Arch Oboler
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Arch Oboler | |
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Died | March 19, 1987 | (aged 79)
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Arch Oboler (December 7, 1907 – March 19, 1987) was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, and director who was active in radio, films, theater, and television. He generated much attention with his radio scripts, particularly the horror series Lights Out, and his work in radio remains the outstanding period of his career. Praised as one of broadcasting's top talents, he is regarded today as a key innovator of radio drama. Oboler's personality and ego were larger than life. Radio historian John Dunning wrote, "Few people were ambivalent when it came to Arch Oboler. He was one of those intense personalities who are liked and disliked with equal fire."[1]
Early life
Oboler was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Leon and Clara Oboler, Jewish immigrants from Riga, Latvia.[2] The family was poor, though cultured. He grew up a voracious reader and discerning music appreciator, listening to the likes of violinist Fritz Kreisler and the great soprano Amelita Galli-Curci. [citation needed]
Early radio career
Oboler entered radio because he believed it had great unrealized potential for telling stories with ideas. He thought that the medium was being wasted on
From 1933 to 1936, Oboler wrote potboilers for programs such as Grand Hotel and Welch's Presents Irene Rich. Things changed in 1936, when radio's leading impresario Rudy Vallée used a short radio playlet of Oboler's titled Rich Kid. The success of Rich Kid landed Oboler a lucrative 52-week stint writing plays for Don Ameche for The Chase and Sanborn Hour. During this time, Oboler wrote a number of idea plays and some were aired, in shortened form, on The Rudy Vallée Show and The Magic Key of RCA.
Lights Out, Part I
Oboler caused controversy with his very first play for the series, Burial Services. The ending of the play, in which a young girl is buried alive with no hope of rescue, was too much for audiences. Letters of protest poured into NBC. After this incident, Oboler toned down the realistic terror in his horror plays in favor of the fantastic. Perhaps the best remembered story from this series of Lights Out is Chicken Heart. In that story, the tiny heart of a chicken, kept alive in a Petri dish in a lab, grows exponentially until it covers the entire earth. Oboler was very innovative with sound effects, and the insistent beating heart creates much of the terror in the broadcast. The story made such an impression on a young Bill Cosby that he created a memorable comic routine (featured on the Wonderfulness album) around his childhood memories of Chicken Heart; Stephen King also singles out Chicken Heart as a memorable episode in his discussion of horror radio in the book Danse Macabre. Another well remembered story is The Dark, about a malevolent fog that turns people inside out. This story also features memorable sound effects. Like Chicken Heart, The Dark was also parodied, this time by The Simpsons on a "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween special. Oboler tired of Lights Out because he wanted to write realistic plays about Fascism. "I found myself wanting the dimensions of that half hour on the air expanded to take in the actual horror of a world facing, with half-shut eyes, the fascistic Frankenstein's monster moving over Europe.".[3]
Your Hollywood Parade and the Mae West incident
Around the time that Oboler was writing for Lights Out, he was invited to Hollywood to write sketches for the Lucky Strike-sponsored Your Hollywood Parade. The show featured such guest stars as Dick Powell, Bob Hope, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, and many others. After a frustrating encounter with Gary Cooper, Oboler decided that he would need to direct his plays in addition to writing them.
Arch Oboler caused more controversy with his script contribution to the 12 December 1937 edition of
Arch Oboler's Plays, Part I
In 1939, with his own money, Oboler recorded an audition record of his play The Ugliest Man In the World, from which he hoped to launch a new radio series of idea plays. He brought the recording to his network, NBC. At the time, NBC was looking to launch an experimental radio series to rival CBS's Columbia Workshop. NBC was also looking for a radio writer and director to rival CBS's Norman Corwin. NBC gave Oboler his own series, without a sponsor and with complete creative control. It was NBC that named the series Arch Oboler's Plays. It was an almost unheard-of honor. The time slot was less auspicious; the series occupied the Sunday 7–7:30 period opposite Jack Benny. An impressive roster of actors worked for scale to appear in Oboler's plays, including Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, Edmond O'Brien, Elsa Lanchester and James Cagney. Perhaps the most memorable broadcast was Oboler's adaptation of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, starring James Cagney. The harrowing story of Joe Bonham, a World War I casualty with no limbs, eyes, ears, or mouth, was particularly suited to radio. Oboler created striking sound effects for the play, including 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 so successful that it attracted the sponsorship of Procter & Gamble. The new series was titled Everyman's Theatre. Everyman's Theatre was essentially Arch Oboler's Plays with commercial sponsorship. The series ran from 1940 to early 1941. Oboler lost patience with the series because of the middle commercial interruption that came during his plays. After the series ended, it took almost a year before Oboler's services were called on again.
Plays for Americans
After
Lights Out, Part II
Oboler generously wrote Plays for Americans for no fee. He decided that in order "to go on writing plays which contained some level of maturity and usefulness, [he] had to find a way to make money quickly...a sponsor was quickly procured to pay me well for a revival of Lights Out". Oboler's new series carried the introduction for which it is best remembered, the sound of chimes behind announcer Frank Martin intoning:
Lights out, everybody! We bring you stories of the supernatural and the supernormal, dramatizing the fantasies and the mysteries of the unknown. We tell you this calmly, but sincerely, so if you wish to avoid the tension of these plays we advise you to turn off your radio now.[5]
This series of Lights Out differed from its predecessors in that it contained overt anti-Nazi messages. For instance, in Execution a Nazi commandant's efforts to kill the leader of a French resistance movement are frustrated by the continual regeneration of the leader. Most of these Lights Out broadcasts are remakes of Oboler's first Lights Out series. Almost all of these broadcasts are saved, whereas only three broadcasts remain of the earlier Lights Out. [citation needed]
To the President
At the same time that Oboler wrote Lights Out, he started a new series of propaganda plays titled To the President. "The plays used the device of a citizen speaking to the President; each drama concerned itself with the particular problem of that week in the war." Like Plays For Americans, To the President had a star-studded cast including actors such as Fred MacMurray, Claude Rains, and Harry Carey. [citation needed]
Free World Theatre
Oboler's next series was the ambitious Free World Theater. Oboler produced and directed all 19 of the propaganda radio plays of this series, and wrote two of the plays. These plays were published with an introduction by Thomas Mann.[6]
Everything for the Boys
Oboler next worked with Ronald Colman on a propaganda series that featured Colman as the lead in adaptations of popular novels and plays. Colman and Oboler did not get along. Oboler chafed at the commercial interruptions of his plays. The series was an expensive disaster. [citation needed]
Arch Oboler's Plays, Part II
Oboler's second series of Arch Oboler's Plays was broadcast over the Mutual Broadcasting Company. It aired without commercial interruption, and featured a mixture of idea and propaganda plays.
Films
In making a leap from radio to film, Oboler was sometimes compared to Orson Welles, as in this commentary by Marty Baumann:
Even as Welles shocked much of the nation with the unforgettable
RKO's Gangway for Tomorrow. Proving to producers that he knew his way around a screenplay, Arch was at last given the opportunity to direct.[7]
His screen credits include Escape (1940) and
Oboler's films include:
- Escape (1940) writer
- Gangway for Tomorrow (1943) screenwriter
- Strange Holiday(1945) writer, director, producer
- Bewitched (1945) writer, director
- The Arnelo Affair (1947) writer, director
- Five (1951) writer, director, producer
- Bwana Devil (1952) writer, director, producer
- The Twonky (1953) writer, director, producer
- One Plus One (1961) writer, director
- The Bubble (1966) writer, director, producer
- Domo Arigato (1972)
Broadway
Sidney Lumet directed Oboler's Broadway play, Night of the Auk, a science fiction drama about astronauts returning to Earth after the first Moon landing. The play was based on Oboler's radio play Rocket from Manhattan, which aired as part of Arch Oboler's Plays in September 1945.[8] Produced by Kermit Bloomgarden, the play ran for only eight performances in December 1956 despite a cast that included Martin Brooks, Wendell Corey, Christopher Plummer, Claude Rains and Dick York.[9] In the December 17, 1956, issue, Time reviewed:
Night of the Auk (by Arch Oboler) took place on a rocket ship returning to the earth from man's first landing on the moon (time: "The day after some tomorrow"). The mood of the return voyage is far from jubilant, what with a loathed egomaniac in command, a succession of murders and suicides, the discovery that full-scale atomic war has broken out on earth, and the knowledge that the rocket ship itself is almost surely doomed. Playwright Oboler seems indeed to be prophesying that the atomic age may end up with man as extinct as the great auk. Closing at week's end, the play mingled one or two thrills with an appalling number of frills, one or two philosophic truths with a succession of Polonius-like truisms, an occasional feeling for language with pretentious and barbarous misuse of it. A good cast of actors, including Claude Rains, Christopher Plummer and Wendell Corey, were unhappily squandered on a pudding of a script – part scientific jargon, part Mermaid Tavern verse, part Madison Avenue prose – that sounded like cosmic advertising copy.[10]
A version of Night of the Auk aired as an episode of the anthology television series Play of the Week in 1960.[11] In August 2012, Outside Inside Productions presented the first New York revival of Night of the Auk at the 16th Annual New York International Fringe Festival. Authorized by the Oboler family, this new production, directed by Adam Levi with co-direction by Kaitlyn Samuel, was a 75-minute one-act version of the original play, adapted by playwright Michael Ross Albert.
Television
In 1949, Oboler helmed an anthology television series, Oboler's Comedy Theatre (aka Arch Oboler's Comedy Theater) which ran for six episodes from September to November. In the premiere show, "Ostrich in Bed," a couple awaiting the arrival of a dinner guest find an ostrich in their bedroom. In "Mr. Dydee" a dim-witted horse player inherits a diaper service.
Recordings
Oboler's
Books
Novels
House on Fire (Bartholomew House, 1969), was adapted by Oboler for radio's Mutual Radio Theater in 1980. in 2015, Valancourt Books reissued House on Fire with a new introduction by Christopher Conlon.
Collected works
- Free World Theatre: Nineteen New Radio Plays (Random House, 1944)
- Oboler Omnibus: Radio Plays and Personalities (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945)
- Night of the Auk: A Free Prose Play was published by Horizon Press in 1958
Short stories
His short story "And Adam Begot" was included in Julius Fast's Out of This World anthology (
Non-fiction
"My Jackasses and the Fire" in the June 1960 issue of Coronet.
Personal life
Oboler married the former Eleanor Helfand; they had four sons: Guy, David, Steven and Peter Oboler.[2]
In 1953, Oboler had a
References
- ISBN 0-19-507678-8.
- ^ a b Profile, familytreemaker.genealogy.com; accessed October 31, 2014.
- ^ a b Oboler Omnibus: Radio Plays and Personalities, Oboler, Leisure Books, Inc.[ISBN missing]
- ^ "Nachman, Gerald. Raised on Radio. Pantheon, 1998". Archived from the original on 2009-02-10. Retrieved 2009-01-02.
- ^ William E. Spear (24 January 2007). "Great Beginnings: Lights Out". Two Plus Plus Productions LLC. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
- ^ ASIN B000Q9OYAM
- ^ Baumann, Marty. The Astounding B Monster Archive: "Arch Oboler: Radio raconteur enters new dimension", bmonster.com; accessed October 31, 2014.
- ISBN 0-7864-1233-X.
- LCCN 2008044300.
- ^ Time, December 17, 1956.
- ^ Richard F. Shepard (May 3, 1960). "Night of the Auk on Play of the Week" (PDF). The New York Times.
- ^ Internet Speculative Fiction Database, isfdb.org; accessed October 31, 2014.
- ^ "Oboler Mending Abroad". Variety. August 19, 1953. p. 5. Retrieved March 17, 2024 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ "Son of Arch Oboler Drowns in Excavation," Cumberland Evening Times, April 8, 1958.
- ^ "Frank Lloyd Wright's Arch Oboler Complex Appears Gutted by California Fire". 28 November 2018.
External links
Archives at | ||||
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How to use archival material |
- Arch Oboler and His Bathyspheres Library of Congress Now See Hear blog post by Matt Barton, curator of the Recorded Sound Section. [1]
- Arch Oboler at IMDb– IMDb
- All Movie: Arch Oboler
- Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Film: Arch Oboler
- Mutual Radio Theater
- Zoot Radio, Free Arch Oblers radio show downloads
- Arch Oboler at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database