An Introduction to Sound Serials Part I:

From my unpublished "Next Week at This Theater"

"Most of us actors wanted to do our own stunts … and most of the stuntmen wanted to be actors” … actor Pierce Lyden

"There were times when I would have to pretend to shoot a man off a balcony. Then, when the scene was over, I would change wardrobe and go up on the balcony and fall off" … stunt man Tom Steele

Thanks to Jack Mathis and his life's work, the four volume "Valley of the Cliffhangers," "Valley of the Cliffhangers Supplement," and "Republic Confidential Volumes 1 and 2," we have an accurate accounting of how the leading chapter play producer, Republic Pictures, created their 66 serials, and although minutiae probably varied (costs certainly did), both Universal and Columbia most likely employed similar methods. Republic, as we shall see, inherited much of their serial-making expertise from Nat Levine's Mascot Pictures, which had been incorporated into the new Republic Pictures in 1935.

By 1936, with the tremendous success of Universal’s Flash Gordon and with Republic’s purchase of the screen rights to Chester Gould's popular comic strip Dick Tracy, serials were once again becoming a force to be reckoned with, a fact that brought Columbia Pictures into the fold the following year. It may be useful to quote Jack Mathis at some length here:

“Although the snobbish class distinction between features and serials remained a lasting stigma, chapter play profits helped make possible many a highfalutin production. As the Golden Age of the sound serials approached mid-life in 1940, major studios gazed enviously at the 100% to 300% grosses above their negative costs being regularly accrued by the cliffhangers. So astonishing were the percentages that [Republic studio head] Herbert J. Yates defied any feature produced on an equal investment to match these figures, a challenge echoed by his competitors Harry Cohn at Columbia and Nate Blumberg at Universal."

An amazing result, really, for a product sold on the free-for-all States Rights market for as low an amount as $10 an episode (in its hey-day Mascot charged as little as $5, and even lower than that if competition from Universal proved especially tough).

During the first decade of its existence, Republic's annual release usually consisted of two "streamline" 12-chapter serials and two "super" 15-chapter serials to satisfy the need of theaters for a full season of weekly entertainment. (Columbia stuck with 15 chapters whether or not the story demanded it, which it truly never did.) Running times for the opening chapter was set at 30 minutes in the first decade of operations (20 thereafter), with each subsequent installment running 15-18 minutes until the mid-1940s when chapter-lengths were standardized to an exact 13:20. Like no other Hollywood producer, Republic anticipated television and 13:20 plus commercial breaks would come to exactly 15 minutes, the standard length of syndicated television programs in the early 1950s.

Titles were a management decision but likes and dislikes of exhibitors and audience reaction mattered greatly. With the exception of literary adaptations, titles adhered more to exploitation possibilities than anything else (a harbinger of things to come in the teen-market craze of the 1950s) and the writers then had three months to come up with a proper story and screenplay to fit title and concept.

Filming at Republic and on location took three to eight weeks according to the length of the serial, with editing accomplished at one week per chapter. Scoring, dubbing, printing and other post-production tasks were then added before a release date was set. This strict sausage factory method of serial-making meant that first-run serials actually began playing in theaters before post-production of the entire serial had been completed. In many instances, the opening chapter of a new serial followed right after the resolution of the current presentation, ensuring that kids everywhere would be profitably hooked for another 12 to 15 weeks.

to be continued...

Doris Houck (Two-Fisted Stranger, Heading West, Landrush)

Of all the B-Western series, with the possible exception of Republic's Rocky Lanes, the Columbia Durango Kids needed leading ladies the least. In fact, in later years, the series often dispensed with them entirely. With no one the wiser, truth be told. But if there actually was a girl involved, she was involved even more peripherally than usual for the genre and was mainly there for the studio to trot out one of their many contract starlets, each and every one of whom studio czar Harry Cohn believed to possess the potential to become another Rita Hayworth. Doris Houck (1921-1965) did three Durangos in a row and you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart: she was the daughter of a mine owner in Two-Fisted Stranger, a banker in Heading West and a newspaper editor in Landrush. All of these fathers are single, widowers presumably, a very common occurrence in B-Westerns, where the survival rate of women seems to have been tragically low. A B-Western father is also always quite elderly and played by distinguished types like Davison Clark (Two-Fisted Stranger) and Nolan Leary (Heading West), if not downright geriatric like Landrush's dear old Emmett Lynn, who could easily have been Miss Houck's grandfather. In any case, Doris Houck's characters in all three films are virtually indistinguishable, as, truth be told, are the general plots: Charles Starrett plays someone named Steve who is really the masked defender of the weak, the Durango Kid, Smiley Burnette does his usual shtick (Heading West is the one where he performs magic tricks, and he is seconded by vinegar-faced Maudie Prickett in Stranger), and the main villain appears law abiding on the surface. For Houck, these Durangos were meant to keep her in front of the camera – just like the studio's many crime series entries – while she waited for that big break that would bring stardom. It was not to be, alas. Originally a chorus girl, Idaho-born, Los Angeles reared Doris Houck, who sometimes billed herself as Doris Colleen (notably in the Stooges' public domain classic Brideless Groom where she sticks Shemp Howard's head in a vise), danced at New York's Riviera Club and was featured with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra at Nils T. Granlund's famed Los Angeles landmark The Florentine Gardens. That led to her stint with Columbia but little else. Off screen, she dabbled in writing (one gossip column tidbit had her authoring a tome entitled “Analysis of the Hairy Ape,” presumably referring to Eugene O'Neill's classic play), and was at one time rumored to be close to marrying handsome cartoonist Peter Arno, but that union proved short-lived. Of longer duration, but a lot messier, was a marriage to Los Angeles Vice Squad Officer Fred Otash which ended in an especially acrimonious divorce in 1952. (The 220 pound Otash, who became a private detective and later hooked up with Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg, once testified before a state Senate investigation committee that “Communists and sex deviates [should] be ousted from the movie industry, that male movie stars stay with their wives and female movie stars stay with their husbands.” Bitter much?) Doris Houck disappeared from the news following her divorce from Otash.

Ms. Houck's husband, Fred Otash, has turned up in a couple of very interesting publications recently, including a reprint of James Spada's biography of Peter Lawford, "Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept The Secretts" (New York, NY: Author & Co., 2011), where Spada has Lawford contacting Otash on the morning of Marilyn Monroe's death. Otash at the time resided at 1342 N. Laurel in West Hollywood, a home that still exists. The former vice squad detective is also mentioned -- at length in fact -- in Samuel Bernstein's treatise on sleaze-merchant Confidential Magazine, "Mr. Confidential: The Man, His Magazine & The Movieland Massacre That Changed Hollywood Forever" (Los Angeles, CA: Walford Press, 2011). The juxtaposition of the two books is quite revealing: Otash clearly worked both side of the street, so to speak, like providing material for Bob Harrison's Confidentialrag, mostly outing gay Hollywood, while at the same time aiding Lawford keep whatever secrets the death of Monroe may or may not have revealed.