The Radio Drama that Spooked a Nation--Part 1

By Kit Hawthorne

Have you ever heard of the science fiction radio play that was so realistic, it made Americans believe an actual alien invasion was taking place? This gripping 1938 audio drama, and its aftermath, have become part of American folklore. According to the popular version of the story, the broadcast was convincing enough to cause mass panic and suicides across the nation.

The truth is both less sensational and far more interesting.

Two major factors contributed to the broadcast’s unique impact. One is the genius of Orson Welles. The other was the listening habits and emotional state of Americans in the late 1930s.

Orson Welles, photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Orson Welles—actor, director, writer, producer, musician, magician—is considered one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His career began early. At twenty-one, he was already directing high-profile stage productions in New York City. In 1937, he and John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre. Its first Broadway season was wildly successful, with productions of Julius Caesar, The Cradle Will Rock, Shoemaker’s Holiday, and Heartbreak House. Welles made the cover of Time Magazine in April of 1938. Two months later, CBS offered him a radio show, The Mercury Theater on the Air. The show would feature classic dramatizations with Welles as master of ceremonies, star, narrator, writer, director, and producer. Welles already had a movie in progress, two plays in rehearsal, and another seven in preparation. At the time of the War of the Worlds broadcast, he was twenty-three years of age.

Houseman’s description of the radio show’s production schedule fills me, a novelist of regular hours who works in solitude, with horror. The weekly broadcasts were never more than a week out in preparation, and sometimes a lot less.

The show aired on Sunday evenings at 8 p.m. In the preceding week, Houseman and Welles would choose the shows and lay them out. Most of the actual writing was done by Howard Koch, who typically took five fifteen-hour days to produce the first draft of an hour’s radio script. The associate producer, Paul Stewart, would then hold preliminary rehearsals, with rudimentary sound effects. On Thursday, a wax record of the show was cut, and later that night Welles would listen to the record and give his revisions. Over the next thirty-six hours, the script would be rewritten. Another rehearsal took place on Saturday afternoon, with sound.

The next day, Welles took over. According to Houseman, by early Sunday afternoon,

…two simultaneous dramas were regularly unfolded in the stale, tense air of Studio Number One: the minor drama of the current show and the major drama of Orson’s gargantuan struggle to get it on. Sweating, howling, disheveled, and single-handed he wrestled with Chaos and Time—always conveying an effect of being alone, traduced by his collaborators, surrounded by treachery, ignorance, sloth, indifference, incompetence and—more often than not—downright sabotage! Every Sunday it was touch and go. As the hands of the clock moved relentlessly toward air time the crisis grew more extreme, the peril more desperate. Often violence broke out. Scripts flew through the air, doors were slammed, batons smashed. Scheduled for six—but usually nearer seven—there was a dress rehearsal, a thing of wild improvisations and irrevocable disaster. (John Houseman, “The Men from Mars,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1948.)

Illustration by By Henrique Alvim Corrêa

This particular production was based on the 1898 novel by H.G. Wells (no relation to Orson Welles, and still alive at the time of the broadcast, which he vehemently repudiated). Howard Koch, the writer, spent three days trying to wrest a script out of the novel before calling Houseman in despair, claiming that the story could not “be made interesting or in any way credible to modern American ears.” This was Tuesday afternoon, five days before the show was scheduled to air. Unable to reach Welles, who was then in his thirty-sixth hour of dress rehearsals for a play to be performed at the Mercury Theater, Houseman told Koch to buck up. By the wee small hours of Wednesday morning, Koch had overcome his panic and gotten the script under control, finally finishing at sunset. Thursday, as usual, associate producer Paul Stewart rehearsed the show and made a record.

Listening to the record, the team was underwhelmed. They all agreed the show was dull. The only way they saw to liven it up was to play up the newscast angle with its chaotic, real-time, on-the-scene quality. They did their best to spice up the story and held another rehearsal Saturday afternoon. Even with the alterations to the script, the show felt flat. One of the CBS sound men confided that the show “just didn’t come off.”

Come back next month to find out just how wrong that sound man turned out to be!

Kit Hawthorne makes her home in south central Texas on her husband’s ancestral farm, which has been in the family for seven generations. When not writing, she can be found reading, drawing, sewing, quilting, reupholstering furniture, playing Irish pennywhistle, refinishing old wood, cooking huge amounts of food for the pressure canner, or wrangling various dogs, cats, horses, and people. Visit her at https://kithawthorne.com/.