It was the spring of 1934.
Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy had been on the radio waves for only eight months and the script writer, having completed over 100 scripts of the radio serial, was showing signs of wear. Executives at Blackett-Sample-Hummert, Inc., the advertising agency representing the sponsor, General Mills, was seeking a new script writer to take over the assignment. In May of 1934, Arch Oboler, then a resident of Chicago, Illinois, where the children’s radio program originated, was approached with an offer to take over the scriptwriting chores. Oboler listened to the program for a week, reviewed sample radio scripts, and provided a critique. Oboler claimed the Jack Armstrong program lacked the lighter, humorous touches that were so characteristic of high school activities and proposed (should he be accepted for the assignment) to introduce a new character to the program for comic relief: Sammy “Fat” Wells. Sammy would, as it turns out, become the best football player Hudson High ever had, despite the fact that Sammy was full of harmless pranks and bubbling with laughter. Oboler wrote a multi-page “General Synopsis of Future Story Development” and submitted it to the ad agency. The agency promptly declined. Oboler’s proposal was not off the tracks, but certainly not in the direction the producers (and the sponsor) were looking for. Oboler never wrote for Jack Armstrong.
Historical hypotheticals applied, this was perhaps for the best for Arch Oboler’s future would soon be cemented with a radio horror program called Lights Out. Had Oboler received the assignment from the agency, and wrote for the daily serial, he might not have ventured into the field of radio horrors… and Lights Out might have become a different program than we know it today.
Today, as fans of old-time radio often associate Oboler with the horror anthology, he has been erroneously cited as the creator of Lights Out. That duty should properly belong to Wyllis Cooper.
According to an article in the November 28, 1933, issue of Variety, Wyllis Cooper conceived the idea of “a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of the listeners at the witching hour.” Radio station WENR, a Chicago affiliate of NBC, agreed to give Cooper a 15-minute time slot at midnight, while the competing radio stations were primarily focused on music. More fantasy and supernatural than mystery, Cooper’s tales generated a number of letters from radio listeners concerned about the spooky offerings. The network reviewed those letters and confirmed what they were curious to know: were people listening at such a late-night hour? Within four months the program expanded to a 30-minute time slot and the station sought sponsorship from a local business. After a year of terrifying late-night bedtime stories, and no sponsor having signed on the bottom line, the program was dropped in order to ease Cooper’s scriptwriting workload – especially since another of Cooper’s programs, Immortal Dramas, was sponsored by a major advertising company. The Lights Out program was brought back to the airwaves a few weeks later in spotted increments, including an unsuccessful tryout in New York City to take the program nationwide, and finally picked up nationally in April 1935 over NBC. Cooper remained the role writer through May of 1936, when he accepted an offer to go to Hollywood and write screenplays.
Very little survives from the Chicago-Wyllis Cooper era but a number of his 1934-1935 radio scripts would later be recycled for use on
Fantasies from Lights Out (summer of 1945), two additional revivals of the series in the summers of 1946 and 1947, and a number of episodes of Quiet Please (1947-1949). Cooper’s style of more often a first-person narrative, sometimes with a stream-of-consciousness approach. Beginning with the broadcast of June 3, 1936, Arch Oboler would take over as the new script writer for Lights Out. Oboler, hoping to maintain the style of Cooper, carried over the stream-of-consciousness technique for many of his radio scripts. Oboler would be paid $50 for every half-hour script he provided to NBC, later contracted to $75 beginning November 18, 1936, then $100 by September of 1937. Oboler would not be the only script writer for Lights Out during this time period, but he certainly wrote the majority of the scripts.
Oboler’s first script for Lights Out would ultimately become the most talked about over the years, “Burial Services,” broadcast June 3, 1936. Because a recording is not known to exist, we have only the radio script to consult. Following the signature opening of 13 chime notes, the audience is introduced to two grave diggers who were asked to prepare a coffin for services. The young girl, Jeanie, died of apparent heart failure on the morning of her wedding day. In the background, the pleas of the young girl who lay comatose, paralyzed, unable to speak or move, begged to be heard or observed. But the casket remained closed as the men and women who gathered for the burial service, exchanged words of encouragement to each other. For the benefit of the audience, the inner thoughts of those same characters revealed a different story. Jeanie’s mother wanted the girl dead to inherit a fortune. Tom Randolph, Jeanie’s fiancé, now finds himself the adoration of Jeanie’s sister, Irene. The only kind words spoken during the drama was that of the minister, who delivered his speech. At the conclusion of the drama, Jeanie gave one last attempt to alert the men and women who attended the burial service, but the casket was closed shut. As the casket was lowered in the grave, and the minister delivered the final words, one of the undertaker’s assistants remarked, “Gosh, Joe! She did look alive!”
Following the broadcast, the network received letters from multiple listeners who felt the horror was too realistic and should not have been broadcast. Despite the fact the program was a late-night horror offering designed for a specific clientele, it would be this incident that Oboler would later be prompted to issue a warning before every Lights Out broadcast that he scripted during the 1942-43 season. (“Lights Out brings you stories of the supernatural and the super-normal… dramatizing the fantasies and the mysteries of the unknown. We tell you this frankly so if you wish to avoid the excitement and tension of these imaginative plays, we urge you, calmly but sincerely, to turn off your radio now.”)
 |
Arch Oboler and Boris Karloff
|
Like Cooper, Oboler would soon make the trip out to Hollywood to write for numerous programs including the Rudy Vallee variety program, The Chase and Sanborn Program starring Edgar Bergen, Your Hollywood Parade, The Texaco Star Theatre program, and the Good News program. Among the many dramatic sketches which Oboler would provide for the guest stars on those programs, Oboler would pen the now-historically-notorious “Adam and Eve” sketch that featured Mae West in the lead.
In the spring of 1938, Boris Karloff signed contract to make five guest appearance on Lights Out, a program which rarely had any celebrities make guest appearances. Known for playing killers and ghouls on the silver screen, the actor’s appearances on any horror program were considered gold for both sponsors and the network. Arch Oboler was being paid $500 per Lights Out radio script in 1938, and the network agreed to pay $750 per script if Boris Karloff played the lead. (Contract between Oboler and NBC was dated March 28, 1938.) The five broadcasts originated from WMAQ, the radio studio in Chicago, where Karloff was in town for the stage production of The Tell-Tale Heart.
Among those five consecutive broadcasts were two that are noteworthy to mention for the fact that the radio broadcasts do not exist in collector hands. In “Three Matches” (April 13, 1938), young Sally Taylor is slated to marry the wealthy Eric Marden (played by Boris Karloff), whom no one in society likes. Marden is 30 years older than Sally. At the cathedral Marden waits impatiently for Sally to arrive, only to discover she was a no-show. A telegram arrived indicating that she was appreciative for him helping her, and Sally’s sister, Jean, but she could not marry Marden on the grounds that she truly loved Vincent Rogers. When the members of the family learn the news, Marden is subjected to laughter and embarrassment.
One month later, the newlyweds return from their honeymoon. To show no hard feelings, Marden invites the lovebirds to his cabin high up in the mountains, away from society. The countryside was lonely and desolate. When Vincent and Sally share a laugh, the psychotic Marden Marden takes the laughing personal and pulls a gun, shooting Vincent and Sally dead. After arranging for the car to go over the cliff and explode, burning in a rubble, Marden laughs madly as he plans to marry Jean Taylor.
Weeks pass and Marden woos the young lady, then arranges for marriage. After the wedding, the two venture to Marden’s lonely countryside cabin. Jean flees into the storm to escape, realizing she made an error in judgement. Marden, however, in trying to stay warm and figuring Jean will return when she realizes she has nowhere to go, lights a number of matches to get a fire started in the fireplace. Every time he lit a match, he caught a glimpse of Sally and hears her ghostly voice. When the ghostly figure shows up at the door, Marden beckons her in. He soon discovers that, as she held him in embrace, her wedding dress was on fire. Her face turned into flames. Eric Marden suffers a horrible and agonizing pain. As his body, scorched and dead, lay on the ground, the voice of Sally could be heard with a triumphant finality in the way she speaks: “Eric… Now there’s nothing left of you… to rot!”
In the episode titled “Night on the Mountain” (broadcast April 20, 1938), Karloff played a convicted felon named Roger Thomson who, having been found guilty of murder, was electrocuted in the chair – but not before begging for a second chance. Lying in the morgue, Thomson discovers the electric that coursed through his veins never killed him but instead made his blood bubble. Thomson was now a walking vampire who bit the neck of the doctor, the prison guard and anyone else who stood in his way. Drinking the blood of his victims, to stay alive, the killer hid in a cave up in the mountains, where bats flew out to feed. Thomson waited until the police dragnet died down and then made for the cabin in the woods. Hoping to seek revenge against a woman named Ruth, who Thomson loved and killed for, the walking vampire wandered the forest and grew so weak that at one point he had to attack a young boy and drink the youth’s blood. During his climatic encounter with Ruth, Thomson discovers she was indeed in love with him – not the man he killed who he thought was her secret lover. Not wanting to exact revenge against her, Thomson returned to the prison where the warden once again had to walk his condemned man to the electric chair – and this time Thomson is begging for the electric current.
Boris Karloff’s friendship with Arch Oboler remained more professional than personal. Karloff enjoyed acting before the microphone as it never affected his screen career and such acting assignments added income to his bottom line. After a brief discussion, Oboler and Karloff agreed to continue a series of horror dramas, penned by Oboler, using the Lights Out! name, if Oboler would be able to get a sponsor to afford Karloff’s fee.
In a letter dated May 18, 1938, Oboler told Karloff that “the fantasy series is still doing well; they tell me it should happen by the end of July.” On August 30, Oboler wrote to Karloff: “Believe it or not, the R and R agency is even more enthusiastic about the program than ever. I’m to have a conference with the sponsor sometime within the next few days at which time definite plans for the fall are to be made.”
Sadly, the deal never went through. On December 23, Oboler wrote back to Robert Kendall of NBC notifying the network that “I am cancelling the agreement dated March 28th, 1938, authorizing you to sell my services on a program titled Lights Out starring Boris Karloff.” Sadly, the proposed weekly series with Karloff in the lead never met fruition.
