Mr|Tots Season 4 Preview: Captain Horatio Hornblower

Continuing from our last installment, wherein I discussed the process of adapting Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep into a radio drama, I would like to now guide you through the editing process, in which the rough script is combed over and prepared for air. Although occasionally painful, this is a necessary step in the production of a good piece of radio theater.

Whether the piece is original or adapted, it is very rare that the first draft is ready to be performed hot off the printer. For a variety of reasons, each script must be painstakingly reviewed and revised, often by multiple Mr|Tots members, before we are comfortable putting it on the air. The Big Sleep is no different. Taken primarily from William Faulkner’s screenplay, the challenge with this particular piece is its length. The average original Mr|Tots script tends to run somewhere between twenty and forty pages. Adaptations, however, are often much longer, with Derek Long’s seventy-eight page adaptation of North By Northwest currently holding the record. The reason, in my opinion, is two-fold.

First, there are restrictions placed on the adaptation by the method of storytelling utilized by the original author. There are some scenes that seem like superfluous padding which nevertheless contain morsels of critical information, and therefore cannot be excised. These small scenes tend to add up and cause a script to swell beyond the writer’s intentions.

Second, each script contains within it certain elements that the writer adapting the piece for radio refuses to lose due to some bizarre affection that even he cannot explain. For a good example, witness our Season One adaptation of Casablanca, in which I couldn’t bring myself to lose even the minor interactions between background characters. Why? Because I just couldn’t, that’s all.

With The Big Sleep, length was always going to be a problem. It’s a painfully complex story, and my original draft came in at over eighty pages. Clearly something needed to be done. My first step is always to go through the script line by line and determine what can be cut, sometimes down to a sentence. This sort of trimming and pruning process can sometimes remove two or three pages from a script without fundamentally altering the content of the story. It’s a must for anyone trying to write something that can actually be performed on the air.

Sadly, it’s never enough, and there are entire scenes that almost always have to be lost. In the case of The Big Sleep, there were two major scenes that I removed from the script. In the original film, there is an extended scene at the midway point where Marlowe is called before the district attorney and asked to justify his actions to that point. What follows is a long section of exposition where Marlowe summarizes the entirety of the events that have already occurred, thus allowing the audience to catch up. In my radio adaptation, this scene has been cut because I don’t believe that it is worth stopping the entire production for a recap that stretches over five pages, especially when it’s impact on the story is minimal.

The second thing that was cut concerned a subplot that introduced the minor character of Canino, in which he confronts and kills another minor character. The purpose of the scene is to connect Marlowe to Joe Brody’s girl Agnes, but ultimately I felt that such a scene only slowed down the story, and that the same point could be made much more expediently. As a result, much of Canino’s story ended up being left out.

Finally, a writer has to put his or her own stamp on the work, and that sometimes boils down to making tiny unnecessary changes that nevertheless alter the story. For me, the changes concerned the ending, which I will not reveal here. I will say that in the original script, there was a romantic tag that I believe undermined the darkness of the story and betrayed the essence of the Marlowe character. That tag has been excised and replaced with something else, which I hope you will enjoy.

In our next installment, I’ll be guiding you through the process by which music is selected for a broadcast. Best until then.


Mr|Tots Season 4 Preview: Red Army - Red Planet


Mr|Tots Season 4 Preview: The Lateness of the Hour

Stefan Claypool (creator of Nazi Hunters and Escape From Robot Planet) and Noah Mease (creator of New Tales From Kafka City and Penny Dreadful) team up for an epic, ten-part serial!  The heat is on as the Cold War goes interplanetary!  But who will uncover the mysteries that lie on the surface of Mars, and at what price?  Find out during the thrilling fourth season of The Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense!

From the mind of Noah Mease, creator of Penny Dreadful, comes an exciting new radio drama full of thrills, chills, and kills…

While most of you have probably heard a Mr|Tots production through a live broadcast or a podcast, many might be unaware of the amount of work that goes into each episode of our show.  Although we originally chose our projects not one week before they were performed, we now plan sometimes months in advance in order to accommodate our growing cast and take advantage of our increasingly sophisticated resources.  The summer months are a valuable time for the Mr|Tots crew, since they offer the chance to prepare for the next batch of shows without the pressure of the Middlebury academic schedule.  For the first part of The Making of a Mr|Tots Broadcast, we’ll be examining the process of conceiving of and writing an episode of The Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense.  The episode in question: our upcoming production of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.  As this is an adaptation of a preexisting work, there are differences from the process used for an original piece, but the principles are the same.

There are two things to consider when adapting a film, novel, or television program for radio.  The first is whether or not the original work is dramatically satisfying.  The second is whether or not it is well-suited for radio.  The first question is easy to answer, while the second is not.  The original impetus for choosing The Big Sleep to adapted was its status as a classic of both literature and cinema, but there were originally doubts as to its suitability for radio.  The plot is notoriously complex, and the process of adaptation requires both a fidelity to the original text and the ability to separate what is necessary from what is not.  But in many way The Big Sleep is uniquely well-suited for a radio adaptation.  First and foremost, it is a piece that relies on character and plot rather than visual spectacle.  Second, it is in all previous forms, including Chandler’s novel and William Faulkner’s screenplay, an exceedingly well-written piece of work, oozing wit and charm while at the same time possessing a classical gravitas.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is the sort of piece that Mr|Tots members can enjoy performing.  This may be the most important element of all, since Mr|Tots’s best works in the past have been those which we’ve truly enjoyed producing.  For these reasons, The Big Sleep passes the radio-appropriate test.

Once we’ve determined what piece we actually want to produce, someone must begin the long, occasionally painful task of actually writing the adaptation.  Most Mr|Tots adaptations tend to stay fairly close to the original text, so it is handy to have close at hand a copy of the work itself.  I chose to work from Faulkner’s screenplay instead of Chandler’s novel, partially because the original novel contained material that we would be unable to broadcast, but mainly because the tempo and structure of the film lent itself to radio adaption more easily than that of the book.  I was fortunate to find a PDF of the screenplay online.  (There have been, and continue to be, instances such as Double Indemnity, where no screenplay is readily available, and the adaptation must be slowly churned out with a copy of the film at hand for frequent viewings.)  With that, I set to work.

With The Big Sleep in particular, the first and most important creative decision to be made was whether or not to include narration.  It is not unusual in radio to do so, since it is easy to use spoken description in the place of the visual elements available to other mediums.  For some past productions, including originals such as The Secret of Shadow Valley and adaptations such as The Man Who Wasn’t There, the technique has been successful, but it seemed somehow inappropriate for The Big Sleep.  The rationalization I ultimately used was that even though Marlowe is the archetypal detective, to fall back on a technique like voice over seemed almost lazy for his story.  The decision made, I proceeded.

When creating an original piece, you have the opportunity to write for particular actors.  When writing the Nazi Hunters serials, I knew ahead of time that Jack Cuneo and Bobby Joe Smith would be playing the leads, and could consequently write to their strengths.  With an adaptation, it’s a bit tougher, and as a result, the characters often tend to be a bit more fleshed out in and of themselves.  You leave less to chance and generally force actors to conform to the writing, rather than the opposite.  The Big Sleep is no exception, but this is often an advantage, since it allows for the creation of more self-consistent characters.  In short, I am writing Marlowe as Marlowe, and as no one else.

Again, The Big Sleep is legendary for its convoluted plot, and it was my intention to leave it as intact as possible.  However, in the course of converting the story into an hour-plus radio drama, some details had to be lost.  Certain characters were dropped or combined with one another as work progressed, and a few scenes were removed to keep the running time appropriately brisk.  But the key when making the decision about what to keep and what to lose is determining what the ultimate effect on the end product would be.  When adapting Casablanca, you can’t lose the airport speech, but you can lose minor background characters and subplots.  Ultimately, it’s the piece as a whole that matters, which is why even though it sometimes hurts to lose minor details, it does often have to be done.

And this is the second-most important thing to consider when adapting a radio drama: ultimately, it is the work itself, not the work in comparison to that from which it was adapted, that is important.  You can’t expect a listener to have seen the film or read the book.  You can only try to offer them the best radio drama experience they can find.

What’s the most important thing to consider when adapting a radio drama?  Simply that the actors have fun performing and that the fans have fun listening.  You can ask for no more.

The Big Sleep will be broadcast during Mr|Tots Season Four, which begins in September 2008.


Living with Pasternak, Part 2


Living with Pasternak, Part 1

• New installments of The Time Presidents and Chris Kringle: Soldier of Fortune, among others.
• Some thrilling new original pieces from our robust stable of writers.
• New and exciting genre experiments as we continue to push the boundaries of what is both possible and socially acceptable on radio.
• A weekly dramatic serial? It could happen!
• A dazzling cast and crew, featuring your old favorites and a variety of new and exciting voices!
• And, of course, the heaping helping of madness you’ve come to expect from us.

This summer we’ll be working hard to prepare for our September 2008 premiere, and will be making updates to this site. Until we return to the air, we encourage you to listen to our podcast and browse our archives for old material. We’d love to hear what you think of the show, so feel free to contact us as well. Season Four is coming, folks, and we hope to make it our best yet! Until then, on behalf of all of us here at the Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense, thanks for listening.


Pianoforte


Credits 3.5×10


New Tales From Kafka City III


Student For Hire


Nazi Hunters 5: The Shadow of Doubt


Credits 3.5×09


Brookshale 3×04 - “Brookshire”


Fin Fang Foom


A Public Service Announcement by Bobby Joe Smith III


The Man Who Wasn’t There

It’s coming…


Credits 3.5×08


The Buccaneer


Brookshale 3×3


The Princess and the Pea


Loose Mouth Cream


“The Terror of London, a Gaslight Romance”

Ahoy there! This week Mr|Tots is proud to bring you a pair of thrilling features guarenteed to tickle your funny bone, your suspense bone, and any other relevant bones you may have. First, Stefan Claypool directs Jack Cuneo, Alex Revelas, and Noah Mease in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, the classic James Bond novel. And then, Noah Mease presents the second installment in New Tales From Kafka City, entitled The Scottish Radio Play And stay tuned for new episodes of 5 and Brookshale: A Soap Opera. Be sure to listen in tomorrow at 7 PM Eastern Time for another exciting episode of the Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense!


Credits 3.5×06


North by Northwest

For you listening pleasure, episodes 1-4 (two is one of our “lost” episodes).

Skip Murphy and Duke Fowler in “Rendezvous with Oblivion”

Skip Murphy and Duke Fowler in “O Tannenbaum of Despair” (lost)

Skip Murphy and Duke Fowler in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hitler”

Skip Murphy and Duke Fowler in “The Master Space Race”

Finally, a short poll to tide you over:


Credits 3.5×05


Brookshale 3×02


Lights Out: Man in the Middle


Suspense: The Dark Tower


The Time Presidents: Rah! Rah! Rasputin!

Such a statement must seem like hyperbole in the wake of extravagant productions like Escape From Robot Planet, Chris Kringle: Soldier of Fortune, and Gunsmoke: Cheap Labor, but we cannot overstate the epic nature of tonight’s broadcast. Yes, finally, after months of anticipation, we will be bringing you Derek Long’s adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, starring Stefan Claypool, Jessie Gurd, and Bobby Joe Smith. We’re pulling out all the stops tonight, so be sure to tune into WRMC 91.1 FM at 7:00 PM EST to hear the most spectacular production radio has ever known!

Tune into WRMC 91.1 FM this Saturday night at 7:00 PM EST to hear another stunning episode of the Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense! This week, we’ll be presenting you a trio of exciting scripts. First, you’ll hear Nick Smith, Kofi Appiah, and Derek Long reprise their roles as Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, and Calvin Coolidge in Stefan Claypool’s The Time Presidents in “Rah! Rah! Rasputin!”, co-starring Dave Malinsky and June Trinos. Then you’ll be treated to Derek Long’s take on the old radio classic Man in the Middle, starring Stefan Claypool, Jessie Gurd, Aviva Bannerman, and Bobby Joe Smith. Finally, Alex Revelas and Dan Murphy join forces to direct George Kaufman’s classic The Dark Tower, starring Kofi Appiah, Andrew McDonald, Aviva Bannerman, and Nick Smith. Plus you’ll hear an exciting new installment of Brookshale: A Soap Opera. It’s a show you won’t want to miss, so don’t miss it!


Credits 3.5×04


The Evening and the Morning Star