The official Joe Frank web site
News and Reviews
Archive
Salon Magazine - 2000
"Public Radio's Bad Dream" contd
Joe Frank conjures up the nightmares that "This American Life" and "A Prairie Home Companion" have when they go home at night.
By Susan Emerling
<--last | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | next-->
Humorist Harry Shearer, whose own program, "Le Show," airs on KCRW on Sunday mornings just before "The Other Side," remembers Frank's "All Things Considered " days differently. "For 51 minutes it was the regular vanilla news program, only not the usual NPR voice -- less nasal and less vocally constricted," he says. "Then the last five or six minutes of the show was an essay that was like a fist coming out of your radio. It's very rare to have people like Joe -- and I don't want to say that there are people like Joe -- who trust the audience not to freak out." After four months of feeling totally out of his depth, Joe transferred to a new job producing radio dramas, where he did some of his finest programs, including "The Decline of Spengler" and "A Call in the Night."
Over the course of the afternoon, Frank makes frequent references to former lovers and girlfriends, even an ex-wife from his life before radio who called him "poetry in motion." These women, as he tells it, have graced him with their intimacy but have also wrought painful havoc as they've inevitably rebelled against the compartmentalized role they're asked to play in his life.
The level of eroticism runs so high in his programs that recently personal ads have appeared in the Los Angeles papers: "Looking for logic in the irrational, green eyes, 5' 3" slender 31, seeks Joe Frank listener for romantic interlude," or "Somewhere out there is a maverick who is thrilled Joe Frank is back, SWF, 42, 5'5" 125 lbs. playful, sensuous, adventuresome, let's explore the frontiers within." During the years he was off the air, Frank's fiercely loyal listeners found each other in fan-run Web sites and organized electronic swap meets of bootleg cassettes. (KCRW's own Web site archives dozens of programs.)
Frank has also garnered a broad Hollywood following. Filmmakers Michael Mann, David Fincher and Ivan Reitman have all optioned or bought stories from the Frank apocrypha. Francis Ford Coppola, who listens to the show in San Francisco, was signed on to produce a series of Frank stories for HBO, with the appropriately dark Fincher ("Seven," "Fight Club" ) directing, a project that never came to fruition. Frank was ultimately paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won't name) that plagiarized his dialogue, but there has never been a real Frank feature film. The four shorts made for the Playboy Channel in the mid-'80s don't even approximate the power of his radio shows. He is currently writing a screenplay for William Friedkin, which he laments is taking him away from his obligations to his radio audience.
<--last | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | next-->