Arch Oboler
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Arch Oboler (December 7, 1909 - March 19, 1987) was a Chicago-born scriptwriter, novelist, producer and director who was active in films, radio and television.
Oboler generated much attention for his radio scripts, and his work in radio remains the outstanding period of his career. Although some noted a tendency for gruesomeness, he received praise as one of broadcasting's top talents, and he is regarded today as one of the innovators of old time radio.
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[edit] Radio
Oboler sold his first radio scripts while still in high school during the 1920s. He pursued a career in radio, and first found notoriety when he took over the NBC horror anthology Lights Out in 1936. The show was already a sensation because of creator Wyllis Cooper's violent, quirky scripts, and Oboler continued in a similar vein. Oboler stated at the beginning of every episode:
- This is Arch Oboler bringing you another of our series of stories of the unusual, and once again we caution you: These Lights Out stories are definitely not for the timid soul. So we tell you calmly and very sincerely, if you frighten easily, turn off your radio now.
In 1939, Oboler was given another show Arch Oboler's Plays, which ran on CBS. While still featuring horror stories, Plays used more topical material, especially regarding the war then beginning in Europe.
Two years earlier, however, one of Oboler's rare comedy efforts provoked a then-notorious furor: his sketch, for the 12 December 1937 edition of The Chase & Sanborn Hour, in which then-host Don Ameche and guest Mae West portrayed a slightly bawdy Adam & Eve, satirising the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden.
On surface, the sketch didn't include much more than West's customary style of suggestive double-entendres, and today the sketch seems extremely tame. But in 1937, that sketch and a subsequent routine featuring West trading suggestive quips with Edgar Bergen's primary dummy Charlie McCarthy helped the broadcast cause a furor that resulted in West being banned from broadcasting and, reputedly, from being mentioned at all on NBC programming for fifteen years. The timing may have been the major factor, according to radio historian Gerald S. Nachman in Raised on Radio:
- The sketch resulted in letters from outraged listeners and decency groups . . . What upset churchgoing listeners wasn't the biblical parody so much as the fact that it had the bad luck to air on a Sunday show.
[edit] Stage and Screen
His screenplays include Escape (1940), Gangway for Tomorrow (1943) and On Our Merry Way (1948). In 1945, he moved into directing with Betwitched and Strange Holiday, followed by the apocalyptic Five (1951), filmed at his own Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house. He made film history with the 3-D Bwana Devil (1952). The Twonky (1953) was adapted from the Lewis Padgett short story in the September, 1942, issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
Sidney Lumet directed Oboler's Broadway play, Night of the Auk, a science fiction drama about astronauts returning to Earth after the first moon landing. Produced by Kermit Bloomgarden, the play ran for only eight performances in December, 1956, despite an impressive cast (Martin Brooks, Wendell Corey, Christopher Plummer, Claude Rains, Dick York). The play was published by Horizon Press in 1958. In the December 17, 1956 issue, Time reviewed:
- Night of the Auk (by Arch Oboler) took place on a rocket ship returning to the earth from man's first landing on the moon (time: "The day after some tomorrow"). The mood of the return voyage is far from jubilant, what with a loathed egomaniac in command, a succession of murders and suicides, the discovery that full-scale atomic war has broken out on earth, and the knowledge that the rocket ship itself is almost surely doomed. Playwright Oboler seems indeed to be prophesying that the atomic age may end up with man as extinct as the great auk. Closing at week's end, the play mingled one or two thrills with an appalling number of frills, one or two philosophic truths with a succession of Polonius-like truisms, an occasional feeling for language with pretentious and barbarous misuse of it. A good cast of actors, including Claude Rains, Christopher Plummer and Wendell Corey, were unhappily squandered on a pudding of a script—part scientific jargon, part Mermaid Tavern verse, part Madison Avenue prose—that sounded like cosmic advertising copy.
Audio horror gained an added dimension with Oboler's stereo LP recording, Drop Dead! (1962). It features the following tracks: "Introduction to Horror," "I'm Hungry," "Taking Papa Home," "The Dark," "A Day at the Dentist's," "The Posse," "Chicken Heart" and "The Laughing Man."
Oboler returned to films with another 3-D feature, The Bubble, in 1966. His fantasy novel, House on Fire (Bartholomew House, 1969) was adapted by Oboler for radio's Mutual Radio Theater in 1980.
[edit] Listen to
- Lights Out: "Valse Trieste" (12/29/42)
- The Chase & Sanborn Hour, including the infamous "Adam & Eve" sketch (12/12/37)
