WELLES: Of course we are deeply shocked and deeply regretful about the results of last nights broadcast. Q: What was your reaction after you learned the extent of the panic the broadcast had caused? The technique I used was not original with me, or peculiar to the Mercury Theater’s presentation. I’m terribly shocked by the effect it’s had. You must realize that when I left the broadcast last night I went into a dress rehearsal for a play that’s opening in two days ( Danton’s Death) and I’ve had almost no sleep. I was frankly terribly shocked to learn it did. Q: Where you aware of the terror going on throughout the nation while you were giving the broadcast? Welles then answered questions from reporters. The same make-believe is familiar to newspaper readers through a comic strip that uses the same device. In these broadcasts, conflict between citizens of Mars and other planets been a familiarly accepted fairy-tale.
As a matter of fact, the fantasy as such has been used in radio programs many times.
WHICH BOOK ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT IN 1938 SERIES
In very old morgues of many newspapers there will be found a series of grotesque cartoons that ran daily, which gave this fantasy imaginary form. That is the familiarity of the fable, within the American idiom, of Mars and the Martians.įor many decades “The Man From Mars” has been almost a synonym for fantasy. The fourth factor seems to me to have been the most pertinent of all. Furthermore, at the conclusion, a detailed statement to this effect was made. The third element was the fact that at the very outset of the broadcast, and twice during its enactment, listeners were told that this was a play that it was an adaptation of an old novel by H. Only one in the series was a true story, the broadcast of Hell on Ice by Commander Ellsberg, and was identified as a true story in the framework of radio drama. For seventeen consecutive weeks we have been broadcasting radio sixteen of these seventeen broadcasts have been fiction and have been presented as such. The second element was the fact that the broadcast took place at our weekly Mercury Theatre period and had been so announced in all the papers. The date of this fanciful invasion of this planet by Martians was clearly given as 1939 and was so announced at the outset of the broadcast. The first was that the broadcast was performed as if occurring in the future, and as if it were then related by a survivor of a past occurrence. It seems to me that they’re our four factors, which should have in any event maintained the illusion of fiction in the broadcast. WELLES: Despite my deep regret over any misapprehension that our broadcast might have created among some listeners, I am even more bewildered over this misunderstanding in the light of an analysis of the broadcast itself. He entered the interview room unshaven since Saturday, eyes red from lack of sleep. 31, 1938 – the day after The War of the Worlds hoax broadcast by Orson Welles, who played Professor Pierson, adapted the novel to radio, and who directs the Mercury Theater. No more interesting interview was ever given than that granted to the press on Monday Oct. Press conference transcript from RADIO GUIDE Magazine, 1938 As if I didn’t know what I was doing… but I’m afraid it was about as hypocritical as anyone could possibly get! There are pictures of me made about three hours after the broadcast looking as much as I could like an early Christian saint.
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