TLS signed “Ray,” one page, 8.5 x 11, personal letterhead, June 18, 1947. Letter to literary agent H. N. Swanson about the radio series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, in part: "I am enclosing the radio script I talked to you about. I had a conversation with Jim Fonda about this and I think I persuaded him not to use it, at any rate not yet, until he has had two or three good shows…I told him that he had lost the character, that the dialogue was cheap, would-be tough, and that the whole thing was rather an inferior 'Rogue's Gallery' script. I think he agrees with a lot of this, but in common with all radio men he seems to think the public are a lot more stupid than I think they are…Of course, what we are really up against here is that the writer, Milton Geiger, is an excellent radio adapter but has no quality as a writer himself. He is like these motion picture writers who know how to build a scene or a story but can hardly write a line of usable dialogue. To a certain extent we can depend on Van Heflin to save a poor script. Van understands the character, sympathizes with my ideas about it, and when he gets a bad line he has sense enough to read it against the mood of the line itself. as much as to say 'look at me, trying to be tough—isn't that silly.' I thought he was far better than Dick Powell, who thought he was tough. I have tried to impress on Fonda that the angle on this show must be, not that the character is a smart private eye who can outguess the police and make very woman he meets want to snuggle up to him; but an ordinary working man who is trying to make a living in a rather dirty world; whose feelings are much too close to the surface, so that he is continually becoming involved in situations which hurt him, and which he yet has the guts to resolve. This is something which has never been done on the air, and if they will only do it, I think they will be surprised at the results." In fine condition.
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