{
  "title": "THE CALL OF CTHULHU",
  "category": "[SHORT-STORY]",
  "article": "A keystone work in the output of H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu has…\n[Gerald W. Page] “I did the first Lovecraft ARTC ever did, which was The Call of Cthulhu. I\nwould not have done if I had reread it before I agreed. Tom Fuller, the founder of ARTC who died\nnot too long ago, called me up and said, “ARTC is going to start performing at Dragon-Con.”\nPreviously, they had had a radio series for which I had given The Happy Man . They had\nperformed The Happy Man on the radio, and it had been a good script for them, so they wondered\nif I could do the script for The Call of Cthulhu. Naturally I said, yes.\n“So, I put it off until finally the deadline was getting close. I pulled the story out and reread it\nand quickly realized it had no suitable dramatic structure for radio. If you remember the way the\nstory is built, it is three separate incidents that only add up together when they are taken side-by-\nside. They’re totally unrelated; they don’t involve the same characters. The narrator finally comes\nacross newspaper clipping describing the other two events and realizes that this all fits together.\nThere’s really no character involved in all of that.\n“All of a sudden, I’ve got to figure out how to make it work. So, I just threw words at it. I added\nsome characters that allowed me to bring in some things and to, incidentally, make use of a few\nactors. There are no female characters in the story, so I introduce one. I can’t remember her last\nname, but Joyce, an older woman, was working with ARTC, and she was just an absolutely\nmagnificent actress, and I wanted her in there, so I created a role for her. Anyway, I sent it to\nthem, and they respond with this long silence. Doug Kaye told me a few months ago that when\nthey rehearsed, they cut like hell. It was the worst script I ever did; it was just awful.\n“Finally, Dragon-Con comes around. This is the first performance of ARTC at Dragon-Con,\nwhich has since become a regular annual event. They go in there, and this thing is performed. I\njust sat there, kind of excited but kind of nervous too, because I know it is not my finest hour.\nAnd, when they called me up on stage afterwards, I got a standing ovation from the crowd.\n“The only thing I can say is that Lovecraft is very good for his adapters, because there’s no way\nthat script would have stood up without the force of that story. It didn’t hurt that we had a pretty\ngood cast, either. I remember that Doug Kaye was in it. Tom Fuller. I think Bill Jackson, but I’m\nnot sure. ARTC had a very good group. They still do.\n“That was the only Lovecraft they let me get close to. If I had given it to them three months\nearlier, they would have thrown that one away. I’m convinced that the only reason I got the story\nis because Tom read the story and said, “I’m not tackling this!”",
  "origination": "",
  "duration": "",
  "personnel": "",
  "extant_recordings": "",
  "chronology": "",
  "sources": "",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}