A RADIO MAN GOES VISITING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 114, 29 August 1941, Page 17

A RADIO MAN GOES

VISITING

Beau Sheil Meets Stars of American Air and Screen

HUTTLING in a few hours over sky trails hazardously pioneered many years ago by his old associate, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the deputy-Controller of the Commercial Broadcasting Service, Beau Sheil, has just completed a visit to America in which only one week of the two months he was away from New Zealand was spent in travelling. Mr. Sheil travelled both ways by Pan-American clipper, and the time he saved was spent to good purpose visiting broadcasting studios in Hollywood and Canada and generally studying the latest devélopments in radio in. both Canada and the U.S.A. One: of Mr. Sheil’s most important contacts in Hollywood was with C. P. MacGregor, whose studios have produced many well known ZB features. The house of C. P. MacGregor is a wellequipped freehold building in the heart of Hollywood with fine studios and what is claimed to be the world’s largest dramatic library. The MacGregor studios have been seriously affected by recent protective legislation which guarantees a minimum daily wage to radio players, with a corresponding rate of payment for every country outside America in which their work is broadcast. This payment for extra broadcasts is the subject of negotiation at the moment and there is every hope of a compromise being reached, but nevertheless the legislation will have the effect of cutting out the production of features produced on a moderate budget. Fewer And Bigger Mr. MacGregor is meeting the new conditions by concentrating on a few big productions, chief among them Academy Award, the series already playing in New Zealand. By offering money well above the legal minimum, he hopes to attract more and more film stars to his studios. Several, of course, including Ona Munson, Gale Page, and Elaine Barrie Barrymore, have already been featured in Academy Award plays, and more and bigger stars will be playing in them in the future. Radio has a strong appeal to many film stars, says Mr. Sheil. Besides the well-established "top liners" such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Jack Benny, other stars are attracted by the dramatic experience radio offers. One Lux Radio Theatre show which Mr. Sheil heard starred Myrna Loy and Cary Grant in I Love You Again, based on the motion picture. The remarkable success of Lost Empire in New Zealand has been a pleasant surprise both to C. P. MacGregor and to its author, Hector Chevigny. The book Lost Empire, which ~Chevigny wrote simultaneously with the radio drama has attained close to best-seller status in America, and he has made arrangements for an Australian and New Zealand edition which will probably be printed very shortly in Australia. Chevigny has also undertaken to write a special new drama for New Zealand ZB listeners. ‘ New Musical Show One programme which Mr. Sheil ‘has brought back to New Zealand with him

will be going on the air from the Commercial Stations in about a month’s time. It is a musical show transcribed by the MacGregor studios and combines items by some of Hollywood’s best known radio stars and the dance bands playing at three of the Pacific Coast’s most famous night spots, the Coconut Grove, the Biltmore Bowl, «and Ciro’s. While in the United States, Mr. Sheil visited some dozens of radio stations, ranging from the palatial, chromiumfinished Hollywood headquarters of the National Broadcasting Company and Columbia networks to small 500 watters "in the sticks." The largest studios are magnificently appointed (though except in size, Mr. Sheil claims that Auckland’s new 1ZB studios will bear comparison with anything he saw abroad) and invariably have a large "radio theatre," complete with stage and seating for several hundred people. Ancient And Modern An oddity he noticed at the NBC studios, which boast as much chromium and modernity as any in Hollywood, \ as an organ loft housing an ancient and seemingly decrepit pipe organ patched with sticking plaster and string. Craftsmen of the old order, the men who care for it, will have nothing to do with innovations .and new-fangled gadgets, and since the organ works satisfactorily, nobody dares gainsay them. Development of Television In England, television has received a serious setback from the war, In America, however, its development is still going on, though several major technical problems have still to be

solved. One station operates in Hollywood, with a limited schedule of broadcasts. Mr. Sheil inspected it and paused awhile to be televised and marvel that television actors are able to endure more than a minute at a time of such grilling heat. Attracting more attention than television is Frequency Modulation, more commonly known as FM. While this, too, is still in the experimental stage, additional broadcasting licences have recently been granted for FM_ stations, and radio stores in Los Angeles sell a reasonably priced FM converter for standard sets. The principal advantage for FM is noise-free, high-fidelity reception in difficult areas. The Canadians Were Impressed Canadian broadcasting executives with whom Mr. Sheil talked were amazed at the extent of the service given by the ZB stations in the daytime, especially in regard to such women’s sessions as the Shopping Reporter, the Young Marrieds’ Circle, and the Bachelor Girl, and they were even more impressed by the fact that these sessions netted a clear quarter of a million dollats a year for the Commercial Broadcasting Service. Mr. Sheil is sending recordings of typical women’s sessions to Canada and he expects to‘ hear of.a spate of Canadian ‘Bachelor Girls and Shopping. Reporters before long. Mr. Sheil has also «:ranged for the interchange of special programmes between New Zealand and Canada. One of the first Canadian broadcasts which

will be heard here deals with fire prevention ~and preservation of forest areas. Lessons From Hollywood An important aspect of Mr, Sheil’s stay in Hollywood was a study of the many advances which the technical depaftments of film studios have made in sound recording. Radio can learn a lot from the movie makers in this respect, and the results of his investigations will be seen in the increasingly important work of the CBS production department. k While on a Universal Studio set he met Deanna Durbin to whom, on behalf of ZB listeners, he gave a greenstone tiki and a book of Maori. songs. Deanna will be recording a Maori song and sending it out with her customary Christmas greetings to the ZB’s. As he was presenting the gifts to Deanna, Mr. Sheil was surprised to hear a call of "Give us a haka" from the back of the set. It was from the tall, solemn Arthur Treacher, who has played butler in several of Deanna’s pictures. He toured New Zealand once with a stage company,-was delighted to meet a New Zealander again, and all work stopped on the set while he and Mr. Sheil gave the best rendering they could of a Maori haka. Mr. Sheil came back to New Zealand with the \conviction that while it is obviously futile to attempt to draw comparisons between the service offered by the ZB stations and that offered by the big American networks, New Zealanders are very well catered for as. Tre gards programme content and presentas tion. And listeners who are still not accustomed to the presence of come mercial announcements at the beginning and end of ZB programmes may be in» terested to learn that in American radio, "commercials" are frequently twice as long as they are here and that there are many more of them.