by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
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 mambos.)
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’ originals) 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.
