Suspense Upgrades

This day in Suspense history...
November 12
1951 The Mission of the Betta
1961 The Imposters

Travel day back to North Carolina... The Suspense upgrades are done for now... audio of the SPERDVAC presentation will appear very soon!

greybelt wrote:This day in Suspense history...
November 12
1951 The Mission of the Betta
1961 The Imposters

Travel day back to North Carolina... The Suspense upgrades are done for now... audio of the SPERDVAC presentation will appear very soon![/b]

greybelt thanks for the upgrades and the afrs shows

Happy travels greybelt. Thanks for the upgrades!

Thanks for these and all of your efforts and sharing.

This day in Suspense history...
November 13
1947 Riabouchinska (the then Mrs. Spier, Kay Thompson, took a liking to Ray Bradbury's work, and suggested that Mr. Spier and Mr. Bradbury meet... and that led to this broadcast).
1960 The Man Who Murders People

Did a lot of audio editing yesterday on the long flight -- should have everything posted on Friday.

In the meantime...

Orson Welles and Ava Gardner were a going together at the time of her booking for a star appearance on Suspense. Producer William Spier had given Welles his first radio acting job in the mid-1930s for March of Time and the two had many generous collaborations thereafter. Welles made four consecutive appearances in 1944 that included the famous two part adaptation of Donovan's Brain, bringing great publicity to the series. Gardner and Welles arrived together for the Suspense broadcast of May 1, 1947. Spier was told that Welles was there and that the two of them were sitting in the commissary waiting for their call. Spier sent word down that Welles should come up to the studio. Spier quickly wrote some lines of dialogue for Welles for what would become an uncredited cameo as a gas station attendant. The appearance starts just before the 15 minute mark of the program and is about 20 seconds long. The AFRA payroll report lists Welles with the other cast. (Special thank you to the Thousand Oaks Library for their documentation about this episode)

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The inside joke was when Ava mentions his name -- the in-joke was enjoyed in the studio, and no one in the listening audience was really the wiser. But the story did make the next day's Daily Variety. Gardner's line may have been ad libbed, but knowing Spier, he may have given her the line and not told Orson.

Thank you greybelt. Happy trails!

The presentation from SPERDVAC 2019 is now at YouTube!

The video, audio, and slides are at this folder
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There are three different mp3 encode rates, FLAC, and WAV.
The slides are in PDF format.
If you want to download the video rather than watching it on YouTube, the mp4 file is just over 1GB.

Thanks again to the folks at SPERDVAC and also to everyone here at Cobalt for your steadfast support and encouragement.

Enjoy!!

Thanks for all you're doing for this series Greybelt.

Just listened to your Sperdvac Suspense presentation GB. Well done!
I particularly liked the piece about Scott Flohr - hilarious.

Another "one hit wonder" Suspense writer?

One of the favorite Suspense plays Back Seat Driver about a killer who would hide in cars and then threaten the driver and passenger to take him where he wanted to go. The first two performances were with Fibber McGee & Molly, another case of casting against type, and the final time after the Suspense star system ended, with Parley Baer and Vivi Janis.

The author is Sally Thorson, and this was her only Suspense script. She had two scripts performed on the Whistler. Back Seat Driver was her most successful effort as she seems to have been active in local dramas early in her career, and then took a job selling production equipment. In this case, it was the Sonovox, which, I have been told, was used to make the sound of the train in Dumbo sound like a voice. It was a special effects device, from what I can gather, and advertisers were experimenting with it. I would not be surprised if it was used on the Bromo Seltzer commercials that are in some Inner Sanctums. I did find a 1942 Sonovox ad featuring Sally.

Sally was married to Russ Thorson, who was also active in radio in San Fran prior to their moving to Hollywood. Sally had been active as a writer and an actor in Chicago and in San Francisco (where I believe she directed some local productions). I think I have determined that Russ is a different person than actor Russell Thorson who was on I Love a Mystery and numerous supporting TV roles through the 1970s. I hope someone else in Cobaltia can help verify that for me.


Back Seat Driver became a beloved Suspense episode, but for Sally it was another case of an obscure writer hitting the first pitch in the bottom of the 9th for a game-winning grand slam homer, and not really being heard from again.

One curious thing about the 1951 re-performance -- a month before, serial killer Billy Cook was arrested after a national alert. Over a few weeks from the end of December 1950 he would hitchhike cars and terrorize the occupants. I wonder if after the mid-January arrest that's what gave Elliott Lewis the idea that it was time to call FM&M back for another performance of it. We'll never know. But this British Columbia radio columnist thinks it might be the case.



I have been getting encouraging comments about the Suspense presentation at SPERDVAC. If you haven't viewed it, it's at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Links to the audio and other files are at the research site listed below.

A PDF update to The Suspense Collector's Companion can be downloaded at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

A few days of upgrades ahead.
Suspense_1943-06-15_Last_Night_wJosephKearns&Margo UPGRADE-4 Incl tax PS announcement at open.mp3
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If this is your first Degoo visit, when you click the link, the Degoo player will likely open. Right mouse click (for Apple folks I believe it's CMD-click) and select "Save audio as"
OR In Chrome, and perhaps other browsers, click on the 3 vertical dots in the player box and a little box that says "download" will appear -- click on it and you can save the file that way, too. This option did not appear in my test in Firefox.
Before you download, copy the file name above so you can assign the file that name. Degoo has its own gibberish file name assigned to the file for download.
Google Chrome looked like it wanted to block the site, but from my research it is a safe site and Chrome may be mistakenly detecting the player as a threat.
If there are problems downloading, this is the hubiC link [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] just in case.


And a couple of items...
The SPERDVAC presentation about Suspense is at YouTube [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] -- I made a post about it at LinkedIn and was surprised how the number of views increased. There are some fans of Suspense there because they listen to the SiriusXM RadioClassics channel while they are on the road visiting clients!

I have a web page with notes about free cloud storage at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Thanks again to everyone who joined Degoo using this link [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Degoo offers 100GB of free space -- and I now have 145GB to work with for these posts. If you haven't signed up for this generous amount of space, it would be appreciated if you do. It's not as full-featured as pCloud or some others, but it serves our purposes her quite well.
The web page identifies lots of services where you can get the kind of space you need for free or paid at reasonable prices. I know a lot of folks picked up the Black Friday special that pCloud had for its lifetime 2TB service for $245. They'll probably repeat it around Christmas. If you don't have a free pCloud account, go get one, this way you'll get a notice when the special price is effective again.

Thanks greybelt
Best regards
Art

Great! Thanks greybelt.

Firefox blocked the site. Here's their message: Deceptive site ahead

Firefox blocked this page because it may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing personal information like passwords or credit cards.

Advisory provided by Google Safe Browsing.

lasombra
I used Firefox today as well. I followed greybelts instructions and it downloaded fine

Best regards
Art

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