The Wyllis Cooper era In late 1933,
NBC writer
Wyllis Cooper conceived the idea of "a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of the listeners at the witching hour". The idea was to offer listeners a dramatic program late at night, at a time when the competition was mostly airing music. Though there had been efforts at horror on radio previously (notably ''
The Witch's Tale''), there does not seem to have been anything quite as explicit or outrageous as this on a regular basis. The first series of shows (each 15 minutes long) ran on a local NBC station,
WENR, at midnight Wednesdays, starting in January 1934. At some point, the serial concept was dropped in favor of an anthology format emphasizing crime thrillers and the supernatural. By April, the series proved successful enough to expand to a half-hour. In January 1935, the show was discontinued in order to ease Cooper's workload (he was then writing scripts for the network's prestigious
Immortal Dramas program), but was brought back by huge popular demand a few weeks later. After a successful tryout in New York City, the series was picked up by NBC and broadcast nationally, usually late at night and always on Wednesdays. The first episode aired on April 17, 1935. When
Lights Out switched to the national network, a decision was made to tone down the gore and emphasize tamer fantasy and ghost stories. Cooper's run was characterized by grisly stories spiked with dark, tongue-in-cheek humor, a sort of radio
Grand Guignol. A character might be buried, eaten, or skinned alive, vaporized in a ladle of white-hot steel, absorbed by a giant slurping
amoeba, have his arm torn off by a robot, or forced to endure torture, beating or decapitation—always with the appropriate blood-curdling acting and
sound effects. Cooper stayed on the program until June 1936, when another Chicago writer,
Arch Oboler, took over. By the time Cooper left, the series had inspired about 600 fan clubs. Only one recording survives from Cooper's 1934–1936 run, but his less gruesome scripts were occasionally rebroadcast. An interesting example is his "Three Men," which became the series' annual Christmas show (a 1937 version circulates among collectors under titles like "Uninhabited" or "Christmas Story"); it has a plot typical of Cooper's gentler fantasies. On the first Christmas after World War I, three Allied officers meet by chance in a train compartment and find one another vaguely familiar. They fall asleep and share a dream in which they are the
Three Wise Men searching for Jesus. But is it really a dream? In the best tradition of supernatural twist endings, Cooper has the officers wake to find a strange odor in their compartment—which turns out to be
myrrh and
frankincense. In the mid-1940s, Cooper's decade-old scripts were used for three brief summertime revivals of
Lights Out. The surviving recordings reveal that Cooper was experimenting with both
stream of consciousness and first-person narration a few years before these techniques were popularized in American radio drama by, among others,
Arch Oboler and
Orson Welles. In one tale (
The Haunted Cell, original broadcast date unknown, rebroadcast 7/20/1946), a murderer describes how the Chicago police try to beat a confession out of him. When that doesn't work, they put him in a jail cell haunted by the ghost of a previous occupant, a smooth gangster named Skeeter Dempsey who describes his own execution and discusses the
afterlife knowledgeably. In the final twist, the narrator reveals that he has taken Skeeter's advice to commit suicide and is now himself a ghost. Another story, originally broadcast in March 1935 as "After Five O'Clock" and revived in 1945 as "Man in the Middle," allows us to follow the thoughts of a businessman as he spends a day at the office cheating on his wife with his secretary. The amusing contrast between what the protagonist thinks to himself and what he says out loud to the other characters enlivens one of Cooper's favorite plot devices, the
love triangle. One radio critic, in reviewing a March 1935 episode that used multiple first-person narrators, said: Other Cooper scripts are more routine, perhaps in part because the author's attention was divided by other projects. From the summer of 1933 until August 1935, Cooper was NBC Chicago's continuity chief, supervising a staff of writers and editing their scripts. He resigned in order to devote more time to
Lights Out as well as a daily
aviation adventure
serial,
Flying Time. At various times, he also served on NBC's Program Planning Board, wrote the soap opera
Betty and Bob, and commuted weekly to produce another program in Des Moines, Iowa. From early 1934 to mid 1936, Cooper produced close to 120 scripts for
Lights Out. Some episode titles (all from 1935) include "The Mine of Lost Skulls," "Sepulzeda's Revenge," "Three Lights From a Match," "Play Without a Name," and "Lost in the Catacombs" (about a honeymoon couple in Rome who lose their way in the
catacombs under the city). Typical plots included: • A novelist, struggling to write a
locked room mystery, locks himself in his office only to be interrupted by a stranger who resembles the story's murderer. • A killer named "Nails" Malone has "a conference with his conscience" about the murders he's committed. • A scientist accidentally creates a giant
amoeba that grows rapidly, eats living things (like the lab assistant's cat), and exhibits powers of mind control. The show benefited tremendously from Chicago's considerable pool of creative talent. The city was, like New York, one of the main centers of radio production in 1930s America. Among the actors who participated regularly during the Cooper era were Sidney Ellstrom, Art Jacobson, Don Briggs, Bernardine Flynn, Betty Lou Gerson, and Betty Winkler. The sound effects technicians frequently had to perform numerous experiments to achieve the desired noises. Cooper once had them build a gallows and wasn't satisfied until one of the sound men personally dropped through the trap. The series had little music scoring save for the thirteen chime notes that opened the program (after a deep voice intoned, "Lights out, everybody!") and an ominous gong which was used to punctuate a scene and provide the transition to another. A veteran radio dramatist,
Ferrin Fraser, wrote some of the scripts.
The Arch Oboler era When Cooper departed, his replacement—a young, eccentric and ambitious
Arch Oboler—picked up where he left off, often following Cooper's general example but investing the scripts with his own concerns. Oboler made imaginative use of stream-of-consciousness narration and sometimes introduced social and political themes that reflected his commitment to antifascist liberalism. Although in later years
Lights Out would be closely associated with Oboler, he was always quick to credit Cooper as the series' creator and spoke highly of the older author, calling him "the unsung pioneer of radio dramatic techniques" and the first person Oboler knew of who understood that radio drama could be an art form. In June 1936, Oboler wrote and directed his first episode for
Lights Out. The play performed in the episode, titled "Burial Services", was about a paralyzed girl who gets buried alive. The episode was poorly received, and outraged listeners sent more than 50,000 letters to NBC. Afterwards, NBC banned the program from airing before 11 p.m. His next story, one of his most popular efforts, was the frequently repeated "Catwife," about the desperate husband of a woman who turns into a giant feline. He followed with "The Dictator," about Roman emperor
Caligula. This set the pattern for Oboler's run: For every two horror episodes, he said later, he would try to write one drama on subjects that were ostensibly more serious, usually moral, social, and political issues. Like Cooper, Oboler was much in demand and highly prolific. While working on
Lights Out, he wrote numerous dramatic sketches for variety shows (
The Chase and Sanborn Hour,
Rudy Vallee's programs), anthologies (
Grand Hotel,
The First Nighter Program,
The Irene Rich Show) and specials. In August 1936, singer Vallee, then the dean of variety show hosts, claimed that
Lights Out was his favorite series. Oboler occasionally redrafted his
Lights Out scripts for use on Vallee's and other variety hours. A version of Oboler's "Prelude to Murder" starring
Peter Lorre and
Olivia de Havilland was scheduled to air on a November 1936 Vallee broadcast. Other
Lights Out plays that turned up on various late 1930s variety programs included "Danse Macabre" (with
Boris Karloff), "Alter Ego" (with
Bette Davis) and "The Harp." Oboler met the demand by adopting an unusual scripting procedure: He would lie in bed at night, smoke cigarettes, and improvise into a
Dictaphone, acting out every line of the play. In this way, he was able to complete a script quickly, sometimes in as little as 30 minutes, though he might take as long as three or four hours. In the morning, a stenographer would type up the recording for Oboler's revisions. Years later, Rod Serling, who counted radio fantasists like Cooper, Oboler, and
Norman Corwin among his inspirations, would use a similar process to churn out his many teleplays for
The Twilight Zone, a series that in many respects was to television what
Lights Out was to radio. Despite acclaim for Oboler's dramas, NBC announced it was canceling the series in the summer of 1937. According to the
Chicago Tribune, NBC did so "just to see whether listeners are still faithful to it", and encouraged readers to send letters to the station and ask for it to be revived. After two months off the air, NBC revived the program in September following a successful letter writing campaign. Among his roles: an accused murderer haunted by an unearthly woman-like demonic creature (played by
Templeton Fox) urging him to "kill...kill...kill" in "The Dream"; the desperate husband in a rebroadcast of "Catwife"; and a mad, violin-playing hermit who imprisons a pair of women, threatening to murder one and marry the other, in "Valse Triste." Oboler left in the summer of 1938 to pursue other projects, writing and directing several critically acclaimed dramatic anthology series: ''
Arch Oboler's Plays, Everyman's Theatre, and Plays for Americans
. A variety of NBC staff writers and freelancers filled in until Lights Out'' was canceled in 1939. NBC Chicago continuity editor Ken Robinson supervised some of the writing. Regular contributors included William Fifield and Hobart Donovan. A recording of the fifth anniversary show survives from this season. Donovan's "The Devil's Due," about criminals haunted by a mysterious stranger, is in keeping with the formula laid down by Cooper. The final episode aired on August 16, 1939. A third series of eight vintage Cooper scripts was scheduled to run in the summer of 1947 as well. Broadcast from Hollywood over ABC Radio, it starred Boris Karloff and was sponsored by Eversharp, whose company president canceled the series after the third episode, apparently unhappy with the gruesome subject matter. The premiere, "Death Robbery", featured Karloff as a scientist who brings his wife back from the dead, only to find she's become a gibbering homicidal maniac. An uncredited
Lurene Tuttle plays the wife. This episode is one of the few surviving examples of Cooper's
Lights Out work that reflects the sort of explicit horror that characterized the original series. Eversharp paid off Cooper for his five unused scripts and
Lights Out ended its long run on network radio. In 1947, Cooper created
Quiet, Please, another radio program dealing with the supernatural, which he wrote and directed until 1949, occasionally borrowing ideas from his
Lights Out stories while creating wholly new scripts that were often more sophisticated than his 1930s originals. In 1949 and 1950, he produced (and contributed scripts to) three live TV series that frequently dealt with the supernatural:
Volume One,
Escape and
Stage 13. ==Television==