BLACK NIGHT
[RADIO-SERIES]
“Our main objective was to scare the goosebumps out of the folks, and so eerie
scripts, gruesome sound effects, and awesome music bridges was the order of
the day—or night, to be exact.”
Growing out of a series of Edgar Allan Poe dramatizations which Nelson
Olmsted had done for Austin station KNOW, Black Night ran for two successful
seasons on WBAP in Fort Worth. The principal scriptwriter for the first season
was Virginia Wiltten, who at first did her own adaptations of Poe and then later
shifted to original stories.
[Liner notes for Sleep No More album] “Now that I think of it, we had a sort of
Golden Age of Drama down in Austin, Texas, during those depressed middle
thirties. There was the Curtain Club of the University of Texas and Austin’s Little
Theatre, and working between them were such aspirants as Zachary Scott, Elaine
Anderson Scott, Eli Wallach, Walter Cronkite, Brooks West and Alma Holloway,
whom I had sense enough to marry. Most of them came on to New York, fought
the actor’s battle, and made it one way or another. I stayed behind with the
security of a radio announcer’s job. By the time I moved to WBAP, in Fort Worth,
this security was pulling, and the announcer’s life seemed endlessly sterile. What
to do about it? Dramatic shows cost money and there were no budgets. The
cheapest drama for radio I could think of was good literature, read aloud.
Especially the work of that great dramatist who never wrote a play -- Edgar Allan
Poe. WBAP gave me some time with which to experiment.”
Olmsted came to WBAP in the fall of 1937. “Soon after I joined the staff,” he
recalled, “I was made assistant production manager and started working on some
ideas developed at KNOW. The first was a dramatic series called Black Night,
which ran 52 shows in two seasons. This was started out as an Edgar Allan Poe
series of plays, but later developed into original material. I produced, helped
write, and played the leads in these shows, and the station was so well pleased
with the results that they allowed us the use of the 16-piece staff orchestra and
arranger for special interludes and arranged to have the program sent over the
other stations of the Texas Quality Network, which is the leading regional
network of the southwest.”
Don Gillis: “A very long time ago (in 1937 to be exact), Nelson Olmsted…was a
staff announcer at radio station WBAP in Fort Worth. At this same time I was a
member of the studio orchestra and the staff arranger. When he asked me to
prepare a score as background for his reading of Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ I accepted
and the work was premiered by Gene Baugh and the WBAP staff orchestra on
Poe’s birthday. I later revised the score for full orchestra and it had its first
performance by Dr. Frank Black on a series called ‘New American Music,’ for
which future colleagues of mine, Samuel Chotzinoff and Ben Grauer, were co-
hosts. The work has had innumerable performances. The taped performance you
will hear was recorded at a broadcast by the NBC Orchestra in Chicago with
Nelson Olmsted as narrator and Dr. Leroy Shields conducting.”
In his unpublished autobiography Don Gillis recalled his work on the series:
“One of the shows I wrote for was a midnight mystery-thriller called Black Night.
It starred Nelson Olmsted and our main objective was to scare the goosebumps
out of the folks, and so eerie scripts, gruesome sound effects, and awesome music
bridges was the order of the day—or night, to be exact. I remember one
particularly hideous episode in which the victim was supposed to leap to his
death from a high cliff—and the music cue was written to catch the spirit of the
agonized cry of the poor unfortunate feller as he plunged to his squashy death. It
took a rather subtle blend of effect and in our limited studio space (working
without an echo chamber) our Mr. Olmsted had to run from the studio with an
ear-piercing screech and into the musician's room next door. After several
rehearsals in which the producer kept crying for more volume from Nelson, he
determined to give his all—and in a great frenzy of vocalics, he ran from the
studio like a mad man—only to be met at the door of the musician's room by a
thoroughly horrified fiddle player who was convinced that the whole place had
gone berserk."
The second season of Black Night ended prematurely in February of 1939, but
by then Olmsted had already launched the format which would be his special
forte in the decades ahead—that of readings of literature and fiction, which had
its origin in the WBAP series The World’s Greatest Short Stories, which
premiered on January ? of that year. The influence of Black Night carried over
into Olmsted’s narration of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “What Was It?,” “The Case of
M. Valdemar,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[Program information]
ORIGINATION: WBAP, Fort Worth, Texas (TQN).
DURATION: November 5, 1937-June 20, 1938 (first series), October 31, 1938-
February 27, 1939 (second series).
PERSONNEL: Gene Baugh (musical director), Ken Douglass (director), Don
Gillis (musical arranger), Douglass Morrow Kenyon (production manager),
Marjorie Luethi (scriptwriter), Nelson Olmsted (producer, scriptwriter), Morris
Steinberg (composer), Virginia Wiltten (scriptwriter), Dorothy Compere Woodfin
(director), A. M. "Woody" Woodford (sound effects, production manager).
[NOTE: Ken Douglass and Douglass Morrow Kenyon were probably the same
person.]
CASTS: Graydon Lamar Ausmus, John Bremond, Alfred Bryant, Mary Estelle
Collins, David Compton, June Harrison, Florene Helm, Harry Hoxworth, Valerie
Marsh, Miriam Moore, Nelson Olmsted, Florene Pearman, Gene Reynolds,
Clarice Sandin, Johnny Sullivan, Virginia Wiltten.
EXTANT RECORDINGS: None.
[NOTE: In the April 11, 1938 issue of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram it was
reported that “recordings of many of the Black Night plays are being made.”
What happened to these recordings is not known at this time. Texans, check your
attics!]
[Program log]
BLACK NIGHT (WBAP, FORT WORTH)
[Friday—10:30-11:00 PM]
November 5, 1937 “The Tell-Tale Heart”
November 12, 1937 “The Cask of Amontillado”
[“…The scene is laid in Rome at the height of the Carnival
season. Suspecting his beautiful wife of infidelity with an
Italian fortune seeker, an American husband takes revenge
in a way that only a writer like Poe could imagine. The
decaying bones of the dead Christians buried in the
catacombs beneath a river serve the revengeful husband for a
wine cellar and it is there that he supposedly has stored the
cask of rare old Amontillado…”]
November 19, 1937 “The Fall of the House of Usher”
[“…The plot concerns an almost unbelievable incident in the
lives of two Oxford graduates, Roderick and Edward.
Roderick sends his former schoolmate a plea for aid and the
unsuspecting Edward journeys to the weird, swampy locale
where the House of Usher is located. The ghastly situation
that confronts Usher’s guest and the hideous climax are
guaranteed to make even the most devoted followers of
Frankenstein perform an intricate castanet arrangement
with their knee caps…”]
[Monday—11:00-11:30 PM]
November 22, 1937 “The Pit and the Pendulum”
[“…concerns a young man’s experience at the hands of
torturers in the late Sixteenth Century…”]
November 29, 1937 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
December 6, 1937 “The Mystery of Marie Roget”
December 13, 1937 “The Masque of the Red Death”
December 20, 1937 “The Black Cat”
December 27, 1937 “White Rendezvous”
January 3, 1938 “Another Year”
[“…The plot concerns the effect of a guilty conscience upon
an evil-doer. A breath-taking climax is attained as the bells
ring out the old year…”]
January 10, 1938 “The Vampire of San Blas”
[“…Two men become lost in the Panama jungles and
encounter red ants, mosquitoes, jungle drums and Miriam
Moore as the Vampire…”]
January 17, 1938
January 24, 1938
January 31, 1938 “Avalanche”
[“…The story is woven around the power of a certain dying
woman’s curse and its effect on two evil-doers who escaped
the law but failed to flee an unknown power. A realistic
avalanche, created especially for the drama by Woody
Woodford of WBAP’s sound effects department, rushes the
drama to its crashing climax…”]
February 7, 1938
[“…the locale…is Kirkmichael, Ireland. There, amid the
crumbling
ruins of an old abbey the characters will experience the
supernatural. Several sophisticated moderns dare the wrath
of the unknown and are wrapped in the mantle of despair…”]
February 14, 1938 “Branded Lady”
[“…the story of a jealous husband and the revenge he visited
on his wife and her innocent companion.”]
February 21, 1938 “Hangman’s Heyday”
[“…The plot concerns a maniacal murderer who lures his
victims to a country place, then proceeds to strangle them.
His clever manner of arranging the crimes to appear as
suicides guarantees his own safety for a while, but an unseen
power proves his undoing and retribution is swift…”]
February 28, 1938
March 7, 1938 “Towers of Terror”
[“…There’s a wicked villain eaten by rats for a climax…”]
March 14, 1938 “The Siren of the Swamp”
March 21, 1938
March 28, 1938 “Heart of Steel”
[“…a young scientist creates a robot man, but the monster,
because of his newly-acquired ‘heart’, falls in love with the
scientist’s girlfriend. When he realizes that his love is not
returned, he goes on a rampage…”]
April 4, 1938 “The Phantom of Pirate’s Cay”
[“…It’s all about buried treasures on an island in the
Caribbean Sea. A treasure was buried on the island, a curse
placed on all who sought it. Two men dared to break the
spell. What happened to them makes up the story…”]
April 11, 1938 “The Snake Dance”
[“…another one of those grewsome thrillers… It concerns the
ability of a strange Indian to cast a hypnotic spell over his
victims and turn them into reptiles..”]
April 18, 1938 “Well of Oblivion”
[“…The ancient triangle and the wife’s revenge provides the
theme.”]
April 25, 1938 “Berenice”
[“…Perhaps the most grewsome and least known of Edgar
Allen Poe’s horror tales…”]
May 2, 1938 “The Raven”
May 9, 1938
May 16, 1938
May 23, 1938
May 30, 1938
June 6, 1938
June 13, 1938 “The Masque of the Red Death”
June 20, 1938
October 31, 1938
November 21, 1938
November 28, 1938
December 5, 1938
December 12, 1938
December 19, 1938
January 2, 1939 “Mad Mary’s Children”
January 9, 1939 “Creatures of the Mist”
January 23, 1939 “Fear”
Januaru 30, 1939 “Chained to a Test Tube”
February 6, 1939 “The Death Watch”
February 13, 1939
February 20, 1939
February 27, 1939
[Sources]
PERIODICALS: Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Variety.
THE BLACK SPIDER
Further research needed; have documented later broadcast in 1937.
ORIGINATION: Somewhere in Australia.
DURATION: October 28-??? ??, 1935.
[The Australian OTR Database cites this earlier broadcast.]
PERSONNEL: Unknown.
CAST [1935]: George Blackshaw, George Blunt, Brian Bridges, William Lloyd,
Kathleen Moody, Ron Steyne, John Storr.
EXTANT RECORDINGS: None.
THE BLACK SPIDER
A serial presented on Austalian radio in 1937. It ran on Sunday, Tuesday and
Thursday evenings from 6:30 to 6:45. On Tuesdays and Thursday it was preceded
by two other serials, Freddo the Frog and Singing Wheels.
ORIGINATION: 2NZ, Inverell, New South Wales.
DURATION: [August 29-September 2], 1937.
PERSONNEL: Unknown.
CAST [1937]: “…the 2NZ Dramatic Players…”
EXTANT RECORDINGS: None.