Wyliss Cooper helping kids through college and doesn't like it.

Comments on Wyliss Cooper helping kids through college and doesn't like it.

Endof80
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Posted Jun 20, 2014 - 9:19 AM:

I stumbled across this old newspaper clipping while googling, http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/5648992/

NEW YORK, (AP) — Wyliss Cooper is helping a lot of kids through college—and he doesn't like it. His doctor tells him he shouldn't g»t excited, but every- time) Cooper thinks about how the .students are milking him his blood pressure goes up like an Arizona thermometer in August. Here is how enterprising young scholars across the land capitalize on Cooper, author of "Quiet, Please," a weekly half- hour dramatic show on the Mutual network: '.'They write in fan letters to the network saying they enjoyed the program and asking for a copy of the script. When they get it, they stick in a few 'he saids' and 'she saids' and 8...


Not sure of the date, and you have to be a member to access the entire article (which I'm not not interested in paying for).
I don't see this one in the press clippings here, perhaps some one has access to it already?
MS
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Posted Jun 20, 2014 - 5:43 PM:

["Student Plagiarists Make Hay With Free Radio Scripts" by Hal Boyle - This syndicated article appeared in various papers. This version is from The Berkshire Evening Eagle, December 22, 1947]

NEW YORK (AP)--Wyllis Cooper is helping a lot of kids through college -- and he doesn't like it.

His doctor tells him he shouldn't get excited, but everytime Cooper thinks about how the students are milking him his blood pressure goes up like an Arizona thermometer in August.

Here is how enterprising young scholars across the land capitalize on Cooper, author of "Quiet Please," a weekly half-hour dramatic show on the Mutual network.

"They write in fan letters to the network saying they enjoyed the program and asking for a copy of the script. When they get it, they stick in a few 'he saids' and 'she saids,' and turn it into their English classes as original themes.

"Most of them don't even have energy or brains enough to change the names of the characters."

What angers Cooper and other bigtime radio writers even more than this collegiate petty larceny is "the plagiarism extant in radio itself today -- by people on small isolated waffle-iron stations who ask for scripts, of your shows, then change them only slightly and broadcast them as their own."

He said many broadcasters were beginning to combat this "idea thievery" by curtly refusing most pleas for program scripts.

Cooper specializes in radio drama, an art which he thinks many writers abuse "by trying to cut their stories in the same old corny pattern."

Phrases for Ear

It is lonely, exacting work, this framing phrases tuned to give a picture to the ear rather than the eye.

"My definition of a writer is a man who hates to write," Cooper said.

He speaks with bitter knowledge. For a quarter of a century he has been putting clean white sheets of paper into his typewriter and pulling them out again all broke out with high-priced prose.

He wrote "Son of Frankenstein" and several "Mr. Moto" scripts for the movies, but he prefers radio writing. He originated the NBC "Lights Out" mystery series and also wrote scores of NBC "Army Hour" scripts in wartime.

"In 1935 I wrote 18 shows a week for a year -- all original stuff," he said. That required an output of 30,000 words every seven days, each conceived in pain and delivered in anguish.

Cooper now writes in a small Greenwich Village hotel room he rents for the purpose. He recalled how a friend once tried to help Bob Benchley out of the periodic creative paralysis all writers get at times.

"He told Benchley to sit down and write the word 'the' on a sheet of paper and the rest would be easy," Cooper smiled. "Benchley tried it. He typed out 'the' and sat staring at it for two hours. Then he typed 'hell with it' -- and got up and left."
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