Orson Welles War Of The Worlds Quotes

For the benefit of this naïf, the movie experts ran through an inventory of all the lost movies they could think of: the eight-hour version of Greed, Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who works in the Nazi concentration camps, the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles’s legendary The Other Side of the Wind, The Blockhouse – a Second World War drama starring Peter Sellers,

After Orson Welles terrified the nation with his Halloween 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, his name became a household word. The immediate result was sponsorship for his theatrical air company, The Mercury Theater on the Air. Campbell Soups had been sponsoring the once-famed but fading variety hour Hollywood Hotel, which closed its doors in December 1938. The soup company immediately picked up Welles and his players, and the first Campbell Playhouse under that title was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, introduced by newsman Edwin C. Hill. The

To show just how all pervasive the Committee of 300 is, a few words about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a Club of Rome creation and the test it ran against a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island (TMI) Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems in order. Termed “an accident” by a hysterical media, this was not an accident, but a deliberately designed plot to reverse favorable public opinion to nuclear power generated electricity. TMI was a crisis test for FEMA. An additional benefit was the fear and hysteria provoked by the news media, which had people fleeing the area, when in fact they were never in any danger. Bear in mind that nobody died as a result of the TMI “accident,” nor were any serious injuries reported. The stage-managed incident bore all the hall marks of a similar incident when Orson Wells scared New York and New Jersey half to death with claims that the world was being invaded by alien beings from Mars. Actually, the radio play was an adaptation of H.G. Wells “War of Worlds.” TMI was considered a success and gained favor with the anti-nuclear forces, as it provided the rallying point for the so-called “environmentalists,” well financed by Atlantic Richfield and other major oil companies and

The Helen Hayes Theater was considered prestige drama, but it was heard sporadically and never built the reputation or the audiences of the great theaters of the air. Appearances with Orson Welles’s Mercury troupe in 1939 confirmed her belief that, “next to the stage, radio is the best medium for drama.” Her Lipton Tea series, beginning the following year, was her best and longest forum. She supervised the entire production, playing the leads, helping with casting and sound effects, and even participating in the tea commercials. But it became the first casualty of World War II when, three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Lipton announced its cancellation in anticipation of tea shortages from India.

But this later bit of bilocation-by-editing (Welles in Paris prompting Elmyr in Ibiza) also blatantly reminds you of what the editing room suggests: Orson has orchestrated everything to create, not a “normal” documentary, but a satire on the mind-set that believes in documentaries. Just like the “war of the worlds” satirized those who believe in official media versions of the news.

With no end to his service in sight, he signed to write two screenplays that fall—an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers for producer Mark Hellinger at Universal, and The Stranger, which Orson Welles would eventually direct at RKO.

Inside Studio One at CBS, the drama rolled to its conclusion. Taylor had heard frightening reports of affiliate reactions to the show. Casualties were mounting across the nation, he had been told: there were deaths by suicide and mob tramplings, with more coming in every minute. He returned to the booth with orders to interrupt immediately and announce that the play was fiction. But Welles had reached the 40–minute break; Dan Seymour stepped to the microphone and said, “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells.

The 1938 CBS radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ dramatization of War of the Worlds, a novel written 40 years earlier by H. G. Wells, created panic across the United States as millions of people tuned in and believed that earth was experiencing a real invasion by the Martians.75 The broadcast was partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and guided by the Council on Foreign Relations, in what was later discovered to be a psychological operation (psyop, for short) to “test” panic and hysteria throughout the United States.76 Astonishingly, it was said to be heard by over

No better demonstration of the power of Wells’s novel was the panic that erupted in New Jersey in October 1938 after a radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, presented in the guise of a news broadcast and performed by Orson Welles.