Wordfest

U. S. radio prattles away at the rate of 20,000,000 words a day,* talkier than a year of Hollywood talkies, ten years of Broadway drama. Much of this chatter has to be written down first in scripts, continuity, commercials, special announce ments. The men & women who do the writing earn anywhere from $15 to $4,000 a week.

For career-seeking cubs and ink-stained oldsters considering a fling at this mighty wordfest, as well as for those interested in a chatty guided tour of radio's fabulous script mill, U. S. bookstalls last week had a handbook compiled by a radio veteran.

The veteran: tall, dark, handsome Erik Barnouw, Holland-born, Princeton-built ('29), author, dramatist, summer-stock trouper who might have become a matinee idol had he not chosen backstage radio. Now, after eight years' writing for such varied radio campaigners as Tony Wons and Orson Welles, True Story and Maxwell House, Barbasol and Koppers Coke, Erik Barnouw at 31 rests autumnally in a chair of radio writing (Radio ui-u2) at Columbia University. His 306-page Handbook of Radio Writing (Little, Brown; $2.50) he knocked off in four weeks last winter. A thoroughgoing text on the tricks of the trade, with liberal examples quoted from radio worthies like Gang Busters, The Shadow, Columbia Workshop, the new handbook also has many interesting slants on radio both as a market and as a madhouse. A few: > Highest-paid writers in the radio business are good gag men, who sometimes get as much as $1,500 a script. Authors of best-selling five-a-week serials may command $1,000 a week or more per serial. Some write as many as four best-sellers regularly. Top price for "framework" (nonserial) dramas (True Story, Big Town, etc.) : $750. Top ad agency writers (commercials, continuity) may earn $250 a week; special continuity writers on big variety shows, $100 a script. Scripts accepted from established free lances bring as much as $1,000; those from unknowns, $25-$100 and the chance for radio fame & fortune.

> In most studio archives, the world's great music is "neatly chopped up and filed away in mood-segments of a few seconds to several minutes." Grieg's very handy Peer Gynt Suite, for example, is minced under Barbaric, Carefree-Abandon, Death, Daintiness, Exotic-Grotesque, Mys-terioso-Comic, Norwegian, Storm Agitato.

> Trickiest device in radio is the voice filter, which simulates telephone conversation, radio voices, old Victrola records, fairy queens, the Shadow, the Voices of Conscience, God, other worlds. The echo chamber creates hollow reverberations for ghosts, voices from Beyond, train callers, etc. Other acoustricks: MARCH OF TIME used to muffle actors in big cardboard packing boxes; unearthly Buck Rogers overtones sometimes come from a microphone inside a grand piano. > Radio writing has almost as many taboos as tricks. A few: words like intestines, elimination, pimples, bad breath, damn; subjects like free love, bank crashes, election frauds (which may shake people's confidence in established institutions) ; villains of stated nationalities or races--which bring squawks from Irish, Germans, Italians, Mexicans, Japanese, Negroes. Less touchy are Russians, Chinese, English. Least touchy: Americans.

*Author Barnouw's cautiously calculated guesstimate. The 693 active U. S. broadcasting stations use about 11,000 hours of air time daily. The figure of 20,000,000 words a day makes allowance for duplications between network stations, music programs, sound effects, pauses for breath, etc.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.