Wednesday, April 27, 2005

At last! My work has been published!!

Um, actually, it's just my transcriptions of various radio shows from the thirties and forties. And by published, I mean that the site where I would find other transcriptions has also put up the ones I myself have done.

I used to live in Los Angeles and had a show going where I (and my wife and several comics, comic actors, and drunken troubadors) would re-enact old radio shows live. It's called "Fake Radio" and it will be doing another show soon at The Fake Gallery in LA. You can find the link somwhere to the right of this here page. The show was a lot of fun to do and fairly simple in terms of production. I would pick an hour long show or two half-hour long shows, either finding the script at this site or transcribing them from a CD, MP3 disc, or tape and casting from the talented group of fiends of ours.

I would then wait a week or two to hear from everybody about their availability, and then about a week from the show I would put together the sound and music cues on CD with the help of tech fiend Dan Fogelle. Also, my brother BJ (no jokes) would send out an e-mail flyer that he had designed to everyone on my e-mail list. Finally we would meet about a two hours before the show and rehearse. And then it was showtime.

The scripts we used were usually radio adaptations of movies (shows like this were very popular at the time) starring the original stars of the films. These shows had titles like "The Lux Radio Theatre", "Screen Directors Playhouse", or "Academy Award Theatre". We also would do shows that had either big stars in them (like Orson Welles' Mercury Radio Theatre, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in "Bold Venture", Dick Powell as "Richard Diamond, Private Detective", Frank Sinatra as "Rocky Fortune", or Vincent Price as "The Saint"), were emblematic of the time (you couldn't not do "Dragnet"), or just made me laugh (the radio sitcom "Our Miss Brooks", which was a comedy that wasn't so filled with forties references that no one get it and is also really funny, and, most importantly has more parts for females. We have a lot of talented ladies in our group.) The shows also had to have fast-paced dialogue, which wasn't too tough to find. But I also wanted action, so most of the shows were detective, western, or screwball comedies. Even the episodes of "Our Miss Brooks" had explosions.

It finally occurred to me last November to start sending out press releases to the local papers to get in their calendar listings. This was after I had gotten this advice from people for two years. The audience, which had been getting on the smallish side (we did "War Of The Worlds" for three people), increased enough for us to pay the rent and our mighty lights/sound guy Andrew. But by January, my wife found out she was going to be transferred to Virginia for a better position in the company she works for and we decided it was a great idea to leave. My fiend David Koff is going to start doing new Fake Radio shows in LA pretty soon.

Since moving to Jerusalem's Lot- sorry, I mean Castle Rock- oops, I mean Falls Church, VA, I've been working on the transcript of the Lux Radio Theatre version of "Meet Me In St. Louis". At some point, I will try to meet people who are interested in this sort of thing to form another group out here to perform.

And maybe this time, I will try publicity a little sooner.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

im not flying to washington to do lights for these shows.