Orson Welles' War of the Worlds

Last Monday was the 80th anniversary of Orson Welles' famous radio version of War of the Worlds, when listeners became convinced that an alien invasion was actually occurring.  That was October 30, 1938 (the same year Superman debuted, incidentally).  How innocent the past seems!  But radio was the entertainment medium of the day.  The first Hollywood blockbuster, as we would understand it today, was released only the year previous, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the year following, Gone with the Wind.  TV hadn't really happened yet.  Popular serialized storytelling played out in radio dramas.  That's where the Shadow made his reputation, where the phrase "Only the Shadow knows" comes from, and why it's something people still remember, because every episode ended with it.  Families would gather around the radio the way they would TV later.  (Forget about such things these days, I suppose...)

Anyway, real panic ensued from Welles' production.  And today, that seems completely inconceivable.  We've truly lost all context.  It seems like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, where we discover in the twist ending that nothing was what it seemed. 

So naturally it would make a great movie, trying to explain it today.  Welles directed Citizen Kane three years later, 1941, and the controversy behind that production was entirely different, but it also drastically affected the course of his life and career, and in the process helped make him an endlessly fascinating figure in history. 

Today if we talk about Welles it's almost invariably about Kane, or about how his career was affected by it.  I imagine it would be equally inconceivable to anyone alive in 1938, who listened to his War of the Worlds, who believed in an actual alien invasion, for his reputation not to include that moment, rather to be defined by that moment.

So a movie would also help reclaim that moment.  And don't get me wrong.  I don't want a movie about the production, but about the broadcast, a juxtaposition of Welles putting it on and listeners actually believing it, about the sheer panic. 

And that's how you begin to reclaim history.