Awesome Audio (All's Wells That Ends Welles Edition)

 

Huh? As if things weren't bad enough in the Ukraine and the Middle East, now we have to worry about the Thames Valley as well?

Now we're getting somewhere. First published in serialized form in a pair of U.K. and U.S. magazines in 1887, and then as a hardcovered novel in 1888, Wells' tale of an extraterrestrial invasion of England, if it didn't invent (there were earlier examples here and there) then certainly popularized the idea that there were races of beings on other planets, and it was only a matter of time before we'd find them or they'd find us. And no matter who found who, we Earthlings better be careful, because it went without saying (for no other reason than Wells had so convincingly said it first) that the otherworldly peeps resided in a much more technologically advanced society than our own. Now, why exactly should that be? Why couldn't Mars or any other planet have little green hunter-gatherers? Wells never said, but some scholars have theorized that, despite War of the Worlds straight-faced prose, his intent may have been satirical. In other words, Wells wanted to take us humans down a notch or two, probably figuring we had gotten pretty cocky in the last few decades of the Victorian era as the technology of this planet was becoming increasingly advanced, what with such inventions as Edison's light bulb, Bell's telephone, and...  

...Marconi's radio. Now, the above photo is not from the Victorian era, as attested by that young woman's hemline. It just that from the time something is invented, 1901 in the case of radio, to the time it becomes commonplace may take a while. By the 1930s, radio had become commonplace, the internet of its era. And like the internet, content sometimes went viral. 

 

Which brings us to this fellow. A Midwestern child prodigy whose father made a fortune inventing a bicycle lamp, Orson Welles had become a leading light of Broadway and the Manhattan theatrical scene as a whole when he was barely out of his teens, first as an actor and then increasingly as a writer, director, and producer. In 1937, Welles and fellow Federal Theatre Project director John Houseman founded their own repertory company The Mercury Theatre, the success of which attracted the attention of the Columbia Broadcast System. At the age of 23 Welles was already a relatively old hand at radio, having played the title character on the popular series The Shadow, when CBS asked him and Houseman to come up with something, which turned out to be Mercury Theatre of the Air. The format was that every week would be a radio adaptation of a well-known literary work--Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc.--with Welles playing the lead. Some months into doing this show, Welles got an idea. Along with The Shadow, he had also done quite of bit of acting on the popular program The March of Time, which often depicted historical events in the form of a radio news broadcast. Why not do the same thing with a classic work of fiction? The War of the Worlds was chosen, its setting changed and updated from Victorian England to New Deal USA. 

Airing on the day before Halloween on October 30, 1938, what listeners would have heard first was the announcer welcoming you to another edition of Mercury Theatre on the Air and that this week's episode would be a dramatization of the H.G. Wells classic. This was followed by Orson Welles himself reading an updated version of the first few paragraphs of the Wells novel, which then gives way to "Ricky Ricardo Ramon Raquello and His Orchestra" supposedly broadcast live from a NYC hotel. Unfortunately for poor Mr. Raquello, his orchestrations kept getting interrupted by breaking news reports of objects falling from the sky. Here's one such interruption: 

After that news reports start coming fast and furious and regular broadcasting is permanently preempted for the night and maybe forever as the seriousness of the threat to the nation soon becomes clear. And I do mean soon. According to Houseman: "Our actual broadcasting time, from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes. During that time, men travelled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air. And millions of people accepted it—emotionally if not logically." As civilization falls, so too does the "Inter-Continental Radio News." The last thing one hears before the station break, the real station break, is a lone ham radio operator asking if anyone is out there. After the commercial, and another reminder from the announcer that this is just fiction, the final twenty minutes of the play reverts back to Orson Welles' first-person narration, as his character wanders the ruins of civilization, encountering a right-wing whack job along the way, in much the same way as the novel's narrator did, albeit this time in a much more abbreviated fashion. The story ends relatively happily when Welles character, as did his counterpart in the novel, discovers all the Martians have dropped dead (I'll get to why in a moment.) At this point, Welles the survivor of an apocalypse gives way to Welles the radio personality as he cheerfully delivers his goodbyes for the night:

Then all hell broke loose:

Really? The entire nation panicked? Well, that's what everyone thought at the time...until you try and find the person willing to go on record and admit that they panicked. It's always the other fellow who think it's real, while you know better. Actually, more people that night were listening to radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergan (just try and catch him moving his lips) and knew nothing of it...until they read the next day's papers. Still the idea that there was a mass panic must have come from somewhere. Academics far and wide have spent the last 85 years trying to answer that question. The consensus seems to be that in every major radio market the broadcast aired, there were a few people here and there who took it to be real, of maybe merely wondered if it was real, and called up their local police department, their local fire department, and most significantly, their local newspaper, to find out just what the hell was going on. So it made headlines, the newsworthiness of the event, some have alleged, exacerbated by the fact that print media had been losing advertising revenue to the radio upstart. Payback time may have been a motive on the part of the press. As stories of people committing suicide rather than be captives of the Martians swirled about, Orson Welles himself thought at first it was end of his career. Both the suicides and end of his career proved to be false. Already a public figure, Welles became even more of a public figure. A star in fact. Hollywood came calling. He produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in a major motion picture, Citizen Kane, the theme of which was...

...media manipulation.

As for H.G. Wells, he was still alive during all of this. Three years after the radio broadcast, Wells and Welles finally met, in San Antonio, Texas. Orson was there for a town hall meeting, and H.G. to address a gathering of the United States Brewers Association (science fiction and alcohol--both has its effects on the imagination.) Here they both are on--where else?--the radio:

H.G. Wells died at the age of 79 in 1946, by which time atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War of the Worlds minus the Martians. As for Orson Welles, his next movie after Citizen Kane was The Magnificent Ambersons. He produced, directed, wrote, and, though not seen on screen this time around, provided his signature narration. At least he did all those things until the film was taken out of his hands by an impatient RKO. From then on in the word "sporadic" best describes the rest of Welles' career. To be sure there were acting-directing highs, such as The Lady from Shanghai and A Touch of Evil. Solely as an actor, he turned in a memorable performance as the likably unscrupulousness Harry Lime in The Third Man. But Welles just couldn't abide the studio system, even as a combination of antitrust rulings and television was gradually tearing that system apart. During the 1960s and '70, Welles' self-directed movies were independent productions. I've seen a few of these and they certainly held my attention, but such arty fare as an adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial or the Shakespearean amalgamation Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles played Falstaff, were hardly commercial crowd-pleasers. And these films could be few and far between as Welles was aways scrambling to find someone to financially back them. That's when he wasn't scrambling to pay back the IRS, a not uncommon celebrity chore. An endless appetite for food and drink led to enormous weight gain, though facially at least a certain handsomeness always remained. As did his sense of humor. The final decade-and-half of his life saw him involved with such disparate undertakings as narrating a Bugs Bunny documentary; appearances on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, where he once hilariously upbraided Dino for his debauched lifestyle; Paul Masson commercials ("we will sell no wine before its time"); guesting on, and even guest-hosting, Johhny Carson's and Merv Griffin's talk shows; a cameo in a Muppets movie; a bravura performance as an exasperated judge in Butterfly, the film that made Pia Zadora, however briefly, a household name; and the very last time his distinctive voice was ever heard on film, in this case film animation, as Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. The man who had once so memorably manipulated the media in the end was manipulated by the media himself, which he seemed to find amusing. Orson Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70.

Now I'd like to return briefly to War of the Worlds. Remember me telling you the Martians were all dead at the story's conclusion? So how did they die? Infectious diseases. The extraterrestrial's immune systems couldn't handle all the pathogens found here on Earth.

This past July Congress held hearings on the question of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs for short. While NASA officials conceded they could not identify many of these flying objects, there was no reason to believe they were visitors from another planet. Well, that's one denial that went over like a lead weather balloon. If anything, it increased suspicions that this world is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than ours.  And if so, how do we know their intentions are benign? That they won't stir up as much trouble as the extraterrestrials did in H.G. Wells' novel? What can we do to stop them?

 Maybe this fellow can persuade the outer space invaders not to take their shots. After all, he and his ilk have already convinced enough earthbound humans not to.  

 

Vital Viewing (Mammon Mechanics Edition)

Today we again take up technology. Not the kind that you find in your home, but the machines out in the public sphere that just like any store or shop asks to be paid for services rendered, only there's no salesclerk, just you and a button, or a few buttons. Increasingly these machines accept plastic or paper money, but traditionally took coinage. So check your pockets for any loose change and lets see what it will buy us. 

Lets start with that most ubiquitous of coin-operated mechanical devices, the vending machine. How do one work? According to the following video, better than ever:

Well, that was certainly an upbeat look at the latest technology, wasn't it? So, you no longer have to deal with sticking your hard-earned nickel and dimes into a snack machine only to have that bag of Doritos or Nestle Crunch bar get tantalizingly lodged between the glass and the spirally thing? That's a relief!

Must be one of the older models. And that guy better be careful, or he could end up like...

...this unfortunate chap.

Ever fantasize about having a claw? Thanks to coin-operated technology, you can have the next best thing: 

Nice, and just think, unlike Freddy's claw, no teenagers were killed in the making of this video. Heck, the stuffed rabbit wasn't even damaged.

Though there were precursors, some going all the way back to the Roman Empire, the coin-operated machine era basically begins in the early 1880s, when London railway stations introduced devices that for a small price dispensed postcards and envelopes. This was the same decade that saw the invention of the electric light bulb, but the first vending machines were more like traditional clocks, relying on gears and levers and springs for the exchange of goods and services. Eventually, the technology evolved to the point where you had to plug them into a wall, but there are still a few that do things the old-fashioned way, such as those quite-common machines that dispense unwrapped gum and candy:

Since this video was first posted on YouTube in 2015, it's received an astonishing 98,167 views. In case you were thinking of making a purchase yourself, I'm sorry to say one or more of those 98,167 viewers have beaten you to it, and the machines are no longer up for sale.

Back to the big coin-operated boys, such as washers and dryers, which have a building all their own. Often a kind of a seedy-looking building. I don't think it's age. I think laundromats are built seedy-looking. It's in the blueprints. But that just gives them a kind of transient charm. Just the thing for transient relationships:

Well, I'm not going to take my laundry there. With all that singing, I wouldn't hear that little beep that tells me the load is finished!

Machines attaining human-like emotions has been a staple of science-fiction for what seems like forever. And usually those machines with human-like emotions end up wreaking havoc on humans with human-like emotions. Really, it's much better to build a machine with dog-like emotions. Those machines would be loyal and never turn on their human masters, as long as you kept them well-fed. Still, I can't help but wonder if the machines-wreaking-havoc-on-humanity genre is really what would happen if machines had hearts. Especially, coin-operated machines. Pay phones obviously can't feel, or else they all would have ganged up and beat the hell out of a cell tower by now. And anyway, when we humans experience heartbreak, we don't always take it out on others. We only do that 90%, maybe 91%, of the time. After that, we usually take it out on ourselves. And so too, I think, would a machine:

Many of you, maybe even most of you, will recognize the late Dom DeLuise, whose birthday falls today. But what about that talking weight machine? Whose voice was that?  

That coin-operated machine didn't say "Rosebud" before it ceased operation, but it could have.

Under the Radar: Norman Lloyd

 

I'm sure most of you recognize the man on the right, the now-legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, but you ordinarily wouldn't know the man on the left, except, well, I just gave away his name in the title of this post. Yes, it's Norman Lloyd, never a household name, though he was in or involved with movies and TV shows that themselves may have attained that status, and, if you were a bit adventuresome in your 1980s television watching choices, and not too squeamish about hospital-related matters, Lloyd's by-then elderly face would have been familiar as well.

 

Though he acted as a child, his career more or less begins with the now-legendary Federal Theatre Project, itself a subsidiary of the now-legendary Works Progress Administration, itself a subsidiary of the now-legendary New Deal. The goal of the FTP was to keep stage actors, stage directors, and playwrights from starving to death during the Great Depression. It did that but also had an influence on popular entertainment that lasted decades beyond its elimination by an arts-hating Congress in 1939. For instance, while involved with the theatre, Lloyd became acquainted with two very promising actors-writers-directors-producers by the names of Orson Welles and John Houseman. When Welles and Houseman left the FTP to start their own theatrical troupe, the now-legendary Mercury Theatre, they asked Lloyd to join them, which he did. In fact, he acted in the theatre's very first production, William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Performed in (1930s) modern dress, common enough in Shakespeare productions these days but a novelty back then, the production is said to have had clear antifascist overtones with Lloyd as Cinna the Poet dying at the hands of the secret police-like mob in a case of mistaken identity. So successful was this and other Mercury productions that Welles and Housman were invited to do a radio version, the now-legendary Mercury Theatre of the Air, in which Lloyd also took part, though he seems to have been otherwise occupied during the now-legendary "War of the Worlds" broadcast. God only allows so many now-legendarys in a person's life, and Lloyd already had more than his share. In fact, his decision to stay in New York rather than move out to Hollywood with the rest of the Mercury Theatre meant he lost out on a role in the now-legendary Citizen Kane. Realizing his mistake, Lloyd moved out to Tinseltown on his own a year later, where he came to the attention of the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock, who, as it turned out, had a few-more now-legendarys to throw Lloyd's way.

First off was 1942's Saboteur, in which the film's hero, played by Robert Cummings, is framed for an act of sabotage in a war plant that was actually the work of the film's villain, played by Lloyd. The movie's most memorable moment is its climax--sorry if I'm giving something away but I can't help it--which has Lloyd's character dangling from the Statue of Liberty's raised hand, before falling to his death. Three years later Hitchcock called upon Lloyd once again, this time to play a psychiatric patient being treated by a couple of rather glamorous shrinks, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, in 1945's Spellbound. Though an excellent actor, Lloyd himself wasn't particularly glamorous, and so continued to play either villains or oddball characters for film directors other than Hitchcock throughout the 1940s. In The Southerner, also from 1945, he even played both. He was neither a villain nor an oddball in 1952's Limelight, and instead just a sidekick to Nigel Bruce's impresario character. It wasn't much but was written by, directed by, and, in the lead role, acted by the now-legendary--actually, he was legendary then--Charlie Chaplin, providing Lloyd with more great show biz anecdotes, as if he didn't have his allotted share already.

Now we come to not so much a now-legendary but now-notorious era of Hollywood history: the blacklist. John Houseman, Lloyd's old boss during his Mercury Theater days, was going to produce a movie version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar just as he and Orson Welles had done on Broadway (only this time with the actors clad in first century BC-appropriate togas) and wanted Lloyd once again aboard, most likely reprising his role as the doomed poet Cinna. However, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer balked. Like Zero Mostel, Betsy Blair, Jack Gilford, Lee Grant, Larry Parks, Betty Garrett, Will Geer, Herschel Bernardi, John Garfield, and many, many other talented actors and actresses (not to mention screenwriters and directors), Norman Lloyd's name had come to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lloyd had never been a member of the Communist Party, unlike, say, Parks, who had joined during the Great Depression (can't imagine why given how well capitalism was doing at the time.) Like Garfield, Blair, and Gilford, Lloyd may have signed petitions sponsored by or gone to political rallies of organizations deemed to be communist front groups by the HUAC. According to Lloyd himself, it was simply that he knew a lot of blacklistees, friends and acquaintances of his going back to his days in the Federal Theatre Project  as well as a brief stint in the now-legendary Group Theatre (I purposely left that one out earlier because I didn't want you to suffer from now-legendary overload.) Now in his early forties, Lloyd's show biz career seemed over with when an unlikely savior reappeared in his life. 

    Alfred Hitchcock's political views remain something of a mystery. I've read several biographies of the great filmmaker, and they don't tell you, when in England whether he voted for Labor or the Conservatives, or after he became an American citizen sometimes in the 1950s, whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. It can be claimed by anybody along the political spectrum whose particular shade of thought happens to be out of style, but there is a definite distrust of authority that runs through Hitchcock's work. Policemen and British and U.S. intelligence agencies are never out-and-out villains in his movies, but then they don't have to be, since the cops and government agents are shown to be so menacingly inept, they often end up doing the real bad guys work for them! I wonder if Hitchcock viewed the McCarthy Era through that same lens. He wouldn't have to be a communist himself to think that the anticommunists were on a wild goose (or goose-stepping?) chase that could take them right to the top of the Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock at least saw Norman Lloyd as more like Robert Cummings in Saboteur than like, well, Norman Lloyd in Saboteur. But it wasn't a Hitchcock movie that hastened Lloyd's show biz resurrection but something that as much as any hit at the box office turned Hitchcock into a now-legendary figure: television. Of course, I'm talking about the long-running anthologies series titled Alfred Hitchcock Presents (and, when another 30 minutes was added to it, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.) Though he owned the show, and contributed the opening and closing remarks, Hitchcock in 1955 still had a thriving theatrical movie career (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds all still lie ahead) and so entrusted the actual production of the series to a favorite screenwriter of his, Joan Harrison, and Lloyd, who in addition to being an actor had also done some directing and producing. CBS protested the hiring of Lloyd, as had MGM earlier, but Hitchcock got his way. So why didn't John Houseman? Hard to say. It may have been that Hitchcock's apolitical demeanor made the whole thing seem like less of a threat than it did with Houseman, who owed his career to the still-controversial New Deal. And as a Hollywood power player, Hitch simply may have had more clout than Houseman (after all, The Paper Chase and all those Smith Barney commercials--"They make money the old-fashioned way, they earn it"--were still 20-some years in the future.) Under Lloyd's and Harrison's stewardship, the suspense anthology series earned high ratings and critical acclaim. In addition to producing the show, Lloyd directed 22 episodes, two more than Hitch himself.

 

Alfred Hitchcock Presents/The Alfred Hitchcock Hour finally came to a close in 1965. For the next 17 years, Norman Lloyd kept himself busy producing and directing made-for-TV movies, interspersed with the occasional acting job, though that part of his career seemed mostly done with. An occasional acting job-turned-permanent changed all that in 1982. Lloyd was only supposed to appear in six episodes of a new medical drama series playing Dr. Daniel Auschlander, a liver specialist who finds out he has liver cancer, culminating in his character's death in episode six. However, the producers liked him so much that they put the cancer in uneasy remission, and those six episodes became six seasons, as Aushlander dealt with his own mortality while presiding over a large staff (and a large acting ensemble) in his role as Chief of Services at the run-down, inner-city, Catholic-turned-public-teaching hospital St. Eligius, derisively referred to as "St Elsewhere" by medical professionals who worked elsewhere, and from which the series took its name. Like costar Williams Daniels, who played the grouchy and sarcastic heart surgeon Dr. Mark Craig, Lloyd could go from drama to comedy and then back again, and then back again after that, at the turn of a coin, which an actor often had to do on St. Elsewhere. Though classified as a drama, the series had a wicked sense of humor (such as when a patient is crushed to death in a folding hospital bed) and, for some reason, loads of pop culture in-jokes ("Floyd has worked here forever. He may bury us all" Get it?) The humor was woven into the very fabric of the show (look at its title) and not what you would call "comedy relief". If you want that, go watch that other 1980s medical drama ("Trapper John M.D. His patients never die," Auschlander replies when asked which TV character he would most like to be.) No, St. Elsewhere would often throw a pie in the face of its serious subject matter, while still basically taking it seriously. You just had to watch it to know what that sentence means. Though it never got all that high of ratings, and at the end of every season seemed to be on the brink of cancellation, St. Elsewhere was easily the best show on TV in the 1980s, and one of the best shows of all time. If Norman Lloyd hadn't been in it, and hadn't been so wonderful in it, I probably wouldn't have bothered with this post. Two great Auschlander moments right at the top of my head, one dramatic, and one comedic. I said earlier he spent much of his time pondering his own mortality, and never more so than when he was at home with his wife, played by the equally wonderful Jane Wyatt. When Katherine has a health emergency of her own and needs an operation, Auschlander still can't quite stop talking about his own problems. However, after the surgery, which turns out to be a success, he goes to her hospital room and profusely apologizes to his unconscious wife for his self-centeredness. The comedic? Well, you wouldn't think chemotherapy is a subject that could produce a lot of yuks--I've seen first hand its effects on a close family member, and they were indeed unpleasant--yet a very funny scene has Auschlander getting his usual treatment, and trying to relax to it by listening to classical music. I don't remember if it was Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, or Brahms, if I ever even knew to begin with, but the symphony is interrupted by a dog's bark. Auschlander opens his eyes and sees a German shepherd getting the same treatment! Auschlander is disabused of his self-centeredness once again. We all have problems, even dogs.

When St. Elsewhere went off the air in 1988, Lloyd was 74-years-old with thirty-three more years to go. He continued to act. Indeed the very next year he played the principal in The Dead Poets Society. His final acting job was 2015's Trainwreck, made when he was 100. In between, there was a lot of television guest shots, including Wiseguy, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Modern Family. When he wasn't acting, he played a lot of tennis, which he described as an "addiction". A fall in 2015 finally ended that pastime. And he was said by all, with ample evidence on YouTube, to be one of the all-time great raconteurs, with a neverending string of show biz stories to relate of all the famous people he had known in his long life, which finally came to an end this past Tuesday. With him, an age of classic theatre, classic movies, and classic television recedes into, you guessed it, legend.

   

  

Quips and Quotations

A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.

--Citizen Kane, Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

Quips and Quotations

I passionately hate the idea of being "with it". I think an artist always has to be out of step with his times.

--Orson Welles