The Big Story
Reality was often too shocking for prime time
Reality was often too shocking for prime time
The series had 381 radio broadcasts, plus an audition program, and 314 television episodes. A total of 383 program numbers were assigned for the radio series (in 1948, the show skipped some weeks for the political conventions, but still assigned program numbers to those pre-empted weeks, even though nothing was broadcast).
For all of the tremendous success of the radio franchise, very little of it has survived. Only about 1 in 8 radio episodes have been found. We have 54 of them in whole or in part, resulting in 48 complete episodes. They are as follows:
The Feature Assignment network audition recording, whose script was re-worked into The Big Story format and presented as episode 5 of the series,
19 complete network broadcasts,
28 Armed Forces Radio recordings,
5 partial network recordings, and
1 partial Armed Forces Radio recording
THIS NEW SET IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD; details below...
The Big Story Project: A Unique Opportunity
Audio + Scripts + Research
BROADCASTS: Audio files are the essential ingredient of classic radio series compilations. The Big Story Project used access to pioneer collections gathered by OTRR efforts and audio donations by members. This led to significant upgrades of sound quality and discovery of missing episodes. The recordings are now available in both lossless (FLAC) and convenience (MP3) formats.
SCRIPTS: The Big Story Project has a second ingredient: its sponsor was sued for damages to health and public medical costs as part of the multi-decade tobacco litigation. They reached settlement with states attorneys general in 1998. As part of the litigation's evidential discovery process, most every script for The Big Story was scanned into Adobe Acrobat PDF files and made freely available to the public. Members of the fledgling OTRR took advantage of that opportunity. This allowed for proper numbering of episodes consistent with the scripts, analysis of story details that helped identify the original events, and supplying context for the full enjoyment of those incomplete broadcast recordings for which only part 1 discs or part 2 discs have survived.
RESEARCH about the original stories: Every surviving episode's original news stories have been identified and documented. Newspaper clippings and articles are supplied in single Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. The original news stories are often more tragic, sometimes gruesome, than what was aired. The series "fictionalized" so many aspects of the stories that finding the news items for some of them took years... but now we have them!
RESEARCH about the reporters: While some of the reporters were "famous," like Walter Winchell or Dorothy Kilgallen, most were unknown nationally, many with newspaper careers of short duration. Some left their newspaper positions well before the use of their story on the program. This made it difficult to learn more about them and to track down what they did in the years following their newspaper stints. Every reporter's career trajectory has been identified. One was peculiar and disappointing. He left his Midwest reporter beat and moved to California to find fame and fortune in public relations and publicity. Sadly, he was later arrested for promoting a financial scam to convince unwitting persons to invest in a fake municipal monorail system in Kansas City! Happily, there were other life-long local reporters with high journalistic standards and earned the respect of their communities. Some have particularly inspiring stories of fortitude in the face of tough times and threats to themselves and family as they aggressively pursued the truth.
Like many top series of the radio era, the stories behind the productions can be fascinating in themselves. For various legal concerns, The Big Story had a policy of creating "fictionally authentic" productions about true news events. Only the reporter's name and employer was maintained in the stories. Everything else, especially perpetrator and victim names, but sometimes incidents, would be disguised for the broadcasts. This created an extra layer of mystery and challenge in the investigation of series history.
Each episode's Listener's Guide entry has a link to the specific Internet Archive page for that episode's resources. The broadcast audio can be streamed on the page or downloaded from it. The episode script and background research can be viewed on screen or downloaded as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.
For those who decide to print out the Listener's Guide, there is a unique QR code for every episode. It can be scanned using a smartphone or tablet for easy access to that page for streaming purposes, viewing, or downloading. If you're reading the PDF on a computer screen, the QR code can be read by a smartphone camera if you prefer streaming audio with that device rather than your computer.
The Project has been submitted for designation as a "Special Collection" of The Internet Archive. We are awaiting official word, which we are told will be soon, and likely to be favorable.
In the meantime, all of the pages for the project can be accessed at this address https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22The+Big+Story+Project%22 (This address will always work; an additional address will be assigned after "Special Collection" status is awarded. This page will be updated with that information when it is available.)
The Project created a separate Archive page for each Big Story episode. There are also individual pages for The Listener's Guide and for a video presentation noted at the bottom of this page.
Each episode's page has FLAC and MP3 audio files, and two Adobe Acrobat PDF files. One of the PDFs is the script, and the other is the research package. Occasionally there are other PDFs related to historical background.
Episode audio can be streamed by hitting the play button in the player at the top of its page.
TO DOWNLOAD ANY FILE FROM AN INTERNET ARCHIVE PAGE:
Look for the "Download Options" panel, usually on the right hand side of your computer screen.
If you mouse over FLAC or MP3, a dropdown menu appears and select "save file as" or its equivalent to a place on your computer.
If you mouse over PDF, a little down arrow will appear. Click it and the names of the two PDF files will appear. Right mouse click on one of the file names to download. If you want both PDF files (SCRIPT+RESEARCH) a grey button will appear that says "2 files." If you click on that, the script and the research file will be together in a .zip file.
There is no separate Internet Archive page with the complete collection of recordings or scripts or research at this time.
Click here to go to the list of programs and their Internet Archive links
THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED WORK AND SUPPORT OF ALL OF THESE PROJECTS. THE PARTICIPATION OF COBALT CLUB MEMBERS AND THEIR ENCOURAGEMENT IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.
Download the Listener's Guide, audio, scripts, and research documents using any of these cloud services:
Transfer-it (links expire approximately January 8, 2027)
Listener's Guide PDF (1.4MB) https://transfer.it/t/qpXobsoxDDYR
FLAC (2.5GB) https://transfer.it/t/RiRf6hwHmTaK
MP3 (1.3GB) https://transfer.it/t/Rnse6g5RELia
Scripts (45MB) https://transfer.it/t/pP1nHlw1GBrK
Research (156MB) https://transfer.it/t/F7zHnkoxmJgb
Filen cloud storage has folders for each of the above click here.
pCloud account holders please follow this request
If you do not have a pCloud account, please use one of the other services above, transfer-it or Filen.
The pCloud folders are in my personal account which is subject to monthly bandwidth limitations. Please copy the files into your pCloud account rather than downloading. Make sure you have enough space before starting https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZeWI4JZhjHdjAHJkpXA3dukleuFwSPWe3Qy
The Big Story Project needs continued work on the script collection. We have 380ish scripts of the series in PDF files with 10-15 or so scripts in each PDF file. It would be helpful if those scripts could be parsed into separate files, one for each script, and properly labeled.
The files are at https://transfer.it/t/cEx8oV8FWJxY. There are 31 files totalling ~170MB. The date on them is 2005, which is about the time OTRR was founded.
There is free PDF editing software that makes the extraction of each script easy. PDFGear can be downloaded at https://www.pdfgear.com/
There are many PDF editors around, paid and free. I've used PDFGear for over a year, and it's been easy to use and reliable. Use whatever software you prefer... as long as the job gets done...
The scripts for the surviving recordings have already been extracted. This means there are about 330 scripts that need to be parsed into their own files. Assisting in this effort would be a great contribution to the long-term project. Send me an e-mail at suspenseotr@gmail.com if you have interest in volunteering.
PLEASE NOTE: DETAILS OF THE PRESENTATION ARE BASED ON THE RESEARCH FINDINGS UP TO THAT DATE. Much has been learned since and will be discovered in the years ahead.
The video can also be viewed at The Internet Archive (click here). YouTube does not allow downloads, but the presentation video can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.
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