JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 103 из 359*
All of this may seem far afield from the subject of radio drama and the question of whether or not to open the door on the monster, but we'rereally standing right next to both subjects. As movie audiences of the forties and fifties believed Lewton's Central Park set, so radio listeners believed what the announcers, the actors, and the soundmen told them. The visual set was there, but it was plastic, bound by very few hard and fast expectations. When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster.
Audiences of today listening to old tapes don't accept the Make-Believe Ballroom any more than I am able to accept Lewton's papier-mache rock wall; we are simply hearing a 1940s deejay playing records in a studio. But to audiences of a different day, the MakeBelieve Ballroom was more real than make-believe; you could imagine the men in their tuxedos, the women in their gowns and smooth elbowlength gloves, the flaring wall sconces, and Tommy Dorsey, resplendent in white dinner jacket, conducting. Or in the case of the infamous Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds , a Mercury Theater Halloween presentation (and that was a trick-or-treat millions of Americans never forgot), you could broaden that country of the imagination enough to send people screaming into the streets. On TV it wouldn't have worked, but on the radio there were no zippers running down the Martians' backs.
Radio avoided the open-door/closed-door question, I think, because radio deposited to that bank of imagination rather than making withdrawals in the name of "state of the art." Radio made it real.
*Want more proof of how the set of reality changes, whether we want it to or not? Remember Bonanza , which ran on NBC for a thousand years or so? Check it out in syndication someday. Look at that Ponderosa set-the front yard, the big family room-and ask yourself how you ever believed it was "real." It seemed real because we were used to seeing TV series shot on soundstages up until 1965 or so; nowadays even TV producers don't use soundstages for exteriors. The state of the art has, for better or worse, moved on.
2
My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury-it was an adaptation of his story "Mars Is Heaven!" on Dimension X . This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. "It's on too late," she said, "and it would be much too upsetting for a little boy your age.” At some other time Mom told me that one of her sisters almost cut her wrists in the bathtub during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast.
All of this may seem far afield from the subject of radio drama and the question of whether or not to open the door on the monster, but we'rereally standing right next to both subjects. As movie audiences of the forties and fifties believed Lewton's Central Park set, so radio listeners believed what the announcers, the actors, and the soundmen told them. The visual set was there, but it was plastic, bound by very few hard and fast expectations. When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster.
Audiences of today listening to old tapes don't accept the Make-Believe Ballroom any more than I am able to accept Lewton's papier-mache rock wall; we are simply hearing a 1940s deejay playing records in a studio. But to audiences of a different day, the MakeBelieve Ballroom was more real than make-believe; you could imagine the men in their tuxedos, the women in their gowns and smooth elbowlength gloves, the flaring wall sconces, and Tommy Dorsey, resplendent in white dinner jacket, conducting. Or in the case of the infamous Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds , a Mercury Theater Halloween presentation (and that was a trick-or-treat millions of Americans never forgot), you could broaden that country of the imagination enough to send people screaming into the streets. On TV it wouldn't have worked, but on the radio there were no zippers running down the Martians' backs.
Radio avoided the open-door/closed-door question, I think, because radio deposited to that bank of imagination rather than making withdrawals in the name of "state of the art." Radio made it real.
*Want more proof of how the set of reality changes, whether we want it to or not? Remember Bonanza , which ran on NBC for a thousand years or so? Check it out in syndication someday. Look at that Ponderosa set-the front yard, the big family room-and ask yourself how you ever believed it was "real." It seemed real because we were used to seeing TV series shot on soundstages up until 1965 or so; nowadays even TV producers don't use soundstages for exteriors. The state of the art has, for better or worse, moved on.
2
My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury-it was an adaptation of his story "Mars Is Heaven!" on Dimension X . This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. "It's on too late," she said, "and it would be much too upsetting for a little boy your age.” At some other time Mom told me that one of her sisters almost cut her wrists in the bathtub during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast.