The Damon Runyon Theatre - Single Episodes
THE DAMON RUNYON THEATRE The Damon Runyon Theatre was another of Alan Ladd's Mayfair Transcription Company productions. Ladd, long an admirer of 'The Brighter Side', Damon Runyon's long-running newspaper column, initially signed Pat O'Brien to star as 'Broadway' in the program. Indeed we have an alleged audition from the program, titled "Princess O'Hara" in which O'Brien and Wendy Barrie are heard announcing the next production of the series, 'A Piece of Pie'. Newspaper listings of the era describe Pat O'Brien slated to cut all 52 programs upon completing principal filming of the Howard Hughes/RKO feature, The Boy with Green Hair . But the quixotic Hughes decided the 'message' element of The Boy with Green Hair was a bit too risky for late-1940s audiences. He directed that the film be re-shot, as needed, to remove the social intolerance message from the completed celluloid. Newspaper accounts cite O'Brien as anticipating a New York recording session for all 52 episodes of The Damon Runyon Theatre sometime during the Summer of 1948. But owing to the re-shoot and re-cutting of The Boy with Green Hair , the movie wasn't completed until September of 1948. This may--or may not--explain Pat O'Brien's absence from the remaining episodes of The Damon Runyon Theatre --or whether any were recorded beyond Princess O'Hara. Given the common practice of cutting two to five transcribed recordings in one session, one might well imagine that O'Brien recorded as many as five Damon Runyon Theatre programs before his performances were cut short. But it's intriguing to wonder how many of the episodes they actually did record before O'Brien had to rush back to RKO's West Coast studios to complete The Boy with Green Hair . As it turns out, Ladd tapped short-lived veteran Radio actor John Brown to voice the recurring 'Broadway' character so central to the exposition of every episode of The Damon Runyon Theatre . As most fans of the program would attest, John Brown's 'Broadway' was as good as it gets in Radio. Brown had already begun performing a similar character on My Friend Irma (1947) as Irma's (Marie Wilson) shiftless boyfriend, so the leap to yet another Lower East Side accent wasn't that great for Brown. Indeed, one wonders if Brown ever got out of character for the seven years that My Friend Irma aired over CBS. Yet another stumbling block for many new programs produced in 1948 was the infamous 'Petrillo Ban' on producing any new professional Radio recordings. The following is from the Time Magazine article of December 29, 1947: "Cocky little James Caesar Petrillo just sat back and waited. Recording companies rushed symphony orchestras, hillbilly bands and blues singers in & out of studios, trying to record as much as possible by January 1, when Petrillo's ban on record-making becomes effective. Record officials gloated that they had piled up a big enough backlog of new records to last a year or more. They were hopeful that Petrillo's Musicians' Union might not be able to stand so long a layoff. Last week, James Petrillo pointed his stubby finger at a point they had apparently overlooked. The Taft-Hartley law prevented record companies from signing a new contract which would pay royalties to a union-administered fund—but the record companies had obligingly recorded a year's supply under the old contract. All those phonograph records to be doled out over the bleak months ahead, he thought, would net his union around $10,000,000. The record companies looked as if they had been hit over the head with a kettledrum. Together with men from radio, television, and phonograph manufacturers, they formed a united industry committee to fight Petrillo. But Petrillo wasn't budging an inch: "We are never going to make records again -- ever. That's one New Year's resolution we've made and one we are going to keep." James Caesar Petrillo was president of the American Federation of Musicians, who had successfully imposed a ban on professional recordings between 1942 and 1944 until an appropriate royalty system could be established to the benefit of his union members. Petrillo successfully reimposed the ban for most of 1948 -- it was finally lifted on November 22, 1948. Indeed, then Freshman Congressman Richard M. Nixon made headlines taking up the cudgel for the Recording Industry in an attempt to thwart Petrillo's union. This is the reason the same music theme is employed in both the alleged Pat O'Brien audition recordings and the final production pressings of The Damon Runyon Theatre . Having dodged two potential stumbling blocks, Ladd's The Damon Runyon Theatre was first aired over independent radio station KSEL, Lubbock, Texas. The program was soon heard over most major outlets between November 1948 and December 1951. As with Mayfair's other syndicated programs, the production quality and engineering is superb. Veteran Mayfair producer Vern Carstensen again supervises the production and Richard Sanville directs. Mayfair writer Russell Hu