This story was published in Radio Recall, the journal of the Metropolitan Washington Old-Time Radio Club, published six times per year.
Click here to return to the index of selected articles.
|
|
Don't Wait for Movie
by Martin Grams, Jr ©2013
(From Radio Recall, June 2013)
In reference to Apritlssue the WAKE UP
AND LIVE (1937), the movie is presently owned
by 20th Century Fox and Fox rarely screens older
movies on cable TV channels which the studio
feels has no commercial value. Sad fact to make,
but Turner Classic Movies and AMC will not be
screening the movie anytime soon, as suggested
otherwise in your recent issue of RADIO
RECALL
The film is available on DVD at
www coyerout.com and was screened at a recent
Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention. Any effort to
watch this movie will more than likely result from a
DVD purchase than waiting for a cable TV airing.
Turner rarely licenses from Fox and when they
do, only films that are released to DVO on a
commercial level.
According to the Associated Press, a new
movie about Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy
wilt be coming out soon. The producer of this film
is Bergen's daughter, Candice, and the
screenplay will be based upon her biographical
book, Knock On Wood.
The movie's two other prcx1ucers are James
Francis Trezza and Pad Widener who stated they
want to introduce a new generation to the early
days of vaudeville, where Edgar started. They
have selected Barbara Turner who worked with
them on their film, Pollock, to be the screen writer
Edgar Bergen died at age 75 in 1978; his
dummy, Charlie McCarthy, now resides in the
Smithsonian Museum. The three foot high
wooden character always got all the best lines in
their radio show.
A release date for this motion picture has not
been announced yet.
The Library of Congress recently acquired the
massive collection of audiovisual materials
generated by sports broadcaster, Bob Wolff. The
Library's tentative inventory indicates about 1500
items (discs, reels, cassettes, video and motion
picture film) totaling 2000 hours of footage.
Wolff, whom the GUinness Book of Records
designated as the longest serving sports
broadcaster donated his 74 years of audio and
. visual archives to the Library. About a fourth of the
collection will be digitalized and later made
available on-line.
Radio Annual of 1938 reported that the 1 st
patent on the wireless went to Dr. Mahlon Loomis
of Washington, DC on June 30, 1872. That would
make it 22 years before Marconi sent out wireless
signals on his father's estate. Loomis, a D.C.
dentist, beamed radio signals in the mountains
near Terra Alta, WV. Radio's first inventor is open
to debate. (See Dan Hughes' article on another
"first radio inventor" Nathan Stubblefield of KY in
our August 2010 issue, which you can read on
the club web site under RADIO RECALL.)
|