Radio: Gold Mine

Standing in a Manhattan bar one night last spring, Newsman Carey Wilber watched, with mounting amazement, the unfolding of a TV drama. When it was over, Wilber said to the bartender: “I can write stuff as good as that.” The next day he bought a second-hand book entitled The Television Program. He read it on his way to Toronto, where he was working as a reporter on the Globe and Mail. Then he wrote a 30-minute TV script which was promptly bought by Armstrong Circle Theater. Last week another Wilber play, The Fire Below and the Devil Above, appeared on Kraft Television Theater. It was the 18th TV drama he has sold in the past eleven months.

Just Like Captions. Television and 36-year-old Carey Wilber seem made for each other. Though he has spent 17 years as a newsman and is still starry-eyed about the “romance of the fourth estate,” he has never been more than a journey man journalist. He has written a few short stories, but has never been able to sell any. He started a historical novel (“It was about a sad sack in the War of the Roses”), but couldn’t finish it. Yet almost everything he writes for TV is snapped up by eager producers. It takes him as little as seven hours to do a 30-minute show, and he can turn out an hour-long drama in three days. The long est he has worked on a script has been two weeks, and Wilber thinks it is significant that it is one of the few still unsold.

Wilber quit his Toronto job ten months ago. He lives and works in an off-Broad way hotel, equipped with a rented TV set and a rented typewriter. His formula is simplicity itself: “I think of the pictures I need to tell a story and then arrange them in the sequence I think best—from there on it’s just like working on the copy desk and writing captions for a picture.” His plots are equally simple: “I get two characters going and I put them in a mess, and then they write the show themselves.”

Klondike Vein. A Wilber TV play is often spiced with Spillane-type violence: a flogging or a torture scene or a near-lynching. His heroines are outright symbols of purity, his villains ‘are double-dyed, his heroes are properly heroic. A TV producer describes the typical Wilber melodrama as “a handling of clichés that somehow keeps the viewer from realizing he’s watching clichés.” Wilber’s favorite author is Jack London but, he admits, “I’ve never read much of London or anyone else.” He has seen only one stage play in his life (The Male Animal). He is so innocent of the theater that he called one of his TV shows The Cherry Orchard and was flabbergasted to learn that a writer named Chekhov had beaten him to the title by almost half a century. For backgrounds, Buffalo-born Wilber draws heavily on his own experiences and on stories he has heard during his tours of duty on such papers as the old Buffalo Times (where he started as a copy boy), the Birmingham Age-Herald, Milwaukee Journal, Memphis Commercial Appeal, and as a stringer for Alaska’s Ketchikan Chronicle and Anchorage Times.

His Alaska visit in 1946 gave Wilber the material for two of his best scripts, A Long Night in Forty Mile and Two Pale Horsemen. Alaska also gave him a touch of gold fever. He does not think of TV writing as a lifework. What he wants to do is make enough money to head back to the Klondike in style. He says, mysteriously: “I know of a lost vein on a ridge between the Chitanana and the Cosna Rivers. I’m going to go back there and dig it out.”