459 results for 'Jack Benny: All's Welles'

Since the days of the nickelodeons, serials (or “chapter plays,” as they were also called) entertained motion picture audiences by spreading out a story over several installments, generally 20-30 ...

Fans of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar are generally in agreement that it was actor Bob Bailey who made “America’s fabulous freelance investigator” the old-time radio icon he is today. (I apologize ...

During his long-running stint as the titular sleuth on Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, actor Bennett Kilpack—born William Bennett Kilpack on this date in 1883 in Long Melford, Suffolk in the Uni ...

Whether you know him as Teddy Bergman (his birth name) or Alan Reed—an identity he adopted to separate his comedic roles from the dramatic ones (as well as downplay his Jewish heritage)—you certai ...

“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” So declared the man born Samuel Dashiell Hammett on this date in 1894, a confession he made to his daughter Joseph ...

On this date in 1943, the first of several attempts to introduce radio to one of the most memorable of literary sleuths got underway. Nero Wolfe, the well-upholstered creation of author Rex Stout, ...

Radio writer and playwright Arch Oboler once had these words of praise for the man he would eventually replace as the mind behind the mayhem that fueled the horror series Lights Out: “Radio drama ...

“America’s favorite singing cowboy,” Gene Autry, began his long-running radio series Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch in January of 1940. It was fitting that the man who began his lengthy motion picture ...

Thomas Charles Sanders was born on this date in 1904 to English parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. Old-time radio fans, of course, know him as Tom Conway, and know that he played two famous detec ...

In 1943, Universal Pictures was reaping the rewards from a revived horror movie cycle, so the studio decided in June of that year to ink a deal with Simon and Schuster to institute a film series b ...

A dilemma faced E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, a Wilmington, Delaware firm founded in 1802 as a gunpowder mill. It was that whole gunpowder thing, of which DuPont manufactured plenty during ...

In his invaluable reference book The Great Radio Soap Operas, author Jim Cox opines that Gertrude “Trudy” Warner—born in Hartford, Connecticut on this day in 1917—“may have played the leads or fem ...

The man responsible for the motion picture career of actor William Lawrence Boyd—born in Hendrysburg, Ohio on this date in 1895—was without question Cecil B. DeMille. The famed director-producer c ...

At the turn of the twentieth century, a career as an actor or actress was frowned upon in “proper” society.” Aspirations to trod amongst the footlights were held in low regard, particularly among ...

On January 14, 1953, TV’s This is Your Life paid tribute to “The King of the Cowboys”—none other than Roy Rogers himself. Host Ralph Edwards presided over some predictably teary-eyed moments duri ...

In 1932, having been dismissed from his position as a vice-president with the Dabney Oil Syndicate, Raymond Chandler decided to take up writing detective fiction to make a living. Chandler had pr ...