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Orson Welles' radio drama is the most famous broadcast in radio history.
As the clock struck 8 p.m. in New York City on the Halloween night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles stood on a podium inside a Madison Avenue radio studio. The 23-year-old (1)______________ (THEATRE) star prepared to direct 10 actors and a 27-piece orchestra for the Columbia Broadcasting System’s (2)_____________ (WEEK) “Mercury Theatre on the Air” programme. Millions of Americans, as they were every night, huddled around their radios, but (3)___________ (RELATIVE) few of them were listening to CBS when it was announced that Welles and his fellow cast members were presenting an original (4)_____________ (DRAMA) of the 1898 H.G. Wells science-fiction novel “The War of the Worlds.” Instead, most of the country was tuned in to NBC’s popular “Chase and Sanborn Hour,” which featured ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Channel (5)____________ (SURF), however, was not a modern-day (6)___________ (INVENT), and (7)____________ (ORIENTATION) listeners who stumbled onto the “Mercury Theatre on the Air” without having heard the (8)____________ (CLAIM) at the top of the radio play were thrust into the middle of an hour-long drama that left some believing that the country was under attack. The CBS programme opened (9)___________ (SERENE) with dulcet dance music played live by an orchestra.” Then, an actor (10)____________ (PORTRAY) an (11)_____________ (ANNOUNCE) broke in with a fake news report that several explosions of incandescent gas had occurred on Mars. In quick (12)____________ (SUCCESSIVE) came a series of (13)______________ (INCREASE) (14)____________ (ALARM), suspense-building newsflashes that culminated with Martian spacecrafts crashing into a farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. For the rest of the hour, terror crackled over the airwaves. (15)_____________ (BREATH) reporters detailed an (16)_____________ (TERRESTRIAL) army of squid-like figures that killed thousands of (17)___________ (EARTH) with heat rays and black clouds of poison gas as they penetrated into New York City. Welles and the rest of the cast (18)___________ (PERSON) (19)_____________ (ASTRONOMY), state militia officials and even the Secretary of the Interior, who sounded like President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the end of the hour the director wrapped up the radio drama by telling his audience, “This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that ‘The War of the Worlds’ has no (20)__________ (FAR) (21)______________ (SIGNIFY) than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo!’”
KEY
1. theatrical
2. weekly
3. relatively
4. dramatization
5. surfing
6. invention
7. disoriented
8. disclaimer
disclaimer: a statement in which somebody says that they are not connected with or responsible for something, or that they do not have any knowledge of it. Sp. declaración de limitación de responsabilidad.
E.g.
They protect themselves by issuing various disclaimers.
9. serenely
serenely: /səˈriːnli/ in a calm and peaceful way.
E.g.
She smiled serenely.
dulcet /ˈdʌlsɪt/ sounding sweet and pleasant.
E.g.
I thought I recognized your dulcet tones (= the sound of your voice).
10. portraying
11. announcer
12. succession
13. increasingly
14. alarming
15. Breathless
16. extraterrestrial
17. earthlings
earthling: (in science fiction stories) a word used by creatures from other planets to refer to a person living on the earth.
18. impersonated
19. astronomers
20. further
21. significance
Related Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZgTPgmJAWc
The National Panic That Followed The War of the Worlds
The fright that Welles put into America, however, was much greater than he thought. Although the program included a reminder at intermission that it was a dramatization, thousands of anxious and confused listeners believed it to be real. They besieged police departments, newspapers and CBS with phone calls. In New Jersey, ground zero for the fictitious invasion, national guardsmen wanted to know where they should report for duty, and the Trenton police department fielded 2,000 calls in under two hours. In Providence, Rhode Island, hysterical callers begged the electric company to cut power to the city to keep it safe from the extraterrestrial invaders. Fear and anxiety had become a way of life in the 1930s, and it took little to rattle jittery Americans. The Depression had emptied their wallets, the gathering crisis in Europe threatened to ignite into war and just weeks earlier the Hurricane of 1938 had roared ashore. Plus, the Hindenburg disaster, which had been broadcast over the airwaves just the year before, was still fresh in the country’s collective psyche. The newspaper industry also felt unease from the increasing popularity of radio as an informational and advertising medium, and seeing a chance to strike back at its growing rival, it gleefully collected the sporadic reports of individual confusion generated by “The War of the Worlds” and weaved them into a narrative of “mass hysteria.” Newspapers reported suicide attempts, heart attacks and exoduses from major metropolitan areas. The New York Daily News printed the feverish headline “Fake Radio ‘War’ Stirs Terror Through U.S.” along with the photograph of a “war victim,” a woman in a sling who had heard the reports of black gas clouds in Times Square and ran out from her midtown apartment into the street where she fell and broke her arm. Similar stories of woe were printed from coast to coast and unleashed a media frenzy. Orson Welles' Response With threats of lawsuits swirling in the press, CBS went into damage control. At a hastily called press conference, a doe-eyed Welles displayed his theatrical acumen and expressed his remorse and shock at the public reaction. “I can’t imagine an invasion from Mars would find ready acceptance,” he said when asked if he pranked the country. Decades later, however, Welles admitted, “The kind of response was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting.” The Federal Communications Commission did not sanction CBS or Welles, and the radio dramatist quickly spun his Halloween trick into a treat. Thanks to what became known as the “panic broadcast,” the radio program signed Campbell’s Soup as a sponsor, and soon after, Welles inked a deal to direct “Citizen Kane,” named by the American Film Institute as the greatest movie of all time.
Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast
“The War of the Worlds”—Orson Welles's realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth—is broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938. Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’s 19th-century science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of how legendary it would eventually become. The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway. Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. “Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.” The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. The Federal Communications Commission investigated the unorthodox program but found no law was broken. Networks did agree to be more cautious in their programming in the future. The broadcast helped Orson Welles land a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane—a movie that many have called the greatest American film ever made.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-War-of-the-Worlds-novel-by-Wells
