WMAQ and W9XAP, the Chicago Daily News Radio and Television stations, have brought you in the past half hour, the first performance in the midwest, a visual and audible radio-play through the medium of television.
Television may be termed a new invention... demonstrating the fact that television is at last practicable, and practical. The program tonight was dedicated to those ardent and loyal television fans... Their every comment, adverse or commendatory, has been an incentive to develop this new art to the limit of present technical and mechanical capabilities.
Makers of Dreams Television test broadcast, 1931
script in the collection of
The ARTS Library
From its inception, The American Radio and Television Script Library has aimed to fill a seemingly unnoticed, yet vitally important gap in the preservation of radio and television history. Other archives, such as The Library of Congress and The Paley Center, house recordings of the shows as they were presented to the public. But before the sound stage could be set for any of those productions, the stories had to be written and rewritten; the ideas explored, polished, and finalized. Those recorded programs only tell a part of this important story; they offer little insight into the elusive, creative process of the artists who produced American broadcasting.
Inspired by this need, the Library set out on the mission to collect at least one script from every written episode produced for American radio and television. As lofty and challenging as that goal may be, it has put the Library in the singular position of being the premiere repository for television and radio scripts and related materials. Thousands of shows and tens of thousands of episodes have been produced during the past ninety years. Though the Library is not yet near its goal, it is well on the way. With more than 120,000 scripts representing over 4000 programs, this is most likely the largest collection of such material anywhere in the world.
The collection is well balanced between contemporary programs and very rare and hard-to-find early material. KNX Radio's The California Theater (1924) and Lights Out (1946,) NBC's inaugural attempt at anthology television that later would become a mainstay genre of 1950’s TV, are represented alongside scripts from series as disparate as Saturday Night Live, ER, and Law and Order. These are the working scripts of the directors, writers, actors and craftsmen who created America's radio and television programs, many of whom were pioneers in their fields. Scribbled notes for movement, voice inflection, script deletions, new text, and technical requirements are the hidden treasures found throughout this collection.
Each script has been catalogued and cared for with great respect. High standards of collection care have been maintained with guidance sought from professional archivists and conservators when needed. Detailed records are kept on acquisition history and cross-references made with relative materials. All scripts are organized and stored systematically, and are easily retrievable.
The American Radio and Television Script Library boasts well over 125,000 original scripts and rundowns from the beginning of broadcasting through to the current, popular shows of today. In addition to this core collection, there are tens of thousands of additional documents and other items including:
University of Southern California – 6000 scripts from various broadcast programs
UCLA – includes the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Collection: approximately 30,000 scripts from various films and programs
Syracuse University – Center for the Study of Popular Television – script collections representing approximately 50 television programs
The Writer’s Guild/Shavelson-Webb Library – 20,000 film, television, and radio scripts
The Museum of Television and Radio (The Paley Center) – there is no active script archive
The University of Maryland’s Library of American Broadcasting – 1500 scripts from various series
The American Radio Archives – 25,000 scripts
The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas – approximately 8,000 scripts from various series
From acquisition to cataloguing to conservation to presentation, the costs of maintaining the library and museum are monumental. Add that to design refinement for the final destination of these TV treasures and one does not have to be the Professor from Gilligan's Island to see that the situation is precarious!
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