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Take it away, Brad. Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles. We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man. Hello, I'm Orson Welles and I've been quoting from another Welles, no relation, H.G. Welles, the distinguished novelist, historian, prophet who was also the great master of science fiction. He wrote The War of the Worlds on which was based a certain notorious radio broadcast, which as some of you may remember, sent many thousands of our listeners panicking into the streets all over the country. Orson Welles at the time of the War of the Worlds broadcast is pretty well known in New York and in New York theater circles, and he had achieved some prominence as a radio performer. But the radio work that he was doing was anonymous because you weren't credited.
So he's not a national figure by any means. Back in those days, the major radio networks, they would give away a lot of airtime without commercial sponsors, essentially as a public service because the Communications Act says if you're going to have a broadcast license, you disturb the public interest. Something like the Mercury Theater where, you know, Orson Welles is going to perform great works of literature and drama, things like that on the air.
This is seen as a public service. The first episode is Dracula. They do Treasure Island. They do Sherlock Holmes, you know, all the classic books and plays. The radio show is kind of a disaster. It's not doing well in the ratings because it is sort of highbrow.
Who knows how long CBS is going to give them this hour of time. And that's when the idea comes up. Maybe your next show should be an adaptation of the War of the Worlds by H.G.
Wells. It's a question, you know, where the idea to adapt in this way came from. Welles told different versions of the story at different times. But when he was under oath, talked about having this idea of doing a broadcast that sounded like breaking news, because there had been in September of 38, the famous Munich diplomatic crisis where Nazi Germany was claiming part of Czechoslovakia, and there was a reaction to that. And there was a real question as to whether this would precipitate another world war. No, our prime minister has come back from his third and greatest journey.
And he said, we regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again. They were reporting on this around the clock, breaking into programming regularly. People were getting used to the idea that anything could be interrupted with news of a catastrophe at any time. And Welles sees what great drama this is that people were gripped by this. And he wanted to capture that in some sense in a dramatic, fictitious context, not to fool people, but use some of that power to take an old story and make it seem new.
But he didn't have a book in mind. And somebody, maybe John Houseman, we don't really know, but somebody suggests The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Orson Welles says, great, fantastic. It's the first alien invasion story really in the modern sense that anyone ever did.
H.G. Wells wrote it in 1897 and 1898. Really as a sort of satire of colonialism, because it's written at the high point of the British Empire. And he had been reading about what the British were doing in Tasmania to the indigenous inhabitants there and had this idea of a reversal of maybe what if a superior civilization lands in the heart of the United Kingdom and starts treating the British the way the British are treating people on the other side of the globe.
What would that look like? In our broadcast, the Martians were as aggressive and ruthless as any human being. They were supposedly as bad as we are, at our worst, but also much uglier.
They brandished death rays and their slimy tentacles. But what seems really cutting edge in 1898 by 1938 looked particularly to members of the Mercury Theatre as something that was really kind of hokey. Science fiction back in those days was seen as mainly for children. So they turn it over to a writer that they had just hired by the name of Howard Koch. He would go on to co-write the screenplay for Casablanca and a lot of Hollywood films. But at this time he's just a struggling playwright and Koch gets the book over the weekend and he's got to turn in a script on Tuesday. And he is not impressed with the novel. He thinks it's outdated. He thinks it's really silly. He tries to get them to change the story. And he's given the instruction to take the story that sat around the turn of the century, modernize it for the rich of the United States and do it as a series of news bulletins, which he does. I mean, he takes the basic structure of how the Martians land and come out of their spacecraft. It was understood that the Martians were fighting for their own survival.
Their planet was growing so cold and inhospitable that they might perish if they remained. In the book, they move toward London. In the broadcast, they move toward New York City. And he has a roadmap of New Jersey, because that's where he'd been visiting the week before, and closes his eyes and drops a pencil on the map. And it lands on this little town called Grover's Mill, which is a few miles from Princeton. And he goes, oh, Princeton? OK, so I can have my astronomer be a professor at Princeton and I can land the Martians here.
And it's not far from New York City and puts that all together. For a while, at least, just toward the end of the radio play, they appeared to be totally invincible. And so they have a draft script. They do a rehearsal that they record so Wells can listen to it. They listen to it, I think, on maybe the Thursday before the Sunday show. And everybody who heard it talks about how horrible this rehearsal was, that the script just wasn't working, the performances weren't there, they didn't have the sound effects and the music and everything like that.
It just wasn't believable. And that's the moment when Orson Welles, who again, his radio show is in trouble, realizes he needs to bring all of his talents to bear on the show, but he only comes into it on the day. So it's the night before Halloween, a Sunday night. A lot of people had the expectation that it was going to be a quiet night. But again, because of the news that had been coming out of Europe, there is a growing and definite sense that some sort of conflict is inevitable.
Anybody could have been frightened under the right conditions. And so back in those days when radios had tubes, you had to warm up. So you switch on the dial and it takes a while for the sound to come in. So if you turn it on right at 8 p.m., you could easily miss the opening announcements of the show and instead come in on a weather report or music. Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago, the Government Meteorological Bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars. Due to the unusual nature of this occurrence, we have arranged an interview with a noted astronomer, Professor Pearson, who will give us his views on this event.
In a few moments, we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey. We return you until then to the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra. Much of the first part of the show is a fictitious musical program. This sort of music that was very common on the airwaves at that time and that people wanted to listen to on a Sunday night. They did chores or did their homework or whatever being interrupted by these reports about what's going on on Mars and then in New Jersey.
And so a lot of people, either they turn the radio on or they spun the dial and that's what they came into. This introduces a problem. Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read you a wire addressed Professor Pearson from Dr. Gray of the Natural History Museum, New York. Quote, 915 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, seismograph registered shock of almost earthquake intensity occurring within a radius of 20 miles of Princeton. Please investigate. Signed, Lloyd Gray, chief of astronomical division, unquote.
Professor Pearson, could this occurrence possibly have something to do with the disturbances observed on the planet Mars? And you've been listening to A. Brad Schwartz, author of Broadcast Hysteria, telling the story of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds and what a stunt Orson Welles performed for ratings. And not just a stunt, but pure and great radio theater. Radio was the mass medium.
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Visit addi.com to learn more about Addi. And we continue with our American stories and author A. Brad Schwartz telling the story of the War of the Worlds. When we last left off, Wells staff had taken a well-known but dated and cheesy sci-fi book about invading aliens written by another Wells in response to British imperialism and modernized it to feed into American anxieties about the crisis in Europe.
The process took less than a week. Let's return to the story. In those days, virtually everything that aired on the major radio networks, NBC and CBS, aired live. The reasons for that had to do with the networks basically proving that they could do things that smaller stations couldn't do. But that conditioned people to think that whatever you're hearing is happening right now. This introduces a problem for news broadcast, right, when if the president is giving a speech and you're not airing it as it's airing, you can't play a recording of it according to network policy.
So how do you get around that? You would have an actor in a studio performing an impression of the president, perhaps saying things that the president never actually said. And this was allowable because the performance is live, even though it's a fakery.
Fakery allegiance to the truth is what they called it. This was an accepted practice. This was something that was actually more popular in some ways than live news. This was one of Orson Welles' first radio jobs, actually. So Orson Welles, having had that professional experience, takes a lot of those techniques and the impressions of FDR, Frank Reddick, who plays the radio reporter who's there when the Martian spacecraft opens up.
He listens to the Hindenburg broadcast over and over again and basically does an impression of it. It's a terrific drag, ladies and gentlemen. It's broken. It's flames now. And the flame is rising to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast.
All the humanity, all the past is really gone. So in the Hindenburg, it's bursting into flames in War of the World, turning into flame when the heat ray goes off. And this is not out of the intention, but they're shuffling how dangerous the practice was, how easy it is to make something that is not real sound real. They were using every trick in the book and they succeeded too well. We were very impressionable at that age because of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. And that really made a big impression on us.
One fellow in particular who owned a store took the money from his cash register and loaded his car up with food and took off for the mountains and left his wife and children at home. Here's AT&T telephone operators from the 1930s, courtesy of the AT&T archives, describing what happened the night War of the Worlds aired. Every light on that board lit.
Now that board was, I would say, almost a half-block long. People believed it. And I think of the ones who were begging us to get connections to their families, to their husbands, before the world came to an end so they could just tell them they loved them. The man told me that people were jumping out of the windows and they were going to kill their families before the Martians could get them. Some people said, did I have a chance to see them?
What were they like? A few policemen trickled in, then a few more, and soon the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys and CBS executives who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness. The following hours were a nightmare.
The building was suddenly full of people and dark blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked in a small office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busy collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen. Out of character to assure you that the war of the world has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The haggard Welles sat alone in despondent. I'm through, he lamented, washed up.
I didn't bother to reply to this highly inaccurate self-appraisal. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it and that both institutions are still open for business. There were several letters that Orson Welles received that are written that night. Dear Serbs, I heard your broadcast of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre impractically had hysterics. Everybody was absolutely wild.
They were tearing frantically about and tearing up beds and dressers and practically crazy. If you know what's wise, you better not have programs like this in the future. To the Columbia Broadcasting Company, sponsors of World of Worlds, it is outrageous to broadcast such plays as was presented by the Mercury Theatre Sunday night.
Orson Welles, little white-haired old man of Broadway, I would suggest you enter some accredited college or university or possibly a prep school and acquire a reasonable amount of education. Are you a drug addict, a gutter drunk, or are you a thanks to you that half a dozen or more nearly passed out or died because of your silly program? You might as well dig a hole and crawl in it.
Stay there too, and we mean you. Most of them are written not in response to the broadcast itself. Relatively few people heard the show. Then it was only when they opened their newspapers the next day and they saw these headlines. War drama sends listeners in panic thinking Martian invasion is back. It was only then that, you know, a lot of people were frightened, not by the Martian invasion, but by the idea that so many Americans could be deceived. Finally, the press was let loose on us.
Ravening for horror. How many deaths have we heard of? Implying that we knew of thousands. What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? Implying that it was one of many. What traffic deaths? The ditches must be chalked full of corpses. The suicides?
Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive? John Houseman Were you aware of terror at the time you were giving this role? Were you aware that terror was going on throughout the nation?
Oh no, of course not. We did Dracula and it seemed to me during Dracula I had high hopes that people would react as they do in a movie of that kind. And I don't know that they did, particularly.
And so I'd given up. One doesn't believe in the radio audience much. You don't know whether they're listening or not. You have no idea how many people are listening or what they're thinking.
I had every hope that the people would be as excited as they would be at a melodrama. Dramatized news goes out of fashion very quickly after this. Do you think, Mr. Wells, that you might have taken unfair advantage of the public in using a method as a conveyance for authentic news? I don't believe that I have since. It is not a method original with me.
It is used by many radio programs. It's very important to make clear that even though Wells, many years after the fact, would sort of suggest or claim that he did this to teach people a lesson, not to believe everything that they heard, everybody else who was involved with the show, who left a recollection, said that was not the case, that they were as surprised as anybody else, that they were just trying to make this alien invasion story that nobody believed seemed credible by a fake news broadcast. Somebody who was frightened wrote, after this broadcast, how are we supposed to know when news is news and when it is just fiction? And that's really the question that this episode raises. When you have this new technology that can spread lies just as quickly as facts, where do you draw the line?
How do people know what to trust? Now, that concern, that was a very real concern back then, has only deepened and I think has become the central question of our time. 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 Halloween. And a terrific job with the production, editing and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery and Reagan Habib. And a special thanks to A. Brad Schwartz, author of Broadcast Hysteria, Orson Welles' War of the Worlds and The Art of Fake News. And my goodness, the real trouble they got into was this. They did it so well. And then the newspapers ran with it. My goodness, some of those messages from outraged Americans. Are you a drug addict?
You might as well dig a hole and crawl into it and stay there. But it launched one of the great careers in American life, the life of Orson Welles. The story of the War of the Worlds, here on Our American Stories. Did you know women are more likely than men to develop dry eyes, which may be due to hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle or after menopause and the use of oral contraceptives? Give your dry, burning or irritated eyes a daily refresh with Refresh Optive Mega 3 Lubricant Eyedrops, a preservative-free formula that provides fast-acting, lasting relief. Refresh Optive Mega 3 is safe to use as often as needed.
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