Dodge Brothers Hour, The

Synopsis: An experiment by the NBC radio network and The Dodge Brothers Hour in which motion picture audiences heard words spoken by the great silent screen actors from United Artists - Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Talmadge and John Barrymore and others. Barrymore gave Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy (III, i). The broadcast was not a success. Clear reception was hindered by rainfall throughout much of the Northeast and ice storms in the Midwest. Audiences at the 5th Avenue Playhouse in New York chanted "take it off!" and after twenty minutes it was. Farr (op cit) notes that ‘Barrymore was said to have been pleasantly fortified and claimed complete indifference toward the whole business’.
Language: English
Country: United States
Medium: Radio
Transmission details: 29 Mar 1928 (Channel: NBC)
Duration: 60 mins
Availability: No surviving copy.

Cast

John Barrymore

General: Audiences first had to listen to Dodge company president Edward G. Wilmer praise his latest model car , "The Standard Six" for over ten minutes.
Reviews: Bob Farr ‘Screened But Not Heard’: the Big Broadcast of 1928’. http://www.otr.com/1928.html (accessed 4/2007).

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