Vincent Price Interview Transcript re AD 1

[Bill Hollweg]

Here's a transcription of the 1970 interview with Price on Radio acting:

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Q: You started your radio career right after your 1935 Broadway debut in VICTORIA REGINA, appearing in a scene from THERE'S ALWAYS JULIET, with Cornelia Otis Skinner (on June 18, 1936) and then on RCA's MAGIC KEY THEATER, doing a scene from VICTORIA REGINA with Helen Hayes.

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, I could get radio jobs because I was in a hit play. So I would take advantage of that, and I worked on radio every single week, and maybe did five or six shows a week, playing in these different kinds of radio dramas. I learnt my business, how you really create a part orally, and it was an exciting and wonderful experience. I felt that on radio, the one experience that I really could get and afford (to do) was to work on soap operas. Marvelous things, like JOHN'S OTHER WIFE or SAM'S OTHER MOTHER. Extraordinary soap opera stories, and I would go and work on these without a name, without anything, because I was not a part of the radio group (of actors).

Q: Do you keep copies of any of the radio shows you did in the thirties and forties?

VINCENT PRICE: No, but there are lot's of people around the country collecting old radio shows and putting them on tape and bringing them up in sound quality. They're doing a really marvelous job. I think I must have done well over 2,000 radio shows in my life, but I don't have many of them, because at the time it cost a lot of money to put them on acetate records, and you didn't get paid very much in radio. So unless it was a very special show, you didn't order it taken off the air.

Q: Of course, nowadays you can make copies quite cheaply.

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, but back then, if I wanted a show like THE SAINT taken off the air, it would cost about $60! That was a lot of money in those days, and you weren't paid that much. I did have some shows taken off the air, mostly the LUX RADIO THEATER shows, because all the actors gave their services to LUX RADIO THEATER, since the money was then given to the motion picture home and relief fund. So they always gave us recordings of those shows and I have all the one's I did on LUX, like THE LETTER, with Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall, and DRAGONWYCK, with Gene Tierney and Walter Huston. And I did a show with Tallulah Bankhead on the PHILLIP MORRIS PLAYHOUSE, and she was marvelous. Really superb actors and great memories they are.

Q: LUX was one of the biggest radio shows on the air during the forties.

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, and Cecil B. DeMille was the host and they had William Keighley and different people, all very distinguished directors. The fact that the money went to the Actors fund was very impressive. Besides, I suppose it also had one of the biggest listening audiences of all time. And these radio dramas were rehearsed like plays. You rehearsed a full week, and some of the most exciting ones I did were THE LETTER, with Bette Davis. That was kind of an extraordinary story, because of Bette—being as volatile a lady as she is. You know, she was a wiggler, and wiggling was something that you weren't meant to do in radio. You were meant to keep your distance from that mike. They finally built an iron circle around the mike, to keep Bette's distance from the mike, because she'd fall in love with it. She'd get up close to it and it would pop and hiss and do all the things that happen when you get too close to a mike—which I'm probably doing right now.

Q: So you had plenty of time for rehearsal—you didn't just come in and have to read the script cold?

VINCENT PRICE: That's right, there was a very long rehearsal period and you really worked. You maybe started at 10:00 in the morning, working right straight through, until you did the show at 9:00 that night. It was long hours of work. The extraordinary thing about radio was the care that went into the shows. There was a kind of perfection about the radio actor that was extraordinary. It was a very small group of people, and I always felt myself enormously privileged that I was able to join that group, because they didn't take everybody in—not by a long shot! If you liked radio as much as I did, you depended on these people. People like Lurene Tuttle and Hans Conreid, who could do anything! They really could do anything. If somebody who was doing a Greek suddenly got sick, you'd say, "Hans, how about it?" and he was a Greek, or he was a Russian, or whatever you wanted him to be.

Q: And you acted in some very scary radio shows, like SUSPENE and ESCAPE.

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, and I did a show called THREE SKELETON KEY, which was about three men who were trapped in a lighthouse when the rats invaded this little island, and it still is one of the most exciting radio shows I ever did in my life. It was tremendously thrilling. The young fellow who wrote it, I challenged him to write it. He was sort of trying to get into movies and his name was James Poe. He's since won about five Academy Awards, but he couldn't really get started. He and his wife were great friends of ours, so I said, "why don't you write me a radio show? He said, "I don't know how to write for radio." I said, "what do you mean you don't know how to write for radio? You write. You create visual effects. So he searched around and found this short story and he adapted it to radio and it really made his reputation, this story, because it became one of the really great radio shows ever done.

Q: They never made THREE SKELETON KEY into a movie.

VINCENT PRICE: It should be, but where are you going to get that many trained rats, except in New York. I also did radio plays like ANGEL STREET, which was about a fella who was trying to drive his wife mad. It was a very exciting play, which ran for five years on Broadway.

Q: You mentioned before how much you liked listening to radio shows like Jack Benny's show.

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, and I've got to tell you a marvelous radio story. For years and years I always listened to Jack Benny, who was really the greatest single performer on radio there ever was. He was absolutely brilliant. He could take ten minutes of dead air and make you fall on your face laughing. If you remember, Ronald Colman was always the next door neighbor of the Benny's (on his show). The Benny's were always so chintzy and cheap they never had enough of anything so they were always going over to the Colman's to borrow a cup of sugar, or eggs, or something. So lap dissolve a few years later, when I did a film with Ronald Colman (CHAMPANGE FOR CAESAR), and he and his wife asked me and my wife over to dinner. Well we always knew where Jack Benny lived, it was one of the sort of landmarks of Hollywood. So we got in the car all dressed-up, went down next to Jack Benny's, went up to the front door, rang the bell and said, "Mr. and Mrs. Colman are expecting us," but they didn't live there at all. (laughter). Nor did we know where the hell they lived! We finally had to call the Screen Actors Guild to find out where the Colman's lived. That shows you what a radio fan I was. I always thought that the Colman's lived next door to Jack Benny, and in his basement was a vault with chains around it.

Q: Since actors were usually under contract to a studio in those days, did you have any trouble getting permission to do freelance radio shows?

VINCENT PRICE: Well, when I first went out to Hollywood as a movie actor, I had it written in my contract with 20th Century-Fox that I had the freedom to do radio—of course there was no television at the time. But they were really very sticky about this. They were kind of angry that I should want this. I said, "I feel radio is my training ground, and that's where I want to work," so they let me do it. But of all the contract players, I was one of the few allowed to do radio, anytime I wanted to, as long as it didn't interfere with any filming. Then Fox finally put their own radio show on the air, HOLLYWOOD STAR TIME with Hedda Hopper as the M.C. We did a lot of adaptations of Fox pictures: I did LAURA, THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE. Anyway there was one show where they had two little starlets. Two pretty girls who were very sweet who were up and coming stars. And there was a character actress on the show, and none of them could do radio, because radio is not just getting up and reading, it is acting. Well, Lurene Tuttle was playing the Mother on the show, and after a day of rehearsal they told one of the little starlets she would have to go, so Lurene took over that part. Then the following day they got rid of the next starlet and Lurene took her part. It ended up with Lurene playing five or six different parts. Lurene was a great friend of mine, and had been a great leading lady on the stage, but it ended up with me being absolutely hysterical, because she was playing a woman 80, a woman 50, a woman 40, a child 13, any part that came up. So it was only Lurene and myself in a show that should have been seven people! I finally had to work on a separate mike because I couldn't look at her. She changed her whole characterization. She was brilliant.

[Bill Hollweg]

Q: Did you find that some film actors were afraid of doing radio?

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, some were terrified of it. Most of the stars at Fox, and I mean the great stars like Tyrone Power and people like that, when Fox had it's own show, there were very few of them who knew how to work on radio. They didn't know how to read. They couldn't sustain it, they couldn't give it a variety and it had to have a variety and a tremendous excitement to it. Even if it was a very calm performance, it had to have an inner excitement.

Q: Radio's heyday really came to an end with the rise of television in the late fifties.

VINCENT PRICE: Yes, and when we finally did the last SUSPENSE show in Hollywood, with all the people who had been on every radio show you ever heard from Hollywood in the old days, we were all sitting around and Virginia Gregg, who was one of the great ladies of radio finally looked around and said, "isn't it awful—if only television was going out and radio was coming in." It was true, too—we all felt that way. I still think radio is probably the greatest entertainment medium ever invented. It made the audience work, and I think television audiences don't have to work—that's why they fall asleep half of the time. I really think the commercial people, who ever they are, who say whether we work or don't work, are making a big mistake. In California, you drive enormous distances and I have the radio on all the time and I'd like to hear something good.

VINCENT PRICE on Radio Acting

(From THE PRICE OF FEAR)

Radio is my favorite entertainment medium. I really mean this, though I've had a go at most of the others: stage, cinema, television, even musical comedy and the lecture platform. But all of us who have worked in radio in its great days in America, and its still great days in the UK, are devoted to it for so many reasons that it's hard to list them all.

Radio is the neatest of all the show biz media. Neat seems a funny way to describe it, but it's, well, just neat! There doesn't seem to be that disturbing, unnerving waste of time, which is so much a part of film work. It's always been well organized and by the very nature of it always on time. Oh how important that is to artists of any discipline! Also, it is concentrated and consecutive; it does not start in the middle and end at the beginning like so much television and film work. There is plenty of rehearsal usually and the fact of not having to memorize lines relieves the radio artist of that bugaboo of the stage.

But what makes radio really exciting is the all-round creativity of it. The writer creates the original, then the director creates the ambiance for the actors, and the brilliant technicians who manipulate the tapes, dials, sounds and music create the atmosphere. But the most creative of all participants in the joys of radio are the listeners, the audience. While we in the broadcasting studio are giving our all to them, they in their turn are truly creating us. The listener is set designer, costume designer, make-up man, and even the casting department. They 'see' the characters they hear, then put them into the drama quite literally, in make-up, into the set, the wardrobe, even the mood and atmosphere.

For the actor these macabre kinds of stories are an enormous and satisfying challenge. They call upon us to make the unreal real, the sometimes unbelievable believable. They demand the exact opposite of realistic drama; they come close, often too close, to comedy, even farce, but there again is the challenge for the performer. People have asked me a thousand times if I resent being associated so closely with the drama of fright. Not at all, and I pity the questioner who doesn't stop to consider that many, even most of the greatest writers from the Greeks onwards have tried deliberately to frighten us for many reasons. Perhaps we are purged in this way to become better human beings; to realize that 'there are more things in heaven and earth' than we dream of; or perhaps just to give us a thrill, to jolt us out of our comfortable complacency, to tear a hole in the cloak of our materialism

[Digital Earl]

Price is a treasure. Great stuff, and thanks for posting it, Bill.

Yep, Three Skeleton Key should be a movie. You could easily do the effects, the rats, now with CG.

Classic quotes here:

"I still think radio is probably the greatest entertainment medium ever invented. It made the audience work, and I think television audiences don't have to work—that's why they fall asleep half of the time."

and

"...what makes radio really exciting is the all-round creativity of it. The writer creates the original, then the director creates the ambiance for the actors, and the brilliant technicians who manipulate the tapes, dials, sounds and music create the atmosphere. But the most creative of all participants in the joys of radio are the listeners, the audience....The listener is set designer, costume designer, make-up man, and even the casting department. They 'see' the characters they hear, then put them into the drama quite literally, in make-up, into the set, the wardrobe, even the mood and atmosphere."

[UltraRob]

Yes, thanks for posting this Bill! Price is the #2 man on my radio heroes list, right after Orson Welles, so I love hearing him discuss the subject. I often wondered myself if he'd been unhappy about being typecast as a horror guy, but now that question has been answered!

Those comments struck me too, Earl! And I won't argue with them at all!

Rob

[Bill Hollweg]

	Quote:	UltraRob
	Yes, thanks for posting this Bill! Price is the #2 man on my radio heroes list, right after Orson Welles, so I love hearing him discuss the subject. I often wondered myself if he'd been unhappy about being typecast as a horror guy, but now that question has been answered! Those comments struck me too, Earl! And I won't argue with them at all! Rob

Glad I could nelp! Orson and Vincent are my 2 faves- along with Peter Cushing in Aliens in the Mind!

[Digital Earl]

Aww, man, Aliens in the Mind is so special. I'll have to dig that up again now that you come to mention it.

It's still available via the Beeb store.
http://www.bbcshop.com/Science-Ficti.../9781846071034

Amazon

Amazon

[Bill Hollweg]

	Quote:	Digital Earl
	Aww, man, Aliens in the Mind is so special. I'll have to dig that up again now that you come to mention it. It's still available via the Beeb store. http://www.bbcshop.com/Science-Ficti.../9781846071034 Amazon Amazon

A fantastic Story!