#ALIEN INVASION SHOWS SERIES#

Wells’s 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds-even though Houseman doubted that Welles had ever read it. The three men discussed various works of science fiction before settling on H.G. 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. But for the week of Halloween, Welles wanted something very different from the Mercury’s earlier offerings.

#ALIEN INVASION SHOWS SERIES#

A low-budget program without a sponsor, the series had built a small but loyal following with fresh adaptations of literary classics. The Mercury’s desperate attempts to make the show seem halfway believable succeeded, almost by accident, far beyond even their wildest expectations.īy the end of October 1938, Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air had been on CBS for 17 weeks. 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.

Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles' famed radio play and its impact. Wells classic 'The War of the Worlds.' A. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles' adaptation of the H. heard a startling report of mysterious creatures and terrifying war machines moving toward New York City. On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the U.S. 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.īroadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News 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? “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. He’d heard reports of mass stampedes, of suicides, and of angered listeners threatening to shoot him on sight. 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. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America.

Alien invasion shows