Perhaps Why Radio Drama Is Better

The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.

Francis Ford Coppola

Not having the time to do real research on this I looked at what the official source of  online . . . Oh, mercy,  I'll have to say it "culture" says about what constitutes a "low budget film," Wikipedia.   It has figures like $60,000 (Blair Witch Project) $20,000 (Chan Is Missing - which I liked a lot when I saw it) as the lowest of the "low budget" films.   It being the movies, it relates those figures not to the quality of the ideas involved, no matter what Coppola says,  but how much money the movies made. 

Micro-budget films - which I doubt was the kind of budget Coppola was talking about, are mostly a 3rd World category, $7000 (El Mariachi) and $3000 (Pather Panchali) but as that movie was made more than sixty-years ago I don't know if that's in 1955 dollars or today's or what the budget in 1955 India means in the United States in 2018.  My guess is that $3000 got you a hell of a lot more production value in 1955 India than it would get you in even 1955 America.

Needless to say, even by the standards of high-production radio dramas as are produced only by a few of the large national radio services, now, the budgets of "low-budget" films are massively financed.  The entire budget of the BBC's Radio 4 is smaller than the budget of a modestly financed major studio movie and their Drama department is only a fraction of that.  I would bet that lots of producers would drool over a budget of $3000 for one production, I'd be curious if anyone knows what kind of financing we're talking about for a typical radio drama production.  If there are many independent producers of audio-drama who spend hundred dollars on an episode (or perhaps a whole season) I'd be surprised.

Like in the movies, the largest number of audio-radio dramas are pretty empty of ideas or originality or of much worth for anything but, perhaps, practice for those involved in producing them, if that. [Stephen Spielberg's practice movie, Duel, had a budget of $450,000, according to Wikipedia, ] But I think there's more of a chance you're going to find more in a good audio drama than you'll get in an allegedly intelligent movie.  Even back when there was actual, for-profit, network-radio drama in the United States, Rod Serling said that he was able to do a lot more by way of ideas BECAUSE IT WAS LOW BUDGET.  The money men were only interested in the money and having something on to fill air time.   If it were possible to do an idea per dollar ratio I'll bet the one for audio drama, even with the massive amount of crap in that category, it would break into measurements in whole numbers per dollar.   The movies, with those budgets and the idiocy of almost all of it, I don't think you could measure that in whole numbers without going through an epoch of  hyper-inflation.