More Meridian

Original shadow box artwork by Karen Strachan.

This week we released Meridian 7-1212, the second of two Old Time Radio recreations we recorded for The Sonic Society. Along with the show, we released a bonus scene that's about four minutes long. It adds another short story to the vignette-based piece, further expanding the web of people who call in to the titular phone number.

In the scene, two sailors have overstayed their shore leave. Pete, the younger and more naive of the two, has fallen head over heels for a woman he just met. Joe, more cynical and worldly, is immediately skeptical, having seen his friends taken in by similarly alluring women who turn out to be con artists. The scene ends on a clever and wryly poignant note, bringing us back to Dot Day and the telephone time service while resonating perfectly with the bleak, pessimistic world of the show.

If you listen to the most widely available version of the original broadcast, you won't hear this scene. So where did it come from?

When we re-recorded Meridian, we used a transcribed script made available through the Generic Radio Workshop. It wasn't until after we finished recording that I discovered the original script for Meridian 7-1212 had been published in 1939, along with 13 other scripts from The Columbia Workshop. I started looking around for libraries that might have a copy, and eventually found it in the collection of the Paul Barret Jr. Library at Rhodes College—my alma mater, a regular host to Chatterbox productions, and the domain of Chatterbox Board member Bill Short. In other words, right under our noses.

Reading the original script was interesting for several reasons. It cleared up some of the spelling errors in the transcription, which, among other things, credits the author as Irving Reese rather than Irving Reis. It revealed some character names that are not included in the dialog, like the surnames of the two reporters in the opening scene. It also clued me in to a few words and lines that we flat-out got wrong: e.g., the second drunk is actually named "Stuff," not Scott.

But mainly, it allowed me to find this additional scene, which I knew about from Leonard Maltin's brief description of the show but had never heard nor read. As Eric worked through the show's post-production, we decided it would be great fun to include this scene with our release. Lee, our Dot Day, left town at the end of last summer, so we recorded her calling the appropriate times and added her voice to the great work done later by actors Stephen Garrett and Ross Williams.

Chronologically, the scene takes place between the London scene and the final scene at the courthouse. Now that I've read it, I definitely feel its absence from the larger show. As I said above, it further expands the story's world—and this is a world I want to explore as much as possible. Plus it balances out the heaviness of some of the other stories with a tale that, while not exactly happy, is at least darkly amusing.

So, the mystery remains: Why isn't this scene in the recording that has been passed down to us? Was it cut for time prior to the show's 1939 broadcast, and never actually performed? (That would be strange, as the recording clocks in at a brief 25 minutes, compared to 28 - 29 minutes for other Columbia Workshop shows.) Was it cut out of the recording for some unknown reason during the past 71 years? Or (and I'm just speculating here) is the version we have one that was recorded for rebroadcast to the Armed Forces? This was a pretty common practice, so that those stationed in other parts of the world could still hear their favorite shows, and at a reasonable hour. In that case, I can see the scene being excluded for its depiction of disobedient naval officers. If anyone can shed any light on the subject, I'd be grateful.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?

Original artwork by Dean Zachary

This week we’re releasing our recreation of The Shadow: The Little Man Who Wasn’t There, which gives me the opportunity to geek out a bit about this coolest of vigilante heroes.

I’ve loved the character of The Shadow since grade school. I was introduced to him through comic books, where he matched my fondness for heroes who didn’t possess fantastical powers. From there, I discovered the radio shows, mainly through cassette tapes bought in blister packs from the aisles of Wal-Mart or the Cracker Barrel gift store. (These tapes were a large part of the inspiration behind Chatterbox.) I was first in line for the lame1994 movie starring Alec Baldwin. More recently, I’ve enjoyed delving into the original pulp novels in beautiful reprint editions from Nostalgia Ventures.

Along the way, I’ve learned a bit more about Walter B. Gibson, the man behind The Shadow. Gibson was an unbelievably prolific writer, and is credited with writing 282 of the 325 Shadow pulp novels released under the pen name Maxwell Grant. (At times, he was writing two complete novels a month.) Not only that, but Gibson was an accomplished magician, and I was amazed to discover that he was ghost-writer and friend to another of my early-20th-century obsessions, Harry Houdini.

Gibson did not create The Shadow. The character was originally introduced in 1930 as a narrator for the radio show Detective Story Hour, back when radio shows mainly existed to help sell pulps. When people at the newsstands started clamoring for “The Shadow” magazine, publishers Street & Smith knew they’d better act fast. Walter B. Gibson was brought on to flesh out the character, and he did so in a big way. He created The Shadow’s iconic appearance, along with his battery of secret agents and his identity as Lamont Cranston (which was later overturned in the pulps, by the way).

The classic radio version of The Shadow, who first appeared in 1937, was a considerably different character. In an effort to tone down the violence of the pulps, he was stripped of his twin .45s, most of his agents, and his ties to the underworld dwellers of Chinatown. The radio Shadow was more of a gentleman detective in the vein of The Thin Man. But this version wasn’t a total loss. Radio gave us Margo Lane, who was so popular she began appearing in the pulp stories as well. The Shadow was granted “the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds, so they cannot see him.” And of course, radio gave us indelible performances by Orson Welles, Bill Johnstone, Brett Morrison, and others as the man of mystery himself.

Running for 17 years, the radio show had its share of highs and lows. (Later seasons seemingly featured Margo being abducted by a different mad scientist each week.) But “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There,” written by science fiction author Alfred Bester, always stood out to me as a show that features all the best parts of The Shadow: A clever mystery, a cast of colorful characters, and one of those thrilling climaxes in which The Shadow reveals -- to the criminals and to us -- that he does, in fact, have the upper hand.

We recorded the show (along with Meridian 7-1212) in response to a request from Jack Ward of The Sonic Society, who was looking for a contribution to his “Summerstock Playhouse,” where contemporary audio theater companies recreate some of their favorite OTR shows. Recording the show was great fun, and it gave me, at age 31, the chance to reconnect with a character I had loved at 13. What a thrill to work with such a great cast and crew on this production, and to have the opportunity to read those iconic opening and closing lines:

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows!"