Word: webbe
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Free Gardenias. Webb's colleagues referred to him as the "man with a hundred voices-all alike.'' Unabashed, he talked KGO into letting him do a comedy show, lured in audiences by getting a florist to donate free gardenias. "Did you call me, doctor?" he would cry. "No, I called you nurse, nurse!" In the midst of these frenetic endeavors, fortune smiled on him-a round-faced, voluble Irishman named...
...Webb was impressed; Breen, just out of the Navy, had worked in New York. Breen was impressed, too. "Jack," he recalls, "behaved as if he had a Hooper rating of 28 and was in direct competition with Jack Benny." Breen moved into Webb's $30-a-month room. A little later KGO was asked to fill an empty Sunday night half hour "for a Pacific feed" (all West Coast ABC stations). Breen, who was fascinated by San Francisco's Embarcadero, put together a hard-boiled private-eye show about waterfront crime, called it Pat Novak for Hire. Webb...
Breen assaulted his audience with sex, violence, and sounds of foghorns and lapping water. He loaded the script with similes (sample: as difficult as "sandpapering an oyster"). But as the first program began, he stood in a control booth frantically waving at Webb to underplay. The show was an instant success, and for the first time Webb knew the delights of fan mail. Pat Novak ran for 26 stirring weeks. Then Breen simultaneously quarreled with the station management and got a Hollywood offer. He quit. An hour later, Webb quit, loaded his jazz records and clothes into his 1941 Buick...
After two years in radio he was a man with a reputation. With Pat Novak in his background, he did a brisk business as a radio freelance actor. But the jobs dried up: Webb could not resist telling directors how they could improve their shows. He sought motion picture parts. But to the eternal question, "Got any film?" (any previous parts), he could only shake his head. He finally got a bit in an Eagle Lion production called Hollow Triumph. A year later he got another in a picture called He Walked by Night...
Inky-Dinks & Sink. On motion picture lots, as he had at station KGO, Webb carried on his restless and insatiable quest for knowledge. If a sound man hastily "rolled a loop" of track as an airplane passed over (so that the intruding racket could later be dubbed into parts of the scene shot after it had disappeared),Webb asked why. He watched stage carpenters make golden oak out of cheap pine sets with yellow paint and combs. He patiently learned about studio lights (brutes, seniors, juniors and inky-dinks, in order of their size), and the tricks of lighting eyes...