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OMNI Magazine Article Radio: The Arts - By Derek Best It is a genuine luxury to discuss radio drama. Normally, when attempting criticism, one is haunted by the looming specter of the cliché. But radio is untouched, like a pristine snowfield on which one can walk anywhere and be assured of making fresh tracks. Radio has been so largely ignored as a serious medium that reciting the alphabet would be an original statement. And if the critic is in virgin territory, imagine how the makers of such radio series as Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy must feel. Probably a little like God on the first day of creation. Radio of course is not new. Some of us even remember it. Most of us don't. Probably the average Star Wars fan knows, say, bob and Ray only as two strange old men who hosted Saturday Night Live one week. Even to those who do hold fond memories of the "wireless" and the golden age of radio drama, these new series must come as something of a shock. Everything is different. The boundaries of perception have been pushed back, the old conventions are gone, the speed and flow of information have been increased, the degree of sophistication expected tin the listener is greater. For instance, though old-style radio drama almost mandated a slow fad-out and fad-in between scenes, the "new" style thinks nothing of having an abrupt switch, leaving the listener to orient himself. Actually we orient ourselves quite easily. In this age of the whiz-bang, quick-cut TV commercial, we have learned to perceive things differently. The radio equivalent of a cut does not disorient us in the least. Production technology is now thoroughly modern. Actors no longer huddle around a single microphone for an unedited performance while a man in the corner slams doors and bangs coconut shells together. Today's radio drama is electronic, layered, edited, synthesized, and twenty-four-tracked. While the performers of pop music complain that radio has become a producer's medium, the new technology has made radio drama rewarding for both performers and listeners. Let's be specific. national Public Radio (NPR), the noncommercial, publicly supported radio network based in Washington, D.C., is running and rerunning three science-fiction serials. Each consists of 12 or 13 half-hour episodes and can be heard in most large American cities. Two of the series, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (which will premiere in February 1983), are produced by NPR in association with KUSC-FM, in Los Angeles, and with the cooperation of Lucasfilm, Ltd. NPR has also begun a 15-part series, A Canticle of Leibowitz, based on the Hugo Award-winning novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr. The other series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is a British import, produced by BBC radio. it has an enormous cult following in Britain and has spun off a book, a record album, and a stage show. If you haven't heard any of these series, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Star Wars is a 13-part radio serial featuring Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels, re-creating their original roles as Luke Skywalker and C-3PO. The show also uses the full gamut of original sound effects, and more than all of the original musical score. Before I say anything that might be construed as negative, every episode is a masterpiece of audio craftsmanship and a dazzling technical tour de force. However, there are a a great many conceptual aspects that are flawed. it doesn't take much mathematics to calculate that the series is six-and-a-half hours in total length. How well does such a simple fable stand up to this inordinate stretching? Equally important: How does such a visual fable get along with the loss of those visuals? The answers to these two questions are intertwined. This *McLuhanesque age has come to demand visual stimulation, but we cannot forget that science fiction was born as literature -- a medium in which it still flourishes quite nicely. Thus it has traditionally demanded imaginative visualizing by its followers. This immediately suggests a close kinship with radio. The penchant for adding a picture, with 25-foot-high close-ups of red and green lasers blasting everything to smithereens, is a recent fad, and the Star Wars sagas are the uncontested champions of the movement. When such a banquet for the eyes is transferred to the radio, we have to ask how precisely this stimulates our imagination. After all, if you were to run the movie with the projector bulb switched off, you might have an experience that requires you to paint your own mental pictures, but it wouldn't be creative radio. It would be a simple memory-jogging exercise. There definitely are parts of the radio version that are vastly more innovative and stimulating than just that. There is one long section, for instance, where Darth Vader brutally interrogates the captive Princess Leia. At the beginning of the session a faint buzzing is heard, like a Jew's harp. She asks, "What's that?" He answers, "An interrogation machine." She gasps, "A torture robot!" now what does a thing like that look like? We have no idea, and we are given no idea. This is radio at its best, leaving us to dredge the appropriate imagery out of whatever private nightmares we carry inside us, with only that loathsome buzzing as a clue. These new special effects are the result of a kind o audio perfectionism. The sound designer of Star Wars, Ben Burtt, is a fanatic. During production he spent days wandering around on a ship, recording every little creak and groan, just to make up one small ingredient in his complex aural recipe. The "Light Saber" sound, for instance, was made from a combination of the hissing, arcing sound recorded at the high-voltage anode of a TV picture tube and the humming, buzzing sound of an old projector-interlock motor. Anthony Daniels, as C-3PO, acted out his entire role in an isolation booth in the corner of the studio in order to feel the dissociative "automaton" part more accurately. And others in the cast reported that performing for radio was physically more demanding than performing for film, so much energy being channeled into the single expression of the voice. Star Wars pundits will know that the "Interrogation Machine" scene is not in the film. Since the serial weighs in at six-and-a-half hours, there are many new scenes, and in general they are the ones that work best as radio. This means that the scenes that work less well are the classic set pieces from the movie (the bar at Mos Eisley, for example, and the big shoot-out at the end). At first one might think this is because these scenes were originally conceived as visual events while the new scenes were written for radio. But is is more subtle than that. Those parts that were originally shown in the theater are not dramatically or technically inferior in any way, but the problem is, the memory of the film never obtrudes. No matter how hard the performers and the sound mixers try, they are walking in the tall shadow of a visual beast few of us will ever forget. That's why the additional scenes for the radio show give us more freedom and are more effective. John Williams's gargantuan musical score tends to compound this mistaken judgment. The producers of the show had free access to this score as well as to all the audio effects created by Burtt for the film. You might think that with such a panoramic palette to work from, they could hardly not create a masterwork. But they create only a masterful imitation, which constantly reminds us of its origins. Music, with its powerful evocative mechanisms, completes the illusion that what we're hearing is the film's score; therefore, what we're seeing is in the mind's eye. At times the show is not a spoken drama at all but an orchestral tone poem with sound effects, like Peter and the Wolf, with a few words of dialogue thrown in for punctuation. Let us leave this galaxy of clear-cut heroes and villains for a while and take a look at The hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams and produced for the BBC by Geoffrey Perkins. Without doubt the BBC is the alma mater of radio drama. Auntie BBC, traditionally stiff and conservative, has always demonstrated the ability to pull wild surprises out of her hat. Remember Monty Python? doctor Who? Now comes this cryptic, complex series. Briefly, the story concerns Arthur Dent (played by Simon Jones), a tea-drinking, reluctant antihero, whose home planet, Earth, is obliterated to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He is rescued by a wandering writer from a small planet somewhere near Betelgeuse, who is traveling on assignment to update a kind of pop space-travel guidebook, entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (published by Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor Bets). The book itself forms the thread and narration of the serial as the two travelers are precipitated from one deep-space crises to another. The narration is the spirit of the show. The voice (Peter Jones) is sonorous and condescending. If anything, it gets a little too smug. Contrast this with the classical resonant voice of the narrator in Star Wars, so deep and rich it sounds as if the tape is running slow. It brings to mind the disembodied voice of "God" in The Ten Commandments, for which Cecil B. DeMille used the artificially slowed voice of Charlton Heston, booming from the burning bush. Just as Star Wars derives its imagery (intentionally or not) from our having seen it, Hitchhiker's Guide (on radio, in contradistinction to the recent TV spinoff) is utterly dependent on our not being able to see it. Its success stems from the mental gymnastics required of the listener. At one point Dent is trapped in the side effects of a device called the Infinite Improbability Drive, and he finds his arms are separating from his body. His first and only concern is, "How am I going to wear my digital watch now?" The language barrier is tackled differently, too, by the two series' writers. In Star Wars it is simple: Everyone speaks English (except Chewbacca). Hitchhiker's Guide is more sophisticated; everyone is presumed to be speaking his or her own tongue, but early on we are introduced to the ingenious Babel Fish, which you slip into your ear for instant translation. And, as might be expected, Guide takes its sound effects less seriously. Not that they are incomplete or poorly crafted, just more humorous. An element of satire is built into the choice and composition of sound, as when the universe ends and the final phrase of the symphony of apocalyptic tones is the unmistakable gurgle of a bathtub emptying. Hitchhiker's Guide is a satisfying cerebral belch. It is cliquish, erratic, hip, sometimes sophomoric, and invariably unpredictable. Sometimes its wit and insight tend to overshadow the technical prowess of the show. Yet prowess there is. The BBC runs a department quaintly named the Radiophonic Workshop. (Picture a lot of men in tweeds, smoking pipes, tinkering with tube oscillators and EMI tape decks.) This is the BBC's disco studio, bristling with modern electronics, to ensure that no technical advances are denied to radio drama. It was here that the series' staggering variety of special effects was assembled, layer upon layer. Listening to the show with stereo headphones is an unforgettable experience. As it is with Star Wars. It is probably the best way to take in any modern radio drama, lest we find ourselves staring at the radio, uncertain where to put our hands. As a parting shot, it is worth noting that The Hitchhiker's Guide insists that humans have only three problems: "Why are we born? Why do we die? And why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?"
*All people are connected.
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