Northwest Film Forum

Before his ascendancy to icon of all things cinema, Orson Welles was a fledgling director in New Deal America. In 1938, the man who later brought the world Citizen Kane had an idea for a radio production he believed would strike fear in homes nationwide. Welles, the director of a New York City–based radio program called "Mercury Theatre on the Air," adapted H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds for the show’s Halloween episode. Converting our cinema into a living room, Northwest Film Forum will celebrate the 70th anniversary of this historic radio program by playing the original broadcast in the cinema.

 

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More About Orson Welles' War of the Worlds original broadcast

From the website www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk

"So get a copy of the broadcast, dim the lights, gather your loved ones around you and prepare to be transported back to October 1938, not to a simpler era, for life was every bit as complex and uncertain as it is today, but to time when people were ready to believe that what they heard from a trusted source was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We interrupt this program to bring...

Less than seventy years ago, television was barely at an experimental stage and in the United States, radio was the undisputed king of the airwaves. Three out of four families already owned a set (eight million alone were sold in 1936), but as many were to rudely discover, they were not yet fully attuned to the power of this exciting new medium. The wake up call came on the Halloween night of October 1938 when a brilliant young auteur by the name of Orson Welles tapped into the subconscious fears of a nation and convinced thousands of people (perhaps many more) that Martians were invading the United States.

Incredibly, the cause of this mayhem was a dramatic presentation of The War Of The Worlds, a seminal novel written 40 years previously by H. G. Wells. So how and why did this all happen? There are a number of reasons, but it is first worth emphasizing just how new and exciting radio still was in 1938. The big radio networks such as NBC and CBS were only a decade old and engaged in a frenzy of experimentation, filling the airwaves with vast amounts of original material such as comedies, dramas, soaps and a fresh brand of journalism that opened the US public to a new awareness of world conflict and politics.

Americans were now able to connect with events and hear their law and opinion makers as never before. A notable trailblazer in this regard was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose "fireside chats" (beginning in 1933) brought the voice of government and authority into the home as never before. Major news events also gripped the nation. Bulletins on the hunt for the kidnapped baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh kept listeners in an agony of suspense over several months in 1932 and in 1936 the war correspondent Hans Von Kaltenborn became the first American reporter to broadcast live from a war zone, when he brought the actual sounds of a Spanish civil war battle into ordinary homes. Equally dramatic was the fatal crash of the airship Hindenburg, recorded on May 6th 1937 by Herbert Morrison of Chicago station WLS, an event that reduced the helpless reporter to tears of frustration and horror. Undoubtedly however, it was the troubling broadcasts from Nazi Germany that did most to unsettle America in this period. During the Munich Crisis of September 12-30th 1938, more radios were sold to anxious Americans than in any previous three-week period, as Hitler rallied his forces and the world slid inexorably toward war.

In this atmosphere of tension, Orson Welles and his staff were preparing their latest Mercury Theater presentation, a show that has previously dramatised such novels as "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Dracula". On the face of it, The War Of The Worlds should have had no greater effect on the listening public than the previous broadcasts, which is to say, none at all, but Welles and his co-writer Howard Koch were planning something special this particular night, and though it is a matter of considerable debate if they actually intended to create the subsequent panic, it was undoubtedly their very novel dramatic device that did much of the damage.

Rather than set the story in Victorian England as written by H.G. Wells, the action was transplanted (not unsurprisingly) to contemporary America, but much more significantly, Welles and Koch told the story as a series of newsflashes that intruded without warning into what sounded like a perfectly routine program. This radical departure from established dramatic formats was to prove devastatingly effective, and combined with the use of numerous real place names, added significantly to the depth of the panic. In yet another contributing factor, it is thought that many people (upwards of 50%) tuned in late to the broadcast. This was largely because a great many listeners switched at an inopportune moment from a rival network, which was broadcasting the wildly popular Charlie McCarthy Show. About 10 minutes into this show, a singer would be introduced, and this was the point a lot of listeners would twiddle their dials while waiting for the star of the show to return. Tuning into the Mercury Theater a few minutes late (and thus having missed Welles distinctively sonorous introduction) they found themselves listening to the innocent sounds of "Ramon Raquello and his orchestra", only for the music to be interrupted by the first of a series of increasingly alarming news stories.

First come reports of several explosions of "incandescent gas" observed on the planet Mars, then after a brief interlude of more music comes a hook-up to Princeton Observatory where an interview is conducted with professor Richard Pierson. Pierson (played by Welles) assures the listeners that there is nothing to be alarmed at, but then the first reports of a meteor impact arrive. It is at this point that an unassuming place called Grover's Mill enters the story. Even today Grover's Mill is a sleepy little hamlet of no great material consequence, but that night it was going to become the centre of the universe for a very considerable number of people.

As fate would have it, Howard Koch chose Grover's Mill as the beachhead for the Martian invasion by the simple method of jabbing a pencil into a map purchased at a roadside garage. He then plotted the advance of the Martians toward New York City, brushing aside American defenders and destroying dozens of familiar place names along the way. An emergency government announcement appeared to give credence to the story, and huddled about their radios, panicked listeners began to bombard local police stations with calls. For instance, from Trenton police headquarters comes the following illuminating passage extracted from the station duty log. "Between 8:30PM & 10PM received numerous phone calls as result of WABC broadcast this evening re: Mars attacking this country. Calls included papers, police depts including NYC and private persons. No record kept of same due to working teletype and all three extensions ringing at same time. At least 50 calls were answered. Persons calling inquiring as to meteors, number of persons killed, gas attack, military being called out and fires. All were advised nothing unusual had occurred and that rumours were due to a radio dramatisation of a play."

Also from Trenton comes the account of a Mrs Thomas. "We were petrified. We just looked at each other, scared out of our wits. Someone was banging on our front door. It was our neighbour across the street. She had packed her seven kids in their car and she kept yelling, come on, lets get our of here." Also a local at the time, thirteen-year-old Henry Sears was doing his homework when he heard the first news flash of the invasion. Taking the radio down into the tavern below which his mother owned, he and a dozen or so patrons listened with mounting fear to the broadcast, until the men jumped up and announced they were going to get their guns and join in the defence at Grover's Mill.

What then of Grover's Mill? There are some great stories of the defense, not least that residents are reported to have opened fire on a water tower, thinking it was a Tripod, but oddly enough, the epicentre of all this action seems to have slept through the entire night undisturbed. Like the proverbial eye of the store, the hamlet was apparently blissfully unaware of the pivotal place it held in history, as was discovered by the late Sheldon Judson. He was to become emeritus Professor of Geology at Princeton University but at the time was a student member of the University Press Club. Alerted to the possible fall of a meteor by the city desk of the Philadelphia Inquirer, he enlisted the help of Arthur Buddington, Chair of the Princeton Geology Department and together with another professor, they set out for Grover's Mill. Here they found it entirely unperturbed by events. Certainly though, as the previous stories attest, there was a considerable panic under way that night in other parts of the country, and it is nice that there is now a monument in Grover's Mill to commemorate the part this unassuming hamlet played in events that night.

So was it done on purpose? The unglamorous answer is probably not. Over the years, Welles told conflicting versions of the events, and even tried to claim credit for planning it, but as newsreel footage at the time clearly shows, he was fairly rattled by events himself. He also said on occasion that "seventy five percent of what I say in interviews is false", so we'll never know for sure. This certainly does nothing to detract from the significance of the broadcast and it clearly stands as a testament to his talents as a showman and the skill and dedication of his cast and crew.