Radio: Drama Factory

With an outsize birthday cake and 200 winking candles, television’s biggest drama factory last week celebrated an occasion. NBC’s Matinee Theater, which makes an earnest try at bringing a full hour of live theater to 5,000,000 daytime viewers every weekday (3 p.m., E.D.T.). ground out its 200th production in nine months—the equivalent of more than five seasons of once-a-week TV.

Matinee Theater uses more scripts, actors, directors and properties than any other show on the air. Since its first show (J. P. Marquand’s Beginning Now), some 2,000 actors have slipped in and out of 5,000 costumes for Matinee’s forays into contemporary drama (93), comedy (35), period pieces (20) and the classics (11). Actor-Crooner John Conte has clocked in a record 3,240 minutes of work on-camera as the show’s host.

Matinee has been bought by such sponsors as Bab-O, Motorola TV and Tide, but it has never been a sponsor sellout. However, prestige-conscious NBC is so happy with its plaything that it has booked Matinee for a second year, with a $5,000,000 budget. An “Emmy” Award winner (“Best contribution to daytime programming”), Matinee currently gets more than 2,000 letters a month, last week vaulted into the top slot of daytime dramatic-show ratings.

Delicacy or Violence. Mastermind of Matinee is volatile, grey-eyed Albert McCleery, 44, an ex-paratrooper who runs his big assembly-line operation as if he were a field marshal. From his studio in a converted Hollywood drugstore, McCleery shuttles from one rehearsal to the next (five go on at once), and blocks out his shows, working with about 50 scripts, six to eight weeks ahead. His editorial staff—far bigger than that of most publishing houses—includes a file of 250 contributing authors, rewrite men and story “doctors,” ten editors and readers. McCleery’s biggest headaches begin and end with scripts. He maintains a nine-man Manhattan staff to cull magazines, newspapers, plays and book lists. “There is no such thing as a starving writer any more,” McCleery avers. “There are only lazy writers, off-beat writers and hacks.”

If McCleery has a formula, it is “selective realism,” i.e., showing “with either delicacy or violence” what happens to a human being in a crisis. His favorite techniques are screen-filling closeups (“If an actor is talking, what’s more important than his mouth?”).

Solve the Problem. Most of McCleery’s shows have an “upbeat ending.” “The afternoon is no time to wring people’s hearts out,” he explains. “If I were doing Romeo and Juliet, I would show their ghosts floating gently up to heaven, hand in hand. Even with a four-handkerchief show, the ending must come out satisfactorily. If we can’t solve a problem, we don’t pose it.”

By Matinee-time the children in many homes are napping and housewives are resting from their homework. “But,” says McCleery, “people like honest, literate stuff at any time, not the soap-opera kind.” Monday he gives them his “most realistic, experimental and artistic” shows (with Actors’ Studio overtones). Tuesday is “problem-play-with-guts” day. “We pick them up with a comedy on Wednesday, if we can find one.” Thursday he tries for an offbeat production, “with a gimmick twist,” and Friday is a rehash of a Broadway play. Mostly, McCleery is in a Monday mood: “Here are my people. Look at them and listen to them. They are part of life.”