What happens
Hollywood producer Sidney Brand buys the stage play Sinners in Asylum from its author John Tussler and sets out to turn it into a film starring Sawyer Tarn, a European actress he has signed. Brand pushes his writers to make the story more sympathetic and the heroine more daring, while Tussler resists the changes and insists his play stay as written. Brand is distracted by the birth of his child, and his demands on the production grow more frantic. This is a satirical broadcast from Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air, first aired on January 27, 1939, in which George S. Kaufman makes his acting debut and pokes fun at the movie business.
New York City and Hollywood, California, in the film and theatre business
Characters: John Tussler, Sidney Brand, Sawyer Tarn, Roy, Palmer, Madge, Leeland, Mr. Anders
Listen for: Brand's increasingly absurd demands on the adaptation of the play, and Tussler's protests as his work is reshaped for the screen
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.