Here are some excerpts from an interview with the master animator Ray Harryhausen, where he talks about trying to interest Orson Welles in making War of the Worlds, and how he came close to working with Welles in Spain.
LAWRENCE FRENCH: After years of keeping your effects secrets under wraps, what led you to be so forthcoming in your book, An Animated Life?
RAY HARRYHAUSEN: I bare my soul in the book, don’t I? Everybody else is baring his soul, so I thought I might as well do it, too. You never know when the world may be coming to an end. A comet could hit the earth.
LAWRENCE FRENCH: In the book you talk about trying to interest Orson Welles in the test animation you shot of the Martians from H. G. Wells War of the Worlds.
RAY HARRYHAUSEN: Yes, I had heard Orson Welles famous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds back in 1938 and the H. G. Wells book had always been one of my favorite stories. So right after finishing Mighty Joe Young in 1949 I made ten big sketches and took them around to all the studios, but I couldn’t peddle it. Paramount owned the rights to the book and I took it to Jesse Lasky and he was interested, but he had difficulty in raising the money for it. I even went so far as making a test in 16mm to show what the Martian creatures would look like – all based on H. G. Wells descriptions. Today, I think I might change the concept, because the octopus-like creatures that come out of the tripods might get a laugh. I also showed the test footage to George Pal, long before he made his version of the story. Pal made his picture as an up-to-date, modern version, while I wanted to keep it in the Victorian period, because you run into this problem in the present day of using the atomic bomb. Then you destroy everything and there’s nothing left to photograph. But I finally wrote a letter to Orson Welles, because I thought maybe he’d like to make the movie and I wanted to show the test footage to him. But I never received an answer. Later on, we were going to get Orson Welles to do the voice of the Oracle in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) but at the last minute he doubled his fee. At the time, we were fortunate that Robert Shaw was vacationing in Spain and under contract to Columbia, so he agreed to do it instead of Welles, and on very short notice. I thought he did a very good job – it was very effective.
LAWRENCE FRENCH: What’s bizarre about that is apparently Robert Shaw was staying at Orson Welles’ house in Spain around the time you were making Golden Voyage of Sinbad at the Sevilla Studios in Madrid, and one night while Shaw was smoking in bed he started a fire.
RAY HARRYHAUSEN: Oh really. I didn’t know that.
LAWRENCE FRENCH: Yes, and Welles’ always claimed he lost a lot of material in that fire, including some of his unfinished films. Of course, later on Welles borrowed the footage of your animated flying saucers from Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers to illustrate his War of the Worlds radio broadcast in his own movie, F For Fake.
RAY HARRYHAUSEN: Yes, that’s what I’ve heard.
_________________
And here’s what Welles had to say about using Ray Harryhausen’s footage in his interview with Bill Krohn:
ORSON WELLES: Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, that is such a funny looking film. Of course we sped it up a little and made it look even more ridiculous. I’m perfectly happy to use anybody’s film that’s around. That was the point of that.