RADIO GOES TO THE MOVIES
One word best describes what listeners wanted most from Network Radio during its Golden Age - escape - escape from their daily woes and worries through the comedy, drama and music that radio offered at the flick of a switch.
That’s exactly what they wanted from the movies, too - escape from the hard times of the Depression, from the frequently heartbreaking days of World War II and from the stressful period of readjustment after the war.
The collaboration between the networks and movie studios was a win-win situation for everyone involved that flourished during the 21 year period of peak popularity for both industries when network and movie audiences were greatest. Whether the films were major productions or low-budgeted quickies: the studios made money when theaters sold tickets to the fans who enjoyed seeing their radio favorites on the screen. The networks and sponsors got free exposure for their programs and the performers were rewarded with additional income and fame for what was often relatively easy work.
But in several cases the relationship between the radio and film industries went deeper than the average listener or ticket buyer realized. Cross-ownership of broadcasting and motion picture interests went back to the decade before sound was common in movies.
Lee DeForest and Theodore Case were first to attempt to bridge the two technologies when the developer of the Audion radio tube and his partner began work on the Phonofilm, optical soundtrack, (sound on film), process in 1920. A series of vaudeville acts headlined by Eddie Cantor and filmed in Phonofilm was premiered at New York City’s Rivoli Theater on April 15, 1923. (1)
But the partnership dissolved when Case objected to DeForest who claimed sole credit for the system. As a result, Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, took the Phonofilm process, improved it and called it Movietone. They sold their company and its patents to William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation in 1925. (2) Fox released the first feature length motion picture with an optical soundtrack, (containing music and sound effects only), in November, 1927. The film was Sunrise, which won the 1929 Oscar as Best Unique and Artistic Picture. (3) Fox joined forces with AT&T’s Western Electric in 1929 to improve and market the sound system which was then renamed Westrex.
Meanwhile, movie studio and theater owner Warner Brothers bought radio station KWBC/Los Angeles in February, 1925. Buying the facility was Sam Warner’s idea to promote the studio’s films. He sold the idea to his brothers - Abe, Harry and Jack - with less effort than he had in convincing them that sound was the future for movies.
A new call sign, KFWB, was issued to Warners' station by the Commerce Department and the facility was moved to the studio's lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. (4) KFWB remained under Warner ownership for 25 years, providing a continual publicity platform for the studio’s stars to plug their pictures. But inadvertently, KFWB also led to far greater consequences for the entertainment industry.
As Neal Gabler reported in An Empire of Their Own, it was through KFWB that Sam Warner met Western Electric sound engineer Nathan Levinson. Levinson told Warner of witnessing a breakthrough accomplishment at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey - synchronizing sound on disc with motion picture film. Sam convinced his reluctant older brother Harry to invest in the process and on June 25, 1925, they signed a contract with Western Electric to partner in a series of musical shorts to be filmed at Warners’ recently purchased Vitagraph Studios in New York City. The process reproducing sound on 16-inch, 33-1/3 r.p.m. discs was called Vitaphone in recognition of the studio’s involvement.
Eight short films were produced in the process featuring the Metropolitan Opera chorus, the New York Philharmonic orchestra and famed classical music soloists. These preceded Warners’ biggest gamble, the production with orchestral accompaniment, but no dialogue, of Don Juan starring John Barrymore which opened on Friday, August 6, 1926, at the packed, 1,360 seat Warner Theater in New York City.
Variety covered the opening weekend in its issue of August 11: “Vitaphone has come and amazed Broadway. Warner Brothers, through their presentation of 'Don Juan' in conjunction with the first public showing of Vitaphone, are the talk of Broadway. There has been no other topic wherever theater and picture men gather. The public opening was at $10 a seat on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. The house was stormed for each of its two performances daily…The innovation is the biggest thing to hit Broadway since the advent of 'The Big Parade.'"
Nevertheless, Warner Brothers lost money in 1926 with its elaborate road show production of Don Juan and its inflated ticket prices. Sam Warner had his hands full convincing his brothers to continue with the construction of four new sound stages at their Hollywood studios while major players Paramount and MGM decided to wait to see which sound system would be the industry’s choice before making the huge investments necessary to convert their studios and theaters to the technology.
A half dozen films followed in the next year from Warner Brothers that featured synchronized sound tracks reproducing musical scores on cumbersome 16-inch Vitaphone discs. (5) Once again, Warner Brothers set the pace when it premiered Al Jolson as The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927. The film, with its limited dialogue and music, is now heralded as the beginning of the sound era in motion pictures.
Variety’s review seemed to miss the groundbreaking importance of the film, simply hailing it as, “Undoubtedly the best thing Vitaphone has ever put on the screen.” (6) The Jazz Singer also vaulted Warner Brothers into the top ranks of Hollywood studios - the only studio equipped to produce what the movie public suddenly wanted: Talkies.
Nine months and six-part talking features later, Warners released the industry’s its first all-talking film, The Lights of New York, on July 18, 1928. The low budget crime drama which cost only $23,000 to produce returned over $1.0 Million in box office receipts - a return of 4,350% on its budget! That was the kind of language that the other studios understood.
But Warners still had a six month jump on its major competitors. Paramount’s first all-talking film was Interference, January 5, 1929, and MGM’s first talkie was a musical, The Broadway Melody (of 1929), released on February 1, 1929. During that period Warner Brothers released ten part-talking and four all-talking films and laughed all the way to the bank.
Radio station owner General Electric also came into the picture in 1925 with the Photophone optical sound system, based upon its Pallophotophone process, originally developed in 1921 for use in transoceanic wireless telegraphy. (7) Photophone’s limited motion picture debut, (music and sound effects only), came on August 12,1927 in the premiere of Howard Hughes’ epic Wings in New York City’s Criterion Theater. Wings went on to win the Best Picture Oscar in 1929.
The GE system became RCA Photophone in 1928 which led to one of the strongest of all the ties between broadcasters and studios: NBC and RKO Radio Pictures. The studio was born that year when RCA joined with Boston millionaire Joseph Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America, (FBO), and his recently acquired Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of 161 theaters. Together they created RKO, (Radio-Keith-Orpheum), Radio Pictures. The redundancy in the studio’s name and its animated logo of a stylized radio tower atop a spinning globe are telling as to who called the shots at RKO. But why did RCA boss David Sarnoff want a movie studio?
The savvy Sarnoff engineered the merger with Kennedy to further his company’s sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone and to promote his radio networks. The studio wasted no time in making the sound technology available to theaters, releasing the musical Syncopation on March 24, 1929. Within three years, Sarnoff had installed “his man”, NBC’s first president, Merlin (Deac) Aylesworth, as Chairman and CEO of RKO. Even before Aylesworth arrived in Hollywood, the string of RKO crossover films with NBC had begun with December 1, 1929’s The Vagabond Lover, starring the network’s Thursday night sensation, Rudy Vallee. (See Thursday’s All Time Top Ten.) (8)
To his credit, Aylesworth held the post for five years during which time RKO established itself as a major studio with such hits as King Kong, The Informer, Of Human Bondage, and four of the classic Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musicals. RCA kept its stake in RKO until the mid-1940’s by which time dozens of NBC stars had paraded before the studio’s cameras. (9)
Although not directly involved developing a sound process for motion pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s parent company, Loew’s, Inc., was first to own a radio station when it bought Long Island’s WHN in July, 1923, and moved the facility to the Loew’s State Theater building in Manhattan’s Times Square. The station continually promoted the theater and MGM films. (10) The tie became more obvious in September, 1948, when WHN’s call sign was changed to WMGM, subtitled, “The Station of The Stars.”
MGM used WMGM to pilot transcribed programs based on its successful movie series, Dr. Kildare, The Hardy Family and The Adventures of Maisie, with the intent of syndicating them. (11) Loew’s, Inc. owned the station for a total of 39 years, selling it in 1962 to chain operator Storer Broadcasting who rechristened it WHN.
A briefer network and motion picture studio coalition was formed in 1929 when Paramount Pictures bought 49% of the temporarily strapped CBS for $5.0 Million. Although shrewd CBS chairman Bill Paley bought the shares back for $4.0 Million dollars three years later when his network was financially flush and Paramount was struggling, the association gave CBS a foothold in the film capital and allowed Paley to attract Bing Crosby and Kate Smith to his network with the promise of helping them get Paramount screen tests.
Other film studios capitalized on the popularity of Network Radio’s leading programs and their stars. Among the many were Columbia‘s Blondie, Ellery Queen, Whistler, Boston Blackie and Crime Doctor series; Universal’s Sherlock Holmes and Inner Sanctum mysteries, Abbott & Costello comedies plus Green Hornet, Gangbusters and Don Winslow serials, and Republic‘s low-budget, lightweight Hit Parade and Judy Canova series plus dozens of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers westerns.
Network Radio’s influence in movie presentations also spread outside feature films and into the one or two reel “shorts” and newsreels. The March of Time, Major Bowes‘ Original Amateur Hour, Easy Aces, Information Please, It Pays To Be Ignorant, The Quiz Kids, and Robert Ripley’s Believe It Or Not were among the programs that had movie exposure. Films also used the dozens of big bands that were heard regularly on late night network remotes from night clubs and ballrooms around the country as sources for inexpensive one and two reel material.
In addition, newscaster Lowell Thomas was the voice of Fox Movietone newsreels and Bill Stern narrated sports segments in Paramount newsreels and Columbia’s World of Sports shorts. Familiar network voices Graham McNamee, Ted Husing, Ken Carpenter, Red Barber, Don Wilson, Mel Allen, Ed Herlihy, Jimmy Wallington and many others found unexpected riches in Hollywood narration work.
Not a day went by in the Golden Age when Network Radio’s influence wasn’t seen and heard in American theaters. If Depression, Wartime and Postwar America wanted escape, the broadcasting and motion picture industries were more than happy to provide it in double barreled doses every day for the 21 years of the era and beyond.
(1) Over 175 short films were produced in DeForest & Case’s Phonofilm sound on film process between 1921 and 1929. DeForest was awarded an honorary Oscar for the development by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 1959.
(2) Fox Movietone News newsreel crews continued using the Movietone filming equipment until 1939 because of its portability.
(3) The first Academy Awards, presented on May 16, 1929, honored film work from August 1927 to August 1928. Two awards were given in the Best Picture category: Howard Hughes‘ $2.0 Million production, Wings, was voted Outstanding Picture, and Fox‘s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was named Best Unique & Artistic Picture, a category that was abandoned in 1930.
(4) Harry Warner’s granddaughter, Cass Warner Sperling wrote in her family history, Hollywood Be Thy Name, that family patriarch Ben Warner visited the new station and given his four sons’ fiercely competitive reputation in the film industry, KFWB meant “Keep Fighting, Warner Brothers!”
(5) Warner Brothers released Broken Hearts of Hollywood, its second Vitaphone feature, (music & sound effects only), in August, 1926, shortly after Don Juan. The studio then released The Better ‘Ole, The Third Degree, Bitter Apples, When A Man Loves, Old San Francisco and The First Auto, all with Vitaphone music tracks, before The Jazz Singer in October, 1927.
(6) The sad postscript to the story was that Sam Warner, the brother who led the company into radio and the film industry into sound, died at the age of 40 on October 5, 1927, the day before The Jazz Singer opened.
(7) Vice President Calvin Coolidge recorded a Christmas greeting to WGY/Schenectady listeners in 1922 in the Pallophotophone process.
(8) Variety panned The Vagabond Lover in its review: "It's certainly no great shakes as a picture. Director Marshall Neilan could have phoned it in from the golf course. ...The story is merely a string of excuses to permit Vallee to sing. Otherwise, the studio has covered up and supported the kid band leader with everything but a new contract."
(9) The long list of Network Radio stars who appeared in RKO films includes Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Jim & Marian Jordan, (aka Fibber McGee & Molly), Eddie Cantor, Hal Peary, (aka The Great Gildersleeve), Bob Burns, Joe Penner, Kay Kyser, Joan Davis and series starring Jean Hersholt as Dr. Christian, Tom Conway as The Falcon and Chet Lauck & Norris Goff as Lum & Abner.
(10) If one looks closely at scenes in MGM films involving radio broadcasts, (like 1935’s A Night At The Opera or 1941‘s Whistling In The Dark), the microphones are clearly flagged WHN.
(11) Attempts to sell MGM’s block of recorded programs in syndication failed and they were relegated to Mutual for limited, low-rated network runs. MGM had greater success with Good News, a Thursday night variety series on NBC that began in the 1937-38 season and ran for three highly rated years. (See Good News.)
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
One word best describes what listeners wanted most from Network Radio during its Golden Age - escape - escape from their daily woes and worries through the comedy, drama and music that radio offered at the flick of a switch.
That’s exactly what they wanted from the movies, too - escape from the hard times of the Depression, from the frequently heartbreaking days of World War II and from the stressful period of readjustment after the war.
The collaboration between the networks and movie studios was a win-win situation for everyone involved that flourished during the 21 year period of peak popularity for both industries when network and movie audiences were greatest. Whether the films were major productions or low-budgeted quickies: the studios made money when theaters sold tickets to the fans who enjoyed seeing their radio favorites on the screen. The networks and sponsors got free exposure for their programs and the performers were rewarded with additional income and fame for what was often relatively easy work.
But in several cases the relationship between the radio and film industries went deeper than the average listener or ticket buyer realized. Cross-ownership of broadcasting and motion picture interests went back to the decade before sound was common in movies.
Lee DeForest and Theodore Case were first to attempt to bridge the two technologies when the developer of the Audion radio tube and his partner began work on the Phonofilm, optical soundtrack, (sound on film), process in 1920. A series of vaudeville acts headlined by Eddie Cantor and filmed in Phonofilm was premiered at New York City’s Rivoli Theater on April 15, 1923. (1)
But the partnership dissolved when Case objected to DeForest who claimed sole credit for the system. As a result, Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, took the Phonofilm process, improved it and called it Movietone. They sold their company and its patents to William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation in 1925. (2) Fox released the first feature length motion picture with an optical soundtrack, (containing music and sound effects only), in November, 1927. The film was Sunrise, which won the 1929 Oscar as Best Unique and Artistic Picture. (3) Fox joined forces with AT&T’s Western Electric in 1929 to improve and market the sound system which was then renamed Westrex.
Meanwhile, movie studio and theater owner Warner Brothers bought radio station KWBC/Los Angeles in February, 1925. Buying the facility was Sam Warner’s idea to promote the studio’s films. He sold the idea to his brothers - Abe, Harry and Jack - with less effort than he had in convincing them that sound was the future for movies.
A new call sign, KFWB, was issued to Warners' station by the Commerce Department and the facility was moved to the studio's lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. (4) KFWB remained under Warner ownership for 25 years, providing a continual publicity platform for the studio’s stars to plug their pictures. But inadvertently, KFWB also led to far greater consequences for the entertainment industry.
As Neal Gabler reported in An Empire of Their Own, it was through KFWB that Sam Warner met Western Electric sound engineer Nathan Levinson. Levinson told Warner of witnessing a breakthrough accomplishment at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey - synchronizing sound on disc with motion picture film. Sam convinced his reluctant older brother Harry to invest in the process and on June 25, 1925, they signed a contract with Western Electric to partner in a series of musical shorts to be filmed at Warners’ recently purchased Vitagraph Studios in New York City. The process reproducing sound on 16-inch, 33-1/3 r.p.m. discs was called Vitaphone in recognition of the studio’s involvement.
Eight short films were produced in the process featuring the Metropolitan Opera chorus, the New York Philharmonic orchestra and famed classical music soloists. These preceded Warners’ biggest gamble, the production with orchestral accompaniment, but no dialogue, of Don Juan starring John Barrymore which opened on Friday, August 6, 1926, at the packed, 1,360 seat Warner Theater in New York City.
Variety covered the opening weekend in its issue of August 11: “Vitaphone has come and amazed Broadway. Warner Brothers, through their presentation of 'Don Juan' in conjunction with the first public showing of Vitaphone, are the talk of Broadway. There has been no other topic wherever theater and picture men gather. The public opening was at $10 a seat on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. The house was stormed for each of its two performances daily…The innovation is the biggest thing to hit Broadway since the advent of 'The Big Parade.'"
Nevertheless, Warner Brothers lost money in 1926 with its elaborate road show production of Don Juan and its inflated ticket prices. Sam Warner had his hands full convincing his brothers to continue with the construction of four new sound stages at their Hollywood studios while major players Paramount and MGM decided to wait to see which sound system would be the industry’s choice before making the huge investments necessary to convert their studios and theaters to the technology.
A half dozen films followed in the next year from Warner Brothers that featured synchronized sound tracks reproducing musical scores on cumbersome 16-inch Vitaphone discs. (5) Once again, Warner Brothers set the pace when it premiered Al Jolson as The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927. The film, with its limited dialogue and music, is now heralded as the beginning of the sound era in motion pictures.
Variety’s review seemed to miss the groundbreaking importance of the film, simply hailing it as, “Undoubtedly the best thing Vitaphone has ever put on the screen.” (6) The Jazz Singer also vaulted Warner Brothers into the top ranks of Hollywood studios - the only studio equipped to produce what the movie public suddenly wanted: Talkies.
Nine months and six-part talking features later, Warners released the industry’s its first all-talking film, The Lights of New York, on July 18, 1928. The low budget crime drama which cost only $23,000 to produce returned over $1.0 Million in box office receipts - a return of 4,350% on its budget! That was the kind of language that the other studios understood.
But Warners still had a six month jump on its major competitors. Paramount’s first all-talking film was Interference, January 5, 1929, and MGM’s first talkie was a musical, The Broadway Melody (of 1929), released on February 1, 1929. During that period Warner Brothers released ten part-talking and four all-talking films and laughed all the way to the bank.
Radio station owner General Electric also came into the picture in 1925 with the Photophone optical sound system, based upon its Pallophotophone process, originally developed in 1921 for use in transoceanic wireless telegraphy. (7) Photophone’s limited motion picture debut, (music and sound effects only), came on August 12,1927 in the premiere of Howard Hughes’ epic Wings in New York City’s Criterion Theater. Wings went on to win the Best Picture Oscar in 1929.
The GE system became RCA Photophone in 1928 which led to one of the strongest of all the ties between broadcasters and studios: NBC and RKO Radio Pictures. The studio was born that year when RCA joined with Boston millionaire Joseph Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America, (FBO), and his recently acquired Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of 161 theaters. Together they created RKO, (Radio-Keith-Orpheum), Radio Pictures. The redundancy in the studio’s name and its animated logo of a stylized radio tower atop a spinning globe are telling as to who called the shots at RKO. But why did RCA boss David Sarnoff want a movie studio?
The savvy Sarnoff engineered the merger with Kennedy to further his company’s sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone and to promote his radio networks. The studio wasted no time in making the sound technology available to theaters, releasing the musical Syncopation on March 24, 1929. Within three years, Sarnoff had installed “his man”, NBC’s first president, Merlin (Deac) Aylesworth, as Chairman and CEO of RKO. Even before Aylesworth arrived in Hollywood, the string of RKO crossover films with NBC had begun with December 1, 1929’s The Vagabond Lover, starring the network’s Thursday night sensation, Rudy Vallee. (See Thursday’s All Time Top Ten.) (8)
To his credit, Aylesworth held the post for five years during which time RKO established itself as a major studio with such hits as King Kong, The Informer, Of Human Bondage, and four of the classic Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musicals. RCA kept its stake in RKO until the mid-1940’s by which time dozens of NBC stars had paraded before the studio’s cameras. (9)
Although not directly involved developing a sound process for motion pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s parent company, Loew’s, Inc., was first to own a radio station when it bought Long Island’s WHN in July, 1923, and moved the facility to the Loew’s State Theater building in Manhattan’s Times Square. The station continually promoted the theater and MGM films. (10) The tie became more obvious in September, 1948, when WHN’s call sign was changed to WMGM, subtitled, “The Station of The Stars.”
MGM used WMGM to pilot transcribed programs based on its successful movie series, Dr. Kildare, The Hardy Family and The Adventures of Maisie, with the intent of syndicating them. (11) Loew’s, Inc. owned the station for a total of 39 years, selling it in 1962 to chain operator Storer Broadcasting who rechristened it WHN.
A briefer network and motion picture studio coalition was formed in 1929 when Paramount Pictures bought 49% of the temporarily strapped CBS for $5.0 Million. Although shrewd CBS chairman Bill Paley bought the shares back for $4.0 Million dollars three years later when his network was financially flush and Paramount was struggling, the association gave CBS a foothold in the film capital and allowed Paley to attract Bing Crosby and Kate Smith to his network with the promise of helping them get Paramount screen tests.
Other film studios capitalized on the popularity of Network Radio’s leading programs and their stars. Among the many were Columbia‘s Blondie, Ellery Queen, Whistler, Boston Blackie and Crime Doctor series; Universal’s Sherlock Holmes and Inner Sanctum mysteries, Abbott & Costello comedies plus Green Hornet, Gangbusters and Don Winslow serials, and Republic‘s low-budget, lightweight Hit Parade and Judy Canova series plus dozens of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers westerns.
Network Radio’s influence in movie presentations also spread outside feature films and into the one or two reel “shorts” and newsreels. The March of Time, Major Bowes‘ Original Amateur Hour, Easy Aces, Information Please, It Pays To Be Ignorant, The Quiz Kids, and Robert Ripley’s Believe It Or Not were among the programs that had movie exposure. Films also used the dozens of big bands that were heard regularly on late night network remotes from night clubs and ballrooms around the country as sources for inexpensive one and two reel material.
In addition, newscaster Lowell Thomas was the voice of Fox Movietone newsreels and Bill Stern narrated sports segments in Paramount newsreels and Columbia’s World of Sports shorts. Familiar network voices Graham McNamee, Ted Husing, Ken Carpenter, Red Barber, Don Wilson, Mel Allen, Ed Herlihy, Jimmy Wallington and many others found unexpected riches in Hollywood narration work.
Not a day went by in the Golden Age when Network Radio’s influence wasn’t seen and heard in American theaters. If Depression, Wartime and Postwar America wanted escape, the broadcasting and motion picture industries were more than happy to provide it in double barreled doses every day for the 21 years of the era and beyond.
(1) Over 175 short films were produced in DeForest & Case’s Phonofilm sound on film process between 1921 and 1929. DeForest was awarded an honorary Oscar for the development by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 1959.
(2) Fox Movietone News newsreel crews continued using the Movietone filming equipment until 1939 because of its portability.
(3) The first Academy Awards, presented on May 16, 1929, honored film work from August 1927 to August 1928. Two awards were given in the Best Picture category: Howard Hughes‘ $2.0 Million production, Wings, was voted Outstanding Picture, and Fox‘s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was named Best Unique & Artistic Picture, a category that was abandoned in 1930.
(4) Harry Warner’s granddaughter, Cass Warner Sperling wrote in her family history, Hollywood Be Thy Name, that family patriarch Ben Warner visited the new station and given his four sons’ fiercely competitive reputation in the film industry, KFWB meant “Keep Fighting, Warner Brothers!”
(5) Warner Brothers released Broken Hearts of Hollywood, its second Vitaphone feature, (music & sound effects only), in August, 1926, shortly after Don Juan. The studio then released The Better ‘Ole, The Third Degree, Bitter Apples, When A Man Loves, Old San Francisco and The First Auto, all with Vitaphone music tracks, before The Jazz Singer in October, 1927.
(6) The sad postscript to the story was that Sam Warner, the brother who led the company into radio and the film industry into sound, died at the age of 40 on October 5, 1927, the day before The Jazz Singer opened.
(7) Vice President Calvin Coolidge recorded a Christmas greeting to WGY/Schenectady listeners in 1922 in the Pallophotophone process.
(8) Variety panned The Vagabond Lover in its review: "It's certainly no great shakes as a picture. Director Marshall Neilan could have phoned it in from the golf course. ...The story is merely a string of excuses to permit Vallee to sing. Otherwise, the studio has covered up and supported the kid band leader with everything but a new contract."
(9) The long list of Network Radio stars who appeared in RKO films includes Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Jim & Marian Jordan, (aka Fibber McGee & Molly), Eddie Cantor, Hal Peary, (aka The Great Gildersleeve), Bob Burns, Joe Penner, Kay Kyser, Joan Davis and series starring Jean Hersholt as Dr. Christian, Tom Conway as The Falcon and Chet Lauck & Norris Goff as Lum & Abner.
(10) If one looks closely at scenes in MGM films involving radio broadcasts, (like 1935’s A Night At The Opera or 1941‘s Whistling In The Dark), the microphones are clearly flagged WHN.
(11) Attempts to sell MGM’s block of recorded programs in syndication failed and they were relegated to Mutual for limited, low-rated network runs. MGM had greater success with Good News, a Thursday night variety series on NBC that began in the 1937-38 season and ran for three highly rated years. (See Good News.)
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com