"Five great machines... They rise like a line of new towers on the city's west side... Now they're lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out... black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They're running towards the East River... thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke's spreading faster. It's reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it's no use. They're falling like flies. Now the smoke's crossing Sixth Avenue... Fifth Avenue... a... a hundred yards away... it's fifty feet..."
SEVENTY YEARS AGO TODAY the Mercury Theater Players gathered at CBS studios in New York to broadcast the one-hour radio production of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds."
Fun Facts:
• Mercury Theater Players' Grand Poobah, Orson Welles, was 21 years old at the time.
• Howard Koch, who wrote the radio play, also co-scripted Casablanca. He was blacklisted in 1950s.
• The radio show famously freaked out a lot of people, despite station breaks and three mid-story reminders that what they were hearing was fictional, a testament to the structure of the play devised by Welles and Koch.
• The effect of the broadcast was huge, legitimizing radio as a medium for artistic content.
You can listen to the entire broadcast here.
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