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 2WP_cTa Origins of the First-Person Singular: Mercurial Theatre on the Air In 1938, Orson Welles moved Mercury Theatre from stage to radio, beginning his dramatic series First Person Singular: Mercury Theatre on the Air. By the end of this year, Welles would be beckoned to Hollywood to begin his film career with RKO. During this time Welles established a creative process that interwove narrative strategies from stage, radio, and screen. He created a unique artistic persona and a trademark brand of narrative that invited publicity and allowed him to move to Hollywood not just as an actor but as an actor-director-writer with a record-breaking contract in terms of the money and power that it promised. Welles often adapted social-realist narratives through a psychoanalytic lens, using interpretations conveyed by a first-person narrator. His narrative strategies developed unconventional notions of “text,” “author,” and “audience ,” which became easily recognizable to his audience—a Wellesian brand attractive to customers. This chapter examines the commercial “failure” of the Wellesian brand and argues that it was only a temporary promotional failure, for the Wellesian brand wields perhaps more influence now than ever, and the very proliferation of Wellesian “texts” begs postmodern examination. Thus the image of Welles as famed modernist auteur gives way to that of a Wellesian commercial and cultural brand—a multifaceted success that flourishes even at the expense of the traditional concept of individual authorship. The Wellesian Brand: A Classic for the Masses It is helpful to think of Welles’s work as a brand rather than a text—a constellation of materials that results in various “texts,” whether these are performed, photographed, or merely generated through surrounding letters, ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR  photographs, and newspaper clippings. The term “brand” also captures the commercial pressures and goals surrounding the Wellesian productions for RKO, as well as the results of his artistic and commercial partnerships with entities as diverse as the Mercury Theatre, Campbell Soup, and the U.S. government. Welles’s RKO era coincides with the consolidation of brand marketing strategies in larger American culture. As Simon Anholt and Jeremy Hildreth note in their history of American branding, “The walls between marketing, entertainment, politics and the military, always somewhat permeable in the American culture, had truly been dismantled” by the mid 1940s,1 in part because of World War II.2 In Welles’s case, pro-Ally, anti-Axis propaganda funds directly supported his final RKO project, It’s All True, as well as his Pan-American broadcasts of the era. First-Person Narrative and the Wellesian Voice Brands have personalities that, like people, “consist of a whole range of moods and attitudes.”3 Any brand establishes its personality by matching its strengths to the needs of the marketplace, making an emotional connection with the consumer, and being broad enough in scope to encompass a variety of products. One of the most effective strategies for connecting with the consumer is “sensory branding,” or the use of stimuli to help the consumer associate positive experiences and images with the brand. As Martin Lindstrom describes, “The purpose of a sensory branding strategy is emotional engagement.”4 The rise of the Wellesian brand was enormously aided by his distinctive voice and thus by Welles’s work on the radio, which offered built-in sensory marketing. Welles’s resonant voice became his primary semiotic identifier, or “logo.” The sound of his voice became a distinctive sign of the Wellesian brand, much like the label of his radio sponsor, Campbell’s Soup. Welles was tremendously successful at using his voice as an icon of his brand, which offered “quick concentrations of meaning” and “sensory imprints that instantly summon the brand essence.”5 Welles’s voice summoned associations with entertainment , narrative experimentation, and classical quality. It was so integral to his work that when in October 1942 he asked for format ideas regarding a new show sponsored by Lockheed Vega,6 Arthur Miller responded, Your voice is a format. The only two things that must be heard at the beginning of the show every week are your voice and Lockheed-Vega. Those are the two things that must be the same every week[. . . .] Your voice, if I may say so, portends much. It and Lockheed-Vega identify the show, along with the title. That’s all a format can do, portend and identify.7 [3.145.186.6] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 09:19 GMT...

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