The twonky 195312/29/2023 ![]() That same maverick passion nearly bankrupted him when he became obsessed with creating the perfect 3D film system. What Oboler brought to film from radio was an innovative use of multi-layered sound tracks and his trademark stream-of-consciousness technique.He also brought to film his pioneering and independent spirit, which influenced the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague. Nonetheless, the sound effects that he did use are remembered for their audaciousness and creativity such as the eerie vibration of bed springs, which Joe Bonham learns to recognize as the movement of people entering and exiting his hospital room. Oboler was also a minimalist who never used a sound effect or piece of music when the spoken word could better create an image in the mind of his listeners. On radio, Oboler was a tireless and original innovator.He wrote most of his plays from the first person perspective, concentrating on the thoughts, memories and imaginings of his protagonists.Particularly memorable is his adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun with James Cagney as Joe Bonham, a World War I casualty without eyes, ears, tongue, or limbs. NBC, America’s most powerful network gave Oboler his very own radio series with complete creative control and his name in the title: Arch Oboler’s Plays. Oboler was NBC’s “boy genius” and their answer to rival network CBS’s formidable roster of talented writers including Corwin, Welles, and Pulitzer prize winner Archibald MacLeish. His books of published radio plays have introductions from eminent writers such as Irving Stone and Thomas Mann. As Andrew Sarris suggests, Lights Out is the radio series for which Oboler is best remembered.īut Oboler was more than a mere fright master he was also a writer with a political conscience and a relentless desire to elevate radio writing to an art form. Welles’s biographer, Simon Callow, has even noted that “…Welles’s radio work possessed none of the riddling originality of Arch Oboler.” Oboler was to radio what Rod Serling became to television Serling’s ironic and socially conscious “weird tales” for The Twilight Zone and The Night Gallery were influenced by Oboler’s plays for the radio program Lights Out. Oboler stood shoulder to shoulder with the two other giants of American radio, Norman Corwin and Orson Welles. Radio, prior to the advent of television, was the most powerful and influential mass communication medium on the planet. – Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema Arch Oboler creates “Lights Out”Īs a filmmaker he was certainly no Orson Welles, but Oboler deserves better than oblivion.In the 1940s, Oboler was one of the highest paid writers in the world and the most successful radio playwright in America. Hence, he is included if only as a reminder of the vanished mystique of radio in the motion picture industry. His name still reverberates from the Lights Out radio series I heard in my childhood. ![]() Arch Oboler came to Hollywood out of the radio tube, but he never showed the visual flair of Orson Welles.
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