KCRW Builds for Future With an Ear to the Past : Radio: A $1.2-million expansion, designed with help from the BBC, is tailored to producing studio dramas.
Radio drama is taking a step toward recovery this week with the start of a $1.2-million expansion project at KCRW-FM’s basement studios at Santa Monica College. Designed in consultation with the British Broadcasting Corp., the construction represents the first new radio drama studio built in the Los Angeles area since the 1950s.
KCRW (89.9 FM) already broadcasts more radio drama than any other commercial or non-commercial station in the United States, said station manager Ruth Hirschman. And the long-planned doubling of its present space to 9,000 square feet represents the station’s continuing “belief in the face of everybody telling us it’s over, it’s not going to work, nobody does it and it’s very old-fashioned.”
“But nobody does it enough,” she insisted. “You have to be there every night to build an audience. You can’t do it once a week, for an hour, and say, ‘Hey, it has no audience.’ ”
While the new studio spaces are also to be used for music and news coverage, they have been designed specifically with radio drama in mind, said John Huntley, KCRW’s chief engineer. The two new studio spaces will be connected by sliding glass doors. The larger room will be equipped with adjustable acoustical tiles and carpeting that can be removed to expose a strip of concrete designed for walking sound effects.
The plans, created by architect John Mason Caldwell, went through eight major revisions in consultation with the BBC, which plans to produce future radio programs in the new studios. The BBC still produces more than 15 hours of live radio drama each day, and has produced a handful of dramas out of the existing KCRW studios.
“From a production standpoint, we’ve been out of space for four years,” Huntley said. “There have been times when studios were scheduled through three in the morning.”
KCRW has demonstrated its deepening commitment to reviving radio drama since the late 1980s. This was epitomized in 1987’s nearly 15-hour production of Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” by the L.A. Classic Theatre Works. Among the cast of that critically acclaimed broadcast were Ed Asner, Amy Irving and Marsha Mason. Other notable productions have included Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” by the Mark Taper Forum’s Literary Cabaret, and “Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon,” featuring Asner, Peter Falk, Edward James Olmos and Joanna Cassidy in 1988.
“We have talent coming out of the wazoo because we’re in L.A. and every third actor is interested in doing something in radio drama,” Hirschman said last week.
“ ‘Babbitt’ was really a word-for-word presentation of a book. And radio drama requires a more complex setup.”
Besides the two new studios, the station is building a new control center, three editing rooms, a voice booth and expanded office space. In total, about 75% of KCRW’s space will be dedicated to production, leaving the rest for offices--a balance that is the opposite of most commercial stations, Huntley said.
“We don’t have to write memos because we can yell at each other across the room,” Hirschman joked.
Physical construction costs are budgeted for $600,000, with an additional $600,000 slated for equipment. Funds were provided by the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees almost two years ago, Huntley explained, and are to be repaid with fund-raising.
KCRW began broadcasting into the Santa Monica area in 1947, Huntley said, moving its humble studios over the years into a variety of on-campus locations and local junior high and high schools. Before its present studio was completed in the early 1980s, the station broadcast from the basement of John Adams Junior High School across the street from the college.
“On the radio you could hear the recess bell going off,” laughed Caldwell.
