Airdate: Orson Welles 100th Birthday: The War of the Worlds documentary
The History Channel will mark what would have been Orson Welles 100th Birthday with a doco on his extraordinary radio broadcast of 1938.
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Next Wednesday the History Channel will mark what would have been Orson Welles’ 100th Birthday with a War of the Worlds documentary on his extraordinary radio broadcast of 1938.
Shortly after 8 p.m. on the Halloween Eve, 1938, the voice of a panicked radio announcer broke in with a news bulletin reporting strange explosions taking place on the planet Mars, followed minutes later by a report that Martians had landed in the tiny town of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Although most listeners understood that the program was a radio drama, the next day’s headlines reported that thousands of others plunged into panic, convinced that America was under a deadly Martian attack. It turned out to be H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds, performed by 23-year-old Orson Welles.
Wednesday May 6 at 7.30pm.
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One Response
I’ll def watch this. I’m a bit of a Welles’ fan and watched the blu-ray of Citizen Kane for the umpteenth time just last week. (I also loved him in Transformers : The Movie, but he’d turn in his grave for anyone to admit it).