1.
GUEST BLOG / By Ray
Satterfield
/The War of the Worlds, the science fiction novel by English author HG Wells
telling of a space ship from Mars landing on Earth and causing panic, death and
destruction, was published in 1897. On this day in 1938 actor Orson Welles
allegedly caused real-life panic across America when he presented the story in
an all-too-realistic radio broadcast.
Dance
music on the Columbia Broadcasting System was interrupted by an announcer
reporting that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had
detected explosions on the planet Mars. The music came back on for a while, but
then came another announcement that "at 8.50pm a huge, flaming object,
believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in New Jersey."
Then
came a report from the scene by newsman Carl Phillips. He spoke of a 30
yard-wide metal cylinder making a hissing sound. Then the top began to
"rotate like a screw." He went on:
"Ladies
and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed. . .
Wait a minute! Someone's crawling. Someone or . . . something. I can see
peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . . are they eyes? It might
be a face. It might be . . . good heavens, something's wriggling out of the
shadow like a gray snake.
"Now
it's another one, and another one, and another one. They look like tentacles to
me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large as a bear and it glistens
like wet leather. But that face, it . . . ladies and gentlemen, it's
indescribable.
"I
can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are
black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva
dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate."
Orson
Welles was 23 at the time of the broadcast, working with the Mercury Theatre
Company. He went on, of course, to become a highly acclaimed actor, writer and
film director.
Citizen
Kane (1941), which he co-wrote, produced and directed and in which he performed
the lead role is now hailed by some critics as one of the greatest films ever
made.
 |
Wells' Martians as featured in a 1927 Amazing Stories reprint edition, artwork by Frank R. Paul |
But
that was in the future. On this day he was describing the War of the Worlds.
Many
listeners had missed his announcement at the start of the program that this
was just a story told by actors. They thought it was real, especially as Welles
had decided to present the story in a newscast format.
And
when it was reported that seven thousand members of the state militia had been
obliterated by a Martian "heat ray" and that New York was being
evacuated, there was, according to reports at the time, widespread panic.
Anxious
phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many
journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning
Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast,
along with headlines about the mass panic his broadcast had allegedly inspired.
With
his livelihood (and possibly even his freedom) on the line, Welles went before
dozens of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen at a hastily
arranged press conference. Had he intended, he was asked or did he at all
anticipate, that War of the Worlds would throw its audience into panic?
“If
I’d planned to wreck my career,” he responded, “I couldn’t have gone about it
better.”
But
in 1960 a more candid Welles was to offer an explanation for his inspiration
for War of the Worlds: “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in
such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” he said, “and
would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event
taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.”
Today,
of course, he would have been laughed out of the studio. But those were more
innocent times.
2.
The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a
Magnificent Fluke
Orson Welles and his colleagues scrambled to pull together
the show; they ended up writing pop culture history
 |
| Orson Welles (arms raised) rehearses his radio depiction of H.G. Wells' classic, The War of the Worlds. The broadcast, which aired on October 30, 1938, and claimed that aliens from Mars had invaded New Jersey, terrified thousands of Americans. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) |
Welles barely had time to glance at
the papers, leaving him with only a horribly vague sense of what he had done to
the country. He’d heard reports of mass stampedes, of suicides, and of angered
listeners threatening to shoot him on sight. “If I’d planned to wreck my
career,” he told several people at the time, “I couldn’t have gone about it
better.” With his livelihood (and possibly even his freedom) on the line,
Welles went before dozens of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen
at a hastily arranged press conference in the CBS building. Each journalist
asked him some variation of the same basic question: Had he intended, or did he
at all anticipate, that War of the Worlds would throw its audience into panic?
That question would follow Welles
for the rest of his life, and his answers changed as the years went on—from
protestations of innocence to playful hints that he knew exactly what he was
doing all along.
The truth can only be found among
long-forgotten script drafts and the memories of Welles’s collaborators, which
capture the chaotic behind-the-scenes saga of the broadcast: no one involved
with War of the Worlds expected to deceive any listeners, because they all
found the story too silly and improbable to ever be taken seriously. The
Mercury’s desperate attempts to make the show seem halfway believable
succeeded, almost by accident, far beyond even their wildest expectations.
* * *
By the end of October 1938, Welles’s
Mercury Theatre on the Air had been on CBS for 17 weeks. A low-budget program
without a sponsor, the series had built a small but loyal following with fresh
adaptations of literary classics. But for the week of Halloween, Welles wanted
something very different from the Mercury’s earlier offerings.
In a 1960 court deposition, as part
of a lawsuit suing CBS to be recognized as the broadcast’s rightful co-author,
Welles offered an explanation for his inspiration for War of the Worlds: “I had
conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis
would actually seem to be happening,” he said, “and would be broadcast in such
a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time,
rather than a mere radio play.” Without knowing which book he wanted to adapt,
Welles brought the idea to John Houseman, his producer, and Paul Stewart, a
veteran radio actor who co-directed the Mercury broadcasts. The three men
discussed various works of science fiction before settling on H.G. Wells’s 1898
novel, The War of the Worlds—even though Houseman doubted that Welles had ever
read it.
The original The War of the Worlds
story recounts a Martian invasion of Great Britain around the turn of the 20th
century. The invaders easily defeat the British army thanks to their advanced
weaponry, a “heat-ray” and poisonous “black smoke,” only to be felled by
earthly diseases against which they have no immunity. The novel is a powerful
satire of British imperialism—the most powerful colonizer in the world suddenly
finds itself colonized—and its first generation of readers would not have found
its premise implausible. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli
had observed a series of dark lines on the Martian surface that he called
canali, Italian for “channels.”
In English, canali got mistranslated
to “canals,” a word implying that these were not natural formations—that
someone had built them. Wealthy, self-taught astronomer Percival Lowell
popularized this misconception in a series of books describing a highly
intelligent, canal-building Martian civilization. H. G. Wells drew liberally
from those ideas in crafting his alien invasion story—the first of its kind—and
his work inspired an entire genre of science fiction. By 1938, The War of the
Worlds had “become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and
many succeeding novels and adventure stories,” as Orson Welles told the press
the day after his broadcast.
After Welles selected the book for
adaptation, Houseman passed it on to Howard Koch, a writer recently hired to
script the Mercury broadcasts, with instructions to convert it into
late-breaking news bulletins. Koch may
have been the first member of the Mercury to read The War of the Worlds, and he
took an immediate dislike to it, finding it terribly dull and dated. Science
fiction in the 1930s was largely the purview of children, with alien invaders
confined to pulp magazines and the Sunday funnies. The idea that intelligent
Martians might actually exist had largely been discredited. Even with the fake
news conceit, Koch struggled to turn the novel into a credible radio drama in
less than a week.
On Tuesday, October 25, after three
days of work, Koch called Houseman to say that War of the Worlds was hopeless.
Ever the diplomat, Houseman rang off with the promise to see if Welles might
agree to adapt another story. But when he called the Mercury Theatre, he could
not get his partner on the phone. Welles had been rehearsing his next stage
production—a revival of Georg Buchner’s Danton’s Death—for 36 straight hours,
desperately trying to inject life into a play that seemed destined to flop.
With the future of his theatrical company in crisis, Welles had precious little
time to spend on his radio series.
With no other options, Houseman
called Koch back and lied. Welles, he said, was determined to do the Martian
novel this week. He encouraged Koch to get back to work, and offered
suggestions on how to improve the script. Koch worked through the night and the
following day, filling countless yellow legal-pad pages with his elegant if
frequently illegible handwriting. By sundown on Wednesday, he had finished a
complete draft, which Paul Stewart and a handful of Mercury actors rehearsed
the next day. Welles was not present, but the rehearsal was recorded on acetate
disks for him to listen to later that night. Everyone who heard it later agreed
that this stripped-down production—with no music and only the most basic sound
effects—was an unmitigated disaster.
This rehearsal recording has
apparently not survived, but a copy of Koch’s first draft script—likely the
same draft used in rehearsal—is preserved among his papers at the Wisconsin
Historical Society in Madison. It shows that Koch had already worked out much
of the broadcast’s fake news style, but several key elements that made the
final show so terrifyingly convincing were missing at this stage. Like the
original novel, this draft is divided into two acts of roughly equal length,
with the first devoted to fake news bulletins about the Martian invasion. The
second act uses a series of lengthy monologues and conventional dramatic scenes
to recount the wanderings of a lone survivor, played by Welles.
Most of the previous Mercury
broadcasts resembled the second act of War of the Worlds; the series was
initially titled First Person Singular because it relied so heavily on
first-person narration. But unlike the charming narrators of earlier Mercury
adaptations such as Treasure Island and Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist of The
War of the Worlds was a passive character with a journalistic, impersonal prose
style—both traits that make for very boring monologues. Welles believed, and
Houseman and Stewart agreed, that the only way to save their show was to focus
on enhancing the fake news bulletins in its first act. Beyond that general
note, Welles offered few if any specific suggestions, and he soon left to
return to Danton’s Death.
In Welles’s absence, Houseman and
Stewart tore into the script, passing their notes on to Koch for frantic, last
minute rewrites. The first act grew longer and the second act got shorter,
leaving the script somewhat lopsided. Unlike in most radio dramas, the station
break in War of the Worlds would come about two-thirds of the way through, and
not at the halfway mark. Apparently, no one in the Mercury realized that
listeners who tuned in late and missed the opening announcements would have to
wait almost 40 minutes for a disclaimer explaining that the show was fiction.
Radio audiences had come to expect that fictional programs would be interrupted
on the half-hour for station identification. Breaking news, on the other hand,
failed to follow those rules. People who believed the broadcast to be real
would be even more convinced when the 8:30 station break didn’t air.
These revisions also removed several
clues that might have helped late listeners figure out that the invasion was
fake. Two moments that interrupted the fictional news-broadcast with regular
dramatic scenes were deleted or revised. At Houseman’s suggestion, Koch also
removed some specific mentions of the passage of time, such as one character’s
reference to “last night’s massacre.” The first draft had clearly established
that the invasion occurred over several days, but the revision made it seem as
though the broadcast proceeded in real-time.
As many observers later noted,
having the Martians conquer an entire planet in less than 40 minutes made no
logical sense. But Houseman explained in Run-Through, the first volume of his
memoirs, that he wanted to make the transitions from actual time to fictional
time as seamless as possible, in order to draw listeners into the story. Each
change added immeasurably to the show’s believability. Without meaning to,
Koch, Houseman, and Stewart had made it much more likely that some listeners
would be fooled by War of the Worlds.
Other important changes came from
the cast and crew. Actors suggested ways of reworking the dialogue to make it
more naturalistic, comprehensible, or convincing. In his memoirs, Houseman
recalled that Frank Readick, the actor cast as the reporter who witnesses the
Martians’ arrival, scrounged up a recording of the Hindenburg disaster
broadcast and listened to it over and over again, studying the way announcer
Herbert Morrison’s voice swelled in alarm and abject horror. Readick replicated
those emotions during the show with remarkable accuracy, crying out over the
horrific shrieks of his fellow actors as his character and other unfortunate
New Jerseyites got incinerated by the Martian heat-ray. Ora Nichols, head of
the sound effects department at the CBS affiliate in New York, devised
chillingly effective noises for the Martian war machines. According to Leonard Maltin’s
book The Great American Broadcast, Welles later sent Nichols a handwritten
note, thanking her “for the best job anybody could ever do for anybody.”
Although the Mercury worked
frantically to make the show sound as realistic as possible, no one anticipated
that their efforts would succeed much too well. CBS’s legal department reviewed
Koch’s script and demanded only minor changes, such as altering the names of
institutions mentioned in the show to avoid libel suits. In his autobiography,
radio critic Ben Gross recalled approaching one of the Mercury’s actors during
that last week of October to ask what Welles had prepared for Sunday night.
“Just between us, it’s lousy,” the actor said, adding that the broadcast would
“probably bore you to death.”
Welles later told the Saturday Evening Post that he had called
the studio to see how things were shaping up and received a similarly dismal
review. “Very dull. Very dull,” a technician told him. “It’ll put ’em to
sleep.” Welles now faced disaster on two fronts, with both his theatrical
company and his radio series marching toward disaster. Finally, War of the
Worlds had gained his full attention.
* * *
Midafternoon on October 30, 1938,
just hours before airtime, Welles arrived in CBS’s Studio One for last-minute
rehearsals with the cast and crew. Almost immediately, he lost his temper with
the material. But according to Houseman, such outbursts were typical in the
frantic hours before each Mercury Theatre broadcast. Welles routinely berated
his collaborators—calling them lazy, ignorant, incompetent, and many other
insults—all while complaining of the mess they’d given him to clean up. He
delighted in making his cast and crew scramble by radically revising the show
at the last minute, adding new things and taking others out. Out of the chaos
came a much stronger show.
One of Welles’s key revisions on War
of the Worlds, in Houseman’s view, involved its pacing. Welles drastically
slowed down the opening scenes to the point of tedium, adding dialogue and
drawing out the musical interludes between fake news bulletins. Houseman
objected strenuously, but Welles overruled him, believing that listeners would
only accept the unrealistic speed of the invasion if the broadcast started
slowly, then gradually sped up. By the station break, even most listeners who
knew that the show was fiction would be carried away by the speed of it all.
For those who did not, those 40 minutes would seem like hours.
Another of Welles’s changes involved
something cut from Koch’s first draft: a speech given by “the Secretary of
War,” describing the government’s efforts to combat the Martians. This speech
is missing from the final draft script, also preserved at the Wisconsin
Historical Society, most likely because of objections from CBS’s lawyers. When
Welles put it back in, he reassigned it to a less inflammatory Cabinet
official, “the Secretary of the Interior,” in order to appease the network. But
he gave the character a purely vocal promotion by casting Kenneth Delmar, an
actor whom he knew could do a pitch-perfect impression of Franklin D.
Roosevelt. In 1938, the major networks expressly forbade most radio programs
from impersonating the president, in order to avoid misleading listeners. But
Welles suggested, with a wink and a nod, that Delmar make his character sound
presidential, and Delmar happily complied.
These kinds of ideas only came to
Welles at the last minute, with disaster waiting in the wings. As Richard
Wilson observed in the audio documentary Theatre of the Imagination, radio
brought out the best in Welles because it “was the only medium that imposed a
discipline Orson would recognize, and that was the clock.” With the hours and
then the minutes before airtime ticking away, Welles had to come up with innovative
ways to save the show, and he invariably delivered. The cast and crew responded
in kind. Only in these last minute rehearsals did everyone begin to take War of
the Worlds more seriously, giving it their best efforts for perhaps the first
time. The result demonstrates the special power of collaboration. By pooling
their unique talents, Welles and his team produced a show that frankly
terrified many of its listeners—even those who never forgot that the whole
thing was just a play.
* * *
At the press conference the morning
after the show, Welles repeatedly denied that he had ever intended to deceive
his audience. But hardly anyone, then or since, has ever taken him at his word.
His performance, captured by newsreel cameras, seems too remorseful and
contrite, his words chosen much too carefully. Instead of ending his career,
War of the Worlds catapulted Welles to Hollywood, where he would soon make
Citizen Kane. Given the immense benefit Welles reaped from the broadcast, many
have found it hard to believe that he harbored any regrets about his sudden
celebrity.
In later years, Welles began to
claim that he really was hiding his delight that Halloween morning. The
Mercury, he said in multiple interviews, had always hoped to fool some of their
listeners, in order to teach them a lesson about not believing whatever they
heard over the radio. But none of Welles’s collaborators—including John
Houseman and Howard Koch—ever endorsed such a claim. In fact, they denied it
over and over again, long after legal reprisals were a serious concern. The
Mercury did quite consciously attempt to inject realism into War of the Worlds,
but their efforts produced a very different result from the one they intended.
The elements of the show that a fraction of its audience found so convincing
crept in almost accidentally, as the Mercury desperately tried to avoid being
laughed off the air.
War of the Worlds formed a kind of
crucible for Orson Welles, out of which the wunderkind of the New York stage
exploded onto the national scene as a multimedia genius and trickster
extraordinaire. He may not have told the whole truth that Halloween morning,
but his shock and bewilderment were genuine enough. Only later did he realize
and appreciate how his life had changed. As we mark the centennial of Welles’s
birth in 1915, we should also remember his second birth in 1938—the broadcast
that, because of his best efforts but despite his best intentions, immortalized
him forever as “the Man from Mars.”
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