The Idea Business

In Hollywood last week, Radio-TV Producer John Guedel, a fast-moving mastermind of audience-participation shows, decided to switch his People Are Funny program from CBS to NBC. For this switch, John Guedel Productions gets $3,200,000, and is thus assured a far bigger gross for 1954 than the $5,000,000 it made last year.

Producer Guedel is a small, fast-talking man of 40 who conceals his balding head under an ill-fitting toupee, always carries around a battered leather pipe box (full of $1 pipes) and a clipboard for recording his firecracker ideas. He calls each of his employees "vice president," likes to talk about his early years when he wrote glutinous radio shows for a fancy California cemetery. As a partner in John Guedel Productions (with M.C. Art Linkletter), Guedel has grown considerably in the industry since those days. For one thing, his programs are now much livelier; the biggest are Linkletter's People Are Funny and House Party, and Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life.

Guedel has also become an expert on public taste. Says he: "Actually, your radio and TV audience is never bigger than five or six people. So what it amounts to is a visit to people's homes. And those people must want you to come back and visit them every week. There must be a communion." Explains Linkletter, who developed the People Are Funny show with Guedel: "We don't just get the people up there to make fools of them. We play on their emotions and try out their judgment. Gradually, through the years, we've concentrated on people's character traits rather than just socking the audience with punishment." Guedel, who claims to have thought up participation programs back in 1938 when he ran across a book on games, is always bursting with new program angles.

The latest, Earn Your Vacation, started this week as a summer replacement on CBS-TV. Yet, with all the excitement of his current successes and prospects for the future, Guedel is disarmingly frank.

"This is the only business," he says, "where you can make millions with nothing in the world but ideas."

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