Read Online The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore - Free Book Online

classes and educational backgrounds behaved irrationally. They prayed, took flight in cars, or ran out to warn their neighbors that the world was ending; church services were interrupted by hysterics, traffic was jammed, and communications systems were clogged. At Princeton University two distinguished geologists rushed out to search for the Martian “meteor” that was reported to have landed nearby, and scores of citizens were medically treated for shock.
    Four times during the show listeners were told that they were hearing a dramatization, and at the end Welles jovially announced that it had all been a friendly joke: “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.” Nevertheless, for many of those who tuned in late to the first half of the program, the news seemed quite real. Welles and Koch had used actual settings like Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, for the rocket landings and had taken full advantage of public familiarity with “on the spot” news coverage, such as the classic broadcast in which a reporter is heard breaking down at the sight of the Hindenburg explosion. Although a fictional network called “Intercontinental Radio” was invented for the news announcements, and although the entire destruction of the world took only thirty minutes of air time, the early sections of the program were quite good at creating the illusion of real events. Most of the names used on the show were slightly garbled versions of live persons—even “Professor Richard Pierson of Princeton” sounded rather like Newton L. Pierce, an assistant in astronomy at the university, and an announcement of a nationwide emergency was made by the “Secretary of the Interior” in a voice exactly like FDR’s. What was particularly effective was the way Welles as director had manipulated the audience’s sense of time, keeping to real duration at the beginning of the show and then dramatically collapsing the action once the basic illusion was established. At several points, notably in the beginning, he allowed dead silence on the air, and he dragged out “Ramón Raquello’s” rendition of “La Comparsita” for an excruciatingly long period; all this, of course, made the later, more speeded-up and implausible occurrences seem real.
    Listened to today, the program seems quite naïve, and despite Welles’s and Koch’s occasional cleverness one finds it difficult to believe that so many people were deceived. Several explanations have been offered for the phenomenon: the show aired just after the Munich crisis, a war scare that is alluded to at the very beginning of the broadcast and that may have influenced someto think that the reported invasion wasn’t extraterrestrial at all. Sociologist Hadley Cantril, who made a book-length study of audience response, believed that people were fooled because of an anxiety “latent in the general population,” caused by years of economic depression and in some cases by educational deprivation. The world was clearly ripe for radio demagogues, he noted, and the problem lay less in radio than in “the discrepancy between the whole superstructure of economic, social, and political practices and beliefs, and the basic and derived needs of individuals.”
    The program ultimately became important as a case study of mass hysteria, but in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast it was not clear whether Welles would be remembered as a hero or as a monster. The morning papers described public reaction as a “tidal wave of panic,” and the chairman of the FCC issued a statement calling the program “regrettable.” An angry H. G. Wells threatened to sue because of what he claimed was a misuse of his novel, and for a while there were rumors