{
  "title": "BLACK NIGHT",
  "category": "[RADIO-SERIES]",
  "article": "“Our main objective was to scare the goosebumps out of the folks, and so eerie\nscripts, gruesome sound effects, and awesome music bridges was the order of\nthe day—or night, to be exact.”\nGrowing out of a series of Edgar Allan Poe dramatizations which Nelson\nOlmsted had done for Austin station KNOW, Black Night ran for two successful\nseasons on WBAP in Fort Worth. The principal scriptwriter for the first season\nwas Virginia Wiltten, who at first did her own adaptations of Poe and then later\nshifted to original stories.\n[Liner notes for Sleep No More album] “Now that I think of it, we had a sort of\nGolden Age of Drama down in Austin, Texas, during those depressed middle\nthirties. There was the Curtain Club of the University of Texas and Austin’s Little\nTheatre, and working between them were such aspirants as Zachary Scott, Elaine\nAnderson Scott, Eli Wallach, Walter Cronkite, Brooks West and Alma Holloway,\nwhom I had sense enough to marry. Most of them came on to New York, fought\nthe actor’s battle, and made it one way or another. I stayed behind with the\nsecurity of a radio announcer’s job. By the time I moved to WBAP, in Fort Worth,\nthis security was pulling, and the announcer’s life seemed endlessly sterile. What\nto do about it? Dramatic shows cost money and there were no budgets. The\ncheapest drama for radio I could think of was good literature, read aloud.\nEspecially the work of that great dramatist who never wrote a play -- Edgar Allan\nPoe. WBAP gave me some time with which to experiment.”\nOlmsted came to WBAP in the fall of 1937.  “Soon after I joined the staff,” he\nrecalled, “I was made assistant production manager and started working on some\nideas developed at KNOW. The first was a dramatic series called Black Night,\nwhich ran 52 shows in two seasons. This was started out as an Edgar Allan Poe\nseries of plays, but later developed into original material. I produced, helped\nwrite, and played the leads in these shows, and the station was so well pleased\nwith the results that they allowed us the use of the 16-piece staff orchestra and\narranger for special interludes and arranged to have the program sent over the\nother stations of the Texas Quality Network, which is the leading regional\nnetwork of the southwest.”\nDon Gillis: “A very long time ago (in 1937 to be exact), Nelson Olmsted…was a\nstaff announcer at radio station WBAP in Fort Worth. At this same time I was a\nmember of the studio orchestra and the staff arranger. When he asked me to\nprepare a score as background for his reading of Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ I accepted\nand the work was premiered by Gene Baugh and the WBAP staff orchestra on\nPoe’s birthday. I later revised the score for full orchestra and it had its first\nperformance by Dr. Frank Black on a series called ‘New American Music,’ for\nwhich future colleagues of mine, Samuel Chotzinoff and Ben Grauer, were co-\nhosts. The work has had innumerable performances. The taped performance you\nwill hear was recorded at a broadcast by the NBC Orchestra in Chicago with\nNelson Olmsted as narrator and Dr. Leroy Shields conducting.”\nIn his unpublished autobiography Don Gillis recalled his work on the series:\n“One of the shows I wrote for was a midnight mystery-thriller called Black Night.\nIt starred Nelson Olmsted and our main objective was to scare the goosebumps\nout of the folks, and so eerie scripts, gruesome sound effects, and awesome music\nbridges was the order of the day—or night, to be exact. I remember one\nparticularly hideous episode in which the victim was supposed to leap to his\ndeath from a high cliff—and the music cue was written to catch the spirit of the\nagonized cry of the poor unfortunate feller as he plunged to his squashy death. It\ntook a rather subtle blend of effect and in our limited studio space (working\nwithout an echo chamber) our Mr. Olmsted had to run from the studio with an\near-piercing screech and into the musician's room next door. After several\nrehearsals in which the producer kept crying for more volume from Nelson, he\ndetermined to give his all—and in a great frenzy of vocalics, he ran from the\nstudio like a mad man—only to be met at the door of the musician's room by a\nthoroughly horrified fiddle player who was convinced that the whole place had\ngone berserk.\"\nThe second season of Black Night ended prematurely in February of 1939, but\nby then Olmsted had already launched the format which would be his special\nforte in the decades ahead—that of readings of literature and fiction, which had\nits origin in the WBAP series The World’s Greatest Short Stories, which\npremiered on January ? of that year. The influence of Black Night carried over\ninto Olmsted’s narration of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “What Was It?,” “The Case of\nM. Valdemar,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”\n[Program information]",
  "origination": "2NZ, Inverell, New South Wales.",
  "duration": "[August 29-September 2], 1937.",
  "personnel": "Unknown.\nCAST [1937]: “…the 2NZ Dramatic Players…”",
  "extant_recordings": "None.",
  "chronology": "",
  "sources": "PERIODICALS: Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Variety.\nTHE BLACK SPIDER\nFurther research needed; have documented later broadcast in 1937.",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}