Welles, Orson

45 page carbon typescript, 4to. Signed "Dietz" in pencil in upper right corner of first page, numerous changes, deletions and edits in pencil and red pencil; stained, edges worn, some creasing and loss.

radio engineer John Dietz's copy of the corrected production script with technical notes for the war of the worlds - one of the greatest dramatic broadcasts of the twentieth century

On Sunday evening, 30 October 1938, The Mercury Theater on the Air, as a Halloween stunt, presented Howard Koch's riveting adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Koch's dramatization of a Martian invasion at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, was so realistic that the hour-long program caused a nationwide panic and forever changed broadcast practices.

The premise of the script was that the listener had just tuned into a live performance of innocuously pleasant music by Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra, which at more and more frequent intervals, was interrupted with "news flashes." These interruptions to the scheduled programming  were initially about "several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars" (p. 2), which then developed into a report about "a huge flaming object believed to be a meteorite" (p. 7).

Ultimately, the broadcast became a realistically unfolding account of Earth's invasion by technologically advanced Martian forces.  Before its broadcast, the script underwent some twenty-seven changes by CBS censors to diminish the realistic tenor. The corrections herein are either deletions through lines in pencil,  block edits in red, or changes of specific words in pencil, accomplished throughout in two (and possibly three) hands. Changes include  the New Jersey National Guard at Trenton N.J. to the state militia at Trenton, N.J. and Langley Field to Langham Field.

Throughout the script are the technical notes for radio engineer John Dietz, with instructions for fades, cuts to studio, which microphones to bring up or down at shifts to the "live" radio coverage of the invasion, etc.

At 8:00 PM sharp, the performance of Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra at the Meridian Room in New York's Hotel Park Plaza began the program. Thirty-five seconds later the music was interrupted by the first of many special news bulletins from the imaginary Intercontinental Radio News. The program edged towards its frightening climax when reporter Carl Phillips, ventured out to Grovers Mill and reported that what he saw was not a meteorite but space craft of some kind.  Phillips provides his listeners with a startling eye-witness account,  in real time: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed . . . . Wait a minute someone's crawling out of the top! Some one or . . . something. I can see peering out of the black hole two luminous disks . . . are they eyes? It might be . . . (SHOUT OF AWE FROM THE CROWD) Good heavens, something wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake. Now its another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the things body. Its large as a bear and glistens like wet leather. But that face. It . . . it's indescribable. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. . . ." (p. 13)

And so the broadcast continued on: increasingly breathless bulletins interrupting the mundane music of Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra, including a pitch battle between the Army and invaders. Orson Welles played the part of Professor Pierson, the erudite astronomer from Princeton University who was called upon to "scientifically explain" the bizarre sequence of events taking place at Grovers Mill.

The program lasted exactly an hour, but in that one hour Welles managed to cause a national uproar. After receiving a deluge of phone calls from terrified radio listeners, officers from the New York Police Department arrived at CBS studios and were said to have confiscated all the copies of the script. The morning following the broadcast, Welles found himself on the front page of The New York Times as the instigator of a Halloween hoax that had panicked the nation. No deaths resulted from the broadcast but numerous casualties were reported including numerous broken limbs and miscarriages that proved to be true. Lawsuits ensued, most of which were crank suits and readily dismissed. Yet the furor that persisted as a result of the broadcast provoked the Federal Government to take steps to insure that no such program could be broadcast again, without making it perfectly clear that the listeners would understand it was fiction. Although CBS announced that the station was broadcasting "'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells," no further comment was made as to the fact that it was fiction until the very end of the broadcast. Now it is necessary to reiterate the fictitiousness of a broadcast at some interval in the program.

a remarkable document of the greatest media-induced panic from radio's golden age

Census of extant  The War of the Worlds scripts:  

1. Writer Howard Koch's heavily edited copy of the final typescript  - once thought the only one extant - (Sotheby's New York, 14 December 1988, lot 189, $143,000).

2. Orson Welles' copy of the typescript, also used during the broadcast ( Christie's East, 2 June 1994, lot 149, $32,300).

3. A 9 page working draft (sold Bonham's New York, 24 November 2014, lot 277, $9,735). Lastly, a full

4.  Transcript of the recorded drama, issued by CBS the morning after to address the publc's overreaction (Profiles in History, 29 September 2015, $28,800).

5. A 17 page partial early draft (Doyle Galleries, 23 November, 2015. $8,-12,000 estimate).