Ebert Club
#191 October 30, 2013
Sheila writes: Today, October 30, is the 75th anniversary of the historic 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast, presented by Orson Welles and his merry band of Mercury Theater friends. In Peter Bogdanovich's book "This is Orson Welles", Welles tells Bogdanovich: "Six minutes after we’d gone on the air, the switchboards in radio stations right across the country were lighting up like Christmas trees. Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the street and the rending of garments. Twenty minutes in, and we had a control room full of very bewildered cops. They didn’t know who to arrest or for what, but they did lend a certain tone to the remainder of the broadcast. We began to realize, as we plowed on with the destruction of New Jersey, that the extent of our American lunatic fringe had been underestimated." Bogdanovich later says to Welles, "The Martian broadcast didn’t really hurt you at all. Would you say it was lucky?" Welles replied, "Well, it put me in the movies. Was that lucky? I don’t know." Here is the original radio broadcast in all its mockumentary glory.
