Scope and Content Note
Arch Oboler’s career as author, radio and stage playwright and director, and movie script writer and director spanned some sixty years, from the late 1920s to the 1980s. Included in his papers is his accumulation of correspondence, legal, business, and personal files, and manuscript and other materials related to his vast creative output in different media.
Almost all of the scripts from his radio programs in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Lights Out series, are preserved in multiple copies, some with handwritten annotated cues and notes. Amply documented in the papers are most of the films on which Oboler worked as writer, director, or producer, including his greatest commercial success, the 1952 3-D movie Bwana Devil. As is the case with other Oboler films, among the Bwana Devil documents are business and legal papers, promotional and production documents, and movie stills and photographs of filming.
Oboler met architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1940s, but it was not until after World War II that the famous architect designed a house and other residential buildings for Oboler. Included in the papers is correspondence between Oboler and Wright, and documentation relating to construction and upkeep of the portions of Wright’s architectural designs which were actually used in residential construction for Oboler near Malibu, California, where Oboler lived until his death in 1987.
Oboler’s prolific creative output continued into the 1960s and beyond, when he made several feature films which are documented in the papers. He also wrote and published books, magazine articles, and short stories, and wrote, produced, and directed an unsuccessful Broadway play, the Night of the Auk. The papers describe the play’s development, production, and reception upon its New York opening and in later off-Broadway productions. Oboler characteristically employed story lines in different media (the Night of the Auk was also one of his infrequent television productions) and reworked earlier radio stories for proposed television and film treatment. Numerous book and short story manuscripts and television and film scripts with reworked and original plots are included in the Oboler papers, as are materials related to commercial LP record and cassette tape releases of some of his famous early radio plays.
Major correspondents include Bette Davis, Aaron Green (San Francisco architect), Boris Karloff, anthropologist Louis Leakey, Gene Masselink (an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright), William Wesley Peters (an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright), Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (Frank Lloyd Wright's wife), and Iovanna Lloyd Wright (the Wrights's daughter).