Ladies and gentlemen,
we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from
the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, Central time,
Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports
observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular
intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen
and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity…
So began what is probably the greatest Halloween scare of
all time, the radio drama “The War of the Worlds,” broadcast in 1938, 74 years
ago tonight. Directed and narrated
by 23-year-old actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was adapted
from the H. G. Wells novel of the same
name (it would later be adapted on film a couple of times, including a 2005
Steven Spielberg version starring Tom
Cruise).
The show was presented
in such realistic fashion that more than a million (by some estimates)
Americans tuning in were convinced that an actual invasion from Mars was
underway. There is some question as to whether the ensuing panic was actually
as widespread as the media reported at the time, but one thing is certain: the extraordinary
event propelled the brilliant and audacious Orson Welles to fame.
He also acquired a reputation, as geniuses often do, as a
difficult egotist. But biographer Joseph McBride notes that the legend of
Welles as “a gruff, vain vulgarian who had no work ethic” is a myth. “Welles
had a proclivity,” McBride writes in Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?,
“for continually reworking not only his unfinished films but even those that
had already been released.” Why? One acquaintance answers, “Because he loved to
work… and because for him all work was work-in-progress.”
In a 1960 interview filmed in his Paris hotel room and
excerpted on the wonderful Brain
Pickings website, Welles was asked, “In terms of being an adventurer and
being an artist, would you say that you live to work or work to live?” His reply,
as Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova notes, “embodies the secret of finding
purpose and doing what you love”: “I think that working is part of life. I
don’t know how to distinguish between the two,” Welles pondered. “The two
things aren’t separate in my mind… Work is an expression of life for me.”
The final years of Welles’ life, McBride says, were “a saga
of untiring work, dedication, creativity, and indomitable courage in the face
of overwhelming obstacles placed before him by a society that tragically
undervalues its great artists.” Even at the moment of a fatal heart attack in
1985, Orson Welles was seated before a typewriter on which he had been creating
a new screenplay.
“If you want a happy ending,” Welles once said, “that
depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” And his own story ended
doing what he loved.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 10/30/12)
