October 30, 1938—It was just going to be a Halloween episode of the weekly Mercury Theatre broadcast, but instead the CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds frightened the daylights out of a country already on edge—and made an overnight star of its 23-year-old director, Orson Welles.
Nearly 22 years later, in an interview with talk-show host David Frost, Welles identified the following factors as crucial in terrifying the audience—and convincing it that the outlandish events they were hearing about Martians landing in Grover Mills, N.J., were really happening:
* An FDR sound-alike who assured everybody there was no cause for alarm: “I think that’s when they really ran out on the streets.”
* A ham-radio voice trying to talk to others.
* An announcer who coughed, then suddenly stopped.
* The lengthy silence that followed this—and on a full network, no less.
* The faux amateur-radio operator returning to say now, “Isn’t anyone out there?”
You might remember the great scene in Woody Allen’s Radio Days when lovelorn Aunt Beau (played by Dianne Wiest) ends up with the true date from hell, when her boyfriend, hearing the Welles broadcast on his car radio, panics, runs out of the auto hysterically and leaves her out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t entirely exaggerate how America really reacted that night.
An estimated six million people heard the broadcast. At four separate points in the program—including the beginning—came a disclaimer that this was a dramatization.
But if you came in late—and heard only enough to persuade you that something weird was going on—or if you were a senior citizen who didn’t recognize Welles as the voice of the radio show The Shadow, you might have reacted as the following people did:
* The New England mother who packed her children and all the bread she could manage into her car, then drove away from her home.
* The listeners who hid in cellars, praying that the poison gas would pass over their homes.
* The college senior who broke every speeding record in existence to save his girlfriend. (What a guy!)
This was a radio audience, you must recall, that was hearing a daily drumbeat of worsening news from Europe. Only the month before, Adolf Hitler had gotten everything he’d wanted at Munich. In other words, it was a world ready for the notion that the worst could happen.
Several years ago, at a post-show discussion of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Roundabout Theatre, I asked Kitty Carlisle Hart, the widow of one of the playwrights who collaborated on the comedy, Moss Hart, about her impressions of Orson Welles’ TV version of her husband’s classic. She groaned and related a tale of an ego run amok, including Welles’ penchant for imbibing so much wine at lunch breaks that most sequences filmed in the afternoon turned out to be useless.
It was a different Welles who updated H.G. Wells’ classic for a new generation. He was young, healthy, and not quite yet (though getting there) at the point where the principal screenwriter of Citizen Kane, Herman Mankiewicz, could later wisecrack, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”
Nearly 22 years later, in an interview with talk-show host David Frost, Welles identified the following factors as crucial in terrifying the audience—and convincing it that the outlandish events they were hearing about Martians landing in Grover Mills, N.J., were really happening:
* An FDR sound-alike who assured everybody there was no cause for alarm: “I think that’s when they really ran out on the streets.”
* A ham-radio voice trying to talk to others.
* An announcer who coughed, then suddenly stopped.
* The lengthy silence that followed this—and on a full network, no less.
* The faux amateur-radio operator returning to say now, “Isn’t anyone out there?”
You might remember the great scene in Woody Allen’s Radio Days when lovelorn Aunt Beau (played by Dianne Wiest) ends up with the true date from hell, when her boyfriend, hearing the Welles broadcast on his car radio, panics, runs out of the auto hysterically and leaves her out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t entirely exaggerate how America really reacted that night.
An estimated six million people heard the broadcast. At four separate points in the program—including the beginning—came a disclaimer that this was a dramatization.
But if you came in late—and heard only enough to persuade you that something weird was going on—or if you were a senior citizen who didn’t recognize Welles as the voice of the radio show The Shadow, you might have reacted as the following people did:
* The New England mother who packed her children and all the bread she could manage into her car, then drove away from her home.
* The listeners who hid in cellars, praying that the poison gas would pass over their homes.
* The college senior who broke every speeding record in existence to save his girlfriend. (What a guy!)
This was a radio audience, you must recall, that was hearing a daily drumbeat of worsening news from Europe. Only the month before, Adolf Hitler had gotten everything he’d wanted at Munich. In other words, it was a world ready for the notion that the worst could happen.
Several years ago, at a post-show discussion of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Roundabout Theatre, I asked Kitty Carlisle Hart, the widow of one of the playwrights who collaborated on the comedy, Moss Hart, about her impressions of Orson Welles’ TV version of her husband’s classic. She groaned and related a tale of an ego run amok, including Welles’ penchant for imbibing so much wine at lunch breaks that most sequences filmed in the afternoon turned out to be useless.
It was a different Welles who updated H.G. Wells’ classic for a new generation. He was young, healthy, and not quite yet (though getting there) at the point where the principal screenwriter of Citizen Kane, Herman Mankiewicz, could later wisecrack, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”
(Mankiewicz had reason to be annoyed with Welles: Not content with being an actor-director-producer, Welles wanted sole screenwriting credit for Kane. I’d call it the greatest act of literary larceny I’ve ever heard of, but then I have to remember that this is Hollywood that we’re talking about.)
No, the Welles of Worlds still had the power to exercise his lifelong fascination with magic with authority untrammeled by studio interference or his own creatively self-destructive tendencies. The radio broadcast was nothing if not sleight of hand and misdirection used in a revolutionary new medium.
In that sense, a line of continuity runs from his early success to a final, unfinished project: a movie called The Magic Show, a kind of free-floating film essay in which Welles performed his own magic tricks, related the history of a famous magician, and reenacted a disastrous trick performed by another illusionist. It would have been his way of ending a career with the kind of razzle-dazzle that characterized its beginning.
No, the Welles of Worlds still had the power to exercise his lifelong fascination with magic with authority untrammeled by studio interference or his own creatively self-destructive tendencies. The radio broadcast was nothing if not sleight of hand and misdirection used in a revolutionary new medium.
In that sense, a line of continuity runs from his early success to a final, unfinished project: a movie called The Magic Show, a kind of free-floating film essay in which Welles performed his own magic tricks, related the history of a famous magician, and reenacted a disastrous trick performed by another illusionist. It would have been his way of ending a career with the kind of razzle-dazzle that characterized its beginning.
Rather enjoyed that.
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