Highlights Archives
The History of War of the Worlds
For most people, the name War of the Worlds invokes recollections of the now-infamous 1938 Halloween radio show narrated by a young Orson Welles, but the excitement actually began during the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Sherlock Holmes. That's when British novelist H.G. Wells penned the original version of this story of alien invaders. The first edition of his novel, shown at right, sold only 6,000 copies and Wells himself later called it "a clotted mass of fine things spoilt." But over the next three decades the novel's popularity steadily increased on both sides of the Atlantic until it had become a classic in a new genre called "science fiction."
In 1938 Wisconsin-born director Orson Welles secured the author's permission to adapt the story for radio. Working with script writer Howard Koch (who would go on to write the Humphrey Bogart classic, Casablanca) and producer John Houseman (later made a household name in The Paper Chase), Welles created mass media's first wholesale panic.
The program was broadcast as a fictional news report over the CBS network on the evening of October 30, with Welles narrating Koch's script. Many listeners — a generation that had lived through startling scientific advances, the collapse of their economy, and the unthinkable brutality of Nazism — had no trouble believing that the Martian invasion was real. Police were swamped with calls, citizens barricaded their homes, and panic broke out across the country. "I was with my little boy. My husband was at the movies," recalled a New Jersey mother. "I thought it was all up with us. I grabbed my boy and just sat and cried." A Princeton University professor later discovered that 6 million Americans had listened to the broadcast, of whom at least 1.2 million took it for literal truth. You can listen to this broadcast online at The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
When director Steven Spielberg adapted the broadcast as a live-action science fiction film in 2005, press releases claimed Spielberg bought "the last surviving copy" of the 1938 script, but in fact the Society possesses two drafts of Koch's radio script with his notes in the margins. The Society also holds a rare recording of the broadcast given by producer Houseman in 1964.
When science fiction truly blossomed in the early 1950s, Paramount producer and special effects master George Pal decided to make a full-color film version of the story. Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles himself were all asked to direct it before Byron Haskin, whose special effects credits stretched back to the silent-film era, agreed to take it on. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, housed at the Society, has a promotional still from his 1953 movie version. The H.G. Wells estate, owners of the copyright, were so pleased with this 1953 movie that they allowed Paramount to make films of any of the author's other novels, and The Time Machine came to the silver screen shortly afterwards.
:: Posted June 30, 2005
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