Author! Author!

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AUTHOR! AUTHOR! Published fiction writers appear on a radio show where the unusual ending of a possible story is shared, and the task of these authors is to spontaneously come up with an inventive and creative story that explain how it is possible to arrive at this surprising ending.   ============ As described in an article by Francis M. Nevins and Martin Grams, Jr. Fred Dannay and Manny Lee were the creators of the fictional detective Ellery Queen.  A little more than two months before the Ellery Queen series debuted, Dannay and Lee became involved in another radio venture which to the end of his life, Fred Dannay believed to be one of the most fascinating experiments in the medium’s history.  Author! Author! was an impromptu melange of game and panel show which the cousins created and sold to the Mutual network.   It debuted on April 7, 1939 under the sponsorship of the B.F. Goodrich Rubber Company and with Robert Lewis Shayon as director.  The moderator for the series was humorist S.J. Perelman, although light-verse wizard Ogden Nash took Perelman’s place one week.  Dannay and Lee, billed respectively as “Mr. Ellery” and “Mr Queen,” served as permanent panelists, and the guests each week were media figures like Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, Mark and Carl Van Doren, Fannie Hurst, Erskine Caldwell and Quentin Reynolds.  The format of the program was described by the announcer as: “a fiction funfest.”   Each week’s show would begin with a dramatized version of some inexplicable event.  Here’s an example, employed on the first program (which has survived on tape) and summarized by Dannay exactly forty years later for David Behrens of Newsday:   "A young man arrives for the reading of his uncle’s will.  The only heir, he is desperately in need of money to cover gambling debts.  The will gives him a choice: Accept $10,000 in cash or the contents of an envelope.  He opens the envelope, which is empty, with no stamps or writing on it. “I will take the envelope,” he says."   At this curtain line the sketch would end and the moderator would challenge each of the week’s four panelists – Dannay, Lee, and two guests who varied from program to program – to devise on the spot a set of circumstances that would make sense of the scene.  Dannay’s explanation for his own example was as follows:   "The young man could not wait for his uncle to die.  He killed him instead.  The murder was committed with a slow-working poison placed on an envelope in his uncle’s study.  But the uncle realizes his nephew’s evil deed and scrawls a revision in his will, to create a malicious dilemma.  His nephew has to choose between $10,000 in cash or the chance to recover the only evidence of the murder – the uncle’s final revenge."   After each panelist had offered an ad-lib rationale for the situation, everyone would proceed to attack the others’ constructions and defend his or her own.  At the end of the first broadcast the announcer invited listeners to send in their own impossible story situations, with B.F. Goodrich promising $25 for each one used on the air.  The panel members seemed to have a marvelous time heckling each other, but the whole concept presupposed an absurdly mechanical approach to storytelling and offered little to the millions of listeners who had no desire to hear writers match wits.  Surprisingly, Author! Author! survived for almost a year before vanishing into the ether. ============ Episode List  1. The One Dollar Watch 2. The One Hundred Book Purchase These episodes are compiled from the files circulating online at many old time radio sites.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.