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Mike Biel's Comments on
"Inside a Kid's Head"
"Inside A Kid's Head" was one of the reasons I went into radio. The script was in our fifth grade English textbook. When I was in first grade and my sister was in fifth, she and our next door neighbor acted it out for me. When I got to fifth grade, we were still using the same book and our class acted it out. No mics, tape recorder, or sound effects; we just read it and discussed the technical notes. From the moment my sister showed me the script, I wanted to do a full production of it someday.
The opportunity came as my final project for COMM 155, January 6, 1967. The previous year, when I asked Dr. Dusenbury if I could engineer AND direct my final project for COMM 44 - "Winnie-the-Pooh Gets Into A Tight Place" - he thought I was nuts. But, as I explained to him, I was using the S.C.I.M. cast and we had worked without a director besides me all year. So, once again I decided to both engineer and direct. No offense to people like Mike Muderick and Gerry Wilkinson, who would have been my logical choices for engineer, but I had specific ideas about what I wanted to do and it was easier for me to do them then to cue them.
But not too far into rehearsal I realized that perhaps I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew. Look at the size of this cast! I don't think there ever was a larger production in the four years I was there. And frankly, some of the actors I wanted were unavailable. Some, like Charlie Liebman, who was a MUST, would only be available for less than a half hour. In fact, when Charlie showed up, I stopped production, did his scene, let him go, and continued where we were. Joe Ryan had just the right voice for the kid and he sounds even better on the tape than I had remembered it. But more so than most of the class directors, I went over interpretation line by line when needed. But I never could find people that could do the communication master control scene the way I wanted it. Finally I just gave up and did ALL FOUR PARTS MYSELF after everybody left. And the final section could have been a little stronger but it was late and people had to leave. I didn't do any retakes, and most of the last 7 minutes is one unedited take. That late in the afternoon we didn't have enough people left to make the crowd scene convincing near the end - I should have done it FIRST!
Editing was allowed. In fact, there are at least 46 edits in the master tape - there might be a few more because I was counting most of them just now in fast forward. I did the editing up in our dorm room -- and every one of those splices is still in perfect shape over 30 years later. There are eight edits in that communication master control scene alone. And, like the scene in "The Hitchhiker" where the telephone sound was recorded by patching the phone itself into the board instead of using the effects filter, that is how I did this scene. However the level in the mix for the final air tape is too hot, and it got distorted, so the RealAudio posting of that scene will be a remix from the original master.
Gerry Wilkinson mentions how some of the programs in Playhouse 90.1 were actually done from Studio C [a smaller studio]. This production, however, is one of those that could never have been produced in the new building because they never built Dr. Dusenbury a drama studio. And we could never had done S.C.I.M. in Annenburg hall.