Word: hummerts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Second Husband, John's Other Wife, Romance of Helen Trent, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, Lorenzo Jones, Backstage Wife, Our Gal Sunday, Young Widder Brown, Stella Dallas, Alias Jimmy Valentine, David Harum. All these were ghostwritten by some 14 anonymous authors in the names of Adman Frank Hummert and his wife, Anne...
Fifteen years ago the firm Blackett & Sample was organized by Chicago Admen Hill Blackett and John Glen Sample. In 1927 E. (for Edward) Frank Hummert, longtime newspaperman, Liberty Loan slogan writer ("Bonds or Bondage") and pressagent, joined the firm as copy writing chief. In 1930 pretty, brown-haired Anne Ashenhurst, newspaperwoman, was hired to help him. With his young new aide, Frank Hummert discovered that the jackpot in the radio business was the serial "script show...
...Hummert mill produces 50 serial scripts a week, a total of some 6,500,000 words a year. In their Greenwich, Conn. home Frank and Anne figure out the trends of their serials four to six weeks in advance, dictate outlines to a battery of stenographers. Outline for an episode (Backstage Wife) may read something like this: "Suspecting that Cynthia Valcourt murdered Candy Dolan with Ward Ellman's gun, after Tess left the fiat, Mary, Larry and Ward rush to Tony Valcourt's penthouse to have a talk with Tony and Cynthia, having sent Tess Morgan...
When a script is finished by the ghost writers it goes to an adjunct of the Hummert mill known as Air Features, Inc. for production. No Hummert ghost may even stick his nose inside Air Features' production studios...
...hiring dialogue writers, and not creators, the Hummerts save lots of money. Most serial writers in radio command $200 to $400 a week. For The Goldbergs, Gertrude Berg gets about $2,000. The Hummerts pay a minimum $25 per 15-minute script. Since most Hummert ghosts are glad to add caviar to bread-&-butter from other jobs, they have seldom squawked...