Word: webbe
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...waitresses, children and bewildered ordinary citizens who people Dragnet seem as sorrowfully genuine as old pistols in a hockshop window. By using them to dramatize real cases from the Los Angeles police files-and by viewing them with a compassion totally absent in most fictional tales of private eyes-Webb has been able to utilize many a difficult theme (dope addiction, sex perversion) with scarcely a murmur of protest from his huge public...
...which he now hates as the captive Grecian maiden hated the mustachioed Turk, refuses to pay more than a niggling $28,000 a program, although the network extracts a total of $3,000,000 annually from the show's sponsors (biggest contributor: Chesterfield). A few months ago, however, Webb finally found a way out of this financial dilemma; to the Music Corp. of America last year he sold the rights to 100 completed Dragnets and to 95 more which will be filmed in the future. The price: approximately $5,000,000. Webb gets half...
Poverty & Slime. Jack Webb's present fame and financial independence are in-triumphant contrast to a boyhood which he likes to say was spent in "poverty and slime." His mother, Idaho-born Mrs. Maggie Smith Webb, was divorced shortly after he was born. She took the baby and her mother to California-first to San Francisco, and then, as her money dwindled, to a shabby apartment in Los Angeles. They had a bitter struggle. Jack nearly died of pneumonia when he was four. Afterward he suffered with asthma so racking that Maggie or Gram often had to carry...
Frustrated, impatient, sick of the Army, he got a dependency discharge. Early in 1945, he headed for San Francisco, sniffing opportunity. The United Nations' Conference was just beginning, and radio stations, gripped by a wartime shortage of talent, were starved for announcers. Webb landed a temporary job at station KGO, the San Francisco outlet of the American Broadcasting Co. He went through the station like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up information...
...practiced tirelessly to modulate his voice; he haunted the continuity department and the record library. He studied sound effects. Within a few months, with the help of a lean ABC staff writer named Jim Moser, he started a weekly show of his own called One Out of Seven. Webb (who got $8 extra pay) was the cast: he dramatized the big news story of the week by standing before three microphones and doing his best to imitate Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill...