Frankly, Joe's Branching Out

'LA Magazine' 1989 March

Frankly, Joe's Branching Out BY DICK LOCHTE

There are no hard-and-fast rules about success in show business. But for the past three and a half decades, ever since the vast listening audience was transformed with alarming alacrity into the vast viewing audience, the belief has endured that there wasn't much of a future in radio drama. Over the years, several melodramatic ventures have tried to beat the odds and have slunk away in defeat. But just as the Electronic '80s are sputtering to a close, it appears that the form has found an unconventional new champion.

Joe Frank is a sort of dark knight of the airwaves, who is winning the battle for at-home hearts and minds and ears with a captivating, completely original approach to story telling. His 60-minute program, "Joe Frank: Work In Progress", is heard Saturdays at 11 p.m. (and repeated Wednesdays at 7 p.m.) on KCRW-FM, where it is produced. The shows are then picked up by other National Public Radio stations after a considerable delay caused by NPR's conservative screening process. Frank's unique composites of fictional and semifictional interviews, monologues, sound effects, dramatic sketches and radio verité - all underscored by a variety of haunting, exotic beats - manage to be hilarious and unsettling, surreal and painfully familiar. And their consistent effectiveness is green-lighting new media avenues for their creator to travel.

This month Stages Theater Center in Hollywood is presenting the theatrical world premiere of Frank's "Rent a Family, Part One", adapted by the radio show's director, Paul Verdier. (The original version, a three-part miniseries on the subject of the loneliness and alienation of singles in America, this year received the first-place Major Armstrong Award and a Public Radio Program Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.) Then, on April 21, Frank will begin a series of Friday- and Saturday-night stage performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Ahmanson Auditorium that he says "will be literally a work in progress" with new material and possibly a backup band. "With radio, you don't get a direct audience response. This will be an immediate way of finding out what works and what doesn't."

This fall, a collection of Frank's stories will be published by William Morrow. And various other projects are being mulled over, involving MTV, Fox TV, HBO and Steven Spielberg's new anthology series for TV. Norman Lear's office recently called requesting background information and tapes. Frank says all the possibilities are making him feel like Tantalus, the mythological king who found himself thirsty and hungry, but stuck in water that he couldn't drink and just beyond the reach of mouth-watering fruit.

Of course, Frank's present situation at KCRW is considerably more comfortable than the tormented king's. When compared with some of the twists and turns his radio career has taken, it may even qualify as idyllic.

Frank first entered the radio arena in Manhattan. "I'd been promoting rock and folk concerts in the New England area," he recalls. "I was a one-man production company. I put up the posters myself. And I did a lot of driving. I came to realize how powerful the radio medium was, especially when you were in a car, driving at night. There was this medium and nobody seemed to be using it to do anything provocative or imaginative." So he became a volunteer worker at Pacifica's WBAI, where a crisis developed and many of his coworkers quit.

When the midnight-to-5-a.m. slot opened up, Frank jumped in as host of "In the Dark". He'd had a vague idea of what he wanted to do on radio, influenced by monologist Jean Shepard and another WBAI broadcaster, Steve Post. "I began doing some of the things I'm still doing," Frank says. "I worked with actors. I always wanted whatever we did to sound absolutely authentic The actors had to be very bright, very good at improvisation, i wanted the audience to think they were listening to real interviews that would take a slightly bizarre turn."

There was, for example, an interview with a "mime" that covered his origins, his teachers and the differences between performing for large audiences and small ones. So far, so good. But this discussion was followed by the mime demonstrating his craft. "That meant dead air, of course," Frank says. "Sixty seconds of absolute silence at the end of which I told him how splendid I thought his performance was.

"I did that sort of thing for a year and a half, and it was wonderful. But I wasn't being paid. I was a volunteer. And I began to feel that I was a dilettante. I was in my thirties. I sort of panicked. I went to other stations and let them hear excerpts of my program, but they thought it was too far out for them. I went through a period of despondence, depression and re-evaluation."

Just before he exited the radio business entirely, National Public Radio in Washington, DC , called and asked him to host the weekend edition of its popular news-feature show "All Things Considered". "They said they thought of me because they were trying to make the weekend edition more entertaining and arts oriented. Still, serious journalism was completely foreign to anything I'd ever done. But it was the break of my life. So I told them I was very interested in current events and was eager to give it a try. Thereupon I began the most horrendous time of my whole broadcasting career. I didn't know a thing about journalism. I knew how to conduct a stupid interview, but not a serious one. There's an art to getting a three- or four-minute piece with a beginning, middle and end. And I didn't know how to do that.

"I remember going into the office of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and feeling completely out of my depth, like an eight-year-old child who'd walked into a room filled with philosophers. During that interview, and others, I would fade out, not know what the other person was talking about, feeling as if I were in a dream. It turned out that very few of my interviews ever got on the air. I'd return with a mass of tape, and there would be no way to cut it. I was so bewildered and confused that eventually I told my producer that there was no use prolonging the agony."

Frank was allowed to finish the final six months of his contract by producing one radio drama a month for NPR. "They were very successful in terms of listener response, but management thought they were too provocative. Too much sex in them. When my contract was up, I was out. I was very bitter and unhappy. I had thought I was on the cutting edge of radio, doing things that really made a difference to people, and these jerks, these bureaucrats, were afraid to do anything that wasn't mainstream."

For a few years, Frank tried independent producing, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Satellite Program Development Fund. The shows, which wound up on "NPR Playhouse", earned a number of awards. "Still, in creating four radio programs in a year, you're not spending a lot of time or making a great deal of money," he says. "So I entered another dark period of reassessment… and this was when Ruth Hirschman [KCRW's general manager] invited me to come out to L.A."

The "Work in Progress" series began in January 1986. Critics have described the programs as innerspace poetry, an exploration of the mind's hidden landscape, a chronicle of the American psyche. When asked how the shows are specifically created, Frank has no concrete answer. He prefers to let the events speak for themselves.

A Joe Frank workday: By 10 a.m., he is seated before a tape console in KCRW's well-appointed studios on the Santa Monica College campus, making a tape loop of a 20-second segment of a South American song to use as background music for an upcoming show. He discards the pile of excess audio tape on his way to greet the first of three actresses with whom he will be working.

Escorting her into a studio, Frank explains that for the next two hours he would like her to talk to some imaginary person, a lover perhaps or a friend, in conversational tones, responding to Frank's questions and suggestions. The questions and suggestions will not be heard on the broadcast; her replies will form a monologue of sorts. The actress, also a comedienne, warms to the task, eventually describing a heart-rending tale of young love that goes unfulfilled. With scarcely a pause, Frank asks her to react to someone who is brushing his teeth with his mouth open. The total lack of continuity is so absurd that the actress feels challenged and responds wholeheartedly.

After lunch, another actress is seated across from Frank, providing him with more material. This time, the centerpiece is a dark reminiscence of a romance in Italy that has sinister overtones. Frank makes a suggestion that moves the tale from probable autobiography into fiction. The actress eagerly improvises, adding flourishes and filling in the fictitious background. When the session is over, Frank signals to his engineer to stop the tape. He thanks the actress, but before she leaves, Frank asks her the real ending to her story. "Well, he always carried this knife," she says, and Frank interrupts her immediately, asking the engineer to start the tape again.

At 3 p.m., the last actress arrives. Another profitable session. Frank's plan is to use only portions of these tapings for his next show and to spread much longer segments over several future shows. But when the next program airs, it is devoted entirely to the actresses. " I taped a monologue, but it didn't work," he explains. "So I decided to go with just the interviews. I finished editing about five minutes before we went on the air." Even then, work on the program is not complete. Though it has been seasoned with the music loop and with appropriate sound effects, such as the brushing of teeth and gargling, Frank decides a few more touch-ups are needed before the show is rebroadcast.

"It's very hard to explain why I do what I do," he says. "It's a gut-level feeling I have. It's not so much why I want to do it, it's that I want to do it. Inviting these women to the station and asking them questions about themselves, their first loves, I don't even know how to rationalize it, exactly. Except that I want to create something very real, very authentic and compelling. Something different from anything anyone has ever heard." That mission is accomplished every week.