| "Daisy, Daisy (TV play)" | |
|---|---|
| Playwrights '56 episode | |
 | |
| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 5 |
| Directed by | Arthur Penn |
| Teleplay by | Sumner Locke Elliott |
| Original air date | November 22, 1955 |
| Running time | 60 mins |
| Guest appearances | |
| |
Daisy, Daisy is a 1955 American television play by Sumner Locke Elliott that aired as an episode of Playwrights '56 . It was based on the Ern Malley hoax making the play one of the few works on American television at the time to draw inspiration from Australian culture. [1]
William Bingham is an unsuccessful "artistic" writer married to Glenda, who loves best sellers.
Willie spends eight hours one night writing a cliche-ridden book. It is meant to be the confessions of a 17-year-old Australian girl named Daisy Smith who has recently died.
The book is accepted by a publisher and becomes a best seller.
Glenda becomes convinced that William knew a Daisy Smith when he was a GI in Australia. Then Albert Smith turns up claiming to be Daisy's father.
It was Tom Ewell's first live television play in three years. [2]
Sumner Locke Elliott was Australian and based the script on the Ern Malley hoax. The writer had a generally excellent relationship with Fred Coe. However he says he had his only argument with the producer over casting during the making of this play. Elliott said comedy was not Coe's "forte" and the play was a "mess". [3]
Variety said "Starting off with a promising but familiar premise" Elliott "had the choice of either developing that premise logically but risking the problem of an overfamiliar theme, or developing in an offbeat direction and making the outcome of the play a non-sequitur. He chose the latter, and not only did the concluding portion not follow the promise of the beginning but became rather ponderous and dull." [4]
The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, is Australia's most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax the Angry Penguins, a modernist art and literary movement centred around a journal of the same name, co-edited by poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed, of Heide, Melbourne.
Maxwell Henley Harris AO, generally known as Max Harris, was an Australian poet, critic, columnist, commentator, publisher, and bookseller.
James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.
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Sumner Locke Elliott was an Australian novelist and playwright.
Harold Frederick Stewart was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered alongside fellow poet James McAuley as a co-creator of the Ern Malley literary hoax.
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The King and Mrs Candle is a 1955 American TV play. It was directed by Arthur Penn and written by Sumner Locke Elliott. It was an original musical for TV.
Gray Smith was an Australian artist, poet and jeweller who was part of the Heide Circle. While best known as the famous Australian artist Joy Hester's spouse, his most productive artistic period came later while married to Joan Upward in the '60s and '70s. Smith's modernist paintings often featured isolated figures in Australian outback landscapes.
"Friday the 13th" is a 1954 American television play by Sumner Locke Elliott. It originally aired as an episode of The Philco Television Playhouse produced by Fred Coe and directed by Arthur Penn.
"We Were Children" is a 1952 American television play by Sumner Locke Elliott. It originally aired as an episode of The Philco Television Playhouse produced by Fred Coe.