By DAVID ACORD
I gave you my vote (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) for the person most responsible for The War of the Worlds panic. Hint: it wasn’t Orson Welles. This week, I thought I’d follow up with a look at another oft-forgotten element of the controversy: Welles’ relationship with fellow playwright Archibald MacLeish.
Welles is often credited with the idea of appropriating the techniques of radio journalism for dramatic purposes; The War of the Worlds is made up largely of fictional radio dispatches from reporters “on the scene” of the Martian invasion in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. The result was an incredibly realistic and suspenseful broadcast – too realistic, in one sense. But was he really the first one to come up with the idea?
Ronald Knox pulled off something very similar on the BBC way back in 1926, when he went on the air and “reported” that thousands of poor people were rioting across London. However, Knox wasn’t trying to be dramatic; he was trying to be funny. His “reports” were filled with satirical details, made-up names and lots of in-jokes about British politics. Many people were nevertheless frightened.
Although Knox’s influence on The War of the Worlds has long been debated, it’s very doubtful that Welles knew anything about the 1926 kerfuffle. MacLeish was a much more likely “inspiration.” The two had been friends since 1935, when Welles starred in MacLiesh’s 1935 play about the excesses of Wall Street, Panic. In 1937 he performed in MacLiesh’s The Fall of the City on Columbia Workshop, the first verse play ever broadcast on radio. Inspired by the threatening shadow of Nazi Germany and the increasing likelihood of war in Europe, it was a highly experimental and symbolic work about the dangers of fascism.
The Fall of the City is written in the form of a “live” radio broadcast from a nameless city about to be overtaken by a brutal conqueror. Ironically enough, Welles plays the part of a radio announcer who breathlessly reports as a series of strange events unfold in the city square. The first line of the play is his: “Ladies and gentlemen, this broadcast comes to you from the city.” Listening to The Fall of the City today, the stylistic similarities to The War of the Worlds are readily apparent, even though the subject matter of the two plays is vastly different and MacLiesh’s dialogue is overtly poetic and “literary” sounding.
The next year, MacLiesh used the reportage technique for another Columbia Workshop production, Air Raid, which aired on Thursday, October 27 – just three nights before The War of the Worlds broadcast. Like MacLiesh’s previous radio work, Air Raid is a mixture of high poetry and realism. The dramatic vehicle is, again, a live news dispatch. A reporter stands on the rooftop in a small European town that is clearly meant to represent embattled Czechoslovakia, about to be overrun by Germans. In between banal weather reports and other announcements, he describes the scene as enemy planes unleash their artillery and reduce the city to rubble. A prescient review in Time magazine noted that MacLeish had “showed that the most persuasive of classic dramatis personae, the narrator or chorus, was none other than the most accepted public spokesman in 20th-century life, the radio announcer. The announcer could describe events in a way that would make them immediately believed” (emphasis added).
There is no proof that Welles heard Air Raid that evening, but given his close association with MacLeish – and the fact that both programs aired on CBS – it’s likely that Welles knew about it. Perhaps it spurred his memory of The Fall of the City and contributed to his decision to take the script for The War of the Worlds in a more realistic direction.
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