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The Big Story - 1946 Feature Assignment

Heard
1946
Episodes
1

The audition program, “Feature Assignment,” featured the Majczeck case that would soon become the famous 1948 Jimmy Stewart movie “Call Northside 777.”

More about it

The audition has more details about the actual events than The Big Story episodes would have. Audition recordings were used to recruit a potential sponsors for radio series. There was always the understanding that a sponsor would work with their ad agency and the show producers to craft a format, show theme, and casting that would be appealing to their desired audience. Sponsorship, rather than the purchase of advertising segments on a piecemeal basis, meant that an advertiser bankrolled the entire production. This gave them great influence over all aspects of the series.

This led to many changes in the series, especially the decision to mask the names and events in a manner that might protect the sponsor from frivolous litigation of all kinds. This was a good incident to select as an audition. The true news event already had national attention, potential advertisers could get a better sense of how a real story could transformed into a half-hour program that would engage an audience. The script for the audition was later edited and used as the fifth episode of the series, The Man Without a Name. A recording of it has not been found, but the script exists, and has been included on this Internet Archive <span style="font-style:normal

Episodes, in broadcast order

  1. (audition)

    · 27 min

Where it comes from 1

The archive items its episodes are played from, best first, with each one’s rights as its archive states them. An episode two sets both hold is played from the first.

  1. The Big Story - 1946 Feature Assignment (audition)

    Old Time Radio · The Big Story Project · 1 episode here · archive.org

    the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it.

From the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive, uploaded by the collector named.

More News & history

Radio drama, old-time radio and historic broadcasts from the Internet Archive (its Old Time Radio collection with the Old Time Radio Researchers' sets, WWII Era Audio Recordings, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Radio Haiti Archive, German radio plays and listeners' uploads), Wikimedia Commons (with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's broadcasts) and the Library of Congress. Every episode plays from its archive, which this site does not copy; rights are as each archive states them. Nothing here is called public domain on this site's say-so. In the United States, sound recordings first fixed before 15 February 1972 have federal protection under the Music Modernization Act of 2018, for most until 2067 at the latest, so most American radio of the 1930s to the 1950s is not in the public domain there. Each set shows the licence, mark or statement its archive gives, and says whose it is. Horror, crime, war and westerns are for teenage and adult profiles, racist caricature for adults only, and children’s profiles hear what was made for children. More about these archives.