The March of Time

So Bob Gaffney is very important in the unmade Kubrick-Napoleon movie.

He actually got started working for this guy, Louis de Rochemont, who worked at the, or, you know, was in, who he created the newsreel series, The March of Time, which we talked about in our first episode of the podcast and our first episode of Stanley Kubrick.

because kubrick saw the marshall time newsreel series which was like short documentaries they would play before you know i guess feature films or wherever on tv and he found out through a friend that the budget for those short documentaries is like fifty thousand dollars and kubrick is like wait a minute i could probably make one for like fifteen hundred and if they're making them for fifty thousand they must be getting more for them so he made one for fifteen hundred which is the day of the fight um Who was the boxer's name? Walter Cartier? And then he went to go sell it to whoever, like, March of Time or whoever, and they were like, all right, we'll give you...

Tell you what, I can do, like, $350 for the whole thing.

Like, J. Jonah Jameson, Spider-Man, or something like that.

The Mercury Theater, along with widespread public recognition of Orson Welles, was off and running.

By this time, Orson Welles was already a radio veteran, having made frequent appearances on the March of Time as early as 1935, and in fact, at the time of the Mercury Theater's formation, was engaged in a seven-part dramatization of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, which was airing on Friday evenings between July and September of 1937, and over the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Although not officially a Mercury, The series had been airing for a few weeks before the Mercury Theater even came into existence.

Several actors who were to become fixtures of the Mercury Theater on the air, such as Martin Gable, Alice Frost, Ray Collins, Virginia Wells, Mrs. Orson Welles, Agnes Moorhead, and Everett Sloan, appeared in the program, which Mr.