Lives of Harry Lime guide

[Wellesnet]

"‘Study Guide to The Lives of Harry Lime’ sheds light on radio series":
http://www.wellesnet.com/study-guide-li ... io-series/

[Le Chiffre]

Familiarizing myself with the Harry Lime canon also preps me for the new acquisitions coming to the University of Michigan archives. I am most excited about the Welles-written Third Man TV scripts in the collection. I felt the best way to prepare myself for looking at those scripts would be listening to the entire Lives of Harry Lime series. Who knows what differences or similarities there may be between the proposed TV series and the eventual radio series?

Amazing, that's the first I've ever heard of those Third Man TV scripts, or even about a Third Man TV show at all. I know there was a TV show later in the 50s, with Michael Rennie as Lime, but I had no idea Welles had planned one himself.

[cartergold]

Amazing, that's the first I've ever heard of those Third Man TV scripts, or even about a Third Man TV show at all. I know there was a TV show later in the 50s, with Michael Rennie as Lime, but I had no idea Welles had planned one himself.

Hello, Le Chiffre! Author of the guide here. I don't know if it was included with the announcement of the collection acquisition here at Wellesnet, but it was in the U of M announcement, which was a major inspiration for writing the guide: http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24782- ... -seen-work

I had never heard of the show until that announcement either, so I'm looking forward to reading the scripts whenever they become available. Anxious to see if there might be early elements of other Welles projects in there, especially regarding the eventual Harry Lime radio series or even Mr. Arkadin.

[Le Chiffre]

That'd be great. Nice job on the study guide, Robert, which I picked up from Amazon a few weeks ago. Like the UM writeup, your intro mentions an entire season's worth of scripts for the Harry Lime TV show! Exciting, but surprising that Welles would invest that much effort, since he only wrote a few of the radio show scripts. In any event, I look forward to hearing more about them.

I like your write-ups on each of the episodes, and I agree with you in most cases. I too think "An Old Moorish Custom" is one of the best episodes and to me seems somewhat Arkadin-like in Harry's attempt to romance the daughter of a rich gangster who lives in an ancient estate. I think the episodes play MUCH better with all the commerical breaks eliminated, so just for experiment's sake, I did some playing around with the episode last year, cutting out the commercial breaks and adding a few photos to give it a bit of a visual element:
https://vimeo.com/107055333

[Wich2]

and adding a few photos to give it a bit of a visual element:

Chief, no!

Let the Theater of the Mind work its magic.

As the Net exec's young daughter told him in the early days of TV, when he asked her how she liked the new medium:

"Oh, it's okay - but the pictures are better on Radio!"

Best,
-Craig

[Le Chiffre]

Lol. I know, I know. Like I said, it was just an experiment for the fun of it, and I stopped after only two episodes. I still stand by my statement that the shows play better without the commercial breaks, though.

That's a funny story. The exec's daughter was quite right.

[cartergold]

That'd be great. Nice job on the study guide, Robert, which I picked up from Amazon a few weeks ago. Like the UM writeup, your intro mentions an entire season's worth of scripts for the Harry Lime TV show! Exciting, but surprising that Welles would invest that much effort, since he only wrote a few of the radio show scripts. In any event, I look forward to hearing more about them.

I like your write-ups on each of the episodes, and I agree with you in most cases. I too think "An Old Moorish Custom" is one of the best episodes and to me seems somewhat Arkadin-like in Harry's attempt to romance the daughter of a rich gangster who lives in an ancient estate. I think the episodes play MUCH better with all the commerical breaks eliminated, so just for experiment's sake, I did some playing around with the episode last year, cutting out the commercial breaks and adding a few photos to give it a bit of a visual element:
https://vimeo.com/107055333

First, thanks for picking it up! After I published it I saw that you had made a guide here on the boards, so I'm glad to see we're kindred spirits in that respect.

I actually put on your video while I was working a few days ago. I did like hearing it sans commercials. The zither breaks often broke the flow of the story.

I have to say that I didn't mind the pics with the audio in your video. It wasn't very intrusive. For my part, I put pics in my book to compliment the international flavor of the series and contrast against the locations in The Third Man. It added a new dimension to Harry Lime for me since he was outside of Vienna, if that makes any sense.

[Wich2]

Robert -

Another salute to your work on this subject. As far as pics, just to be clear:

I understand your including them in a book, and why you'd do that. Just on principle, though, that's a different thing from "illustrating" a radio play.

As a person who toils in that vineyard myself, I feel a little like the serious pop musicians who first complained loudly about the "music video"-ization of their songs. They were right, that when someone assigns images to their sounds, that tends to shut out listeners creating their own in the Theater of the Imagination.

All best,
-Craig

[cartergold]

Hey Craig,

I see where you're coming from. Apologies if my reply came off a bit too harsh. The debate about whether to put pictures in the book or not was something I thought about a lot mainly because radio is the theater of the mind. Finding a lot of great images in the public domain though made for a great challenge that I hope looks alright.

Your music video example is perfect though. I grew up during the final years of MTV playing videos on a regular basis, so there are some songs that I can't divorce from their respective videos.