#The twonky short story for free
#The twonky short story tv

The actors, starting with Hans Conried, were all stars from radio. Most of the action takes place in one large house, one might speculate that it was Obler's. This was not a film industry production but an independent (yeah, they had them in those days) production.

#The twonky short story tv

Obler had already begun writing and producing for TV when he shot THE TWONKY. LIGHTS OUT was a sort of precursor to the Twilight Zone, heavily weighted as a writer's medium, taking up serious subjects in a fantastical genre. His show LIGHTS OUT was universally admired. Arch Obler was a radio hot shot, representing absolutely the summit of the mediums achievement. But in 1951 the film industry was basically in ostrich mode. When Ronald Reagan also went into production with Revue it was a secret and illegal if not unethical. The actors like Robert Montgomery, David Niven, Charles Boyer etc. Reagan went from 18th vice-president of SAG to president because the other 19 guys quit to go into independent production because of the Consent Decree and being a producer and actor's union official was a Conflict of Interest. This was actually illegal because it was a clear conflict of interest for a company to both represent talent and produce (employ them) but they got an exception because of a deal made by the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. Only Universal, owned by the Music Company of America, the major talent agency in Hollywood, went into television with their Revue Productions.

#The twonky short story for free

Independent producer Sam Goldwyn was more forthcoming, expressing the sense of doom that the other moguls refused to articulate when he predicted that people would stay home to watch bad movies for free instead of going out to pay for bad movies. At Warner Brothers, no television set was allowed to be seen in any set shot for the company. In THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR the voice of God is heard by families clustered around the family radio. In 1951 MGM released WALK EAST ON BEACON where the script has to go through back-flips as the FBI use television surveillance but can't mention the word television. The film industry's response was to go out of its way to ignore television. Often sponsors or their ad agencies produced the shows themselves. Sponsors bought time for particular shows and became identified with the shows. It fit into the radio model pattern, sponsorship, shows of 15, 30 and one-hour lengths. NBC and CBS along with DuMont and Westinghouse were the first to start up stations. Television was taken up by the Radio Industry. It was thought that films could be distributed electronically from central points saving on prints, projectionists, physically transporting reels of film, etc. It gives one pause to think what about what we accept as history from more remote times? Famously the film industry was offered (before WW2) Television first.

Yet this is what's taught in out Universities.

As someone whose had a TV since 1948 and can remember as far back as 1949 with certainty I know that this is completely wrong. His idea was that the film industry had taken control of television from the very beginning. The textbook author, a Johns Hopkins professor no less, was too young to have experienced the era he was writing about and appeared to have established a hypothesis, and then bent some facts, ignored a lot of other facts, shoehorned non-compatible ideas and reinterpreted events to suit his thesis. in American Studies from a South Korean University and therefore a certified expert in American Studies. The professor of the American Studies class was a South Korean with a PhD. Then he showed me his text book and damn if the text book wasn't 100% wrong about what had actually happened. I gave him the run down and when he showed me his paper it was 180 degrees from what I had told him. This may have nothing to do about nothing, but a college film student friend of mine was taking a course in American Studies and had to write a paper on the relationship between the film industry and the establishment of early television.