The Serials - Part 1

One of my big projects for 2010 is a summary of a book called The Serials -- Suspense and Drama by Installment, which was written by Raymond William Stedman. This non-fiction book was published in 1971, and focuses on the history of serials (movies, radio and television.) Since the book was written so many years ago, later soaps won't be mentioned in it, but I think it will be fascinating to read about the evolution of soaps from radio to television.

The preface begins: "In 1912, a year in which many things seemed to be coming to an end, the serial drama was born. Films had been telling stories for about ten years. Magazines had been telling continued stories for decades. And in more and more newspapers appeared a new medium for gradually unfolding a story in visual form: the daily comic strip."

The author mentions in the next paragraph how they are using brush strokes to discuss the medium as many movies and such were not shown nationally. He also opines "serial followers are fiercely loyal". In the acknowledgement section, he thanks those who he spoke to like As the World Turns and Guiding Light creator Irna Phillips and how he had "a grandmother, mother and wife who explained that part of the daytime-serial genre which to a male is unfathomable." Of course, what is amusing with that comment, is how many people I've met over the years who are male and love soap operas.

The first chapter of the book is called Drama By Installment. The author writes about a magazine called "The Ladies' World" and how on the cover of the August 1912 issue of the magazine there was a portrait of a woman drawn by Charles Dana Gibson. What else was on the cover was a contest asking people to tell the magazine what they believed would happen to the girl on the cover, who was named Mary and a character in a new movie-- "What Happened to Mary". The person who guessed correctly would get one hundred dollars.

In the magazine, the story of Mary was explained. She had been abandoned as a baby, and raised by a shopkeeper. A note had been left with her basket along with $500. If the child was raised, and found a husband, the "adoptive" parent would get an additional $1,000. Her adopted father Billy Peart, wanted her to marry a man named Tuck Wintergreen, but she had no interest in him. Once nineteen-year-old Mary found out the circumstances of her life, she left with $100. At the end of the story, it said that whatever it was would happen within 20 minutes of the end of the chapter.

The author of the book has no idea how many people sent in 300 or less word entries, but Lucy Proctor of Armstrong, California guessed correctly. Billy Peart and Tuck Wintergreen reached Mary at the railroad station and a young man swept in and carried her off in his rig. According to the book, in September 1912 the story continued in the magazine and continued pictures from the forthcoming motion picture about Mary's life.

What was interesting was that Charles Dwyer, the editor of the magazine, met a man named Horace G. Plimpton, who was a manager for Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope Company. Mr. Plimpton thought it was an interesting idea to tie in the idea of Mary's story in the magazine and that it should go further into a cinema venture. The movies would come out at the same time as the magazine.

An actress named Mary Fuller was hired to play Mary, and William Wadsworth played Billy Peart. As the movies and magazine stories continued, we saw Mary travel around the United States and the United Kingdom. If Mary didn't get married by the age of 21, a friend of Peart's would receive the money.

According to the book, "each segment could be understood and appreciated in itself without much initial summary. Audiences were left to wonder how and when she would obtain her fortune--but not, as would be true of later serials, how she would escape a peril menacing her at each episode's end." Since there wasn't a cliffhanger at the end of each installment, the author opines that it is still a serial as the story continued at regular intervals and had a continuing narrative. This is different than the series films, which as defined by the author as "characters and sometimes locales continued; yet the individual motion pictures appeared in random and never-specified fashion. Audiences did not go to the theater with the idea that they were seeing part of a whole, nor did they know with certainty that there would ever be another such film."

What happened to Mary sounds like a pre-cursor to the soaps of today. Having a tie-in to get the audience hooked, by having both a magazine featuring the story and a movie sounds like a unique thing to increase interest in the project. While $100, doesn't seem like a lot today, nearly 100 years ago, it would have been. As I have yet to complete this book, it will be interesting for me to see how the serials (either in the movies, radio or early television) compare to what we see today.