Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Here is Wellesnet member Ray Kelly’s article recalling The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, from the Springfield, Mass. Republican. There are additional pictures and sound clips at this link:

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/10/70_years_ago_war_of_the_worlds.html

To introduce Ray’s piece, here is Welles’s famous closing speech from the broadcast:

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ORSON WELLES: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that “The War of The Worlds” has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night …so we did the best next thing. We annihiliated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember 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!

ANNOUNCER: Tonight the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations coast-to-coast have brought you “The War of the Worlds,” by H.G. Wells, the seventeenth in its weekly series of dramatic broadcasts featuring Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air. Next week we present a dramatization of three famous short stories. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.

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WAR OF THE WORLDS EFFECT LINGERS

By RAY KELLY

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On Halloween eve 1938, the monsters arrived early.

An Agawam woman collapsed after hearing a radio report that marauding Martians had landed in Grover’s Mill, N.J., and were advancing on New York City.

Switchboards at newspapers and police stations buzzed from Springfield to San Francisco with calls from panicked listeners who feared incineration from the Martian death rays.

One Massachusetts man scraped together $3.25 for a railway ticket – only to learn 60 miles later that he and thousands of others had been duped by a CBS radio dramatization of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel, “War of the Worlds.”

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October 30th, 2008 marks the 70th Anniversary of Orson Welles famed CBS radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, and to celebrate, Wellesnet will be reprinting or providing links to some of the best of the anniversary articles that will be appearing around the nation and world this week.

However, to begin our coverage, let’s start with the opening scene from Howard Koch’s radio play, along with the cast and credits for the show, followed by Orson Welles own memories on the hysteria the show caused, taken from his his 1955 British TV show, Orson Welles Sketchbook.

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Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater On The Air
present

H. G. WELLS THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Sunday October 30, 1938 – 8:00 to 9:00 p.m.

CBS Radio Network. Produced & directed by Orson Welles. Adapted for radio by Howard Koch, Paul Stewart and John Houseman. Associate producer: Paul Stewart. CBS production supervisor: Davidson Taylor. Music by Bernard Herrmann. Sound effects: Ora Nichols, Ray Kremer and Jim Rogan. Sound engineer: John Dietz. Announcer: Dan Seymour.

The Cast

Professor Richard Pierson – ORSON WELLES
Studio announcer – PAUL STEWART
Reporter Carl Phillips – FRANK READICK
Second studio announcer – CARL FRANK
Farmer Wilmuth – RAY COLLINS
Policeman at farm – KENNY DELMAR
Meridian room announcer – WILLIAM ALLAND
Harry McDonald, radio VP – RAY COLLINS
Brig. General Montgomery – RICHARD WILSON
Captain Lansing – KENNY DELMAR
Third Studio Announcer – PAUL STEWART
Secretary of the Interior – KENNY DELMAR
Rooftop radio announcer – RAY COLLINS
Officer 22nd Field Artillery – RICHARD WILSON
Field artillery gunner – WILLIAM ALLAND
Field artillery observer – STEFAN SCHNABEL
Bomber Lt. Voght – HOWARD SMITH
Bayonne radio operator – KENNY DELMAR
Langham Field – RICHARD WILSON
Newark radio operator – WILLIAM HERZ
Radio operator 2X2L – FRANK READICK
Radio operator 8X3R – WILLIAM HERZ
Fascist stranger – CARL FRANK

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ANNOUNCER: The Columbia Broadcasting System and it’s affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in a radio play by Howard Koch suggested by the H.G. Wells Novel “The War of the Worlds.”

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theater and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles…

ORSON WELLES: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crossley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.

ANNOUNCER: …for the next twenty-four hours not much change in temperature. A slight atmospheric disturbance of undetermined origin is reported over Nova Scotia, causing a low pressure area to move down rather rapidly over the northeastern states, bringing a forecast of rain, accompanied by winds of light gale force. Maximum temperature 66; minimum 48. This weather report comes to you from the Government Weather Bureau… We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.

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