“In the thirty-ninth year of the 20th Century came the great disillusionment…”
Tonight, when the clock strikes 8 Eastern Standard Time, it will have been exactly 85 years since The Mercury Theatre on the Air unleashed its version of H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS over CBS radio airwaves. Though the national panic resulting from the broadcast has been embellished historically, it made Orson Welles a household name and eight-and-a-half decades later, remains the coolest thing I have ever heard.
When reporter Carl Phillips (the brilliant Frank Readick) breathlessly relayed his observations from the Wilmuth farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, it didn’t require much effort to see how channeling Herbert Morrison’s coverage of the Hindenburg disaster the previous year could terrify millions. To my thinking, all it would have required was for someone to tune in a few moments late. Missing the program’s introduction was all it would have taken.
This was 1938. The Golden Age of Radio. It would be a lifetime before 24-hour news networks and social media would conquer our cultural landscape. So, when a reporter on the radio asked for a moment to get a better vantage point during a “news bulletin,” one would have been glued to the radio, nervously awaiting their next communication.
That’s when the magic happened.
After a brief piano interlude, with sirens blaring and the voices of uneasy onlookers murmuring in the background, Phillips re-started his transmission. Only a few words in, Readick–in a stroke of genius–tilted his head away from the microphone asking his broadcast partner, “am I on?” A subtle gesture that added incredible authenticity to the proceedings.
It wasn’t long before Phillips was talking about a small beam of light setting men in the field ablaze, frantically describing the jet of flame as it approached “about twenty yards to my ri…”
Dead air.
Eventually the studio host returned, the show progressed to its next stage, and later it should have been clear THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was all a radio play meant to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve. But the very instant the air went dead is a moment that quickens the beating of the heart to this day. One can only imagine its impact in the fall of 1938. It was Readick, not Welles who sold the program, however. The exquisitely simple act of looking away from his mic, and the mid-sentence cut to dead air was perfection.
When I heard THE WAR OF THE WORLDS for the first time, I was in college. Shortly after, I owned the broadcast on CD and even fashioned an Audio Production group project around those first fifteen delicious minutes.
In fact, during the pandemic I made a return to radio and ordered a face mask featuring Orson Welles, sleeves rolled up and and arm held high as he intensely read the words from Howard Koch’s magnificent adaptation. And whenever anyone glanced at it and asked what it was, I gave them a quick “I can’t work in radio and not hype THE WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast.” None needed further explanation — they just got it.
One could say that THE WAR OF THE WORLDS radio broadcast is 85 years old, but never could one claim that it’s 85 years in the grave.
Take it, Orson:
“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 next best thing: we annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You’ll 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 please for the next day or so 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.”
