/US/Anthology/VolumeOne.htm Volume One IMDB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041070/ Escape TV log http://ctva.biz/US/Anthology/Escape1950.htm Stage 13 log http://ctva.biz/US/Anthology/Stage13.htm
"We're not trying to bring back anything," Ed Byron told Variety for its 1964-04-22 edition. "We want new scripts in contemporaneous terms." ABC hired Jack Wilson as story editor. He had a long pedigree as a radio writer for NBC starting in 1943 and continued there through 1958, and knew a good script when he saw one, and how to fix one when it needed fixing. And then there's the money: ABC was paying $400 a script, 40% higher than the writers union minimum. That translates into $3,600 in US$2021 terms.
From August 1963 to March 1964, there was barely a peep out of ABC Radio aboutits radio drama plans. Then, word came out that Ed Byron was named as executive producer. This was a very big announcement that gave near-instant credibility to the endeavor.
The 1963-08-12 edition Broadcasting Magazine reported that ABC Radio announced its plans to introduce a new radio drama series, The Mind's Eye that Fall. It did not come to pass, but the behind-the-scenes efforts did result in the premiere of Theater Five in Summer 1964.
