Perrt Mason - Homocide office

08/23/06 • 10 min

clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00 Perry Mason on the Radio Since his film experience with Hollywood turned out to be so embarrassing it may come as a surprise that Gardner agreed to put his hero on radio. Although his compadres advised him to aim for a nighttime, prime time slot for Mason, Gardner sold the radio rights to Procter & Gamble, the kingpins of soap, who decided to put the series on during the day. (It was these daytime radio programs, usually funded by detergent companies, that gave rise to the name "soap opera.") The Perry Mason radio series premiered on a few stations in October 1943 and in three months was playing five days a week on stations all across the country. Gardner considered the show a kind of continuing advertisement for his books, in the same way that the Ellery Queen radio show promoted the popular detective books of the same name. But when he sat down and tried to write scripts for the episodes, he failed miserably. "As a soaper, I stunk," he said at the time. He admitted his strengths were in narrative writing and not scripting. When the sponsors brought in another writer to punch up the Mason character, Gardner felt his control of the show (he had "veto rights") slipping away. He came to dislike the show's writing, the plots, the production, even the ads. And he must have been qualified to judge. He monitored the program every day, taking notes--not many of which were complimentary.

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Blondie - The Actor

clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00 Biography: Jeffrey Silver was the very last boy to play the part of Alexander Bumstead in the long-running and highly popular "Blondie" radio show. It's because of him, more than anyone else, that I included a "Blondie Radio Show" section to this website. He's a SPECIAL BLONDIE CONSULTANT and has contributed much in the way of information and pictures. He's also a very talented individual who, as a child actor, had a way of delivering dialogue that is beyond compare. Truly outstanding! He made his professional radio debut in Cleveland on NBC in "The Ohio Story." He later arrived in Hollywood in August of 1948. At first, the Silvers family came to Hollywood only to summer in Long Beach. There was no thought of a Hollywood radio career for Jeff. It just all kind of fell into place. How? Jeffrey's mother spent a day taking her mother to some of the local audience-participation programs. The thought then struck her that her son should try out for a Hollywood radio audition. His radio career flourished on the strength of his ability alone, with most of his roles resulting from word-of-mouth recommendations of actors and directors who sampled his past performances.

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Yours Truly Johhny Dollar

clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00 Appearing on CBS Radio, Johnny Dollar was heard each week flying off to a different town filled with danger and possibly murder as he tried to get to the bottom of insurance fraud. There were rarely any recurring characters except Dollar; despite sometimes romance and friends, the character was generally a loner. These early episodes, however, tended to be flat and the character of Dollar too dry. So at the start of the 1950 season, Charles Russell was out and veteran film actor Edmund O'Brien stepped in as the second Johnny Dollar. The series during the O'Brien years improved with scripts by expert crime writer such as E. Jack Neumann, John Michael Hayes, Sidney Marshall and Blake Edwards. The character took on the stereotype of the American detective developed by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Dollar was more hardboiled; his softer side rarely appeared. O'Brien left in 1952 and John Lund became Dollar number three. With Lund in the role, the character as developed by O'Brien remained.