Wunderkind Out

Last week Procter & Gamble, biggest soap-opera impresario in the land, decided that it was ill-advised to run duplicating shows on NBC's Red and Blue networks, proceeded to cut down on its aerial schedule. While the economical mood was on it, P. & G. also decided to give up its Everyman's Theatre, least popular of its three nocturnal programs, on which it had given radio's wunderkind, Arch Oboler, free rein since last October.

This is a rather unusual situation for Arch Oboler, who is so anxious to hold his franchise as a prodigy that he admits only "roughly" to 31. Ever since he graduated from pulp writing to horror scripts five years ago, he has sedulously and successfully cultivated the notion that his out-rourings represent art of a very high order. A great wind-sawer at rehearsals, Director Oboler has worked with such lights as Nazimova, Bette Davis, considers himself a sort of Radio Reinhardt. Betimes he has ghostwritten a biography of the late Tex Rickard, recently adapted Escape for the screen, is now under commitment to write the screen play for The Flying Yorkshireman. When he discusses radio, he is fond of such pronunciamentos as: "The very first premise for writing good radio should be actually having something to say that hasn't been said before quite in the manner in which you say it." Unfortunately Arch Oboler has never managed to live up to his own dictum. His early shriek-and-shudder work smacked of the pulps he had lately abandoned, and his latter-day effusions never lose their soapy flavor even when social significance is being dragged in by the ears.

Although Arch Oboler has no quarrel with P. & G., he claims to be pleased that his commercial shows are ended. Says he: "We can't just do business as usual in these days, and I can't work my editorial policy in with an advertiser." He hopes to put his editorial policy across by way of an hour sustaining show once a month. "I don't want to do the sort of thing The Free Company (TIME, Feb. 24) is doing," he pontificates. "No flare of drums and 'now we take you to Valley Forge'. . . . We don't need pompous democracy. I'm no junior Laval."

Last week Arch Oboler doffed his inevitable sweat shirt in Hollywood, headed for Manhattan to talk over his sustaining series with NBC. Typical plot he has in mind: A man and wife live all by themselves in an apartment, refusing to speak to other occupants. Then a gangster moves into the apartment house and the man and wife discover they can't isolate themselves from others. "See," he says, "that's like American isolationists, and the gangster could be Hitler." The rest of the series is along the same lines.

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