View From the Phlipside Radio - RIP Norman Corwin

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

A man died last week.  A man that most of you have never even heard of but you should have.  You probably have to be in your 70s or 80s to know the name Norman Corwin.  That’s really too bad because Norman Corwin influenced a lot of the most popular entertainment media of the second half of the 20th Century.  If you’ve enjoyed the work of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry and Norman Lear then you should know the name of Norman Corwin.

Corwin, known as the poet laureate of radio, won two Peabody awards, an Emmy, a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of “Lust for Life” which starred Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh.  That only scratches the surface of the awards over his lifetime for his work in radio, TV and the movies.  He also wrote books, lectured at the University of Southern California and was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.

What Corwin did that deserves some memorialization is taking light entertainment and putting it to work on serious social issues.  Roddenberry’s “Star Trek” often gets the nod for doing this but Corwin was doing it in the ‘30s and ‘40s.  And he was doing it with quality writing that was compared to the very best America has ever produced.  Corwin’s radio program “On A Note of Triumph” a show written in 24 hours for VE day, the day the Second World War ended in Europe, was called one of the all time great American poems by Carl Sandberg.  Sandberg knew a thing or two about great American poems.

No longer was entertainment just for our amusement.  Corwin, along with a few others of his contemporaries like Orson Welles, thought that it should make us think as well.  Through all of this the incredible writing of Norman Corwin shines through.  In 1941 Corwin wrote a radio program called “We Hold These Truths” in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.  The writing was so good that 50 years later when NPR wanted to honor the bicentennial of the fundamental American document they simply pulled out the script and re-recorded it.

In a day when writing 140 character long messages is considered a high art form in the media we need to take a step back and take a look at what great writing really looks like.  We need to remember the work of Norman Corwin.

Norman Corwin died last week at the age of 101.

Call that the View From the Phlipside