Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles had its New York City premiere on November 23, and the next day, on November 24, there was a dedication by Chris Welles Feder and Christian McKay of a plaque in memory of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre which once stood at the site of the current building which now occupies the lot at 110 West 41st street.

That is why Wellesnet will be recalling some of the memories of the original cast members of Julius Caesar this week, beginning with these filmed recollections of one of the founding members of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre company, Mr. William Alland.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part One: Meeting Welles, Theater and Radio

Part Two: Hollywood and Citizen Kane to Touch of Evil

Photos of William Alland and Orson Welles can be seen at Wellesnet's Facebook page HERE.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

William Alland most famously played the reporter Thompson in Citizen Kane, and was one of the original Mercury Theatre actors, having first met Welles early in his career in 1936. He then went on to play the part of Marullus in Julius Caesar, and joined the other Mercury Actors when they went to Hollywood. Alland debuted as a film actor in Citizen Kane and worked with Welles on several of his subsequent films, including playing one of the murderers in Macbeth.

Mr. Alland also had roles in many of Welles's radio shows, most notably playing several parts in the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast.

John McCarty, a colleague from Cinefantastique magazine, recently wrote to tell me he had filmed an long interview segment with Mr. Alland for a documentary project and had just recently placed it on YouTube for everyone to enjoy.

I asked John to write a short introduction for his documentary, The Man Who Pursued Rosebud, and he readily complied. In looking at Mr. Alland's comments, what I found especially interesting, is how his account of his first meeting with Orson Welles differed so greatly from what John Houseman recorded in his own autobiography, Run Though. Like the reporter he played in Citizen Kane, it seems William Alland and Mr. Houseman have two very different memories of how they first came to meet the great man!

So after you watch John McCarty's documentary, I have included the relevant comments from John Houseman's book, where he recalls his own take on how William Alland became a member of the Mercury Theatre.

It should also be noted that William Alland is portrayed in a featured part in Me and Orson Welles, by the actor Iain McKee. In the movie he is known only as "Vakhtangov" which is explained by Mr. Houseman in the excerpt from his autobiography.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE MAN WHO PURSUED ROSEBUD

By John McCarty

In 1994, I published a book titled The Fearmakers (St. Martin’s Press), a compendium of essay-profiles of twenty filmmakers who, in my opinion, had the greatest influence on the evolution of the terror-horror-suspense film genre from the silent era to the present (circa 1993). One of these filmmakers was Jack Arnold, the director of such enduring sci-fi/horror classics of the 1950s as It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula, The Creature of From the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and others.

Two years later, a Texas-based video production company contacted me about developing the book into a documentary series for the fast-growing home video market. Each half-hour segment would focus on one of these master fearmakers and include clips from their films as well as interviews with co-workers, cast members, film historians, and even the filmmakers themselves if they were still around. I signed on as narrator, script supervisor, co-director, interviewer, and chief cook and bottle washer.

After selecting a baker’s dozen from the twenty in my book for the thirteen segments that would be produced, I gave the producers a list of potential interviewees. For the segment on Jack Arnold, the interviewee I most hoped to get was William Alland, Universal’s “house producer” of science-fiction and horror films in the ‘50s – and, not unimportantly to me, the man who had played Jerry Thompson, the reporter in pursuit of the identity of “rosebud” in the Orson Welles masterpiece Citizen Kane.

(more...)

Glenn Anders, a long time member of Wellesnet is also quite possibly the only member who actually heard that famed Martian broadcast all those years ago. I asked Glenn to write something about his memories of that fateful night in 1938, when he was just a seven-year old lad, living a peaceful, uneventful life in the mid-west. Here is his report:

********************************************

NEWS ANNOUNCER: Enemy now in sight above the Palisades. Five -- five great machines. First one is crossing river. I can see it from here, wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook... A bulletin's handed me... Martian cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis... seem to be timed and spaced... Now the first machine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city's west side... Now they're lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out... black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They're running towards the East River... thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke's spreading faster. It's reached Times Square. People trying to run away from it, but it's no use. They're falling like flies. Now the smoke's crossing Sixth Avenue... Fifth Avenue... one hundred yards away... it's fifty feet...

ANNOUNCER'S BODY FALLS TO THE GROUND

—From The War of the Worlds, October 30, 1938.

********************************************

It would have been a Sunday evening, after dinner, in Northeastern Ohio, far from Grovers Mills, New Jersey. The air was growing chilly, and the last leaves of the Maple trees on Swan Street were fluttering on their branches. The Yankees had beaten the Cubs four straight in the World Series earlier in the month, and in mid-November, Kate Smith would be introducing "God Bless America" to the public, for Armistice Day. Overseas, the Nazis had carried out Krystalnacht against their Jewish population, and Winston Churchill was speaking of the possible necessity of war with a ruthless nation a few hours away by air.

For most of the citizens of Geneva, Ohio, such events were distant. Not so in my home, where my father, "Scotty" Fraser, a five-year veteran Cameron Highlander machine gunner of the First World War, when not climbing sixty foot poles for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, listened to the ballgame, the football game, the opera, Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, or most of all, the news from the BBC, on our brand new Philco console radio, standing in its place of honor near his chair. My father, a gentle man, sat by the hearth, reading his beloved True Detective Stories, a cigarette burning in his giant blue ashtray, a glass of California Muscatel and soda at hand.

The last tomato had been harvested, the lily bulbs taken from the ground, and listening to Churchill (not yet Prime Minister) on the shortwave transmission of the BBC, my father began to have arguments with my mother about rejoining his regiment.

But that would be far from Geneva, and only vaguely disturbing to my life on that Sunday.

Tomorrow night was Halloween, and the kids on the block were looking forward to "trick or treating." We were still in the final ebb of the Great Depression, and children did not have money for fancy costumes and elaborate makeup. One flour sack with a few holes for over the head, and another to hold the boodle, mostly homemade cookies and candies, had to make do.

I would have been lying half on our precious Persian carpet, half on the hardwood, near my father's chair, "reading" my latest Action Comic Book, featuring the new hero Superman, glancing occasionally at a clipper ship making way under full sail toward me, emblazoned on a card table artfully arranged to easily mask the unused opening of our red brick fire place. I would have been drawing part of the time, for I did not really read for years after a fall down the cellar steps when I was five.

There would have been no doubt that we would eschew Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, the radio craze at that hour. The sustaining CBS program, the Mercury Theater on the Air, had promised early in mid-summer a dramatization of Treasure Island, a favorite novel of my father's youth. And though that promise was postponed, and others disappeared entirely, we had become habituated to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat minor, which came to symbolize the approaching presence, accentuated by our radios's huge base speaker, of the mysterious but comforting Orson Welles.

As one who actually heard "The War of the Worlds" on that late Fall day of 1938, so long ago, in Ohio, I can tell you that there was nothing on the radio in the late thirties which compared with the Mercury Theater on the Air. The only other program of its kind, on a regular basis, was The Columbia Radio Workshop broadcasts. And Welles was involved with those programs, too, as were the directors who may have been an influence on him, Irving Reiz and particularly, William N. Robson.

And so, a seven year-old boy was lying on the floor, feeling the vibrations of our mighty Philco pulsing through him, its somehow Egyptian green eye dilating slowly down upon him, observing all of us, as we heard:

(more...)

There are pictures of me made about three hours after the broadcast looking as much as I could like an early Christian saint. As if I didn't know what I was doing... but I'm afraid it was about as hypocritical as anyone could possibly get!

—Orson Welles (to Tom Snyder - 1975)

*************************************************

Press conference transcript from RADIO GUIDE Magazine, 1938

No more interesting interview was ever given than that granted to the press on Monday Oct. 31, 1938 - the day after The War of the Worlds hoax broadcast by Orson Welles, who played Professor Pierson, adapted the novel to radio, and who directs the Mercury Theater. He entered the interview room unshaven since Saturday, eyes red from lack of sleep. Welles read this prepared statement:

MR. WELLES: Despite my deep regret over any misapprehension that our broadcast might have created among some listeners, I am even more bewildered over this misunderstanding in the light of an analysis of the broadcast itself.

It seems to me that they’re our four factors, which should have in any event maintained the illusion of fiction in the broadcast. The first was that the broadcast was performed as if occurring in the future, and as if it were then related by a survivor of a past occurrence. The date of this fanciful invasion of this planet by Martians was clearly given as 1939 and was so announced at the outset of the broadcast.

The second element was the fact that the broadcast took place at our weekly Mercury Theatre period and had been so announced in all the papers. For seventeen consecutive weeks we have been broadcasting radio sixteen of these seventeen broadcasts have been fiction and have been presented as such. Only one in the series was a true story, the broadcast of Hell on Ice by Commander Ellsberg, and was identified as a true story in the framework of radio drama.

The third element was the fact that at the very outset of the broadcast, and twice during its enactment, listeners were told that this was a play that it was an adaptation of an old novel by H. G. Wells. Furthermore, at the conclusion, a detailed statement to this effect was made.

The fourth factor seems to me to have been the most pertinent of all. That is the familiarity of the fable, within the American idiom, of Mars and the Martians.

For many decades “The Man From Mars” has been almost a synonym for fantasy. In very old morgues of many newspapers there will be found a series of grotesque cartoons that ran daily, which gave this fantasy imaginary form. As a matter of fact, the fantasy as such has been used in radio programs many times. In these broadcasts, conflict between citizens of Mars and other planets been a familiarly accepted fairy-tale. The same make-believe is familiar to newspaper readers through a comic strip that uses the same device.

Mr. Welles then answered questions from reporters.

(more...)

The N. Y. Daily News has posted their complete original coverage from 1938 on the panic caused by the broadcast of The War of the Worlds. There is also a wonderful gallery of pictures featuring Welles in the studio, along with a Martian's eye viewpoint of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Here are some excerpts and a link:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2008/10/30/2008-10-30_war_of_the_worlds_terrified_the_nation_7-2.html

_____________________________________________________

FAKE RADIO "WAR" STIRS TERROR THROUGH U. S.

By GEORGE DIXON

This article originally ran in the October 31, 1938 edition of the New York Daily News.

A radio dramatization of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" - which thousands of people misunderstood as a news broadcast of a current catastrophe in New Jersey - created almost unbelievable scenes of terror in New York, New Jersey, the South and as far west as San Francisco between 8 and 9 o'clock last night.

At 10 P.M., WABC sent out the following explanation of its "War of the Worlds" broadcast:

"For those listeners who tuned in to Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast from 8 to 9 P,M tonight, and did not realize that the program was merely a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' famous novel, 'War of the Worlds,' we are repeating the fact, which was made clear four times on the program, that the entire content of the play was entirely fictitious."

(more...)

Early in June, 1970 Orson Welles appeared as a guest on The David Frost Show and gave the comments below to Sir David about his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast.

Later that same month, Welles was a guest host on the Frost Show and talked to (among others) these famous luminaries: Duke ELLINGTON, Louis ARMSTRONG, Norman MAILER and Darryl F. ZANUCK.

Now, it seems to me, Ron Howard's upcoming FROST/NIXON movie should have a sequel. Michael Sheen should play David Frost and Vincent D' Onofrio could play Orson Welles. But wouldn't you think a FROST/WELLES movie would make a far better story than a FROST/NIXON film?

Meanwhile, here is a link to the excellent 1988 radio documentary with comments from both John Houseman and Howard Koch about their memories of The War of the Worlds broadcast:

_____________________________________

The Making of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Featuring John Houseman and Howard Koch

http://www.prx.org/pieces/28807

_____________________________________

Orson Welles' Sketchbook
Episode 5: The Martian Invasion - May 21, 1955

Hear online here: Orson Welles' Sketchbook

_____________________________________

ORSON WELLES on DAVID FROST (1970)

DAVID FROST: What memories do you have of that radio program that had such a great impact?

ORSON WELLES: You mean the scandal?

DAVID FROST: Yes. The War of the Worlds. That was in what year?

ORSON WELLES: I know no dates. Just after the invention of the electric light, I know that. I have memories of it. The thing that confuses it in my mind is that we had our own radio show with actors and at the same time we had our own theater, the Mercury Theater. And the night after the program I had an opening on Broadway. So when the police came into the control room and traffic stopped and the world came to an end, we were all saying, "Yes, but have you got the light cue for the second act right?" It didn't quite penetrate until the play had opened that I'd replaced Benedict Arnold as an American villain, and that was because the newspapers, who'd been griping about radio taking away the advertising, finally found somebody to blame. Then they found out that everybody was laughing and thought it was a joke, so in a few days I was suddenly a great fellow, and that's how I got a sponsor.

DAVID FROST: What was the part of The War of the Worlds that really terrified people?

ORSON WELLES: I don't know. Many things, probably. We had an actor who did Roosevelt's voice terribly well, and we brought him on to assure everybody that there was no cause for alarm. I think that's when they really ran out on the streets. We also had a ham radio voice that would come in, identifying himself and trying to talk to other people while this awful thing was happening. We established him, and then we went to a CBS announcer who was describing the arrival of the Martians. And then the announcer began to cough; he couldn't go on and stopped, and then this dead silence. The real trick we did was to hold dead silence on a full network, with no sound at all, and then you'd hear the microphone drop, and then more silence, and then this one little voice, the amateur radio operator, saying, "This is so-and-so. Isn’t there anybody out there—" And that is, I guess, when they put the towels on their heads and ran out of the house. I don't know why they put towels on their heads, but they did. I don't know what they thought that was going to do. A sort of anti-Martian thing. Then there were all these traffic cops. It was Sunday night and all these guys out in Jersey on their motorcycles waiting, and the people in the cars, driving, had the radio, but the cops didn't. Suddenly everybody started driving at 125 miles an hour. "Pull over!" "No, I'm going to the hills!"

DAVID FROST: And if you wanted to terrify people today, how would you do it?

ORSON WELLES: I don't. I didn't want to then.

DAVID FROST: No, of course. But if somebody wanted to terrify people today, how should they do it?

ORSON WELLES: Well, I would say unlimited air-time to Spiro Agnew.

_____________________________________

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:

_______________________________________

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.

_______________________________________

WAR OF THE WORLDS EFFECT LINGERS

By RAY KELLY

_______________________________________

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."

(more...)

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.

**********************************************************************************

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

**********************************************************************************

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.

**********************************************************************************

(more...)

Public radio station KQED in California is presenting a radio show looking at the history of the infamous "War of the Worlds" episode of The Mercury Theater on the Air. The show will be presented twice, once tomorrow (2/16) at 1 PM, and on 2/20 at 8 PM (these are Pacific times, by the way). You can listen to them on their site, so check it out.