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[b]Forgotten Hollywood podcast
Episode 305- Dead Air with author William Elliott Hazelgrove:[/b]
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-305-dead-air-with-author-william-elliott/id1554877313?i=1000692948727

Question posed:

"Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic?"

When posited that simply, the answer is simple as well:

"No."

- Craig

Dead Air and Mercury Theatre On the Air broadcast were the subject of Parthenon’s History Unplugged podcast. The nearly hour-long podcast focused on Hazelgrove’s contention that the panic caused by Welles was not overstated or limited to the East Coast.

An engaging program, it can be found be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or online at [url]https://www.parthenonpodcast.com/history-unplugged-podcast/did-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-broadcast-really-cause-a-mass-panic[/url]

[b][size=150]Don’t Touch That Dial![/size][/b]
By Nicolas Rapold
November 23, 2024
Reading Time: 3 minutes


[b][size=120]Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America[/size][/b]
by William Elliott Hazelgrove

[size=120]To understand the infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast, masterminded by Orson Welles on October 30, 1938, it helps to know what it was up against. The top-rated competition for Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air program was The Chase and Sanborn Show—featuring a superstar ventriloquist. Yes, millions of Americans thrilled to an audio-only version of a vaudeville routine that seems dependent on seeing the dummy being voiced by a ventriloquist.

Suspension of disbelief was apparently not a problem, and in Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America, William Elliott Hazelgrove lists off the chaos that Welles’s Martian-invasion yarn created. People ran pell-mell outside, sped away in cars with no clear destination, went to church, or just phoned the police or radio station to hyperventilate. According to a Princeton Radio Research Project study, six million heard the broadcast, and 1.7 million believed the events were really happening (at a time when more people had radios than plumbing).

It’s been hailed as the greatest hoax of modern times and a cautionary tale about mass media, but Hazelgrove also leans into the boy-wonder legend. Born to a musician and an alcoholic part-time inventor, Welles put on Doctor Faustus at a school for the gifted, bluffed his way into Dublin’s Gate Theatre at 16, and within a few years was voicing both The Shadow and the March of Time news show. Working with John Houseman, he led his Mercury Theatre from one notorious show to the next: Macbeth with an all-Black cast; a production of Cradle Will Rock, which they walked up the street on opening night after budget cuts; a Fascist vision of Julius Caesar, inspired by a Nuremberg-rally picture.

“The War of the Worlds” reached audiences on edge from Hitler’s “annexation” of Sudetenland; many listeners later said they thought the Germans had invaded America. Welles’s broadcast indeed begins slyly: Dance music from the Park Plaza Hotel in New York City keeps getting interrupted by scientific bulletins about Mars. It’s almost 10 minutes before we’re at the crater where the giant Martian capsules have landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.


Welles rehearsing the broadcast, October 10, 1938.
But then it happens: heat rays and flames, two cops die screaming, and our intrepid reporter goes silent—dead, too. Then reports of martial law, military action, and Martian gas attacks, plus a faux secretary of the interior channeling F.D.R.’s voice.

A born master as raconteur and magician, the stentorian Welles had a “demonic authority,” to quote Gate Theatre founder Micheál MacLiammóir. But he also saw the precedent in “Air Raid,” a broadcast that had opened with an announcer speaking from a building in a European border town as war breaks out.

Revamping the H. G. Wells novel, the first-person, live-reported style and constant interruptions enhanced the realism of a radio play that was written in just six days by Howard Koch, who would later win an Academy Award for Casablanca. The actor playing the reporter modeled his delivery on a live broadcast of the fiery Hindenburg disaster, and the sound effects displayed the artistic ingenuity of radio: for the opening of the Martian cylinder, technicians unscrewed an empty pickle jar over a toilet.

Welles was so successful at riling people up that CBS feared legal liability, pushing him into playing contrite for a press conference. Nothing really came of this, and, possibly, people just wanted to forget losing their heads.

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The book quotes extensive, nearly undigested passages from newspapers, rubbernecking at their new rival medium of radio, and the Princeton study. A Boston woman saw the flames of the Martian attacks in New Jersey; a Pennsylvania student “felt it was terrible we should die so young.” Canny Miss Delaney in a New York suburb stated: “My plan was to stay in the room and hope that I would not suffocate before the gas [attacks] blew away.”

When not quoting these accounts, Hazelgrove grooves to Welles’s larger-than-life, radio-god lifestyle: gorging on steaks, riding between jobs in an ambulance, shtupping ballerinas. But while recognizing the movie deals that followed “The War of the Worlds”—in Welles’s words, “I didn’t go to jail, I went to Hollywood”—Hazelgrove wrongheadedly downplays the Citizen Kane director’s cinematic accomplishments.

If one portion of this saga deserves a fresh spotlight, it’s Dorothy Thompson, the journalist who knew the score. Writing an editorial entitled “Mr. Welles and Mass Delusion” for the New York Herald Tribune, she praised Welles’s “The War of the Worlds” for showing how easy it was to send “so-called civilized man” stampeding in terror. She concluded “that the danger is not from Mars but from the theatrical demagogue.” Which is to say, the best way today to get into the mind of a Welles listener is to look around.[/size]

[quote=Wellesnet post_id=29699 time=1731284643 user_id=1659]
on the radio[/quote]

Radio is dead ~

Long Live Radio!

- Craig

DJ John Landecker interviews William Hazelgrove on the radio:
https://wgnradio.com/john-landecker/dead-air-the-night-orson-welles-terrified-america/

In brief, Chief:

- Arthur was not in the show that week. He said he probably listened from home? His personal response was, "Eh," and he noticed no particular hubub there on Staten Island, or next time he came to work in The City.

- Bill WAS in the studio - with a few words at mic. He also did not think much of the show. And he said most of them didn't note much response until they left The CBS to walk to the Mercury for a stage rehearsal. Then, on the NYC midtown streets, they noted some chatter. (But not blaring sirens, suicidal folks hanging out of 40th fl. windows, etc.)

Bottom line:

Young upstart Orson and his Mercury, and Radio in general, had plenty folks not particularly enamored of them.

- The Establishment Press. They did, as Houseman later said, see this as a prime chance to, "Piss on Radio." Those of us who are fans/students of Classic Era Radio, note that even for years before and beyond 1938, Newspapers' "On The Air" sections (after dragging their feet about even giving away such precious space to begin with!), listed many programs as, "Playhouse" (no "Campbell") and "Theatre" (no "Lux.")[i] "What - and give those bastards free advertising?!"[/i]

- Government (Local and National.) Some there would have been perfectly willing to make hay out of any [i]large-scale, big-damage[/i] Panic. (This was the era of Huey Long, and the showboat Scopes and Lindbergh trials, yes?) Bill confirmed, I believe, that Orson and his Pooh-bahs were indeed nervous for a short time, that some kind of hammer might fall.

It never did.

Telling, that...

Happy Holiday Season,
- Craig

What did Herz and Anderson say about it?

The main anti-panic document that I'm familiar with is the 2013 article in Slate Magazine,
https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
which prompted a long discussion of 177 comments. Unfortunately, those comments are no longer available to read, but I have little doubt that they contained many rebuttals from people that either experienced the broadcast themselves or were told about it from parents or grandparents. A shame to lose those anecdotes, but one of my favorites is still online, thanks to Archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141110035113/http://themintyplum.com/?p=2909
[quote]"Then it was like it never happened. My grandfather never talked about it once. He never admitted to it. I never asked my grandmother or grandfather about it, I don't know why. It was just never discussed," [/quote]

Chief -

"It was much more than that."

I would only take issue with that "much"...

And I base that not only on the modern scholarship that is out there, but on personal conversation with contemporaries of the event. Including Mercurians like ingenue Arthur Anderson, and Welles' assistant (he actually slept on his floor at times) Bill Herz.

Happy Holiday Season,
- Craig

People are free to believe what they want, but Ray's interview with the author makes the book sound like a welcome rebuttal to the growing number of people who think the Martian Panic was little more than an invention of newspapers. It was much more than that.

The battle continues.

With respect, I stand with Tony, above.

"The newspapers did not overplay the broadcast. There was widespread panic. The biggest reason is CBS had 126 affiliate stations that shot the broadcast all over and the terror built like a wave. The newspapers did not conspire to hype the story to get back at radio or boost circulation. They reported the news and the news was unbelievable. People did believe Martians had invaded and they believed they were killing off the human race."

It is not 1938, just after the broadcast; it is not even 1971, after Koch's own book.

The weight of three-quarters of a century of scholarship, including recently, just does not support the strong statements above, does it?

Happy Holiday Season,
- Craig

[b]‘Dead Air’ author on ‘War of the Worlds’ panic, impact[/b]:
https://www.wellesnet.com/dead-air-interview/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGPc2FleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVwKzQPsmiibq9U7MQNgDzTnI5N19u2b_lg0THsI15ekgmyZjU2TgxYSBg_aem_TKIH4tbVZg4Q2eGt4-Lxyw

I have some reservations over the "richly anecdotal" references. As posted on FB, I'd be interested to learn whether the author has investigated later research on this incident that downplays the sensational and whether he replies to these different interpretations.

WSJ article on the new book:
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/dead-air-review-mars-madness-with-orson-welles-7a892467?st=gzWAgq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink&fbclid=IwY2xjawGM0NpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWxDeIgPfwyx-WMJ7-oSuJ2Q9PC2iwp_0AGhDmQcGav_q-MTelKORPIMWA_aem_FQYZiDDPxuB8WJe5WQfe0Q

"In 1937, 22-year-old Orson Welles was already a creative force, a prodigious writer and director for stage and radio via his Mercury Theatre. On May 6, he had listened, along with thousands of horrified others, to the broadcast account of the Hindenburg airship disaster, as reporter Herbert Morrison dropped his sober objectivity and practically burst into tears. The transfixing immediacy of the experience would be the key to Welles’s next project, which would air the following year: a documentary-style drama masquerading as the real thing. With “The War of The Worlds,” H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel about an alien invasion of England, Orson Welles found the material to match his vision.

William Elliott Hazelgrove’s richly anecdotal “Dead Air” is the story of Welles’s landmark October 1938 radio broadcast and the nationwide panic that resulted. Welles’s “you are there” adaptation, crafted to imitate a breaking-news bulletin, sent a tremor of panic into listeners across the country who believed it to be a real report of a flying-saucer invasion. Mr. Hazelgrove has scoured regional newspapers of the time to provide a ground-level view of the hysteria that Welles’s radio drama instilled—on the night before Halloween, no less. According to “Dead Air,” police switchboards lighted up across the nation; in Indiana, a woman ran into a church screaming: “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world!”

At a Harlem police station, “thirty people arrived with all their possessions packed and told officers they were ready to be evacuated.” In New Jersey, where the fictional invasion was supposedly taking place, some listeners loaded up their cars and took to the road.

Mr. Hazelgrove has provided a granular history of this landmark in fake news, placing us inside CBS’s Studio One, where Welles orchestrated every detail to his exacting standards, then outside the studio doors, where confusion reigned until media stories of the stunt set minds at ease.

Welles, for his part, worried that his budding career was over; he spent the days after the broadcast pondering potential jail time and lawsuits. The young auteur was widely censured for his dangerous gambit; an FCC investigation was floated but came to nothing. Hollywood was paying attention, however. Almost three years later, “Citizen Kane” was released, and Welles’s legendary career in film had begun.

Mr. Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Publisher's Weekly review:
https://www.wellesnet.com/dead-air/#:~:text=In%20its%20review%20of%20Dead,pro%2Dlabor%20themes%20would%20be