Paul Frees, June 22, 1920

 

Happy 105th to audio's greatest voice man.  

People of Earth, attention....

The Mort Drucker Dracula

Extremely Scary Trailers

The complete 3-part anthology (including these excerpts) can be found on our podcasts page.

 

  

 

Leftover pic of Isabel Randolph

 

This happened to be the frame I paused it at, the other night when I was fixing dinner, and since I'd mentioned her recently...seen here with the venerable Roy Roberts, who always came across like a distant relative visiting from Butte.  

It's from a Dick Van Dyke episode, "Sol and the Sponsor", and although Isabel did play Rob's mom in the series, she isn't here.  

Why are they doing this?

 

The Goons

The Goon Show was an audio comic strip featuring Spike Milligan (who basically wrote the series), Harry Seacombe (heroic Welsh tenor) and Peter Sellers (no mean shakes as a voice-man, himself).  Programs and scripts are available at the Internet Archive.

This bit is a pretty good mental picture of how the program sounded, and shows how some things can only be turned into what they already are.  

The Goons (2:49) 

Broken Record Sale 2014

Ad-block Cutup

 (16:35) Once upon a time, in a far off land with free radio, there was a small community called The Outside World.  Although it appeared only once a week, the residents were numerous, since they were linked by a golden net that was spread out over the sleeping countryside, at midnight every Friday.

Each year, the village elders (and anyone else they could encourage to join them) gathered together to announce an annual book and record sale.  They did this by playing and reading things that would be on sale.  As many and as much of it as they could.  All at the same time.  

These polyrhythmic sound streams, lasting several hours, would usually just burn off into the air.  But in 2014, a traveling anthropologist managed to capture some of the festivities.  Here, with minimal curating, is 16 or 17 minutes of same.

Broken Record Sale 2014 

 

Those (Radio) Gals

The overnight creation of the radio broadcasting biz in the second decade of the 20th Century led to an explosion of voice talent.  Excellent actors that would have got no further than teaching high school Drama were propelled to fame by a brand-new industry that staged hundreds of programs every week.  Some of them went on to film and television.  Today I'd like to remember a few of the ladies who followed this route from radio to recognition as That Gal.

CBS Radio

Agnes Moorehead 

Debuted as a singer at KMOX St Louis in 1920.  Her first film appearance was 1938- "The Mercury Theatre On The Air"- a result of her work with that program.  She had the only exclusive MGM contract that allowed outside radio work, and she performed on radio throughout her career.

 

 

 

 

CBS Radio

Bea Benedaret

TV's Betty Rubble started in radio when she was 12 years old.  Programs included Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, and Fibber McGee and Molly.  Her trip to the big and little screens started out through animated cartoons (not uncommon for radio folks).  

 

 

 

 

Look Who's Laughing

Isabel Randolph

Rob Petrie's mom on The Dick Van Dyke Show was famous as Abigail Uppington on Fibber McGee and Molly (five movies in that role.)  Before that, she was a regular on radio soap operas, and seems to have specialized in snooty, upper-crust types.  (Her hooting, melodious greeting to the McGees is one of the audio hallmarks of that show- like Fibber's closet.)  It was a character that was profitable for her, assuring regular appearances as dowagers and bluenoses through the 1960s.  

CBS Radio: Daws Butler, June Foray, Stan Freberg

June Foray

She started in radio at age 12, and was writing and performing in her own show when she was 15.  Hundreds of radio programs, cartoons, commercials, TV shows...I think I heard her in one of those Norman Corwin VE and VJ Day programs, as Young Housewife Now In Time Of Peace.  (Turns out, it was her, OTR Cat has it in a collection.  Not a plug.  They also have a good summary of her resume.)

The Sound of Pop

Alex Steinweiss

(3:28)  This is an interesting track, in that it features the actual Radio Moscow announcer, so ably imitated by Negativland in Time Zones. 

I kind of admire that, I mean you'd have to work in a radio station during the 70s/80s, when Radio Moscow was sending out programs that turned out to be a great source of free reel-to-reel tape, to appreciate how well they got the quasi-inebriated quality of this man.

And yes, that is Ken Nordine, kicking it off.  Other material is from Colossus: The Forbin Project, Wonderwall, and some demented 78 LP.

The Sound of Pop

 

Scrambled Program Announcement

 

(1:12)  Digging (into) Old Time Radio.  This might be the masthead for 2 hours of late-nite radio in a couple weeks.

Scrambled Program Annct

WROW 1957

 

(0:41) Short bit this week, kind of like a weekly one-panel cartoon.  Think of me as the Gary Larsen of audio!  (Would you believe Smokey Stover?)

My plan is to distill audio art from the vast galaxy-clogging emanations sent out from planet Earth over the last 80 or so years.  This one was made from a 1957 aircheck of CBS affiliate station WROW.

Instead of working toward a Sunday deadline, I'm just going to stand here at the cutting board, and toss these things into a box, and spill it out once a week for your enjoyment/edification.  For the time being.

WROW 1957

The Curious Architecture of "The Apartment" 1960

(Updated) The classic film The Apartment (1960) depicts the middle-class Manhattan apartment of one CC Baxter, aka "Buddy-boy", in a style that can be described as Post-Linear.  After watching this film many times, I will finally attempt to answer the question: did Buddy-boy's apartment exist in our space-time dimension or what?

It seems normal enough from the hallway. (All photos are screencaps from The Apartment.)

 But once you get inside...

 ...This is inside the apartment, looking back toward next door.  It must go back 20 or 30 feet.   Look at the bedroom way back there, and compare it with the distance between their front doors.  Isn't that supposed to be the other apartment?

Here he is, inside the front door on the right, and the kitchen on the left.  This end of the outside wall is in the middle.  Is it actually farther back than the other side of the wall, outside?  

 

Here's a view in the opposite direction, from the kitchen.  Buddy-boy's front door is out in the living room (on the left), and the space from here to there is supposed to be less than the space between their front doors. 

So, looking over these pictures and keeping in mind it is a SMALL APARTMENT, where we're constrained to put estimates on the low side, I get:

- about a foot from the front-door-wall to the kitchen (as seen in the picture of him with the tray), 

- then it looks like a kind of hallway cupboard, (in the kitchen photo, the knobs are just above his back) 

and...a glass door?  
With a towel hanging over it.  

The left side of the kitchen doorway has a couple sets of shelves, with some other apparatus tucked away there (looks like my old DAT).  

I think we're looking at (at least)
    1 foot from the front-door-wall to the kitchen,
    6 feet from the kitchen doorway to the sink (2 ft per shelf section)
    4 feet for the stove and the sink,
    AND at least a foot, in front of that back wall.  (There's another stove tucked in against the wall).

= 12 feet from the front door to the back wall of the kitchen. 

How do we estimate the distance outside, between the two front doors (with all this architecture on the other side of that wall)?

With a door:

(It's the door, here.  A 36"-inch wide apartment door, c 1959.)

3 more doors between them = 9 feet.  Counting from the right side of his doorway to the left side of her doorway.  9 feet.  In a space that's 12 feet on the other side.

Well, using doors to measure, maybe it's still barely possible that the kitchen is stuck in that teeny space between the doors...wait a minute, it's Mrs Dreyfuss-

Hmm, they ARE close apartments.  But what's with those windows on the shared wall?  What's on the other side?  In his kitchen?

I don't see any windows!

Let's look at that bedroom again.

Obviously, too far back to give the other apartment much room behind their own front door.  Maybe Mrs Dreyfuss is standing in front of a little entryway, just inside the door?  A vestibule, perhaps?  The lovely windows that don't exist on the other side lending an air of open welcome?

Well, except for Buddy-boy's bathroom.  It's inside the bedroom, to the right, and goes back at least another 5 feet, behind the kitchen.

Mrs Dreyfuss would be standing next to the shaving mirror.  With no napkins!

But the final rabbited lintel between the lallies (thx, Mr Blandings) has to be the view from the bedroom, itself:

That's the wall they supposedly share with the apartment next door.  The bathroom (aka The Dreyfuss's entryway) even has a window.  There is no way these apartments exist, next door to each other, in linear space.

Billy Wilder was a very careful director.  I suggest that he was aware that the architecture of the set didn't work.  Because, it DOES work, if you understand the layout is reversed.

Look at how much more space he's got if you turn it around, like a mirror.  
And to Wilder's point: the story may not be factual.  But it is a reflection.

 

Hello, earlybirds...

Calvin & Hobbes

Today's post is coming.  I'm going to move the monthly Old TV post to the first Sunday of the month (today), because no new audio is ready.  I could put up a rerun, something from Cutupsound's illustrious past, but the idea of this site is to flip the things out like hotcakes, new audio every week, and I'm still trying to see if it's actually possible.  

Almost all the old stuff is already up at Bandcamp, anyway.  I want to keep this site like a little fountain at the back of the garden that never shuts off.  The next couple months should see if I can be disciplined enough to give you that.

Scrap of a Summer Mix

 

Looks like we'll be back on the radio on the night of May 30-31, through the courtesy of The Wiggle Room.  If nothing else comes along, I think I'll make some long-form audio collage here on the site, for that broadcast, and you can watch/listen.  Here's a few minutes I'd like to model for longer periods of late-nite weirdness.

Maybe radio at the end of May (2:36)

Maybe That Guy

This week, the sound of actors making livings.  Not exactly "before they were famous"; today's post looks at a few examples of work that might be by voices we know and love.  

Mel Blanc: 

The General in Gamera sounds a lot like a voice he did in Duck Dodgers (the original, not the 100 or so spinoffs they've done).  Mel was also working with Fibber McGee and Molly at the beginning of the 1940s- his Hiccuping Floorwalker is singularly adept- and doing commercials on that show, usually recognizable.  This one, not so much.  I'm not even sure it is Mel.  It's not a voice he used later.  I've listened to it carefully, and I still don't know- it's close enough for a qualified Maybe.

 

 Paul Frees: 

This clip was originally included in the Paul Frees anthology I broadcast 25 years ago.  It's the scene in Visconti's The Damned where Charlotte Rampling confronts an anonymous bureaucrat regarding her, shall we say, proposed emigration from the Reich.  The character's face isn't shown; Mr Frees did a lot of uncredited clean-up work on films, and his distinctively tinny baritone is frequently detectable.  

I thought that was the case here.  I made the call partly on the way he says "murder", which sounds pure Chicago (a frequent overtone with him).  But 25 years later, I'm not so sure.  The man was a chameleon.

For example, on a subsequent podcast I identified this clip from The Battle of Britain (1969) as a voice over by him, of a character played by Sir Laurence Olivier.  I've since concluded it probably really is Olivier.  I think.  Now, anyway. 

 

Jon Hamm: 

Oh yeah, that's our old buddy Draper.  (I cut out the sponsor's name.  This ain't Madison Avenue.)

It's an interesting topic.  Some well-known voices have dabbled in anonymity, plying their trade in the daily hurley-burley of show biz.  Probably a theme we'll come back to.

 

Ken Nordine, April 13, 1920

 "There was this guy who was a regular guy, who lived a regular life..."
 

Levi's Jeans ad, "The Stranger", 1971

Ken Nordine's birthday is today, April 13th.  

If you don't know about Ken, I'd describe him as something of a Cosmic Announcer, whose boundaries were limitless.  His bits start out like a commercial advertisement (with that voice, how could it be anything else?)- but then they turn aside, into a kind of story-space, where odd things happen, or sometimes just the sound of words washing into your mind...

For starters, may I suggest something from one of his Word Jazz records, perhaps "What Time Is It?" There's also his Word Jazz radio series.  (The Internet Archive has the whole thing?  Those people are amazing.)  And there's an animated film out there, too.

He also paid the bills with regular commercial work: ads, voice-over narrations.  The picture atop this post is from an ad he did for Levi's jeans, where he rewrote one of his bits to sell pants.  It's a living.  I heard him doing radio ads in the early 1990s, unidentified but with the recognition coming through, in the way the voice said "Countrywide". 

He lost that gig when Countrywide Mortgage ran into legal problems. It's a wild world out there in Working Announcer Land.   And he still had another 25-30 years to go.  (He died at the age of 98.)

 

One of the deejays at a radio station I worked at once sent him a fan letter, and signed it, "Your old buddy."  The reply came back from, "Your old buddy Ken".  

Here's a few items from my humble collection.

- a couple of commercials from 1963 (perhaps he wasn't as ubiquitous as Paul Frees, but I must have heard him hundreds of times before I knew who he was).  I'm pretty sure that's him on the Accent ad (there was another announcer who kind of sounded like him back then), but the ad itself seems like it has possibilities, if anyone wants to play with it.  The wiper blade ad sounds like something that went out to service stations.

- He also narrated those little filmstrips they had in grade school in the 60s.  I chopped one or two of them up for my America's Frontier Musical Heritage series.  Here's one of the sides, in the original.

Also, I should mention Fred Katz, whose music lent the Word Jazz series a degree of oddness.  Mr Katz was also a film composer, writing music for Wasp Woman that Frank Zappa apparently really liked, basically rewriting it and calling it "Uncle Meat".  The sincerest form of flattery.

The 60's: 1962 Missile Crisis

Soviet poster, Google

Another installment in the 60's story.  (Music at the end: Virgil Thompson, The River.)

Missile Crisis (5:46)

 

 

The Docking Pilot

 

Soviet space art, Google

A relic from the 70s, when I'd been doing weird late-nite radio for only a few years.  The piece at the end is Ilhan Mimaroglu's Prelude Number 16 from "Face the Windwills and Turn Left" on Finnadar Records.

 The Docking Pilot (4:39)

The F Production

Tex Avery, NW Hounded Police

This week's post is from Classic Television- The FBI, with Efrem Zimbalist, jr.   (The announcer always said it so we wouldn't confuse him with other Efrem jrs running around out there.)  And Philip Abbott, with the most obvious "credits" joke in TV history.  And special guest stars.

The F Production (1:51)

 

American Fantasy

 Here's a leftover shot from last week, "All Through the Night" (1942): Dame Judith Anderson kissing her dog.

 Aww...Even Dame Judith loves her doggy.  I happen to admire Dame Judith, for her imperturbability.

 

 

She's got as much cool as George Sanders, if not more.  But people do love their dogs.  Thomas Jefferson used to take his dog to work.

 

 

Which brings us to today's bit.  I try to stay away from political stuff, because of the expiration date (anyone want to hear this stuff about W?)  But I was thinking about politics in popular culture, and contrasting today's atmosphere with the sort of lionization our founders received in Radio's Golden Age.  What if they'd been faced with a successful Benedict Arnold?  It might have gone something like this...

 

American Fantasy (5:23)

Old TV: "All Through the Night" with Peter Lorre's personal face illuminator

 "All Through the Night" (1941) is a Humphrey Bogart film, where a gang of Runyonesque sharpies uncover a plot by Nazi saboteurs to mine New York harbor and blow up America's newest battleship, right under our noses.  (Don't ask me how it got there.)  It was made between "The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca", and cast Peter Lorre as a Nazi enforcer who goes around with his own scary face light.

 

 

This effect, of course, was used all the time to enhance scariness, especially in chiaroscuro epics of the 30s and 40s, where direct light is pretty scanty.  It seems to raise the emotional heat, especially around cold-fish killers like Pepi, here.

The effect is so strong- something like that Twilight Zone episode, "The Purple Testament"- it illuminates his face when all around is normal light,

 

My guess is, the light's attached to his waist somehow, it sticks out about a foot or two, and has a little reflector, angled up, like a teeny photographer's light.

Ohh, kids, highly scary!

Uh-oh, now it's on this guy!  Maybe the Nazis are just really into mood lighting.

 

Nazi-mood lighting.

 

So, the Nazi saboteurs have a big meeting, where Pepi scopes out the crowd in his inconspicuous way (the guy with all the light up in his face)-

Bogey pretends to be one of them, and catches wise to the plot (on account of, the whole meeting being in English)-

 Which blows his cover with Pepi, and his light-

 - and they both rush upstairs to tell Conrad Veidt.

 Who has a crazy idea, even for a Nazi, of attacking the battleship with a speedboat filled with TNT.  Pepi's reaction is predictable:

 "You stupid eediot!"  

I'm not sure whether to include the ending, but I will say that Evil meets its fate in an appropriately-illuminated way.  They invented Technicolor, and chiaroscuro was wiped off the Silver Screen. 

Bye-bye, and buy bonds.