1938 жылғы "Марс шабуылы" радиоспектаклі

1938 radio drama by Orson Welles

"The War of the Worlds" was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898) that was performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938, over the CBS Radio Network. The episode is famous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place, though the scale of panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners. The episode begins with an introductory monologue based closely on the opening of the source novel, after which the program takes on the format of an evening of typical radio programming being periodically interrupted by news bulletins. The first few bulletins interrupt a program of live music and are relatively calm reports of unusual explosions on Mars followed by a seemingly unrelated report of an unknown object falling on a farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The crisis escalates dramatically when an on scene reporter at Grovers Mill describes creatures emerging from what is evidently an alien spacecraft. The aliens employ a heat ray against police and onlookers, and the radio correspondent describes the attack in increasing panic until his audio feed abruptly goes dead. This is followed by a rapid series of news updates detailing the beginning of a devastating alien invasion and the US military's futile efforts to stop it. The first portion of the episode climaxes with a live report from a rooftop in Manhattan, from where a correspondent describes citizens fleeing from poison smoke released by towering Martian "war machines" until he coughs and falls silent. Only then does the program take its first break, about thirty minutes after Welles's introduction. The second portion of the show shifts to a more conventional radio drama format that follows a survivor (played by Welles) dealing with the aftermath of the invasion and the ongoing Martian occupation of Earth. The final segment lasts for about sixteen minutes, and like the original novel, concludes with the revelation that the Martians have been defeated by microbes rather than by humans. The broadcast ends with a brief "out of character" announcement by Welles in which he compares the show to "dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying 'boo!'" Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast has become famous for convincing some of its listeners that a Martian invasion was actually taking place due to the "breaking news" style of storytelling employed in the first half of the show. The illusion of realism was supported by the Mercury Theatre on the Air lack of commercial interruptions, which meant that the first break in the drama came after all of the alarming "news" reports had taken place. Popular legend holds that some of the radio audience may have been listening to The Chase and Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen on NBC and tuned in to "The War of the Worlds" during a musical interlude, thereby missing the clear introduction indicating that the show was a work of science fiction. Modern research suggests that this happened only in rare instances. In the days after the adaptation, widespread outrage was expressed in the media. The program's news bulletin format was described as deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the broadcasters and calls for regulation by the FCC. Welles apologized at a hastily called news conference the next morning, and no punitive action was taken. The broadcast and subsequent publicity brought the 23 year old Welles to the attention of the general public and gave him the reputation of an innovative storyteller and "trickster".

Later studies indicate that many people missed the repeated notices about the broadcast being fictional, partly because The Mercury Theatre on the Air, an unsponsored CBS cultural program with a relatively small audience, ran at the same time as the NBC Red Network's popular Chase and Sanborn Hour featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. At the time, many Americans assumed that a significant number of Chase and Sanborn listeners changed stations when the first comic sketch ended and a musical number by Nelson Eddy began, tuning in to "The War of the Worlds" after the opening announcements. Historian A. Brad Schwartz, after studying hundreds of letters from people who heard "The War of the Worlds" as well as contemporary audience surveys, concluded that very few people frightened by Welles's broadcast had tuned out Bergen's program. "All the hard evidence suggests that The Chase & Sanborn Hour was only a minor contributing factor to the Martian hysteria," he wrote. " in truth, there was no mass exodus from Charlie McCarthy to Orson Welles that night." CBS News chief Paul White wrote that he was convinced that the panic induced by the broadcast was a result of the public suspense generated before the Munich Pact. "Radio listeners had had their emotions played upon for days Thus they believed the Welles production even though it was specifically stated that the whole thing was fiction". "[T]he panic and mass hysteria so readily associated with 'The War of the Worlds' did not occur on anything approaching a nationwide dimension", American University media historian W. Joseph Campbell wrote in 2003. He quoted Robert E. Bartholomew, an authority on mass panic outbreaks, as having said that "there is a growing consensus among sociologists that the extent of the panic was greatly exaggerated". AT&T Corporation telephone operators in New York City recalled in 1988 that "every light" on the "half block long" switchboard lit up after the broadcast stated that the Martians were crossing the George Washington Bridge, while operators in Princeton and Missoula, Montana were asked what the invaders looked like. They described callers "crying and screaming", asking whether dead bodies were near the operators, "begging us to get connections to their families before the world came to an end". "The people believed it. They really believed it that night", one concluded.

As it was late on a Sunday night in the Eastern Time Zone, where the broadcast originated, few reporters and other staff were present in newsrooms. Most newspaper coverage thus took the form of Associated Press stories, which were largely anecdotal aggregates of reporting from its various bureaus, giving the impression that panic had indeed been widespread. Many newspapers led with the Associated Press's story the next day. On November 2, 1938, the Australian newspaper The Age characterized the incident as "mass hysteria" and stated that "never in the history of the United States had such a wave of terror and panic swept the continent". Unnamed observers quoted by The Age commented that "the panic could have only happened in America." Editorialists chastised the radio industry for allowing that to happen. The response may have reflected newspaper publishers' fears that radio, to which they had lost some of the advertising revenue that was scarce enough during the Great Depression, would render them obsolete. In "The War of the Worlds", they saw an opportunity to cast aspersions on the newer medium: "The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove that it is competent to perform the news job," wrote Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade journal. William Randolph Hearst's papers called on broadcasters to police themselves, lest the government step in, as Iowa senator Clyde L. Herring proposed a bill that would have required all programming to be reviewed by the FCC prior to broadcast – it was never introduced. Others blamed the radio audience for its gullibility. Noting that any intelligent listener would have realized the broadcast was fictional, the Chicago Tribune opined, "it would be more tactful to say that some members of the radio audience are a trifle retarded mentally, and that many a program is prepared for their consumption." Other newspapers noted that anxious listeners had called their offices to learn if Martians were really attacking. Bartholomew saw it as more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry.

As the Mercury Theatre's second season began in 1938, Welles and Houseman were unable to write the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcasts by themselves. They hired Koch, whose experience in having a play performed by the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago led him to leave his law practice and move to New York to become a writer. Koch was put to work at $50 a week, raised to $60 after he proved himself. A condensed version of the script for "The War of the Worlds" appeared in the debut issue of Radio Digest magazine (February 1939), in an article on the broadcast that credited "Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre players". The complete script appeared in The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940), the book publication of a Princeton University study directed by Cantril. Welles strongly protested Koch being listed as sole author since many others contributed to the script, but by the time the book was published, he had decided to end the dispute. The courts ruled against Welles, who was found to have abandoned any rights to the script after it was published in Cantril's book. Koch had granted CBS the right to use the script in its program. The book, The Panic Broadcast, was first published in 1970. The best selling album was a sound recording of the broadcast titled Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, "released by arrangement with Manheim Fox Enterprises, Inc." The source discs for the recording are unknown. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that it was a poor quality recording taken off the air at the time of broadcast – "a pirated record which people have made fortunes of money and have no right to play". Welles did not receive any compensation.

Welles and Mercury Theatre on the Air were inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988. On January 27, 2003, "The War of the Worlds" was selected as one of the first 50 recordings to be added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. At the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention in August 2014, a Retrospective Hugo Award for "Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – 1938" was bestowed upon the broadcast.

Since the original Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of "The War of the Worlds", many re airings, remakes, re enactments, parodies, and new dramatizations have occurred. Many American radio stations, particularly those that regularly air old time radio programs, re air the original program as a Halloween tradition. The first Spanish language version was produced and aired on November 12, 1944, by William Steele, and Raúl Zenteno in Radio Cooperativa Vitalicia, a radio station in Santiago, Chile. Even though the fictional nature of the drama was reported twice during the broadcast and once again in the end, Newsweek reported that an electrician named José Villaroel was so frightened that he died of a heart attack. A second Spanish language version produced in February 1949 by Leonardo Páez and Eduardo Alcaraz for Radio Quito in Quito, Ecuador, reportedly set off panic in the city. Police and fire brigades rushed out of town to engage the supposed alien invasion force. After it was revealed that the broadcast was fiction, the panic transformed into a riot. Hundreds of people attacked Radio Quito and El Comercio, a local newspaper owner of the radio station that had participated in the hoax by publishing false reports of unidentified objects in the skies above Ecuador in the days preceding the broadcast. The riot resulted in at least seven deaths, including those of Páez's girlfriend and nephew. Radio Quito was off the air for two years until 1951. After the incident, Páez self exiled to Venezuela, where he lived in Mérida until his death in 1991. An updated version of the radio drama aired several times between 1968 and 1975 on WKBW radio in Buffalo, New York. A Brazilian Portuguese version was aired in October 1971, by Rádio Difusora, from the Northeast state of Maranhão. This version remained faithful to Welles' adaptation, changing several American city names to Brazilian state capitals. Also, foreign cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago were reported as engulfed by a poisonous smoke after several cylinders have fallen and tripods were defeating all human resistance. During the transmission, the director of the radio station (also performing) proceeded to explain that many of the station employees were allowed to go home and join their families, but his speech is frequently interrupted by strange noises, which he explains as being result of a worldwide radio interference that was disturbing all transmissions on Earth (presumably caused by Martian machines). Finally, a street reporter announces that gigantic machines were crossing Rio de Janeiro, before the city is also attacked by the poison fog. Like in 1938, some listeners took the broadcast for a real news bulletin and shortly after, the Brazilian Army (the event took place during Brazilian military dictatorship) shut down the radio station, only allowing it back on the air a few days later. On the 50th anniversary of the radio play, on October 30, 1988, a remake was aired by WGBH and picked up by 150 National Public Radio stations. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Nonmusical Recording. In 1994, L. A. Theatre Works and Pasadena, California, public radio station KPCC broadcast the original play before a live audience. Most of the cast for this production had appeared in one or more incarnations of Star Trek, including Leonard Nimoy, John de Lancie, Dwight Schultz, Wil Wheaton, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, Armin Shimerman, Jerry Hardin, and Tom Virtue. It was accompanied by an original sequel called "When Welles Collide", co written by de Lancie and Nat Segaloff featuring the same cast as themselves. On October 30, 2002, XM Satellite Radio collaborated with conservative talk show host Glenn Beck for a live recreation of the broadcast, using Koch's original script and airing on the Buzz XM channel, as well as on Beck's 100 AM/FM affiliates. In 2003, the parties were sued for copyright infringement by Koch's widow, but settled under undisclosed terms. On October 30, 2013, KPCC re aired the show, introduced by George Takei with a documentary on the 1938 radio show's production. On November 12, 2017, a new opera based on "War of the Worlds" premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall and outdoors in Los Angeles. The music was composed by Annie Gosfield, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, directed by Yuval Sharon, and narrated by Sigourney Weaver. The widespread panic caused by the radio drama was parodied by The Simpsons, in the segment "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid" of the episode "Treehouse of Horror XVII".