A few perspicacious readers have correctly divined from my post last week that I am indeed interested in doing something on the radio drama front in relation to the short story and that my feverish intake of all things old-time radio has spawned something of a side project. Let me just say that emails have been sent, authors have been contacted, and that scripts are being written.
Rather than keep the details mum, I’d like to invite any interested parties to contact me on this. If you are a voiceover talent, a musician, an author who would like to see her work adapted into a thirty-minute production (at the moment, the project is being helmed by volunteers, which means nobody’s making money at this), a radio writer willing to deal with a hard but encouraging story editor, an audio geek, a sound effects guru, or you’d like to jump on board with this in some other capacity, drop me a line and I’ll see if we can get you on board.
The current and wildly ambitious plan is this: I’d like to do an initial set of ten thirty-minute radio dramas — a tough and socially conscious (but not didactic) contemporary anthology series in the vein of Quiet, Please and Dimension X. Why ten? Well, the idea here is to conduct a mass casting call of talent, find out where their particular character strengths lie, and then cast them accordingly to the roles in the ten scripts we have at our disposal. Each drama would be meticulously rehearsed and then recorded over the course of one day. Trust me on this. You will be challenged, but this will be fun.
I’m shooting to get the initial slate of ten up over the course of ten weeks sometime in early 2008.
Ideally, these dramas will be based on previous material, although I have about twenty or so original story ideas in outline form. I’m now writing one script, a satirical story about disaster and religion, which I’m now about halfway into. At the moment, I’m serving as story editor and director. And I’m hoping to give other writing talents an opportunity to not only see their short stories presented in compelling dramatic form, but also, if they are interested, to either adapt their stories or possibly create new ones.
If any of this interests you, you can email me at ed@edrants.com. Please include samples and a brief history of what you’ve done. If you have a pitch for a story you’d like to write that would be acceptable for a thirty-minute production, email me and we’ll volley. I’ll try to get back to everyone within a week or so.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
This is an outstanding thing you’re doing. Radioplays, besides being the only reason I subscribe to XM Radio, are a lost art. I don’t have anything radio-worthy yet, but if this keeps going past the initial rush I’m sure you’ll hear from me.