"Snooksie" -- New Carey Wilber Television Comedy

(from Buffalo newspaper, 1953)

Carey Wilber, former Buffalo newspaper man and now one of television’s most prolific free-lance script writers, has fashioned "Snooksie", a comedy of the travails of a star reporter for "Television Theatre" on WBEN-TV at 9 p.m. next Wednesday.

(Article taken from unknown New York newspaper dated 10/17/52)

One of television’s must prolific free lance script writer is a 36-year-old former newspaper man—with the soul of a drifter—who a year ago had never seen a TV or stage drama or sold a line of fiction to the market, although he had tried writing short stories. In less than six months, he has sold sixteen scripts to commercial television programs.

His name is Carey Wilber, born and reared in Buffalo, NY, who has worked for ten newspapers all the way from Birmingham, Ala. To Anchorage, Alaska, spending anywhere from six week to four years in each connection.

Visiting here early last year while on a week’s leave from the Toronto Globe and Mail, he watched a crime program on a TV set in a Lexington Avenue bar and decided that he "could write that stuff." He bought a book on television writing, went back to Toronto and began grinding out scripts.

Present

Mr. Wilber’s first scripts submitted to NBC were rejected. After he sent others to the advertising agency producing "Armstrong’s Circle Theatre," where he checked with his first sale in March and was paid $750. "Then I came galloping down to New York," he says.

The wayfaring writer obtained an agent (he doesn’t shun money and yet despises business matters) and moved into a small hotel near Times Square with a typewriter and rented television set. He still lives there. If his hotel room were any tinier, he would hardly be able to squeeze into it with his 200 pounds and better than six-foot frame. Here Mr. Wilber, whose normal street attire includes a plaid wool shirt or dark turtleneck sweater and a windbreaker, hammers out his scripts, which have been sold to "Lux Video Theatre", "Kraft Television Theatre", "Gulf Playhouse", "The Doctor", and to Hollywood TV film producers. He works not by a set schedule but as the spirit moves him, which is nearly always.

I just pick a good idea and round it out," he comments. "One night I got an idea at 11 o’clock and by 8 the next morning the half-hour script was finished. The first time I did a full-hour script, didn’t take long—three days. But, the second one took me a week. The more I know about script writing, the more I care I put into it".

Writing Captions

"The characters I write about are prototypes of people I have known," he adds, "and the situations are those I either have experienced or heard about. But I do a lot of writing that never jells, and not all of my stuff sells. I have to keep five or six scripts making the rounds all the time in order to make a living."

Mr. Wilber approaches his work in the way that some experts say it should be done—in terms of pictures. "Writing for television is like writing captions," he says. "The only difference is that for TV the picture is in your mind instead of laid out in front of you." One director who has used several of the writer’s scripts sums up his unusual success in this manner: "Carey Wilber is a writing fool with great enthusiasm, an overgrown boy who will never grow up. There is a tendency in radio and television for writers to experience anything, just twist things, and gimmick them up, but Wilber in real life does everything that other people dream about. His plots are corny, but to him they’re real."

Mr. Wilber turns out various types of plays but seems to have a fondness for adventure stories and melodramas. Tomorrow night at 8 o’clock over Channel 2 Corrine Calvert will be starred in a play of his entitled, "Ti Babette," in which she plays the part of a wealthy girl reared in the Canadian north woods who goes to Montreal to seek a more glamorous life.

Copy Boy

"One kind of play I don’t turn out is a situation comedy about family life," says the writer. "The average family just isn’t funny. You have to distort characters too much."

Mr. Wilber went to work as a copy boy for the old Buffalo Times in 1936. Later becoming a reporter, feature writer, and copyreader, he moved on in succeeding years to The Birmingham (Ala.) Age-Herald, The Memphis (Tenn.) Commercial Appeal, The Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin, The Boston (Mass.) Globe, The Tacoma (Wash.) Times and the Milwaukee (Wis.) Journal. In Alaska, he covered the Legislature for the Ketchikan Chronicle and Anchorage Times.

The writer expresses no concern about running out of play ideas. "Any day that I can’t sell a television script," he says, "I know that there’s a newspaper copydesk somewhere that can use a copyreader. The only thing I worry about is the day when I take this television writing seriously."

Local Scribe Hits
the Big Time

Taken from a local column in an unnamed Buffalo, NY, newspaper, c. 1952...

‘STUDIO ONE’ SCORES AT LAST

by Buffalo TV reviewer Wilbur D. Clark, c. 1953

Maybe the name Carey Wilber prejudiced me.

I watched "Studio One" Monday night most of all because he wrote the play "Sue Ellen," and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Afterwards I asked myself, "how come?"

Something about it was definitely different from what I have come to regard as the regular pattern of "Studio One" productions.

In searching my memory for the unkind remarks I’ve made about the Monday night dramas in recent months, the only thing I can recall saying is that the characters always seem to be a bunch of neurotic, screaming so-and-so’s, and that the playwright always knocks himself out probing the diseased minds of the principles.

Yet this one certainly didn’t have exactly normal people in it. Or did it? A nasty aunt and her under-the-thumb spouse conspired to cover up their evil doings by murdering a niece.

Perhaps the murderers were normal-nasty characters, and that appealed to me.

Certainly one Josh White Jr., talented son of a talented performer, helped the production a lot. His sad song at the beginning and end set the mood and then wrapped up the story nicely.

VARIETY

Taken from TV Topics column, October 29, 1952

Always on the alert for something new in the way of television dramatics, NBC-TV’s "Kraft Theatre" came up with an off-the-beaten-track yarn last Wednesday night (22) localled in a Klondike goldmining camp. Original story, penned by Carey Wilber, was replete with allegories, personfications, etc., most of which emerged true-to-form and, while the show never managed to generate the full amount of suspense for which it was obviously aiming, it was interesting right up to the denouement. Kraft show, which is well into its sixth year of weekly dramas, with no time off for summer vacations, obviously is finding it increasingly difficult to locate stories and its producers are to be commended for the way they consistently break away from the trite and overdone stuff.

Wilber’s story told of the regeneration of a gambler, a dance hall hostess, a young thief, a drunken medico and almost everyone in the camp at the happenings of "A Long Night in Forty Mile"—the show’s title, "Forty Mile" being the name of the camp. Wilber built his plot nicely as the young thief, who had lost all of his dough to the gambler, desperately stole a cache of gold from two of the miners, in order to show his wife that he had made good in the Klondike. The wife arrived on the scene, pregnant, and as she went through her labor pains in a room above the saloon, the veterinarian who turned to drink to forget his failure at becoming a real medico, became a man and saved her life; the gambler fell in love with the hostess, and the robber miners forgave the kid and he, in turn, also became a man. Story would have had more impact had not the gambler spelled out the motif for the benefit of viewers, since Wilber’s morals were inherent in the action.

(The rest of review centers on the characterization as well as the director’s direction—evidently the "use of a theramin to denote the wife’s labor pains was overdone, though, Ed Herlihy, as usual, registered solidly with his off-camera hosting and delivery of the Kraft plugs, which comprised recipes utilizing the sponsor’s products.")