WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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This is a special 90-minute Interchange focusing on Orson Welles in his less-appreciated role as an innovator in the WWII-era radio feature, a genre of radio mixing fact and drama that is a (largely forgotten and unacknowledged) forerunner of the radio documentary, as we know it now. (Think Ira Glass and This American Life.) We’ll discuss what the radio feature was, why it arose, and what its role was in WWII, and how it relates to Welles’ signature style and concerns. We’ll feature selections from Welles’ Hello Americans and Ceiling Unlimited, programs which were official, government-sponsored propaganda.
Hello Americans: Episode 12, “Bolivar’s Idea”
Ceiling Unlimited: Episode 12, selection, “With Your Wings” (a short story by John Steinbeck)
Guest Michele Hilmes is in Bloomington to deliver the Naremore Lecture, named after James Naremore, Emeritus Chancellors’ Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and the Media School at Indiana University. Author of perhaps the best critical book on the films of Orson Welles, The Magic World of Orson Welles, Jim Naremore talked Welles with us twice on Interchange to date. Her visit and the Lecture are sponsored by the Cinema and Media Studies Unit in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington.
GUEST:
Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on media history and historiography, particularly in the areas of transnational media and sound studies. She is the author or editor of several books in this field, including Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (1997), Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011), and Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, co-edited with Jason Loviglio (2013). She was a 2013-14 Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Nottingham, England and is currently researching the history of British/American television co-production.
James Gilmore is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled “Knowing the Everyday: Wearable Technologies, Experience, and Informational Excess.” His work has been published in journals such as Television and New Media, and New Media and Society. He is co-editor of the book Superhero Synergies: Comic Book Characters Go Digital, and he is currently finishing co-editing another collection of essays, tentatively titled The Unknown Orson Welles, which will hopefully be published next year.
RELATED
“Beyond War of the Worlds: 12 Other times Orson Welles Ruled the Radio” (A.V. Club)
“Hello, Americans: Orson Welles, Latin America, and the Sounds of the “Good Neighbor” by Tom McEnaney
The Facts about “With Your Wings”—Robert DeMott on An Old John Steinbeck Short Story Recently in the News
MUSIC
All compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos
“Chore no. 1” performed by David Russell
“Valsa Choro” performed by Pepe Romero
“Bachianas brasileiras no. 5,” “I. Aria – Cantilena,” performed by Aquarelle Guitar Quartet
“Suite populaire brésilienne,” “II. Schottisch: Choro” performed by Luciano Tortorelli
NEXT UP
Eleanor Roosevelt In Love and Politics
Susan Quinn joins us to discuss her “biography” of love, Eleanor & Hick. Eleanor Roosevelt has recently been christened the “First Lady of Gay” and in Quinn’s new book we’re introduced to the woman who was likely Roosevelt’s first, and deepest, love, the journalist and writer Lorena Hickok. We’ll also talk to historian Jane Marcellus about Eleanor Roosevelt’s first book, the 1933 It’s Up to the Women; a work that Marcellus claims is a counter-statement to the propaganda project instigated by Edward Bernays for the presidential campaign of Franklin Roosevelt rolled out in the February 1932 Ladies’ Home Journal. What was “up to the women”? Patriotic shopping, of course.
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford
