Recommended reading:
Dead Air: The Night That
Orson Welles Terrified America
By William Elliott
Hazelgrove.
Published
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Published
2024.
Hardcover.
ISBN-10:
1538187167
ISBN-13:
978-1538187166
Description:
A
"granular history" (Wall Street Journal) of the greatest hoax
in radio history and the panic that followed, which Publishers Weekly
calls "a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness"
and Booklist, in a starred review, says, "Hazelgrove’s feverishly
focused retelling of the broadcast as well as the fallout makes for a
propulsive read as a study of both a cultural moment of mass hysteria and the
singular voice at its root.”
On a warm
Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells’ War of
the Worlds, a twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles held his hands up for
radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of people ran
out into the night screaming, grabbed shotguns, drove off in cars, and hid in
basements, attics, or anywhere they could find to get away from Martians intent
on exterminating the human race. As Welles held up his hands to his fellow
actors, musicians, and sound technicians, he turned six seconds of radio
silence – dead air – into absolute horror, changing the way the world would
view media forever, and making himself one of the most famous men in America.
In Dead
Air: The Night that Orson Welles Terrified America, Willliam Elliot
Hazelgrove illustrates for the first time how Orson Welles’ broadcast caused
massive panic in the United States, convincing listeners across the nation that
the end of the World had arrived and even leading military and government officials
to become involved. Using newspaper accounts of the broadcast, Hazelgrove shows
the true, staggering effect that Welles’ opera of panic had on the nation.
Beginning with Welles’ incredible rise from a young man who lost his parents
early to a child prodigy of the stage, Dead Air introduces a Welles who threw
his Hail Mary with War of the Worlds, knowing full well that obscurity
and fame are two sides of the same coin. Hazelgrove demonstrates that Welles’
knew he had one shot to grab the limelight before it forever passed him by –
and he made it count.
In this
fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove (Writing Gatsby) chronicles the mass
hysteria that accompanied Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G.
Wells's The War of the Worlds. Hazelgrove presents Welles as an actor of
immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on
headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The
Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and
traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between
his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed
scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the
broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked.
Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone
their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills,
families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens' poisonous gas, and
even one woman's attempted suicide. Hazelgrove largely brushes aside
contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria's scope matched the
sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited
elitist fears that "Americans were essentially gullible morons" and
earned Welles the national recognition he'd yearned for. It's a rollicking
portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness. – Publishers Weekly.
Orson
Welles may be best known for his film Citizen Kane, but a much earlier outing
in his career led to the opportunity to make such an artistically ambitious
undertaking. Hazelgrove charts Welles' rise from a hectic childhood to the
anointed genius of stage, radio, and, eventually, film. But it was the night
before Halloween in 1938 when Welles' bombastic radioplay rendition of H.G
Wells' War of the Worlds, styled as a breaking-news report, caused an uproar.
Arriving at a nexus point when Americans began not only to rely on the
relatively new invention of radio for entertainment but also as a trusted news
source, the radioplay brought many who were listening to the brink of madness,
wholly believing that aliens had actually touched down in a New Jersey town.
Suicides, car accidents, and general unrest swept the country, and, at show's
end, Welles could only wonder if his career (and even freedom) was over too.
Hazelgrove's feverishly focused retelling of the broadcast as well as the
fallout makes for a propulsive read as a study of both a cultural moment of
mass hysteria and the singular voice at its root. – Booklist, Starred Review.
William
Elliott Hazelgrove's richly anecdotal "Dead Air" is the story of
Welles's landmark October 1938 radio broadcast and the nationwide panic that
resulted. Welles's "you are there" adaptation, crafted to imitate a
breaking-news bulletin, sent a tremor of panic into listeners across the
country who believed it to be a real report of a flying-saucer invasion. Mr.
Hazelgrove has scoured regional newspapers of the time to provide a
ground-level view of the hysteria that Welles's radio drama instilled—on the
night before Halloween, no less. – Wall Street Journal.
"A
fantastical tale about Martians coming to earth and incinerating humans with
heat ray guns - up to 12 million people tuned in and were convinced aliens were
exterminating the human race." – Daily Mail UK.
"The
book highlights what made Welles' production particularly powerful, airing at a
time when millions remained unemployed from the Great Depression and the nation
was on edge about the threat of Nazi Germany. He details how Welles took
advantage of those fears, including using an actor who sounded like Franklin D.
Roosevelt for a part in his broadcast.
"A
bottled-up sense of panic was in the air and people could almost smell the
fear," he writes. "Orson Welles would open that bottle and let the
fear run wild." – Associated Press.
"A
convincing portrait of the artist as a young man—defiant, reckless, ruthless,
and teeming with talent and ambition—Dead Air packs delights worthy of its
subject." – New York Journal of Books.
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