Murrow's Legacy: American Journalism

DATE October 14, 2005 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Bob Edwards discusses his book, "Edward R. Murrow and
the Birth of Broadcast Journalism"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, TV critic for The New York Daily
News, sitting in for Terry Gross.

On today's FRESH AIR, we remember the most important and influential newsman
in broadcast history, Edward R. Murrow. As a CBS radio war correspondent
based in England, he broadcast from the rooftops as the Nazis bombed the city.
He began each report with the words `This is London,' one of two signature
phrases for which Murrow still is remembered. The other is from later in his
career, when he moved to the young medium of television to host a bold
documentary program called "See It Now." Murrow ended each "See It Now"
telecast by telling viewers, `Good night, and good luck,' which is where
George Clooney got the title for his new movie about Murrow. His film, "Good
Night, and Good Luck," starring David Strathairn as Murrow, opens in many
cities today. The film concentrates on the period of Murrow's career leading
to his controversial and critical showdown with Communist witch-hunting
Senator Joe McCarthy.

On today's FRESH AIR, we salute one exceptional broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow,
by listening to another. Bob Edwards, who spent just shy of 25 years as host
of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," wrote a wonderful book about
Murrow titled "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism."
Edwards is now the host of "The Bob Edwards Show" on XM Satellite Radio. He
spoke with Terry last year and began their conversation by reading from his
biography of Murrow.

(Soundbite of 2004 interview)

Mr. BOB EDWARDS (Author, "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast
Journalism"): (Reading) `Murrow's obituaries mention that he seemed a courtly
prince who nevertheless championed the underdog, a sophisticated man with a
common touch. Variety said he had brought television to maturity. He was
hailed for his unrelenting search for truth. The tributes pointed out that he
had led CBS to greatness only to become expendable when his principles clashed
with management.

`It fell to Murrow's biographers, however, to explore some of the deeper
contradictions in his life including the black moods and daylong silences that
frequently haunted a man who had so many reasons to be happy. The man who
oozed confidence on the air was a nervous wreck when about to begin a
broadcast. The shot of whiskey he'd have to calm his nerves at air time

failed to stop his cold sweat or keep him from jiggling his leg in a
continuous nervous tick. America's foremost broadcast journalist put so much
weight on his own shoulders that he could never be at peace. He was a driven
man who demanded more of himself than he could possibly deliver. Murrow lived
by a code too rigid for mere humans to meet. He expected more of himself and
others. Murrow's glass was always half empty. He felt the gloom of having
his idealism shattered by reality.'

TERRY GROSS, host:

Bob Edwards, reading from his new book, "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of
Broadcast Journalism."

Bob, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

You were asked to write a book for this series of biographies. Were you aware
of him in his own time as a broadcaster, or was it only after that that you
started to be aware of him and admire him so much?

Mr. EDWARDS: Oh, no. I listened to him on the radio and saw him on
television. I was a kid and maybe I didn't understand all of the nuances of
his insights into the Eisenhower administration, but here's--on one level, it
was very easy to relate to him being a kid. He was cool. He was so cool. He
looked great, he sounded fabulous and I wanted to do that because of him. Now
later, of course, I appreciated what he did in his McCarthy broadcasts and, of
course, all of his wartime reporting was before my time 'cause I'm postwar.
And to get into those transcripts of his broadcasts and see how he wrote and
the imagery--which I'm no good at, at all. I mean, he wrote beautiful word
pictures and the sound of them. He was a speech major in college and I think
that helped a lot. When he spoke, it was theater. It was--oh, I just wanted
to do that, you know.

GROSS: You say in your book that most of the material is drawn from 30 years
of conversations with Ed Bliss, who, among other things, was your teacher in
graduate school at American University, someone you kept in touch with for
years. What was his connection with Murrow?

Mr. EDWARDS: He wrote for Murrow. He joined CBS during the war when Murrow
was over in Europe. Ed Bliss was in New York. And then when Murrow came back
and did a nightly radio program, Bliss was his radio writer and traveled with
him. When they would go on the road, Ed Murrow would have to make speeches or
whatever, and Ed Bliss would go with him to write his newscasts for the
evening and edit the commentary that Ed Murrow would write. And Ed Bliss
taught Ed Murrow; that was his presentation in college. And the real shame is
that Ed Bliss died last year at age 90 just as I was being contacted about
writing this book. And we didn't have this experience to share. This would
have been so great, and he would have been so helpful to me and I would
just--you know, I wish he were around to enjoy this occasion.

GROSS: Well, what are some of the things he told you about Murrow that you
might not have gotten from the biographies of Murrow? And I wonder, in
particular, if he offered you insights into Murrow's depressions and black
moods.

Mr. EDWARDS: Yes. He did, indeed. They would be riding around in the car
and Ed would be driving and maybe getting them lost, and this would be the
only time that Murrow would get upset with him. And you knew Murrow was upset
when he called you Buster.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. EDWARDS: I've never read this anywhere--that, `Look, Buster', and then
you knew you were in trouble. And, yes, he would have these long silences
that I guess he would just be off in a world of thought all to himself. And
you and I might consider that rude, that we're in the company of this fellow
and he's just not talking to us, but you know, those close to Murrow had to
get used to that. And on other occasions, he could be the life of the party
and buy you drinks and tell you great stories and sing songs from the lumber
camps of the Pacific Northwest where he grew up. And he had these mood
swings.

GROSS: Now Ed Murrow didn't set out to be a broadcaster. He was sent to
Europe to arrange broadcasts by others for the Institute of International
Education, which was part of the Carnegie Endowment. And even in his early
days with CBS, he was supposed to arrange for newspaper reporters to actually
do the reporting. What was the state of radio news at the time Murrow entered
radio broadcasting?

Mr. EDWARDS: Announcers would do everything. They would host a program with
a dance band and then the Henley Regatta and then they would interview a
starlet and then they would cover a news conference. They did everything; it
was amazing. These people, people like Graham McNamee at NBC--who was Red
Barber's hero, by the way--and Robert Trout at CBS, these guys were amazing,
you know, the variety of things they had to do. But they were not
professional journalists, and that's what Ed Murrow started, because the war
broke out and he needed a professional news staff to tell New York and all of
America what was going on in Europe. So the first person he hired was William
L. Shirer, who was a veteran foreign correspondent. And thereafter, he hired
just the most amazing staff as the war spread, people who had come from wire
services, mostly United Press--he just robbed United Press blind of all their
great talent--and some others were newspaper reporters. But we're talking
about Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith and Bill Downs, Charles Collingwood,
Winston Burdette, fabulous, fabulous people who remained in broadcast
journalism for decades after.

GROSS: Was it Murrow's idea to put himself on the air?

Mr. EDWARDS: No, I think it just kind of happened and New York didn't
complain. And it was so successful, that first broadcast in the spring
of--Was it March of 1938?--when the Nazis marched into Austria and annexed
Austria; that's the real beginning of the war. And they had to just go on the
air and do a broadcast. And Shirer wasn't supposed to be on the air, either.
He wasn't--he was, you know, Murrow's man on the continent of Europe and he
was to arrange broadcasts. But you know, out of this emergency, they became
the genesis of the CBS overseas reporting staff. And they were so good at it
they just kept on reporting the war and adding these other newspaper reporters
to the staff.

GROSS: One of Murrow's now-famous broadcasts was part of a special program
called "London After Dark" that CBS Radio broadcast on August 24th, 1940. He
was reporting from Trafalgar Square. What's the importance, do you think, of
this particular broadcast?

Mr. EDWARDS: A couple of things. When Hitler started bombing England, he
first chose military targets, bases and the docks and that sort of thing. And
then he upgraded it and just scatter bombed all over, all the cities of
England to terrify the population in hopes that they would ask Churchill to
surrender and just, you know, `Stop this, stop this awful bombing.' And

Murrow was trying to illustrate that it wasn't working. And he's at Trafalgar
Square and he's recording people calmly walking to the bomb shelters; not
running, not in a panic. He wanted that message out there. So he put the
microphone down on the ground and recorded footsteps. He was very conscious
of the--you know, for a guy with no background in either journalism or radio,
he was conscious of the fact that he was writing for the ear and this
broadcast was to reach you by ear, sound. So he would let you hear the
footsteps of Englanders walking calmly to the bomb shelter. I thought that
was very prescient of him. He knew he was in radio. This was something
different. This was not the printed page; it was for the ear.

GROSS: Why don't we hear some of that report by Edward R. Murrow, August
24th, 1940, from Trafalgar Square.

(Soundbite of "London After Dark," August 24, 1940)

Mr. EDWARD R. MURROW: This is Trafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at
the moment is the sound of the air raid siren. I'm standing here just on the
steps of St. Martin's-in-the-Field. A searchlight just burst into action off
in the distance, one single beam sweeping the sky above me now. People are
walking along quite quietly. We're just at the entrance of an air raid
shelter here, and I must move this cable over just a bit so people can walk
in. There's another searchlight just square behind Nelson's statue. Here
comes one of those big red buses around the corner, double-deckers they are,
just a few lights on the top deck. In this blackness, it looks very much like
a ship that's passing in the night and you just see the portholes. More
searchlights come into action. You see them reach up straight into the sky
and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it.
One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days--or rather these
dark nights--just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like ghosts
shod with steel shoes.

GROSS: That was Edward R. Murrow recorded in 1940. My guest is Bob Edwards,
who's written a new biography of Edward R. Murrow.

Bob, you mentioned in your book that at the time--like during World War II,
the networks had actually banned recording, so even if Edward R. Murrow had
the technology to record sounds and then produce it within his report, he
wouldn't have been able to do it. Why was this ban on--why did the networks
ban recordings?

Mr. EDWARDS: Well, like everything else with networks, it had to do with
money. The networks felt that if they played recordings of, say, Paul
Whiteman's orchestra or Bing Crosby singing, then you wouldn't need a network.
You could go out and buy that recording yourself or your local station could
provide that for you. The reason you needed a network was to bring you Paul
Whiteman and Bing Crosby, the actual--you know, in real time live broadcasts
of the great, you know, entertainers of the time.

So they just extended that to news. I mean, for one thing, they weren't
really in the news business until the war. So everything that you heard of
Murrow and his team up until D-Day was live. And they would be in the middle
of a war zone somewhere--and this is the most amazing thing, the technical
aspect of their reporting, because it was shortwave. You had to be near a
shortwave transmitter and just hope New York would hear you and stop regular
broadcasts and break in and say, you know, `Here's a report from Charles
Collingwood in northern Africa,' and then Charles would be on. And it was hit
or miss. A lot of these reporters were just talking into the air and were
never heard, their reports were never heard, because, you know, New York
didn't get the signal that one of their reporters was trying to reach them
with a live broadcast. So if Murrow had an interview he wanted to do, he had
to take his guest to the microphone and talk to him live. He wouldn't go
record it.

They finally changed their mind on D-Day because Collingwood and some others
had made recordings of landing on the beaches and all that and they thought
that was so compelling that people needed to hear that, and they couldn't hear
it live so they replayed the tape. I think, in fact, that Richard C. Hottelet
was the only one whose report was actually heard on D-Day. He was with the
paratroopers and got back to London on the day, on June 6th, 1944, and
broadcast. The others were just caught up in the war in France and had no
means of being heard that day or for several days thereafter.

BIANCULLI: Bob Edwards, speaking to Terry Gross last year. More after a
break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's 2004 interview with former NPR "Morning
Edition" host Bob Edwards, author of a biography of Edward R. Murrow. A new
film about Murrow, "Good Night, and Good Luck," is now in theaters.

We're having a technical problem. We'll get to that tape as soon as we can.

(Soundbite of 2004 interview)

GROSS: You say that Murrow reported on the bomb shelters, but he didn't
usually go to bomb shelters himself. Why not?

Mr. EDWARDS: He was afraid that he would get used to it, that whenever the
bombs fell, he would go running for the shelter if he went that first time.
So he would go and do stories of people in the shelters, but he would not go
there to seek refuge from the bombs himself. He had enormous courage, not
just from bombs, but from other things that came along later, like McCarthy or
even his own bosses. But he would be up on the rooftop in the middle of the
bombing of London so he could report on it. And he would go around town in an
open car so he could see the damage and report on the stories at ground level.

GROSS: Yeah. The reporting from the rooftop, that really amazes me. You
know, German bombers are flying overhead and he's on a rooftop in London
reporting what he sees. That really takes courage. It must have been
difficult to get permission to do that because he needed the permission of the
British to it. What was it like for him to get permission, and what kind of
guidelines did they lay down for him?

Mr. EDWARDS: Well, at first, they didn't want him to do it at all because
they thought that the Germans could hone in on him or use him as some kind of
beacon locator to direct bombing. He was on the rooftop of Broadcasting
House, a BBC building in London, and they thought that he would make that
building a target. Well, later on, I mean, it got hit a bunch of times and a
lot of Murrow's colleagues at the BBC were killed as a result.

But on this particular night that he first went up there--you know, he had
mixed emotions about it. He was kind of ambivalent because, you know, it was,
again, a live broadcast and New York threw the signal to Murrow on that
rooftop at, you know, probably 7:00 in the evening or something like that New
York time, five hours later in London. And all hell had been going on until a
minute to air and then the bombing stopped. And he's thinking, you know, `Is
this good or bad because they can't hear the bombs?' They could hear the
anti-aircraft fire, and you hear lot, so you do get some war sounds and you
hear the police whistles or the air raid warden whistles and you hear sirens
and the like but you don't hear actual bombs. But he wanted the bang-bang, of
course, because it was radio.

And the British government relented on permission to have Murrow on the
rooftop and I think it was Churchill's doing personally because Churchill
wanted America to know what was going on and what Britons were taking from
Hitler's Germany. This was good PR--propaganda, if you will--for England, and
America--you know, he was really appealing for help and using Murrow to do
that.

GROSS: Let's hear an excerpt of the rooftop report that you were referring
to, the one in which the bombing is temporarily stopped, but you can hear the
anti-aircraft artillery. So this is Edward R. Murrow recorded in
mid-September of 1940.

(Soundbite of September 1940 broadcast)

Mr. MURROW: The plane is still very high and it's quite clear that he's not
coming in for his bombing run. Earlier this evening, we could hear
occasionally--again, those are explosions overhead. Earlier this evening, we
heard a number of bombs go sliding and slithering across to fall several
blocks away. Just overhead now the burst of the anti-aircraft fire. Still,
the nearby guns are not working, and the third flights now are appearing
almost directly overhead. Now you'll hear two bursts a little nearer in a
moment.

(Soundbite of explosions)

Mr. MURROW: There they are, that hard, stony sound.

GROSS: So that was Edward R. Murrow, recorded from a rooftop of the BBC in
1940.

My guest is Bob Edwards, and he's written a new biography of Edward R. Murrow.

Bob, what was the impact of these broadcasts on Americans? I mean, this was,
you know, before America entered the war.

Mr. EDWARDS: That's right, and they were enormously helpful to Churchill in
England. And at one point, Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins, his close aide, over
to London and he arranged a meeting with Murrow. And Murrow thought, `Oh,
this is great. I'm going to get an interview with Harry Hopkins. This will
be very useful.' No, that wasn't it. Hopkins wanted to interview Murrow.
Murrow was the first guy he talked to when he went to London before he talked
to anyone in the British government. Why? Because he wanted to pick Murrow's
brain. He wanted to know what was going on in England, who to see, who not to
see, who was--you know, who was really in charge, who were the movers and
shakers and players and who had the best information on what was going on.
That's a tribute to Murrow's influence, command of information. But those
broadcasts--I mean, that's what Roosevelt was hearing; he was hearing Murrow's
broadcasts from the rooftop and everywhere else in London.

BIANCULLI: Bob Edwards, speaking with Terry Gross last year.

More in the second half. I'm David Bianculli. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

BIANCULLI: Coming up, Wallace and Gromit are back in theaters after six
years. We'll meet animator Nick Park. The three-time Oscar winner has scored
another hit with Wallace and Gromit in "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." Also,
David Edelstein reviews the film. And we'll continue our conversation with
Bob Edwards about the life of Edward R. Murrow.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

Let's get back to Terry's 2004 interview with former NPR "Morning Edition"
host Bob Edwards, who now has his own show on the XM Satellite Network.
Edwards is the author of "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast
Journalism," a biography of the CBS newsman whose story also serves as the
inspiration for George Clooney's new movie "Good Night, and Good Luck."

(Soundbite of 2004 interview)

GROSS: I want to play an excerpt of one more Murrow report. This is another
really famous one, and it's his report from Buchenwald, the death camp, right
after it was liberated. And this is a pretty incredible piece of reporting.
Bob, do you want to say anything about it before we hear it?

Mr. EDWARDS: Yeah, the war was winding down and Murrow wanted one last little
bit of action, so he joined up with Patton's Army and Charles Collingwood was
along, too. So Collingwood tells this story that they had a night of poker
and Murrow--it's was one of those nights. You know, Murrow just could not
lose, and he's raking in all the dough from all the war correspondents and
he's stuffing bills into every pocket of his war correspondent's uniform.

Next day, they go to Buchenwald and Murrow was just devastated and he just
started just emptying his pockets and handing all this cash to survivors
and--I don't know. At that point, could you even call them survivors?
Probably a lot of the people he talked to that day didn't survive more than a
couple more days.

GROSS: He called them the living dead.

Mr. EDWARDS: Yeah. And he was angry. He was just angry, and he didn't
broadcast that day. He let others have the scoop. And by the way, the whole
liberation of Buchenwald was upstaged 'cause Roosevelt died that day. I mean,
it was probably inside every paper and not on the front pages. Murrow went
back to London and it was three days later before he did this broadcast, which
is now the most famous of--about that--about the liberation of Buchenwald.

GROSS: Well, why don't we hear an excerpt of that report from Buchenwald.
And this is Edward R. Murrow.

(Soundbite of 1945 radio broadcast)

Mr. MURROW: In another part of the camp, they showed me the children,
hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me
his number. It was tattooed on his arm; B 6,030 it was. The others showed me
their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing
beside me said, `The children, enemies of the state.' I could see their ribs
through their thin shirts. The children clung to my hands instead. We
crossed to the courtyard. Men kept coming up to speak to me and to touch me;
professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all Europe, men from the
countries that made America.

We proceeded to the small courtyard. There were two rows of bodies stacked up
like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some had been shot through the
head, but they bled but little. I tried to count them as best I could and
arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and
boys lay there in two neat piles. It appeared that most of the men and boys
had died of starvation, but the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder
had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died
there during the last 12 years. I pray you to believe what I have said about
Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For
most of it, I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild
account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.

GROSS: That was Edward R. Murrow. My guest is Bob Edwards, who's written a
new biography of Murrow. It's called "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of
Broadcast Journalism."

After World War II, Murrow becomes vice president and director of public
affairs at CBS. He assembles a news team; most of them go on to become some
of the most famous people in broadcasting journalism. He moves from radio to
television, helps define what television news is. And then, of course, he's
covering things during the McCarthy era, and one of the things he's asked to
do at CBS is to sign a loyalty oath. And I think a lot of his colleagues were
expecting him to refuse, but he didn't refuse. Why didn't he refuse?

Mr. EDWARDS: I think he picked his battles, and he thought that one was too
big. And he could fight McCarthyism and the whole anti-Communist hysteria in
other ways, which he certainly did with his broadcast on "See It Now," which
was really the end--the beginning of the end of Joe McCarthy and his
demagoguery.

GROSS: Well, what did Murrow do on that broadcast that helped turn the tide
against McCarthy?

Mr. EDWARDS: Murrow's thing about McCarthy had to do with the Constitution;
it had to do with due process. I think everyone understood there probably
were Communists in the government and this was not a good thing. But whether
there were or there weren't, the accused should be given due process. So what
Murrow did was to assemble a whole bunch of film of McCarthy illustrating his
methods, and that's--that was a revelation to most Americans, who only knew
about this from newspapers, and newspapers can't give you a good account of
this. You know, `Senator McCarthy said this, but somebody else said that.'
And, you know, you really don't get a flavor of what this guy was about and
how he badgered people and just the unfairness of the whole prosecutorial
process that he conducted and how you were really guilty until proven innocent
and you had no shot at proving innocence.

So that's what Murrow did, exposed him in that way, and then showed you a huge
stack of newspapers and representing editorials against McCarthy, and another
stack of newspapers, you know, that favored him--a much, much smaller
stack--and then did his closing commentary, which was unlike anything
television ever did before and certainly since. It was a one-of-a-kind, it
was a blatant editorial, and just devastating. And...

GROSS: What was it that he said that was so devastating?

Mr. EDWARDS: Oh. `No one familiar with the history of this country can deny
that congressional commitments are useful. It is necessary to investigate
before legislating. But the line between investigation and persecuting is a
very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it
repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind
between the internal and external threat of communism. We must not confuse
dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof
and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not
walk in fear one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of
unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we
are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to
speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.'

You know, Ed Bliss told me he was in New York once and he saw someone coming
at him that--he thought this was not good; this person was going to do him
harm. And he thought of crossing the street and mingling with a bigger crowd
of people and getting away from this guy. And he remembered Murrow's words:
`We will not walk in fear one of another.' So he didn't cross the street, and
he got mugged.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Oh, gee! What's the moral of that story?

Mr. EDWARDS: The moral of that story--the moral of the story is be a little
more practical with a little less hero worshipping.

GROSS: That's great. So did--what did CBS have to say about this? As you
pointed out, this was editorializing.

Mr. EDWARDS: Yeah. For one thing, they didn't promote the program. Murrow
and his co-producer and partner, Fred W. Friendly, bought--they used their
personal money to buy a full-page ad in The New York Times to promote the
program. CBS was not pleased. Of course, they said, you know, this was great
and thank you so much, but they didn't promote the program. And they didn't
like controversy.

Bill Paley, the founding chairman of CBS, and Murrow were very close. They
were--they had a relationship that was not boss-worker, forged during the war.
But after the war, it was different. CBS became this big, diversified
company, profits and the price of a share of stock were what was important and
they were in the entertainment business and here was Murrow doing all these
controversial programs. Paley told Murrow, `Your programs give me
stomachaches,' and Murrow told Paley, `Well, it goes with the job.' And
ultimately, "See It Now," Murrow's great news vehicle, was canceled, and
Murrow was moved to the margins of CBS because he was just too controversial.

BIANCULLI: Bob Edwards, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He now hosts "The
Bob Edwards Show" on XM Satellite Radio. He's also the author of "Edward R.
Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism."

Up next, Wallace and Gromit animator Nick Park.

This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Nick Park and Peter Lord discuss the animated movie,
"Chicken Run," and the creation of Wallace and Gromit
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

The cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his faithful dog Gromit have returned
in the new animated film "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

(Soundbite of "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit")

Mr. PETER SALLIS: (As Wallace) I'm in the mood for food!

(Soundbite of banging noise; music)

Mr. SALLIS: (As Wallace) Oh, Gromit, old pal, I'll need assistance.

BIANCULLI: Animator Nick Park created the much-loved Wallace and Gromit
characters, the ones familiar from such animated comedy shorts as "The Wrong
Trousers" and "A Close Shave," both of which won Academy Awards. Park
recently learned that his first full-length movie starring Wallace and Gromit,
the new "Curse of the Were-Rabbit," had sold enough tickets in America to be
crowned the box office champ on its first week of release.

That was the good news. The bad news was that a warehouse fire at Aardman
Studios, where all of us Park's stop-animation films are produced, had
consumed all the props and sets from his previous films. Well, almost all.
The original plasticene figures of Wallace and Gromit were with Park at the
time of the fire and are safe.

Aardman Studios was founded in 1972. Nick Park was hired in 1986 straight out
of film school and has been there ever since, creating Wallace, Gromit and
lots of other charmingly eccentric and lovable animated characters. Park's
previous full-length film, "Chicken Run" was directed by Peter Lord, chairman
of Aardman Studios, who has worked with Park for 20 years. Terry spoke with
Nick Park and Peter Lord in 2000 when "Chicken Run" was released. Her first
question went to Peter Lord.

(Soundbite of 2000 interview)

TERRY GROSS, host:

It's so funny that you're doing this very sophisticated kind of animation with
this kind of comparatively unsophisticated style of animation, really
literally moving around clay puppets. At the same time, the big animation is
the computer animation that everybody seems to be using now. Do you feel like
you're living in another world than the computer animated people? Do you feel
like you're in just another dimension altogether?

Mr. PETER LORD (Co-director, "Chicken Run"): People often ask us about this,
understandably, because, you know, computer animation is very visible. And--I
mean, our attitude has always been simply, `Well, why can't the two coexist?'
You know, why on Earth should the new technology push out the old if the old
works? You know, why should a synthesized instrument replace an acoustic
instrument? Why should it? No, it--obviously, it shouldn't. The two in a
sensible, sane world, the two coexist, so I hope that will always be the case.

Having said that, it is kind of ridiculous. I mean, our technology is quite
old-fashioned, you know. But heaven knows, it wo--and also, you know, because
it's hands-on, which it is, because it is--it consists of animators in the
studios handling clay models and because also, strangely enough, strangely to
your listeners, it's like a live performance.

And that may sound crazy, because--well, everyone always talk about--you know,
the words `agonizing' and `painstaking' are always on our lips. It is a slow
process, but it's a live process because you've got your puppet and your
puppet is going to walk across the set from point A to point B. When that
puppet sets off in the morning, you have no real way of knowing where it's
going to go to. You know, you'll guess. Of course, you approximate, you
rehearse, but you don't know exactly. And when you're halfway across the set,
you still don't know precisely where you're going and you don't know--and you
certainly can't go back, just as in real life. You know, you're a performer
on the stage, you start the performance, you don't know exactly where you're
going and you sure as hell can't change what you've already done. And in that
sense, what we do is live, whereas computer animation and conventional cell
animation isn't like that because you can do the last drawing at the same time
as the first drawing and then fill in the spaces in between. Or if it's not
going well, you can easily revise it. We can't easily revise what we do; the
only thing we can do is shoot it again.

GROSS: Yeah. Now, Nick Park, most of you animations have bizarre
contraptions of one sort or another in them. In fact, before I ask you the
actual question, why don't you describe a couple of contraptions from your
Wallace and Gromit movies?

Mr. NICK PARK (Co-director, "Chicken Run"): Right. Well, what--from--you
mean "A Close Shave" with the...

GROSS: Sure.

Mr. PARK: Yeah, there's "The Wrong Trousers," which--ex-NASA, in fact. Those
were actually bought from an ex-NASA store and--in Wallace's neighborhood.
And, you know, Wallace uses them--to, you know--they're covered in rivets.
They're very round and robust and have a sort of 1940s feel. And like I was
saying to you, it was the Knit-O-Matic machine in "A Close Shave" that's all
covered in copper sheeting and rivets and that kind of thing and lots of arms
and lots of Jules Verne, you know, H.G. Wells and Victorian technology I like
to describe it as.

GROSS: Yeah. And like the Knit-O-Matic, you put a whole sheep in one end of
the machine and out comes yarn. And by the end of the machine, I think a
little sweater's coming out; these bizarre contraptions.

Mr. PARK: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Now your father was an inventor. Did he make contraptions?

Mr. PARK: Well, he wasn't--no, he probably--I don't think I would disclaim
him as an inventor, but he did make a lot of things. And he spent his time in
the shed making things.

GROSS: What kind of things?

Mr. PARK: Oh, boy. Well, a lot of household things. You know, just shelves
and, you know, that kind of thing. And...

Mr. LORD: He made that caravan. Didn't he make a caravan?

Mr. PARK: Oh, that's right. Yes. That's what made--after making the first
Wallace and Gromit film, "A Grand Day Out," I suddenly realized one day he's
so much like Wallace because I recalled this childhood experience where my
father built a trailer, you know, from scratch, you know, and it was like just
a room on wheels, like a living room on wheels and with beds inside and made
everything and wallpapered it with--and he had furniture and chairs and all
that kind of thing. And the whole family, seven of us, went on holiday in
this caravan.

GROSS: Were you taken to any unusual factories when you were a kid?

Mr. PARK: Oh, yeah. Boy, I had this terrible experience of going to a
chicken slaughterhouse when I was a kid. Well, I was actually a student at
the time. I was doing a summer job. And I was working at a chicken packing
factory folding up plucked chickens and putting them onto trays and feeding
them into this great big machine that wraps them for the supermarket. And,
actually, one day I was sent down to the slaughterhouse 'cause they were short
of labor there and saw some pretty horrific things there. And some of those
ideas from both those experiences have actually come through and been used in
"Chicken Run."

GROSS: Your characters of Wallace and Gromit, which are so popular now--tell
us if you kind of patterned them on anyone you knew either in real life or in
the movies. And I should say Wallace is a man who--a British man who's very
stuffy and proper-sounding, but in reality he's really not very bright.
Gromit is his dog, and the dog is the smart one who read books like "The
Republic" by Pluto. So who's behind these characters?

Mr. PARK: Boy. I mean, I don't think I ever really consciously based them on
anybody particularly. Wallace perhaps--you know, when I think about it, you
know, for reasons I've given, are--he is very close to my dad who, you know,
was very--he was like an inventor and made things. But I think it's his
attitude, actually, the way he'll just get ideas and go about doing them
without thinking. And he'll be--my dad isn't insensitive, but Wallace is very
insensitive and he--another influence, actually. He's very much like an old
music hall character that's very much known in Britain in the north--comes
from the north of England, who plays a banjo, a ukelele, called George Formby.
And he was very popular, I think, before the war, before the Second World War.
And he's got a very similar accent and very similar attitude to Wallace.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. PARK: But again, it wasn't very conscious either to base--he isn't based
on him, but I think these influences have found themselves in Wallace.

GROSS: At the end of Wallace and Gromit films, at least at the end of a
couple of them, Wallace always yearns for some cheese. So why don't we end
our interview with finding out about cheese? Why does Wallace want cheese?

Mr. PARK: Well, yeah. How do ideas come about? I think that the single
reason that cheese--because it all starts when Wallace and Gromit go to the
moon to find cheese, and I was trying to think of a reason why would--why they
would go to the moon. And then, you know, we record the voices first and I
recorded with Peter Sallis, the actor who plays Wallace. It's just the way he
said, `Cheese, Gromit,' and that made such a nice mouth shape for Wallace. It
was such a nice thing to have him getting his chops around. But cheese stuck
and it appeared in all the other movies.

In fact, there's a very short little story. There was a factory in the north
of England that makes a type of cheese called Wensleydale Cheese. And we made
Wallace say `Wensleydale' once in the third film, in "A Close Shave," and just
by doing that, it actually put--the cheese factory was on its last legs and
about to go into liquidation, and it put the cheese factory back in business.

GROSS: You're kidding? How funny.

Mr. PARK: And--yeah, the Wensleydale Cheese Factory.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both so much.

Mr. LORD: Thank you. My pleasure.

Mr. PARK: Thank you, Terry.

Mr. LORD: Thank you.

BIANCULLI: Nick Park, speaking with Terry Gross in 2000. His new animated
film is "Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: New film "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

"Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit" was the number one movie at
the box office last week and a triumph for its directors, Nick Park and Steve
Box. But that good cheer was dampened by that warehouse fire. Critic David
Edelstein mourns the loss, but celebrates the success of "Wallace & Gromit in
the Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting:

The news that the animator Nick Park had lost a warehouse of models to fire is
especially upsetting because these models--the chickens of "Chicken Run," some
Wallace and Gromit figures--they're more than mere cartoon characters; they're
puppets brought to soulful life by claymation, frame by loving frame, in the
old manner of `Pose the figure and shoot and move it a wee, wee bit and
shoot.' And you can sometimes see the finger marks and feel the life force of
their caretakers.

There's something else that's old-fashioned about dear, enterprising Wallace
and his much-smarter silent dog, Gromit, who live together like an old married
couple. They strike me as the summit, the apotheosis of those New Yorker
magazine squibs that used to appear under the rubric, `There'll always be an
England.' These excerpts from British papers were hilarious reminders of the
blinkered aristocracy of P.G. Wodehouse, but they also evoked the ordinary,
middle-class folks living in a sort of hermetically sealed bubble of gentile
repression.

The England of Wallace and Gromit is the England of row house backyard gardens
under low, gray skies and obliviously proper gardeners busily cultivating
vegetables for county competitions. It's an England stuck in the '50s that
never much concerned itself with the sunset of an empire. For this England,
the more urgent problem is rabbits.

Which brings us to "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," an
absolutely magical fusion of horror and deadpan English comedy, the kind the
Ealing Studios made in the '50s. The pair now run a pest control outfit
called Anti-Pesto that humanely dispatches the beasts who threaten potentially
prize-winning carrots, pumpkins and so on. The way that Wallace is whisked
out of bed would make Rube Goldberg gasp with delight. And even more
enchanting is the rabbit vacuum cleaner that deposits the creatures in a glass
jar where they spin around with apparent glee. Thanks to his non-lethal ways,
Wallace has even managed to endear himself to an aristocratic sock puppet
beauty with red hair sticking out at right angles from her head like a pair of
sausages.

Alas, Wallace isn't content with giving hundreds of rabbits a home in his
basement; he wants to reform them. He wants to brainwash them in a
fantastical brainwashing machine into swearing off vegetables altogether.

(Soundbite of "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit")

Mr. PETER SALLIS: (As Wallace) The solution to all our storage problems.
Simply by connecting the Bun-Vac to the Mind Manipulation-O-Matic, we can
brainwash the bunnies. Ha, ha. Rabbit rehabilitation. Once cured of their
antisocial, veg-ravaging behavior, the rabbits can be safely released without
fear of reoffending. Just a little added lunar power to enhance the mind
waves...

(Soundbite of machinery effects; music; door closing)

Mr. SALLIS: (As Wallace) ...and we can begin.

(Soundbite of machinery effects; music)

Mr. SALLIS: (As Wallace) Veg bad. Veg bad. Veg bad. Say no to carrots,
cabbage and cauliflower.

EDELSTEIN: That's the splendid 84-year-old Peter Sallis as Wallace, and the
music of Julian Nott and three other composers is a wonderful pastiche. I
hear echoes of the British-like music genre, especially popular in the '50s
with the witty addition of `Spielbergian' choirs.

Later, there are thunderous passages that would not be out of place in a
Hammer horror film, for Wallace's Frankensteinian endeavors end up producing
the most fearsome rabbit since "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," requiring
Gromit to bail him out of a more cataclysmic mess than ever before.

This is the best-ever blend of horror and comedy, leaving contenders like
"Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" in the dust. Oh, the puns are cheesy,
but only in the sense that cheese-loving Wallace reads "East of Edom" and
"Waiting for Gouda." The claymation is the best of both worlds, the
hand-fashioned and the computerized. Peter Jackson will be lucky to have
anything as thrilling in his upcoming "King Kong" as the revelation of the
giant were-rabbit in pieces as Gromit gives chase in an automobile while the
beast devours one garden after another. Even then, Jackson won't have Gromit,
with that deadpan, young-old face that sees all, but interferes when only
absolutely necessary, because he must love the notion, too, that there'll
always be an England.

The one lucky break about that warehouse fire? None of the newer Wallace and
Gromit models or anything from "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" was there. Hail,
Britannia! Wallace and Gromit live!

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for Slate.

(Credits)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.