Word: wilber
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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...
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...
...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...
...graduate of Harvard and a descendant of Faith Dunster, the niece of that "Godly and painful minister," Master Dunster, may I express through the columns of your esteemed paper, my congratulations to Messrs. Williams and Wilber for their sound and sensible letter in your issue of 31 November last...