Louis L'Amour - Audio Book Publishing

Audio Book Publishing

L'Amour also did some ground breaking work in the Audio Publishing field. For most authors, an audio publishing program is merely offering "books for the blind" or having an actor simply read a book of short stories or novel so that the "Audio Book" can be enjoyed while driving or doing similar activities. Many of the L'Amour titles have been produced in this so-called "single voice" style. In the early days, however, when the fledgling Bantam Audio Publishing (now Random House Audio) came to L'Amour about converting some of his old short stories into audio, he insisted that they do something to offer the audience more value than just having an actor read a bunch of old pulp stories. Together he and Bantam executive Jenny Frost created the concept of a series of "Radio Drama" style productions that would combine a large cast of actors, sound effects and music to produce a modern audio drama of each story.

The innovative team of David Rapkin (Producer) and Charles Potter (Director)was employed to produce a prototype show and L'Amour's son Beau came into the program as Supervising Producer. Between 1986 and 2004 the team had completed over sixty-five dramatized audio productions. Several different styles of show were produced over the years. The first several shows were "transcriptions" literal breakdowns of the exact L'Amour short story into lines for the different characters and narrator. Later productions used more liberally interpreted adaptations written by screenwriters, playwrights and a few film and theater students who were taught the process by Beau L'Amour and the more prolific writers from earlier adaptations.

The majority of productions were done in New York City. In the early years the pace of production was six shows a year but in the mid 1990s it slowed to four. At this time the running time for all the programs was roughly sixty minutes. The cast members were veterans of the New York stage, film and advertising worlds and after auditioning for their parts came together for a rehearsal and then a day of recording the show. Sound effects were created by effects man Arthur Miller in the studio as the lines were being recorded and narration was done at the same time as well. All the elements were mixed live and by the end of the recording session the program was nearly finished, very similar to the live recordings from the great days of radio.

Although many of the programs were written and produced in a modified "Old Time Radio" style, attempts were also made to modernize the approach. Whenever the story material supported it a more contemporary style was used in the writing and more and more high tech solutions to the effects and mix found their way into the productions. While hiring and supervising the writers, mostly out of Los Angeles, Beau L'Amour created a few programs on his own. The techniques used he and producer/editor Paul O'Dell were more in line with motion picture production, simply taping the voices of the actors in the studio and then recording the majority of sound effects in the field. This called for a great deal more editing both in cutting the actor's performances and the sound effects but it allowed for a great deal more control ... and occasionally the subject matter cried out for this approach.

In the mid 1990s a series of the L'Amour Audio Dramas was recut for radio. Louis L'Amour Theater played on over two hundred stations for a number of years. Several of the scripts from the L'Amour series have been produced as live theater pieces, including The One for the Mojave Kid and Merrano of the Dry Country.

The L'Amour program of Audio Dramas is still ongoing but the pace of production has slowed considerably. Beau L'Amour and Paul O'Dell released Son of a Wanted Man, the first L'Amour Drama in half a decade in 2004. Son of a Wanted Man is also the first Louis L'Amour novel to be turned into a drama. Considerably more complex than earlier shows it had a cast of over twenty mid-level Hollywood actors, a music score recorded specifically for the production and sound effects completely recorded in the field in many locations across the west. Produced as sort of a "profitable hobby" Beau L'Amour and Paul O'Dell created the production while working around their day to day jobs. Since this allowed them no more than nine or ten weeks a year the show took four years to complete. According to the Louis L'Amour website the next production will be The Diamond of Jeru, a L'Amour adventure based in 1950s Borneo. The show is in the editorial stages (as of April 2011) but because of an even more ambitious production process than that of Son of a Wanted Man no release date has been announced.