Dead Air (new WOTW book)

[Wellesnet]

‘Dead Air’ book by Willliam Elliot Hazelgrove recounts ‘War of the Worlds’:
https://www.wellesnet.com/dead-air/?fbc ... 9E3mU3MpsQ

[tonyw]

The trouble with direct-to-library publishers like this one is that priced are far too high. This is someghing I've discovered with my hardback edition of GOTHIC PECKINPAH which I want people to read.

[Wich2]

"In its online pitch, Rowman and Littlefield says that Hazelgrove 'illustrates for the first time how Orson Welles’ broadcast caused massive panic in the United States'"

(Italics mine.)

Okay: for me, ya got a problem right from the get-go, with that statement...

- Craig

[tonyw]

Rowman is now not a very good publisher. I had trouble with them in the past. This is obviously mindless publicity on the part of people who should have consulted the real experts.

[Wellesnet]

Publisher's Weekly review:
https://www.wellesnet.com/dead-air/#:~: ... would%20be

[Wellesnet]

WSJ article on the new book:
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/ ... WJe5WQfe0Q

"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.”

[tonyw]

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.

[Wellesnet]

‘Dead Air’ author on ‘War of the Worlds’ panic, impact:
https://www.wellesnet.com/dead-air-inte ... 2eGt4-Lxyw

[Wich2]

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

[Le Chiffre]

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.

[Wich2]

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

[Le Chiffre]

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 ... teria.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/20141110035 ... om/?p=2909

"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,"

[Wich2]

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.") "What - and give those bastards free advertising?!"

- Government (Local and National.) Some there would have been perfectly willing to make hay out of any large-scale, big-damage 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

[Wellesnet]

DJ John Landecker interviews William Hazelgrove on the radio:
https://wgnradio.com/john-landecker/dea ... d-america/

[Wich2]

on the radio

Radio is dead ~

Long Live Radio!

- Craig