Casey, Press Photographer

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An interview with Paul from the CBS Radio Mystery Theater website

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater came along during the 1970's revival of OTR and gained a lot of fans, many that are still listening to the show faithfully.

I recall vividly listening to the show late at night at 10, 11, 12 years old - and being frightened as I hid beneath the covers!

There is a very well-done website out there that explores the show and I am honored to have with me, Paul, the fellow that runs the site. After months of trying to track him down, I finally got a hold of him and here are the questions asked and answered:



OTR BUFFET: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me. I've actually been trying to get a hold of you for about six months but I simply could not find a way to reach you.

Paul: Thanks. I am glad we could connect and I am sure you know how hard it is to get a site like CBSRMT.com off the ground. CBSRMT.com is a website where visitors can listen to all 1,399 episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater old time radio free. Visitors can stream or download old radio shows in MP3 format or copy radio shows to CD. Visitors can listen their favorite Radio Mystery Theater shows and comment with other fans to talk about their favorite Radio Mystery programs (sort of like the comment system on your blog, Jimbo). The episodes are fully logged with broadcast & synopsis. The shows are fully searchable and you can there are short bios of each actor and writer and a list by adaptation.

OTR BUFFET: Between the 2 narrators/hosts, can you point out the strength of each and which one you liked more? Do you have the total of episode hosted by each?

Paul: Both are great CBS Radio Mystery Theater hosts and lend to the show's "Creepyness Factor" in their own way. The part is an out growth of "Raymond" from Inner Sanctum, but while Raymond's silliness added a Halloween fun flavor to the show, H.G. Marshall's seriousness used to make my hair stand on end when I was riding in the backseat of my parent's car. Tammy Grimes' feminine voice should be reassuring, but the fact that it really isn't I find to be even more frightening.

OTR BUFFET: What is your favorite genre of the anthology?

Paul: I'm not sure if Radio Mystery Theater is really a Genre, but I really love the Adaptations from Literature. The Dickens and Poe stories are great fun, but I think the Mark Twain week from January 1976 is about my favorite.

OTR BUFFET: When I think of the series there are 3 or 4 actors and a few actresses that come up quickly in my mind. Which actors and actors do you associate most closely with the series?

Paul: Mason Adams had such a great voice for Radio. But the ones that are the most fun for me to listen to are the people that I remember from TV and Movies, like Morgan Fairchild, Jack Grimes, Richard Crenna.

OTR BUFFET: Can you name a few really good episodes and why they stand out?

Paul: I get a big kick out of the Christmas Carol adaptations starring E.G. Marshall as Scrooge. But if I were going to burn just one or two CDs to take to the desert island with me, it would be filled with the First Week in January Theme shows, maybe they aren't as scary as some of the other episodes, but life on a deserted island is scary enough!

OTR BUFFET: I'll be honest with you. When I listen to CBSRMT then thing that makes the biggest impression on me are the horrible 1970's commercials. How do you feel about the commercials? Do you know of anyone editing those out and just leaving the play?

Paul: We'll have to agree to disagree- I love hearing how sleek and modern the new '74 Chevy's are, and the great deals on pocket calculators for only $60 at True Value Hardware Stores. But I do understand what you mean about commercials. A number of the episodes were retrieved from AFRTS, and they pulled the commercials before playing them for the Military.

OTR BUFFET: Other than Mercedes MacCambridge and Mason Adams, which other Old-time radio stars showed up now and again on the series?

Paul: The acting pool the Himan Brown drew from mostly came from two sources. One was CBS TV talent, especially daytime actors, I think because the 'Soaps were still being produced in New York. The other was Old time radio actors like Adams and MacCAmbridge, along with Agnes Moorehead, Jackson Beck, Staats Cosworth, Mandel Kramer and many others.

OTR BUFFET: What do you think the main difference is between CBSRMT and the shows from the Golden Age of Radio?

Paul: The quality of the production! Part of it is the progress in recording technology between '62 when Johnny Dollar's last broadcast ended Old Time Radio and '74 when CBSRMT got started. But I have a feeling that a lot of the difference is that Himan Brown was given a much larger budget to play with than anyone ever had to play with during "The Golden Age". Radio Drama is so much cheaper to produce than anything with pictures, it would be a lot of fun to see what a group of kids, say a High School Drama Club, could do with a good script and a laptop computer!

OTR BUFFET: Any idea who wrote the theme music to the show?

Paul: I believe it is an adaptation of a Twilight Zone theme written by Nathan van Cleeve. Hearing that big ol' bass is like getting to the head of the line to get on the roller-coaster; you know you are going to get the stuffing scared out of you and you just can't wait!

OTR BUFFET: Were most of the stories for the show written for the show or were they reworks of other scripts?

Paul: A number of the stories are adaptations from literature, but the scripts are all original. Himan Brown paid a flat $350 for each script, so I don't think that anyone got rich writing for CBSRMT. Reworking old scripts would have been hard to pull off- most older shows were a half hour format, so the stories were simple enough to fit. Stretching them to fit a full hour would have been difficult.

OTR BUFFET: With all of the old Time Classic radio we have available to us, why was The Mystery Theater so well received?

Paul: When CBSRMT was on the air it was the only game in town! Radio Drama had been declared Dead when Johnny Dollar went off the air in '62. Mutual had Zero Hour in '73, but even with Rod Serling, in my mind, it just wasn't as good a production as CBSRMT.

OTR BUFFET: How well did it hold up with regard to writing and acting values in comparison to older shows? If favorably, why did it do so well?

Paul: I think that the writing and acting of Radio Mystery Theater is equal to or better than some of the fare from older programs, but for the opposite reason. During the Golden Age of Radio, it was the primary source of income for the actors and writers, so they had to be good or learn to live on less groceries. The pay-scale for CBSRMT was much lower than what the same talent could make in Television, so I have the feeling that many of them worked on the show for the fun of it or as an "artistic challenge." Under these conditions a lot of people will do their best work for personal satisfaction.

OTR BUFFET: Why do you think CBSRMT succeeded when Theatre Five (1973) - which was 30 minutes shorter and seemed to not dwell so much on sci-fi or the supernatural, failed?

Paul: I have a feeling it was the time-slot. 5 pm Drive Time is a bread and butter for the local affiliates who's audience needed to be bombarded with music, DJ patter, and profitable local commercials. Later in the evening is a good time for kids who should be asleep to quietly pull the covers over their heads and tune in their AM portables for a good scare.

OTR BUFFET: Could a new show such as The CBS Mystery Theater even make it on the air today?

Paul: I think that there could be a market for a program like Mystery Theater, but unfortunately not on the air. Which is sad, because I love the technical simplicity of Radio Broadcasts in comparison with the Internet Infrastructure. But unless someone drops The Big One on the dozen or so Server Farms around the world that the Internet depends on, the 'Net will be the big kid on the block for a long time. Audio Drama have the potential to get big again for similar reasons that Radio Soap Operas got big in the 30's: it is cheap to produce very entertaining programs that can be enjoyed while multi-tasking, whether it is washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, commuting to work, working out, or hiding under the covers with a flashlight and an MP3 player getting scared before falling asleep.

OTR BUFFET: Thanks Paul for the time and the answers!

[Many thanks to friends Jon at OTRCat, Larry Gassman (Same Time, Same Station) and "Boston Blackie" for helping provide questions.]

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Review of Crime Photographer

Casey, Crime Photographer interview (with Joe Webb)

 Here's an interview I conducted with OTRR member Joe Webb about the show, Casey, Crime Photographer:


OTR BUFFET: First of all, thanks so much for joining me and doing the interview. Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into OTR.

JOE WEBB: I started when I was 16, and here I am 39 years later having more fun in the hobby than I ever have before. The convenience of digital technology compared to the way we were collecting on reels is just incredible. When I'm not having fun with OTR, I'm a management consultant and a business columnist. Most of my work for the last 30+ years has been in the printing industry, and I'm now writing about the economy in a national business news website at CEONews.com.

OTR BUFFET: How did you get into Casey, Crime Photographer?

JOE WEBB: One of the books I got from the town library decades ago was “Radio's Golden Age” by Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, which would later be released as a revised edition as “The Big Broadcast.” It listed shows and casts and some brief background on each series. Since I was collecting on cassettes at that time, I got the catalog of a company called “Old Time Radio” in Allentown, PA, and they had two cassettes with four shows of the series. I liked them, and bought another cassette from a department store of two more shows. That cassette was from a company called Pastime Products, in Texas. Perhaps some other collectors remember those companies. Then, I got hold of a catalog from a company called Remember Radio, run by legendary OTR collector Don Maris, and he had a whole reel of shows. I got a friend who had a reel-to-reel to transfer those 12 shows to cassette for me. I eventually bought my own reel decks, and had about 3000 reels at one time. But for years, there were only about 18 shows circulating. In 1979, a load of Anchor Hocking shows came out, and suddenly Casey fans had about 50 or so shows. Since then, we gotten a few more, but considering how long it was on the air, the 75+ shows circulating is a relatively tiny proportion of the series.

OTR BUFFET: The show name seemed to change often. By my count it was known by at least three different titles. Can you expound on that at all?

JOE WEBB: I think they were just trying to figure out what would work. The “Flashgun Casey, Press Photographer” was more related to the title of the character in the pulp magazine Black Mask. Then it became “Casey, Press Photographer.” I suspect Alonzo Deen Cole inspired that when he took over the writing a few weeks into the series when they stopped referring to the character as “Flashgun” and always as “Casey.” Then the show was “Crime Photographer,” and then “Casey, Crime Photographer,” and then back to “Crime Photographer.” I have had some transcription discs of the series over the years and it's usually been just “Crime Photographer” on the label. It doesn't really matter much, does it? The characters all stayed basically the same, and it was usually called “Casey, Crime Photographer” by most listeners at that time. Collectors call it that, too, and everyone knows what series they're referring to no matter what part of the run might be being discussed.

OTR BUFFET: What are your overall impressions of the show?

JOE WEBB: The show is inconsistent, with some really good episodes, and some real clunkers. The main attraction is the interplay of the cast. They worked quite well together. The really bad run of the series is when Toni was the sponsor starting in mid-1948. Anchor Hocking decided that sponsoring the show for two years did not give them the desired increase in sales. Toni came in at the last minute and they decided to focus the show more to a female audience, and cut back on some of the action in it. It was a disaster. The show “Holiday” is the better of the circulating shows in this run, but most of it is rather disappointing. It got back on track when Philip Morris picked up the sponsorship and the usual plotlines returned.

The interplay of the characters is what keeps me interested in the series. Casey and Ann is always fun with its occasional playful romantic tension, Casey's bullheadedness and embarrassments, Logan's gruffness, and of course, Ethelbert the bartender's malapropisms and observations about life.

The Anchor Hocking shows are truly an example of what a big network Golden Age show was like at its peak, with a full orchestra, a well-known sponsor, and a live audience. It would be just a few years later when we would get prerecorded musical bridges and multiple sponsorships or no sponsor at all, and no audience. It was also one of the better evening network detective shows to be done in New York.

OTR BUFFET:  Do you know how did they get the idea of using a crime photographer as the main character of a show?

JOE WEBB: It was pulp writer George Harmon Coxe who came up with the idea for the short stories that appeared in Black Mask magazine. It was common to adapt pulp characters to radio, the Shadow being the most obvious example. It seems that one of the editors at Black Mask added “Flashgun” to the name.

OTR BUFFET: I truly do not remember Casey every photographing anything. I'm sure he did but it seems like there was little photographing going on. Am I mistaken?

JOE WEBB:  You are. It's one of the first things that he does when he gets to a scene in many episodes, but it's rarely a factor in the story. With a title like “Crime Photographer” you'd expect some kind of great revelation in developing the crime scene films, almost like in the famous Jimmy Stewart film Call Northside 777 except it would be happening every week. But having Casey be a crime photographer is basically just a device that allows an amateur detective to have access to crime scenes that the police always seem to incompetent or too hand-tied to solve on their own.

OTR BUFFET:  Is the Casey character based on a real life crime photographer?

JOE WEBB: The book by Randy Cox and Dave Siegel, the most comprehensive about the Casey character and radio series, explains that Coxe's newspaper experience exposed him to the details of reporters and photographers. He felt reporters were always getting all the attention and that it might be interesting to use a photographer as a central figure in some of his writing.

OTR BUFFET: How important is the Blue Note Cafe to the show?

JOE WEBB: I never thought much about it, but in reading about the series, it's quite clear that it had quite an effect. From the show's perspective, it became a gathering place for the characters to explain facts about the crime or to tie up some loose ends. During the show it was used to move the action along or reveal a clue. But it inspired many restaurants to adopt the name. One thing I've found quite interesting was that budding jazz pianists used to listen just to hear Herman Chittison play. Early in the series, the pianist had a speaking role, as can be heard in “Clue in the Clouds,” but it would later be just for background music. If you carefully listen to the music, you can hear why pianists would be impressed by Chittison's playing, and also the fact that he had a regular gig on a popular network show.

OTR BUFFET: I think one of radio's greatest characters is on this show and I'm talking of course about Ethelbert, who was played by John Gibson. Gibson was everywhere in the Golden Age of Radio. Would you talk about Gibson and his role of Ethelbert?

JOE WEBB: Gibson was actually on the show longer than Staats Cotsworth. He was a marvelous talent, especially in playing someone as clueless as Ethelbert was supposed to be. People can see him in one of the more popular Honeymooners episodes, “The Golfer,” and in three others, uncredited, as a Raccoon Lodge member. For as clueless as Ethelbert was, some plots revolve around him making some corny crack at mid-show that gives Casey an idea that solves the case. And of course, many of the shows end with Ethelbert relating one of his sister Edna's life-illuminating maxims. Ethelbert gets to try his hand at detecting in one of the Toni-sponsored shows, “Scene of the Crime,” and realizes it's better to be a bartender.

OTR BUFFET: Were crime photographers big during the 40s? Nowadays they seem nonexistent.

JOE WEBB: They were really needed then, but we have TV crews now and handheld video. Most reporters today are responsible for taking their own pictures with digital cameras or even with their iPhones. Back in the 1940s, when the show took place, you had to lug around a lot of equipment, and know a great deal about how to expose and process film, and especially lighting. The crime photographer at that time could not choose the conditions under which they could shoot their pictures. They didn't have the luxury of people dying in photographer studios with proper lighting. They had to assess the crime site, the lighting, and the angles, very quickly, without impeding the police. The difficulty of their jobs was probably unappreciated at the time, which is probably why Casey was always complaining about money.

OTR BUFFET: Do you have any cool Casey trivia? Anything else you'd like to add?

JOE WEBB: The original choice for the part was Frank Lovejoy, but he decided to work on a Broadway-bound play instead. The play was “The Snark was a Boojum,” and rehearsals were in Cape Cod and previews in Boston. When it finally opened on Broadway in the Fall of 1943, it was so bad it closed after four or five performances. But we'd later hear Lovejoy as a reporter on Night Beat, of course. But eventually, Staats Cotsworth would get the part, and he was perfect.

The continuity of the series can be a bit haphazard. In some shows, the wide age difference between Casey and reporter Ann Williams is noted, and other times, it's implied it's just a few years. The show is supposed to be in Boston, but over the episodes, there are more references to New York City.

The only thing I have to add is that if someone has never heard the series before, listen to some of the early Anchor Hocking shows from 1947. Be sure to avoid the shows “Great Grandfather's Rent Receipt,” “Mysterious Lodger,” “Woman of Mystery,” “Thunderbolt,” and most of the Toni-sponsored run, though I did mention two earlier that are just okay from that series. The rest are generally fine. “Demon Miner” was originally a Shadow script written by Cole, but Blue Coal rejected it because the crimes occurred in a coal mine. Cole adapted it to Casey quite well, but it doesn't have the same feel as the other shows. It does end up being one of the better episodes, however. But perhaps I feel that way because it was the first episode I ever heard.

OTR BUFFET:  Awesome stuff, Joe!  Thanks for the interview.


©Jimbo 2010/2011

Staats Cotsworth did not like studio audiences

Crime Photographer

Photo dump/March 16th

Shirley Mitchell

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Casey, Press Photographer

The show you probably know as, Casey, Crime Photographer actually had a couple of other names before they settled on the one most of us are more familiar with.