Story in the Air

The Blue Mojave is a noir radio show produced in conjunction with Unknown Theater in Los Angeles. Created by Evan Calbi, the series stars Kyle Ingleman as the gumshoe Cal Archer and features a talented cast of actors including Kerry Anne Aldridge, Sax Carr, Tegan Ashton Cohan, Brandon Ho, Joe Orrantia, Robert Selander, and Zach Welch, as well the house band The Savage Wood Ramblers.

The year is 1946, and private detective Cal Archer has been hired once again to bail out the daughter of one of California’s wealthiest barons after a prized stallion is killed at the stables of a nefarious businessman with ties to organized crime. While G.I.’s flood Los Angeles at the end of WWII and Governor Earl Warren runs for a historic reelection after winning the nominations of the Democratic, Progressive, and Republican parties, Archer follows a trail that leads to the highest chambers of power in the state. Tour the Blue Mojave, where hearts howl in unison and corruption is never evident to the naked eye.

A nice review from the online critic El Pollo Rico:
“I had the very good fortune to see The Blue Mojave during it’s first limited run several years ago. An absolutely beautiful theatrical and musical homage to California noir. The gritty and wry dialogue evokes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but the raw shadowy undercurrent of Evan Calbi’s lap steel guitar reminds you… that beneath the glib and saucy wisecracks there is something irretrievably damaged and dark in the Blue Mojave. Please go.”

Click here to listen to the episodes.

History of The Blue Mojave

Sometime in late 1947, an upstart theater company produced a short-lived run of live radio for a local affiliate in Riverside, California. Based in large part on Orson Welles groundbreaking Mercury Theater on the Air, a handful of shows called The Blue Mojave aired before poor reception lead to the loss of the show’s sponsor and ultimately its cancellation. No known copies survived.

“I have family in Riverside that I’ve met a handful of times,” Evan Calbi explains. “My grandmother died when my mother was still a child, and I have vague memories of my mother’s family. A few years ago I drove out there to see a cousin I hadn’t seen in twenty years. He let me look through a box of my grandmother’s things, and I found a few scripts. My grandmother was an actress in her twenties, and somebody held onto the scripts all those years.”

The original program tells the story of a private detective named Cal Archer. Based primarily around the locations of Riverside, Lake Arrowhead, and Los Angeles, it’s a piece of pulp noir, another example of the serial storytelling that calls to mind the great detective stories in the magazine Black Mask.

“Updating those scripts made the whole thing very ‘high concept’ in the tradition of Jerry Bruckheimer and the late, great Don Simpson,” Calbi says, referring to the production mantra of the Hollywood team that made such breakout hits as Flashdance and Top Gun. “Murder, sex, banal dialogue — it’s all in there.”