The 52-minute show, it turned out, was long overdue. Within weeks, CBS received 200,000 fan letters from listeners. Currently the _Radio Mystery Theater_ can be heard in New York on Monday through Friday at 7:07 p.m. on station WMCA (570 AM). It is heard seven nights a week on approximately 250 other stations across the country. Brown, the producer/director, oversees every phase of the operation, from hiring the writers and actors to directing and recording sessions from a control booth at the CBS studios.
"I have never stopped believing," he says, "that the spoken word and the imagination of the listener are infinitely stronger and more dramatic than anything television can offer." He is a silvery-haired, distinguished looking gentleman with a mischievous twinkle in hie eye and an endless capacity for humor. Ruddy-complexioned and vigorous, dressed in a gray pinstripe suit and a crimson tie, he approaches his work with an infectious enthusiasm.
On a typical weekday, Brown arrives at the sound studio at 9 a.m. with a batch of scripts under his arm, which he hands out to a group of actors assembled around a table. Many are stars of the stage or screen -- Tammy Grimes, Julie Harris, Tony Roberts, Fred Gwynn, Bobby Morse, Roberta Maxwell, Joan Hackett. "I get the best actors in the world, right here in New York," he notes with pride. "They work for me in the daytime and on Broadway at night."
As the cast members go through a cold reading. Brown interjects his comments: "Do a little more with that. ... Don't swallow your words there. ... Cross out that line." The actors laugh and joke their way through the session; Brown is the biggest jokester of all. Finally everyone takes a break before doing the actual taping. Brown calls his 91-year-old mother on the telephone and speaks to her in Yiddish for some time. Then he answers a questions about his discoveries in sound effects.
"In the 1930s I was doing _Dick Tracy_, a very popular show. For sound effects we had several doors. One of them screaked, no matter what we did to it. I like to think that door was talking to us, saying, 'Make me a star,'" he says with a smile.
The creaking door later became the signature for _Inner Sanctum Mysteries_, and is now employed as the introductory note for the _Radio Mystery Theater_, along with host E.G. Marshall's compelling greeting: "Come _in_." Himan Brown also created the sound of London's foghorns and Big Ben for _Bulldog Drummond_, the laugh of the fat Nero Wolfe, and the never-to-be-forgotten train that roared under Park Avenue into Grand Central Station.
