The night before last Charles and I watched an unexpectedly interesting American Experience episode on PBS: “War of the Worlds,” a show about the famous Orson Welles broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938 and the resulting panic that ensued. This chilling program started with a man, Judge A. G. Kennedy of Union, South Carolina, shown as part of a series of interviews done shortly after the show aired saying that all future broadcasts of that type should be banned and Orson Welles should be criminally prosecuted for what he had done to the American people: “I think suit should be filed against him and the Columbia Broadcasting System for their wrongdoing. Welles’ performance on the radio Sunday evening was a clear demonstration of his inhuman instincts and his fiendish joy in causing distress and suffering all over the country. He is a carbuncle on the rump of degenerate theatrical performers and he should make amends for his consummate act of asininity.” Another interviewee, Notre Dame philosophy professor Daniel O’Grady, said something even more chilling: “Those who were deceived by a dramatic re-enactment would, in an ideal society, be sterilized and disenfranchised. Such damn fools. It shakes one’s faith in democracy to think that such hysteria and panic can affect those who are supposed to vote intelligently next week.” (Yet more proof, if you needed any, that the attitudes behind what’s now known as the Tea Party are nothing new!)
Indeed, much of the show’s most interesting content consisted of these
interviews — all shot in black-and-white in the same
room, with the interviewees sitting on the same couch (not all at once, mind
you!), being asked questions by the same unseen reporter. (According to the PBS
Web site, these “interview” sequences were actually reconstructions, with
modern-day actors playing the original interviewees, but that wasn’t made at
all clear in the documentary itself.) The show dealt with Welles’ background
with the Federal Theatre Project and the Mercury Theatre, the private company
he opened after the Federal Theatre Project pulled the plug on his production
of Marc Blitzstein’s proletarian opera The Cradle Will Rock! (which was recorded by members of the original cast — at
least in abridged form — and came off as a very badly dated souvenir of what 1930’s Leftists thought was
an appropriate way to reach the masses by creating “culture” for them; while
they generated a folk-singing tradition that survives to this day, most of the
attempts at planting the Leftist message into more sophisticated musical and
dramatic forms than those offered by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were dismal
failures, artistically and
commercially) and which astonished New York audiences with a modern-dress
production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
that related the play’s story to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin
then bestriding Europe like colossi. (Earlier, for the Federal Theatre Project,
instructed to do something with an all-Black cast so African-American actors
would have employment, Welles had done his famous “Black Macbeth” that, in order to have the play continue to make sense
with an all-Black cast, moved the setting from Scotland to Haiti and changed
the three witches into voodoo houngans
and mambas.)
Welles had worked
extensively in radio, making money to support his theatre company (this
business of taking commercial jobs he didn’t want to finance the personal
projects he did want would continue
throughout his career!), and had been the second — and best — actor to play The
Shadow (with frequent collaborator Agnes Moorehead as his Margot Lane). In 1938
he landed a sustaining program (i.e., one paid for by the broadcast network
itself rather than funded by a sponsor) on CBS called The Mercury Theatre on
the Air, and debuted the show with an
amazing adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that to my mind is the best dramatization of Stoker’s
oft-filmed property ever, surpassing all
the film versions. The wicked wit of Welles’ (and others’) writing, the
forceful performance of Welles as Dracula (the real Dracula was a warlord, not
a nobleman, and that’s how Welles played him), and the equally sinister and
beautiful work of Moorehead as Mina Harker (in the show’s best scene they do a
bizarre parody of the Christian communion ritual as Dracula tells Mina that she
will become “flesh of my flesh … blood
of my blood!”) establish this as a far
more sophisticated work than any of the Dracula movies (including Tod Browning’s horribly overrated one
with Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye, who are great but sabotaged by a somnolent
script, surprisingly sloppy direction, a weak supporting cast — especially the
women — and virtually no sense of Gothic atmosphere or dramatic pace) and make
one wish that the young Welles had got to do a Dracula film of his own.
Welles went on his merry way working out
a play to adapt every week — sometimes he drew on novels, and he generally
looked for stories told in the first person so he could narrate them in
character (the working title of his show had actually been First Person
Singular), and for a special Hallowe’en
show he lighted on The War of the Worlds.
Inspired by the way the networks had cut in on regular broadcast programming to
air H. V. Kaltenborn’s special commentaries on the 1938 negotiations between
Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain in Munich, Welles decided to tell his
near-namesake’s story as if reporters from a radio network’s news division were
cutting into ordinary band broadcasts — and though he largely abandoned this
strategy in the second half of the broadcast, which focused on Professor
Richard Pierson (Welles’ character) trying to figure out how humanity could
mount a last-ditch stand against the Martians and their all-powerful heat-ray
machines and then reporting (as per Wells’ original) that the Martians had been
vanquished by Earth’s germs, which gave them fatal diseases to which the
Martians’ immune systems owed no resistance, by then the damage had been done
and quite a few people, especially those who switched from another station
during the middle of the broadcast and thereby missed the standard Mercury
Theatre on the Air introduction and theme
music identifying this as a radio dramatization, had been fooled into thinking
there was a real invasion and tricked into doing panicky things like packing
their bags, heading into their cars and driving off heaven knows where, often
creating traffic jams as hundreds of people in communities (especially the ones
the script by Welles and Howard Koch had named as actual targets of Martian attacks)
all tried to flee at once.
One of the most interesting interviews was
with a man, Seymour Charles Haden of Sunland, California, who said that he hadn’t been fooled, but, “Well, my wife, she came
in, my wife, just wringing her hands and wailing away, her eyeballs about to
pop out onto her lap going, ‘What is it? What is it? What can it be? Is it the
Germans?’ Well, she hadn’t heard that word ‘Martians’, but I had.” Indeed, one
of the most interesting explanations for the panic offered by this show (written
by A. Brad Schwartz and Michelle Ferrari, directed by Cathleen O’Connell and
narrated by Oliver Platt) was that listeners misheard the word “Martians” as
“Germans,” and with all the news coverage of Hitler they were scared enough to
believe the Nazis and the German war machine might indeed have launched a
surprise attack on the U.S. with weapons technology far in advance of anything
we had. The show went into some more familiar ground — noting that the
competing show on NBC, the Chase and Sanborn Hour with radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his
dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, was far more popular than the Mercury
Theatre on the Air but a lot of people
doing the 1930’s equivalent of channel-surfing might have turned away from the
operetta number by Nelson Eddy that interrupted the comedy and come upon a
particularly climactic moment in the show that added to the impression of
verisimitude. Also bear in mind that a lot of people who tuned in late wouldn’t
have heard the Mercury Theatre on the Air intro and wouldn’t necessarily have even known where they were on the radio dial — which answered
the questions a lot of people (including Orson Welles himself in his apologetic
press conference given a day after the broadcast — not the same night, as Frank Brady’s biography had it)
have asked ever since: namely, why didn’t people catch on to the fact that this
was in Orson Welles’ regular time slot and therefore what they were hearing was
likely to be a fictional story dramatized for radio?
As I noted when I wrote
about the broadcast itself, the two most famous works Welles ever created —
this broadcast and the 1941 film Citizen Kane — both deal with the media and how the way stories
are covered (and, more so in Kane
than in The War of the Worlds,
the personal agendas of media owners) by news outlets shape what we think we know about the world we live in and the
political, social, economic and cultural forces shaping it. In a way Orson
Welles was an antecedent of Marshall McLuhan and much of media criticism since
— and it’s not surprising from the overall tenor of Kane that his politics were distinctly Left. The
War of the Worlds didn’t start out with the
intent of doing a media critique — at the end of the actual broadcast Welles
said it was “just the Mercury Theatre’s equivalent of putting on a sheet,
hiding behind a bush, jumping out and saying, ‘Boo!’ … So goodbye everybody,
and remember, please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned
tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an
inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there,
that was no Martian — It’s Hallowe’en” — but in later years Welles embraced it
as such. Heard today, the 1938 War of the Worlds remains a fascinating program, superior to the 1953
and 2005 film versions of Wells’ novel (one fact unmentioned on this
documentary was that H. G. Wells himself publicly attacked the program as a
distortion and exploitation of his novel!) though, as Welles told Peter
Bogdanovich, he regarded it as not one of his better radio efforts (and indeed,
for both depth and sheer fright, the much less legendary Welles Dracula holds up a good deal better), but as this program
noted the threats of legislation and lawsuits pretty much fizzled and Welles
actually benefited commercially from the affair. His show got a sponsor,
Campbell’s Soup (its name was therefore changed to Campbell’s
Playhouse), and he became so notorious RKO
Radio Pictures signed him to a three-film contract as writer, producer,
director and star, in which capacities he made one of the greatest films of all
time and sealed his professional doom by going after one of the richest and
most powerful members of the .01 percent of the time, William Randolph Hearst …
but that’s another oft-told tale. — 11/5/13
•••••
Last night’s Mars Movie Night programs (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of
a couple of shows the proprietor streamed off various online channels instead
of showing them from DVD’s or Blu-Rays: an American Experience episode from PBS on the 1938 Orson Welles radio
broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and the 1953 Hollywood filmization of the same
novel. I’d seen the American Experience program before and even written about it for the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/11/american-experience-war-of-worlds-pbs.html,
and this time around I found myself resenting the elaborate reconstructions of
interviews conducted for the famous 1940 sociological study of the panic
surrounding this broadcast, published by and credited to the sociologist Dr.
Hadley Cantril (who a decade and a half later was one of the expert witnesses
called by the NAACP during Brown
v. Board of Education to
establish the detrimental effects of racial segregation and discrimination on
its victims). The basic story is well known: in October 30, 1938 Orson Welles
had been broadcasting his Mercury Theatre on the Air radio program on CBS as a so-called “sustaining”
show — i.e., it was paid for by the network and carried no commercials, though
the hope was that eventually they’d be able to sell it to a sponsor and thereby
get paid for it — for three months. He had two story properties in mind for his
October 30, 1938 program: Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s Lorna Doone and Herbert George Wells’ The
War of the Worlds. Orson Welles decided that The
War of the Worlds would make an appropriate choice
for a program the night before Hallowe’en, and he worked with writer Howard
Koch on the script (Koch later claimed sole credit but Welles said he had been
a contributor but had not written the whole thing,
much the same argument he ended up having with Pauline Kael over the extent of
Herman Mankiewicz’s contributions to the script of Welles’ film Citizen Kane). According to this program, Welles and Koch originally did a
“straight” radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds and recorded it with the cast as an audition piece. Welles heard the
recording, declared it “dull as dishwater,” and 2 ½ days before the broadcast
got the idea of presenting H. G. Wells’ fictional Martian invasion as a series
of cut-in interruptions, with announcers supposedly interrupting banal
dance-band broadcasts by bandleaders “Bobby Millette” and “Ramon Raquello” with
breaking news reports of the “Martian invasion” as told in Wells’ novel.
Wells
got the idea from a script Archibald MacLeish had written for a CBS broadcast a
year before called Air Raid — in which a fictional
bombing attack on a major city was told as if it were being covered as a news
event on radio in real time — and also from CBS foreign-policy correspondent H.
V. Kaltenborn’s cut-ins on the 1938 crisis of Hitler’s threatened invasion of
Czechoslovakia and the Munich negotiations by which British prime minister
Neville Chamberlain essentially handed Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis and
claimed that his agreement with Hitler was “a piece of paper which guarantees
peace in our time.” (Kaltenborn was enough of a star in the U.S. at the time
that the next year Frank Capra cast him as himself in Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, playing one of the radio journalists
covering James Stewart’s fictional filibuster. Orson Welles had earlier used
him on the Mercury Theatre on the Air as the
narrator of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,
which Welles had done live on stage in modern dress in 1937 and transferred to
his radio show the next year.) I’ve long noted that the two most famous works
Orson Welles was ever involved with, this War of the Worlds broadcast and Citizen Kane, both are
about the mass media and their power over the human imagination — and also how
what we believe we know about our world is
determined by the agendas of the professional communicators telling us these
stories and the ways in which we are told. In The War of the Worlds, Welles got more than he bargained for in terms of media critique:
many people — especially those who tuned in while the broadcast was in progress
and thereby missed the opening announcements that this was a radio drama and not an actual newscast — actually thought the Martians were invading the
Earth and had set up their beachhead at the town of Grovers’ Mill, New Jersey
(picked, according to this program, by Howard Koch when he ran his finger over
a map of New Jersey with his eyes closed and, when he opened them, his finger
was pointing at Grovers’ Mill — which today is a tourist attraction for people
who want to see Ground Zero of an “invasion” that never actually happened).
This documentary also makes the point that even people who did not believe the Earth was being invaded by Martians thought the attack
was real and was being launched by Nazi Germany with high-tech weapons no one
had heretofore known they had.
Frank Brady’s biography of Orson Welles noted
that the first intimation CBS got that some people out there were reacting to
the broadcast as if it were a real news report came from a phone call that ran
to the control room of the studio where it was being broadcast — and an
exasperated technician, worried that the call would distract him from his
duties to the live show, barked out, “Of course it isn’t real,” and hung up.
Soon the CBS switchboards were lighting up all over the place and one of the
executives decided they needed to interrupt the broadcast to announce that it
was a dramatization. Welles, according to this documentary, held off on reading
that announcement on the air for 10 minutes, until the show reached its
philosophical turning point in which Welles, in character as Professor Pierson,
described the scenes he’d witnessed of human civilization collapsed and the
earth itself being stripped bare by its new conquerors. There’s some evidence
that the extent of the panic was exaggerated by the newspapers that covered it
— many publishers still saw radio as a rival medium and feared it would render
them extinct, and so a lot of them were only too glad to play up an incident
that made the whole concept of radio look bad — and it led for calls for
tighter government regulation of radio, which fortunately went nowhere even
though what it did do was encourage CBS and the
other networks to put up a “voluntary” ban on the further use of the
simulated-newscast gimmick on fictional radio shows. I remember seeing in the
early 1970’s a documentary called 1985, which
purported to be a news program from that year showing how the environment had
been destroyed because we had not taken appropriate action over a decade
earlier to protect it — and they repeated the disclaimers that this was not an actual news broadcast but a simulation of one from more than a
decade hence so often that the program got leached out of all possible vitality.
— 2/16/19
