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Early in June, 2006, I received the following letter:
Dear Norman:
The enclosed tome is being published by the National Audio Theater Festivals for those misguided beginners who want to pursue an iffy career in audio drama. I wrote it hoping to provide a service to the profession that you and I have toiled at longer than any other living souls in the U.S. of A. People can download it free from the Internet or buy this print version. All proceeds go to the NATF. Can you be persuaded to write an introduction? It can be as long or as short as you wish. Say whatever you think you should about this book, me and/or radio plays.
It is signed, El Fiendo.
For reasons best known to himself, Rasovsky occasionally alludes to himself jokingly as fiendish, and at one point he implies that as a radio director he's a despot. The facts are that he is as tranquil and citizenly a director as you will find in the arts, and nothing like a taskmaster schooled in darkness. He has a positive genius for conceiving and executing scholarly projects of immense scope and profound seriousness. Examples — an extended series on Homer's Odyssey and sequences of even greater length on the French Revolution. Enterprises of this sort require staggering logistics, both structural and intellectual, and El Fiendo does not shirk from either.
This time Rasovsky is backed by the National Audio Theater Festivals, Inc. and their goal is "a guide to the production of audio plays in twenty-first century America." It is not without built-in cavils, the main one being that America has let down radio drama, a medium that it once dominated throughout the world. Rasovsky doesn't mention, so I will, the fact that radio drama is not even reviewed these days. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter no longer fill their pages with radio reviews; neither does the daily press, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal; until the remaining symbol of serious evaluation of American programming is left to John Dunning's remarkable and enduring Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio.
Both in his letter to me at the top of this introduction (which I did not ask for permission to reproduce, so I must sit in a corner), and in the body of his book, Rasovsky laments the state of the art: "I have discovered that the career of the contemporary American audio dramatist offers the most stimulating and direct route an artist can take to penury and obscurity," he writes in his very first paragraph. "Why would a supposedly intelligent individual devote himself to such an unremunerative, unacclaimed vocation? What secret ingredient does audio theater possess that makes it so seductive to rabid practitioners and devotees? The answer, I think, lies not in a special ingredient, but in the lack of one. Audio is blind."
I beg to differ. There is a classic story of a little girl who, when asked whether she preferred television to radio, answered, "I prefer radio."
"Why?"
"Because the pictures are better."
After all, Beethoven and Mozart need no pictures, and it is well that the screen is blank under them. But I agree with Rasovsky over most of the distance in his text and I say without hesitation that his Well-tempered Audio Dramatist is the best text on radio production yet published. It has probing and adroitly-tempered disquisitions on project management, manuscript formats, acting on the microphone, casting, stereo blocking, sound effects and production in general. And though he does not take credit for it, Rasovsky has drawn most of the illustrations, charts and diagrams with unique skill, even at times using pointillism for some panels.
I have in several published collections of my own radio plays discussed production techniques and included what I thought were pretty good lexicons and readable production chatter, but Rasovsky has beaten me with the finest glossary ever to make its way into a book geared to studio production. I stand at attention and salute both El Fiendo and Yuri Rasovsky.
— Norman Corwin
July 2006Mr. Corwin is a writer, screenwriter, producer, essayist and teacher of journalism and writing. He was a major figure during the Golden Age of Radio. During the 1930s and 1940s he was a writer, producer of many radio programs in many genres: history, biography, fantasy, fiction, poetry and drama. He has won the One World Award, two Peabody Medals, an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a duPont-Columbia Award; he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for Lust for Life (1956). A documentary film on Corwin's life, A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin won an Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Feature) earlier this year.
Contents •
Intro •Gimme a break! •Overview •Management •The P.A. •The Text •MS Formats •Mike Acting •Casting •Stereo •Directing •Production •Foley •Appendices •Author's Bio • NATF home page