The Open-End Game

Radio City's executive eyebrows, the hypersensitive seismographs of the broadcasting industry, were twitching excitedly. Cinemactor Ronald Colman's new transcribed show, Favorite Story, was having its premiere over Chicago's WMAQ. To many a radioman it sounded like an early, diffident mumble of an earthquake that might upset the whole map of U.S. commercial radio.

Transcribed shows had Big Radio--NBC and CBS--worried. Big Radio's power has always rested chiefly on its near-monopoly of famous entertainers. Last fall, Bing Crosby fled the fold. He recorded his weekly show, sold it to 208 ABC stations--and over the head of at least one big network to some of its member stations. Total Crosby stations: 400. The advantages: Bing can record the show any time he likes, can edit it before it reaches the air. If other big names followed Bing's lead, the big networks might lose control of their affiliates, might soon be torn apart.

Transcribed-show builders last week were smug-sure that Colman's walkout (for a guaranteed $150,000 a year) would some day become a stampede. Although NBC makes transcriptions, at least one energetic independent was ready with staff and know-how to handle runaways. He was hard-eyed, 41-year-old Frederic William Ziv, the producer of the Colman show and the big beglerbeg of the "open-end"* game.

The Ziv outfit is currently releasing 23 high-rating open-enders, has 30 crack salesmen retailing them to advertisers all over the U.S. Ziv's chief sales targets: advertisers who can't afford (or don't want) to buy time on a full network. Some of his open-ends are filled in by as many as 80 advertisers on 200 stations. Ziv's 1946 income: about $7.5 million; the pickings would be much, much fatter after an earthquake.

Ten top radio comedians got on the record, too. The ten: Benny, Cantor, McGee & Molly, Gardner, Burns & Allen, Bergen, Amos 'n' Andy. They formed their own company, Audience Records, Inc., and this week will release one eight-side comedy album of each act. Price: $4.50. The records will be banned from the air and from jukeboxes. They are designed, the company pressagent explains, for posterity and such of the living as would like to be the life of the party. So the folks at home will know when to laugh, the records were made with a studio audience.

* A transcribed program with blank periods for commercials--so that it can be sold to any number of sponsors. A few Ziv-produced open-enders: the Wayne King, Barry Wood, Kenny Baker, Easy Aces and Philo Vance shows.

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