1938-10-30 War of the Worlds

.1938-10-30: The War of the Worlds radio play, Orson Welles → terror - HiPo > .

The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a series of weekly one-hour radio plays created by Welles and broadcast on the CBS Radio network. ‘The War of the Worlds’ was the seventeenth episode of the radio show, and was adapted by American playwright Howard E. Koch who is probably best known for later co-writing the film Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

For the radio play of ‘The War of the Worlds’ Koch took the general story arc from H. G. Wells’ original novel but substituted 19th Century Europe for 20th Century America by changing the names of locations and personalities to ones that were more familiar and contemporary. He was only asked to write the script a week before the broadcast and earned $50, but was permitted to keep the rights to the finished script.

Before the live broadcast had even finished on the night of 30 October, CBS began to receive telephone calls from concerned listeners. Announcements were made before, during and after the performance that the events were fictitious, but it was clear that these warnings went unheeded by many.

Although the listening figures were relatively small, news of the alien invasion spread through a country nervous about impending war. Within hours of the broadcast the billboards in New York’s Times Square flashed with reports of mass panic caused by the play, although most reports were based on anecdotal accounts from the Associated Press. Subsequent research suggests that the public response was nowhere near the scale claimed at the time.