I always enjoy discovering period industrial films explaining then cutting-edge technologies–how to process Technicolor film, how to record and press 78 RPM records etc. Above I’ve posted a 1937 mini-doc explaining the process by which a radio show transmits from the studio to homes across the country. It’s quite niftily
The emergence of radio as we know it–programming that emanates from a reasonably priced box placed in the living room–was in its infant stages when the above one-hour broadcast was made, from a station in Newark, New Jersey. As you’ll see from this rare and invaluable Edison experimental recording from
Here’s a wonderful clip of silent screen vamp superstar Theda Bara in 1936, speaking at the end of a Lux Radio Theater presentation of ‘The Thin Man’. Since that movie was directed by W.S. Van Dyke who was known to everyone as ‘Woody’, I assume the person who she’s speaking
Last week I posted about the incredibly strange early silent sex symbol Theda Bara. Since her films are more or less all lost, and her vampiric personality exceptionally strange from the photographs we have of her, it might be something of a surprise to hear that she was, in fact,
Yesterday I posted five hours of radio programming of a local Washington DC station in 1939. I find these non-dramatic radio broadcasts particularly evocative of the era and the above is no exception. It’s a broadcast from 1943 that aired on Christmas Eve as a Christmas special for those home
This is a pretty nutty find. It’s close to six hours of a normal broadcast day on a local Washington D.C. radio station, WJSV, on September 21, 1939. In other words, if you were a housewife sitting around your house and put your radio on in the background and left
Here is episode five of the wonderful ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’ series, a group of 15 minute monologues he delivered for the BBC in 1955. Here he discusses his infamous ‘War Of The Worlds’ broadcast and even though you’ve probably heard the entire tale before–the accidentally induced mass-panic it caused ask
A couple of days ago I posted an interview with Rudy Vallee from 1984 on Skip E. Lowe’s local Los Angeles public access television show. It was the 83 year old Vallee’s last televised appearance–he died two years later after a long illness. Let’s do a little comparing and contrasting