Recommendations of the Editorial team
In 1938, a young Orson Welles was working at the Mercury Theater in New York. His Shakespeare productions caused a sensation. Welles was also interested in radio plays that were produced for the radio. He gave the author Howard Koch a script version of HG Wells’ “War Of The Worlds” commissioned. The novel was first published as a serial in an English newspaper in 1897.
Orson Welles sold the radio play to CBS. He took on the role of the news anchor who, in between playing music, kept reporting new reports about aliens landing in New Jersey.
“War Of The Worlds” went on the air on October 30, 1938, on the eve of Halloween. In New York and New Jersey, the production with Welles’s melodious voice was considered authentic by some listeners and they reacted with panic. Around three million listeners were on the radio. The “New York Daily News” later exaggerated the effect of the program and reported “mass panic.”
The horror was not planned
Orson Welles claimed he did not expect such excitement. In order to attract attention at all, he chose the evening before Halloween. Three years later he made Citizen Kane.
Another director filmed the evening of the radio play: In “Radio Days” (1987), Woody Allen comically describes a car ride through New Jersey in anticipation of the extraterrestrials. They appeared as rarely as the Nazi submarines off New York City.
Orson Welles lent his theatrical voice to cereal and beer commercials many years later, starting a war of the worlds: Welles versus Hollywood.