About Corwin
Norman Corwin played the resounding chords of the American conscience
... When you peruse the cultural landscape, there are not that many folks
who have achieved the acclamation of national treasure.
-- The Hollywood Reporter
There is no actor on the stage, on the screen, or in radio, who would not drop what he is doing to be in one of Norman Corwin's radio shows. We all look up to him as a writer of the first importance, as one of the most important writers in any medium in America today. -- Charles Laughton
When I came to CBS, I was very much aware that this was the place where Norman Corwin had worked. And I can't tell you how proud it made me to walk in the door. The door was 485 Madison Ave. in New York, which was the door he walked through for years. -- Charles Kuralt CBS News anchor
You assemble, orchestrate, time and chime. To have the technique and then have something of history, past and present, to shape and utter it so it haunts listeners with big meaning for the hour, that is being alive. I am proud to have known you. -- poet Carl Sandburg
...the greatest director, the greatest writer and the greatest producer in the history of radio. - Ray Bradbury
Anything I know about drama today comes more from Norman Corwin than anybody. -- Director Robert Altman
… in the early 1940's, Norman Corwin was nearly as well known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and much admired. His brilliant dramas, fantasies, and documentaries reached into American homes--and across the ocean--as far as the radio could carry his words. - Charles Kuralt, CBS News anchor
Being unfamiliar with the power, ingenuity, and eloquence of Corwin's work, is like never having heard Shakespeare. -- Audio Dramtist Tony Palermo
He taught us then not only how to open our mouths but how to insert bright pebbles beneath our tongues so that eventually we might fire forth a sentence not only worth listening to but thinking about. -- Ray Bradbury
...Norman Corwin was my god. Well, if not actually the creator of all of heaven above and all of the Earth below, Norman was surely the Almighty's head writer. He was, he remains, without question and without the remotest possibility of a challenger, the Bard of broadcasting. -- Screenwriter Larry Gelbart, creator of M*A*S*H
Norman Corwin can do anything with words. - Charles Kuralt, CBS News anchor
Norman's work and his inspiration have been seminal for me as a writer, and as a person, though I'll never quite hit the same interstellar gulfs he leaves between his footsteps. -- writer J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5
By Corwin
I believe in promise, just promise. Once we give up the sense of promise, we're finished. I think that the future beckons us, that there's a lot of work to be done. Right now, there's cleaning up to do. The business of purging this world of the menace of sneaky cowardly, vicious, savage terror. I'm talking about anthrax and all of the goodies that appeal to the terrorist.
But any species that can weigh the very earth he's standing on, that can receive and analyze light coming from a galaxy a billion light years distant from us, any species that can produce a Beethoven and a Mozart and a Shakespeare, and the extraordinary accomplishments of our species, scientifically and in medicine and in the humanities, has illimitable opportunity for promises to be delivered and met.
Among the things not to be neglected are the expressions that have been forthright and persistent in American history, expressions in which the common person is recognized; Walt Whitman's sense of the importance of the individual. He's got a poem in "Leaves of Grass," the sense of which is: the president is there in the White House for you, not you here for him. It's a poem that expresses the value and the almost sacred obligation to recognize, to give dignity to the individual. After all, nature does. Nature respects us. There are billions of people on this globe. Think of it. No two of them have the same thumbprint.
ON HOPE:
Hope may at times be deceitful. But if so, it's the most agreeable form of deception. Even if it serves only as an emollient, hope does us a big favor. Ask anybody who suffers chronic pain whether anodyne is among the respectables of life.
There are many gradations and forms of hope, many missions assigned to it, all quoting a benefit of some kind. The invalid hopes for health, the beggar for wealth, the captive for freedom, the investor for dividends, the student for honors.
Hope has been called meager in medicine. Called the poor man's bread. But its spore can be found in palaces, too, especially on heads that wear crowns uneasily.
Not every thinker trusts hope. Benjamin Franklin believes that anyone who lives on hope will die fasting. Lincoln called hope a pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible. But we don't have to buy those reservations. It's sounder to go to poets for their slant. Hope almost always involves a reaching out. And to this point Robert Browning wrote, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Then, a poet closer to our time, Carl Sandburg, went to the heart of it:
"... Hope is a heartspun word
The evening star, inviolable over the coal mines
The ten cent crocus bulb, blooming in a used car salesroom
The horseshoe over the door, the luckpiece in the pocket... "
But hoping and wishing sometimes get confused. Hope is long-term, it can last a lifetime. Whereas wishes tend to be short order: blow out the candle and make a wish. I wish they'd turn down the noise in this joint. I'm driving on the 101, wish me luck.
In the context of a world in which a day in September has now been permanently stained and terror has joined the posse of the apocalyptic horsemen, pestilence, war, famine and death, hope becomes dearer than ever.
It's risky to moan and wring hands over the threat of terror, because that means surrendering to the foulest and most insidious enemy of us all, demoralization.
Even if hope at times is a delusion, it sure as hell beats despair.
Stranger things have happened than that hope may be the seed and nursery of a tree, of a peace whose shade will one day spread wider than the shadow of war.
"I have no apology to make for the affirmative tone of these scripts.
I am convinced we will get where we want to go. It will be be grim en
route, but I think there is nothing to be said for cynicism and despair,
and everything to be said for getting out and working toward a better
world."
--
from the foreward to "Untitled and Other Radio Dramas"
I would like to disclaim the notion that I am at all times a serious and intense documentarian. I like to fool around, I like kidding, I like brash verse.
ON RADIO
My kind of radio is that which takes into account the intelligence of my audience. I do not believe in talking down. I also brought to the microphone my concerns; my feeling about society; my feeling about war and peace; my feeling about man as a species that is developing and for which we cherish hopes, frequently dashed, as they are at the moment. Certainly long delayed. We're speaking not too long after the terrible event of September 11, 2001.
I really believe that had the great poets of yore been around today, or men of their caliber, they would opt for radio because radio is a medium that sets up the listener as a collaborator. Whereas television, which is by far the richer and more potent medium today, is very literal. Radio demands, requires the collaboration, just as a good book does: the collaboration being between the writer and the reader. Here it is between the writer and the listener.
What radio has the capacity to offer is an embellishment, is thoughtfulness, is an opportunity to express concepts, to witness a war, to comment upon its ramifications, its progress, its justice or injustice, its horror, its goals, in something approaching dignified language. I don't mean that in the sense of starchy or high falutin,' but something that is not gutter, something that is more than a gut reaction.
Some day I hope that there will be enough of an audience so that radio, as you and I know it, can be revitalized, can return. It exists in small measure now. That kind of radio has retreated to the high ground, [in] work that is done by dramatists who are broadcast by NPR, by PRI. Public radio is the high ground. My last six programs, done with the help and inspiration of Mary Beth Kirchner, were broadcast nationally and they enjoyed the kind of freedom that I had in the days of Bill Paley and Bill Lewis. They had pretty good audiences. I was surprised by the number of people who spent money to acquire cassettes of some of those programs. So it is not as though we're talking about an extinct form of broadcasting.
First, radio is a stage with a bare set. This is not a deprivation, but an advantage, for a bare proscenium should be as inviting to a radio playwright or director as a bare wall is to a muralist, as a silent organ was to Bach.
Sound itself attracts -- ask any eavesdropper. Sound is the first stirring of the infant. He hears sounds, he puts them together, they cohere. Sounds have a romance. The sound of a cricket at night to establish a mood in a radio drama: a very simple effect. The sound of thunder. The sound of rain. There is no sound on the moon because it takes air to support it; the vibrations of air create the sound. And radio was a medium which employed that magic…
...any creative man worth a grain of riboflavin bears a responsibility to these times and to the common people of the world.
The liberal more often than not holds that he is true to himself when he is true to the republic. At least the great liberals in history have functioned in this way. It is the reactionary or revolutionary who begins by being true to himself, and works outward from there until he is certain that what is best for himself is best for the republic.
It was my good friend Sam'l Johnson, whom I staked to many a hot grog at the Tavern, who said "A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge." The crack is inscibed high over the hurrying public on the walls of the Union Station in Washington, and it is the only decent thing left in that city.
A tough answer turneth away rats.
We have come to a time of evil, of corruption, of hysteria, of the ascendency of the materialist values until the dollar is not just a god but God Almighty.
The world is too small and life is too short not to want to spend the best part of one's waking time making both better.
Cats are designated friends.
Essentially, Los Angeles is an extrapolated Indianapolis, with palm trees.
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