Radio

( Originally Published 1944 )

Tell me most truth that false impostures bring;

RADIO, through television and the combination of radio and television, in time to come will probably take over most of our national yen for goofy escape narrative.

Currently more of us take dope in the form of radio than in any other form; and the addicts will at least double with television.

Because I like to poke my nose into things I have done a lot of research on television lately. Its success is assured because the whole of America, excepting the engineers who know something about it, agrees that it won't work.

Whenever you find the whole country saying "nay" to something you can always be absolutely sure that that thing is the goods. It is only when all Americans agree that something is sure to happen that it never does.

Television will be, as the chemists say, an "emergent." It will be neither radio nor motion pictures, but something of both. All preparations now are being made to combine motion pictures and television. What is televised will first be photographed on celluloid, then televised. The first thing this will do will be to put most of the dreadful actors now in radio out of business, because they look exactly like they sound: Jerks! Television will be financed quite easily by subsidies from the manufacturers of television receiving equipment, and by advertising.

Instead of hearing the gloomy guff about how Carter's Little Liver Pills will change you overnight from a grumpy hypothyroid into an ecstatic hyperthyroid you will actually seethe process before your very eyes. Heaven defend us! Advertised nostrums already have lowered our national health to the vanishing point.

For the writer, however, television will be a field day; and the wise writer will prepare for it now.

Currently it is all but impossible to sell scripts to radio by mail. In the first place, few radio stations have anything whatever to do with buying scripts; in the second place advertising agencies farm them out to their personal friends and smart guys who contact them.

Never, in the entire history of any kind of writing, has such bad writing been released for public consumption as radio writing. It is inconceivably bad. In order to understand why you have to understand how it is done.

The greatest practitioners in this country of lying, stealing, and cheating are the advertising agencies. And they control radio writing. If you want to write for radio here is the way I have seen it done over and over again. Radio, being a speaking medium, operates entirely through loud mouthery. You hang around restaurants where radio producers meet and first thing you know you run into one of them. Most of them are loud-mouthed yaps, selected largely for their ability to out-shout those around them. If you want to enter this bedlam it is simplicity itself. The radio producer gets drunk on two drinks, so you buy him two; whereupon he begins to spit in your face as he shouts at you about what a big guy he is. If you want to get into radio there is your chance. If you can stand it that is, if you have a strong stomach-you cultivate the guy. If he likes you he will make a radio writer out of you even if you cannot write a ten-word telegram and get it right. If he doesn't like you he will not make a radio writer out of you, not even if you are Lloyd C. Douglas, or worse.

All talent, acting, and writing in radio is controlled by these mental mice who somehow yell and scream their way into short-term jobs as producers.

Movie writing, as I have pointed out, in many ways resembles stage writing; and radio writing as to technique follows, largely, the technique of movie writing. You cannot get into motion pictures at all unless you are related to a producer or a tremendous Big Name writer. But you can get into radio writing with the greatest of ease; and radio writing, chaotic though it is today, is the straight path toward television writing. Once you make television in the days shortly to come you will be in the top commercial pimping brackets so far as escape writing is concerned.

Wherever you live there will be a radio station near you. Don't go to the station. Don't go to the advertising agency where the stuff is concocted in a witches' brew the like of which would nauseate an intelligent parrot. Go to the saloons, bars, cafes, restaurants and bagnios frequented by radio producers. You can tell them hundreds of feet away by their raucous use of the First Person Singular. By hanging around these chambers of horror filled with radio people you will inevitably meet some of them. Then, on the strength of your nodding acquaintance with them, you will inevitably be invited to write for radio.

Once you have a job as a writer in radio (and you'll positively never get one applying at a radio station or an advertising agency!), even if you cannot, as I said, write a ten-word telegram that will make sense, you couldn't possibly do any worse than the "best" and highest priced of the radio writers, be-cause nobody ever knows who writes a radio script. What you will learn is the technique of the script itself, which will come in very handy for you when television comes of age.

Nobody ever knows who writes a radio script be-cause when you turn in something from six to twenty people will tear it to pieces and put it together again. If it is good a half-dozen of them will take credit for it; if it is bad you will get the entire credit for it. But willy nilly, in spite of all this chaos, you will learn the technique of writing radio script. Once in a station you can pick it up here, there, and every-where. The sound man will be flattered if you ask him how to write in the sound effects; the musicians will enjoy flights of egotism telling you how to indicate bridging music; the producer will dote on telling you how to write; the actors will adore writing their dialogue for you. Out of all this you will emerge, in a few months, with stomach ulcers, incipient delirium tremens, and a knowledge of how to write radio script; i.e., television script.

All radio stations and all advertising agencies connected with radio are always looking for "cheap" writers. That is, they know well enough that anybody can write the ghastly junk they use, so they hate to pay money for it. As soon as a writer gets a bit prominent in radio he demands more money, or starts free-lancing. If he demands more money he starts free-lancing, whether he wants to or not. That is why there are always vacancies for writers who will work for next to nothing. If you're smart and want to be damned sure you get a job offer to work for nothing flat.

Six months in this dreary carousel will net you a firm knowledge of radio technique. It cannot be learned in radio schools of any kind it is much too chaotic, evanescent, and ever-changing.

To one who has had movie-script experience the switch-over to radio writing is easy enough. If I were here to set down the present convolutions of radio script, as I easily could, they would be outmoded by the time this brochure reached your hands. Radio writing stems from movie-script writing; and movie-script writing stems from the stage. If you are one of those dusty, academic drudges fool enough to read books on how to write, the only books on how to write radio worth anything are the published books of plays you can get anywhere. They will give you the fundamentals, because the fundamentals of play writing are the fundamentals of movie writing, and will be the fundamentals of television writing.

Another way you can make a little dough out of radio even before television revolutionizes it is to free-lance. You positively cannot do it by mail. Those who do it by mail first establish their personal contacts directly, and keep reestablishing them by going around to buss whomever they established them with in the first place; or buy them more drinks and food; or, better still, blow up their Lilliputian egos and listen to them sing "I, I, I" at the tops of their voices for hours.

Once you have learned by even a few days' experience in a radio station how to write contemporary radio script, then you can go home and take your short stories which were so lousy you couldn't sell them to editors, and script them being careful to script them to fit a certain program. Send the story in to the producer of the program and if he can read he will not read it because he has long defended him-self against the load of junk bewildered freelance writers send to radio producers. So, instead, stick it in your pocket and go around to the guy's favorite bar or bawdy house, meet him through the bartender or the madam, and the procedure is simple. You ask him how much he pays for scripts. He will name a figure not over half of the least he has ever paid for a script. Give him the script and tell him you'll take that much. He will almost certainly read it and, whether it is good or bad, take it because it is cheap.

I have never sold anything to radio this way, but I have made it possible for others to do so with the greatest of ease because I know every bar and fancy house in Hollywood. There is no such thing as a conventional palace of pleasure in Hollywood. The village has its own type of brothel too complicated to go into in this booklet meant for fireside reading just after the daily Bible lesson has been finished.

The radio producer (and it will likely be true of the television producer) is in a peculiarly vicious position. He is given a lump sum to produce a show for a sponsor. So, when he pays off an actor or a writer, he pays him literally OUT OF HIS OWN POCKET.

That is, having been given a lump sum to produce a radio show, he naturally wants to keep as much of it for himself as he possibly can. He can't save on actors because the continuance of his success as a producer depends almost entirely upon how glamorous and well-known a set of movie-repudiated and stage-repudiated hams he can get. But he can save on writers, and there is where he always tries to save. The names of writers are not always known to the radio public, while the names and titters of acting radio-personalities usually are. The producer invariably feels that whatever the writer writes is just a suggestion anyway, which he must revise, with the help of everyone else connected with the show.

Also the radio producer knows that his average life as a radio producer is about six months. He knows that inevitably he will be out, so he has got to save for himself as much as he can out of the amount which he is given to produce the show.

When television lands with a sudden explosion, as it is sure to do, wise will be the writer who knows his way around a radio script and has a few personal contacts in radio (or in moving pictures if possible). There will be a wild scramble for such writers.

Wise writers will also do themselves a big favor if, having learned enough radio scripting to stain manuscript paper, they will take some of their rejected work and set it up ,for television submission. If I wanted to be good and smart about it but I'm much too lazy I would put into excellent radio-script shape a short-short story; an average-length short story; a novelette; and (for a serial) a full novel. Instead I shall just mark time and wait until television strikes, then use some personal contacts.

With a stock in hand like that, so you can be Johnny Come Lately when television bursts into flame, you will out-distance a lot of better writers than you are who will have nothing ready.

Of one thing I am completely certain. When television strikes its popularity will eclipse anything we have so far seen in the movies and in radio, for various reasons too complicated to go into in this rondo. I am utterly convinced that when that day comes the writer who can write only prose is going to be behind an Eight Ball the like of which he never got behind before.