The 15-minute Matter

A few choice words about the impact of the 15-minute episode format on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. The next step will be to compile the completed segments to see what I have - or don't have, as the case may be.

The Game of Inches Matter

They say that football is a game of inches. The same can be said of editing a movie. This introduction isn't much longer than the previous version but nonetheless manages to include significantly more material than its predecessor.

Lost Voices

I continue to be grateful for the generosity of radio historian John Dunning and his wife Helen in getting me copies of the various interviews they've done with people associated with Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. As time passes, the number of primary sources for a documentary about the golden age of radio can only diminish, making Dunning's conversations with the likes of Jack Johnstone and Bob Bailey's daughter Roberta Goodwin all the more precious. Now, if I could find a similar source of high quality images of the various actors and production personnel who worked on the show, I'd be totally set.

Voices from the Past

One of the challenges in making a film about a program that ended over 50 years ago is that the key participants are for the most part no longer with us. In the case of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, that list includes Jack Johnstone, Virginia Gregg and Bob Bailey to name just a few. Thankfully, as befits key players of the radio medium, many of these individuals can still offer their insights thanks to the generation of old-time radio enthusiasts who were able to interview them before they passed away. In particular, researcher John Dunning's interview with Jack Johnstone gives a fascinating glimpse into the process of making radio drama, especially in the period when the distance between the potential of the medium and the networks' apparent regard for it could hardly have been wider. Sadly, there don't appear to be any interviews with Bob Bailey, doubtless because of the stroke he suffered in the 1970s, but Dunning's conversation with Bailey's daughter, Roberta Goodwin, is equal parts fascinating and heartbreaking as she recounts both good times and bad with her father. In a way, these interviews are themselves a vindication of the radio medium - unforgettable stories brought to life in your mind thanks to the power of the human voice.

The Direct Approach

It's a testament to the allure of radio's golden age that one of the very best books about the era was the work of a self-identified "child of the TV generation" who missed out on radio the first time around. Leonard Maltin's The Great American Broadcast is perhaps not comprehensive the way books like John Dunning's Tune in Yesterday and On the Air aspire to be, yet it many ways it paints a much more richer portrait than those encyclopedic works. Rather than a purely chronological approach, Maltin explores the period by focusing on the people whose work made the programs what they are.

Among the actors, sound-men, writers and directors, Maltin gives us a look at quite a few people who did more than one of those things during their careers. One of these figures was, of course, Jack Johnstone and Maltin offers some interesting details about his life and work, both on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and other programs. One of these anecdotes about Johnstone's approach to directing hints at why Johnstone may have found TV an unappealing option when radio drama finally left the air.

Even though Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a transcribed program, using relatively new tape technology that permitted editing, Johnstone avoided doing so. In order to get the best possible performances out of his cast, he insisted that each fifteen-minute episode be recorded from start to finish in a single take. If an actor made a mistake in the middle of the taping, the whole team would go back to the beginning and start again. Despite initial resistance on the part of some actors, Johnstone's live-to-tape approach ultimately won them over because "everybody [being] on his toes" resulted in better performances. While this very particular approach to perfectionism made Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar one of radio's best dramas, it seems unlikely it would have translated to the very different production demands of television, assuming a sponsor would even have allowed Johnstone that level of control.