[inaudible conversations] tonight we are happy to have as our guest Brad Schwartz here to discuss his new book broadcast hysteria orson welles war of the worlds and the art of fake news published by for r. Strauss and giroux. Sure to attend the university of michigan in ann arbor where he earned his b. A. In history and screen arts and culture in 2012. He cowrote an episode of the awardwinning pbs series American Experience on the war of the worlds broadcast. Broadcast hysteria is getting wonderful reviews. Publishers weekly calls broadcast hysteria and impeccable account of the most famous radio show in history, a fascinating biography of orson welles and a vital lesson about the responsibility about the. Please welcome the Brad Schwartz schwartz. [applause] thank you for that wonderful introduction. Thank you to quail ridge for having me and cspan for being here and especially to all of you for coming. Im blown away by the turnout. Before it began i need to particularly thank someone in the audience. Karen garr who is a Loyal Customer of the store and has been singing praises to me for some time. As you heard in the introduction i am from michigan so its kind of a waste to come here. Its worth the time and the effort as karen has proven. I wouldnt be here without her so if you give me a round of applause you should give her a round of applause as well. [applause] it has been a remarkable year for those of us who care about orson welles. Earlier this month may 6 when mark b. 100 anniversary of orson welles brick. He was born may 61915 in kenosha wisconsin and there have been celebrations throughout the United States and around the world. Ive had the privilege of attending several and what has come out of all of these discussions in these wonderful celebrations attributes that people have done is how are markedly ahead at this time he was and particularly how he works in multiple media. This is something we tend to associate with the present day the idea that you can be in films but you can also be in televisions and on the internet but welles from the beginning distinguished himself by having a career in theater, film and radio of course and television remarkably television. He broke new ground in every field that he tried his hand at. I always knew of orson welles first and foremost as a radio artists. I grew up listening to a lot of oldtime radio shows. My parents are also in the audience tonight would get me these cassettes of shows from the 1930s and 40s and 50s to listen to as i was going to sleep at night because they could never get me to go to bed. So i from a very young age i knew orson welles first and foremost as a radio host is the voice of the shadow star of the hitchhiker which is an old radio play that i would recommend to everyone and of course as the man behind the infamous orbital wills project. I knew the story that most of us know which is that the show aired on the night before halloween 1938 so right before the outbreak of the second world war. At that time hitler and nazi germany were very much on the move. There have been a recent diplomatic crisis involving check was for but you. Americans have gotten used to hearing these regular interruptions of their radio programming for alarming news bulletins going to war with the nazis at any moment. This had as its often called had condition people to accept these news bulletins. Welles took this classic hg wells novel published in 1898 so was 40 years old at the time and he restructured it. He took it from its original setting and moved it to the east coast of the United States in restructured the story a series of fake news bulletins. And copied very closely the kinds of announcements that people have gotten used to hearing during the recent diplomatic crisis. As is often taught in communication classes in history classes in countless books on the subject so they did the show so well that there was a mass panic. People believe whatever they heard on the radio in 1938. It was a very new technology and they had come to trust and so when the radio said the martians were invading than the martians must have been invading. So they jumped in their cars and fled to the hills and put towels around their faces and gas masks and all these other bizarre behaviors and it was a remarkable demonstration of the power of the media and the gullibility of the mass media. That is the accepted story and that is what i knew from a very young age. When i was a student at the university of michigan in my junior year i was studying history and film and one day i was taking a film class in the library and came in and is on the side you may have recently read in the New York Times at the university of michigan just discovered fragments of welles unpublished autobiography and his library and who i met that day was the archivist who made that discovery so we both had remarkable conversation about orson welles. Phil gave a presentation to his class about all the Library Sources that it had to offer students. One of the things he focused on was this large collection of orson welles personal papers that it only recently come to the university of michigan. Its a very new collection. Not a lot of people knew was there and was and still is the largest repository of orson welles papers in the world. He started describing it and we have orson welles packs are words and the valentine needed for Rita Hayworth and the. They were married and we have all these letters that people wrote to welles about the war of the worlds broadcast that no one had gone through seven years. I later learned that this particular one was produced by a guy named Richard Wilson who had kept all the stuff in his garage in West Hollywood for 60 years. That is where he was until his son david to the u. Of them. When i heard that bears his trove of material related to this broadcast that i knew from my childhood instantly the lightbulb went off in my mind. As i started imagining what kind of stories would be there and knowing panic very well i said wow ive got to get into that material. I did an honors thesis and i have this wonderful archival collection in my backyard create one day i would have to the library started going through them and flipping through the letters which were arranged by state. I pulled out the folder from michigan because its where im from. Might as well start there. I started looking through them the first thing i noticed was i was surprised at how positive the response was. Knowing the panic story i had expected letter after letter saying person was use son of a gun you scared my life have to do but it was orson welles we stand with you. We love the broadcast over and over again and eight or nine letters before i found one from someone who is upset about that fact. That immediately clued me into the sense that there was more to this story that had yet to be told. The more i dug into it the more i read about it i discovered that just about everything that we think we know about orson welles comes from the same basic sources. They had really been all that much original Research Done and people didnt think there were documents that could be used to do that research and here i had 14 personal stories often incredibly detailed stories that allowed me to reconstruct how people reacted to the broadcast in 1938. With the addition of another 600 or so letters from the fcc would turn down the natural archives i was able to reconstruct to talk about the fright and the hysteria and put it into context. But also to talk about all the other issues. As they started diving deeper and deeper into the letters and reading what he wrote they raised all these concerns and all these fears about the power of the media about what it would do to the american way of government as they understood it and it struck me that what they were saying had all sorts of relevance to the present day. As i said orson welles by the time he does work the world is 23 years old. He at the time was mainly known in the new york area as a theater director. He had done a couple of really innovative and controversial shakespeare adaptation most famously an allblack adaptation of nick bassett in haiti and then he had done a production in 1957 of Shakespeares Julius Caesar done in a fascist aesthetic. Supposed to be set in fascist italy so that they display about 2000yearold events went from the headlines. That was his style at the time. That is what he did of course with war of the worlds of these successes led cbs to give him a radio series beginning in the summer of 1938 called the style of the show is that he would select literature to adapt and bring a toothbrush live the way he did on the stage and it was supposed to be Public Domain type of adventure stories. Kind of cheap and fun for the whole family. In those days because there were no really the sons of how to read the mass audience and judge who was listening had the great technologies and things that they do today so they couldnt judge who was listening to what and what the audience wanted to hear so they would oftentimes opposite a particular program instead of trying to compete they would have these things called sustaining ships which they did not sell advertising time but the network with pay for a program outofpocket. And at that time the federal Communications System act of 1934 required and still requires that the broadcasters act be deemed out of necessity. Broadcasters needed to produce shows that were uplifting education in additional to popular entertainment. So on the one hand realizing that they had unsellable advertising time and on the other hand trying to satisfy this requirement. The Vision Networks would do the sustaining shows and basically give an hour for advertising to someone like orson welles or someone like Norman Corwin was a famous radio right or someone like Arturo Toscanini who is a famous conductor and say do whatever you want with it. That is the situation wells was in soviet done by the fall he had done dracula. He had done treasure island. He had done caesar and all sorts of classic works of literature in a style that came to be known as a type of the show is the first person narrative style. Wells believed as you did at the time that radio was not really dramatic form of a narrative form the idea that youre telling the story. Youre not putting on a play so he was a storyteller very openly. He told the story in the voice of the narrator or a storyteller to draw the audience in. It was revolutionary at the time time. After the show had gone for 17 weeks in the fall of 1938 welles as he often did was growing tired. He was incredibly creative as we all know. He hated to repeat himself and the ice hard to do the things and try new things. He had this idea of doing a show that would seem like a breaking news broadcasts like a crisis was actually happening. The ed seen how powerful his broadcasts were and he wanted to capture that in his work the way it done americas fear of fascism in caesar. He had this idea but he didnt have a hook to apply it to. That was the point of the show obviously so he was kind of stuck crazy talk it over with his producer John Houseman later famously kingsfield and paper chase and his associate director on the show paul stewart and eventually one of them suggested war of the worlds by hg wells. Orson welles that is seemed like he never read the model. He was directing at the time a stage play. He was about to open the mercury theatre stage production in the fall season and he was busy with that play. It was likely going to flop. Everybody knows that we didnt have all this time to do this weekly radio series. He turned it over to Houseman Stewart and a writer named howard koch. He was to write code right costa blanca and several other films. Koch in all likelihood is the first person in welles company to read war of the worlds. He thought it was dated and silly this idea of a martian invasion was not taken very seriously by the adult reading public of the time. Science fiction of the 1920s was for children but rogers serials and then click that. Houseman tried to contact welles because it didnt bring her sing this play for 36 straight hours with no sleep which he did often. With no other options cant she had to topple down and wrote taking welles abstracts. The way the show typically worked was paul stewart would direct a rehearsal and would be recorded onto acetate discs for wells to listen to later. He didnt want to read the script without seeing out the show sound and offer some changes in on the broad cast a he would have a structure change everything. Right up until the last minute of airtime and then go on the air with typically a perfect show. He always does his best work right at the edge of collapse. Invariably in his early career he came right to the edge. His correction company was going to fail. The government padlocked the theater and they werent going to let them do the show in his Radio Broadcasts ice came down the wire but they ice came out perfect praise paul stewart were courted a rehearsal of howard kochs script for were the worlds and wells listen to it. The thursday before the show he has a similar reaction. It was terribly boring, terribly silly. Nobody would take this at all to be a serious drama. People he feared would turn away by the truce. From that moment on what he conducted the first reversals he started doing all these things to make the show sound more and more realistic and frightening was the only intention im speculating but i think its beyond speculation the only intention of trying to make the show seem credible or interesting not to frighten anybody out there with. Wells threw on quite consciously a kind of fake news style that was found in several shows both news type shows and entertainment shows in the 1930s at that time. Welles had worked with a playwright and a poet who had done a couple of radio plays that were very similar in tone to his broadcasts. He had done this famous show called the march of time which was the most popular news program on the air in 1930s but it wasnt really a news program. What they did on the march of time is they would stage these dramatic enactments of news stories where instead of having a recording of Franklin Delano roosevelt are what Franklin Delano roosevelt did today they would hire an actor to say things that roosevelt never actually said and they often come at the impersonations were so good in those shows were so well produced but people didnt oftentimes no but they werent listening to the real roosevelt are the real hitler or every newsmaker of the day. Welles appeared on the show many times. As he is trying to salvage the war of the worlds in the last minutes over airtime he starts drawing on this thing. Theres a speech in the broadcast where the first draft of the script as the secretary of war who comes on and gives a speech about how we are combined forces of the government in protecting the American People and all that and that have been cut but wells put it back in. He couldnt say it was the president because i was against Network Policy but he had the actor who had also been on the march of time do this impression of franklin roosevelt. Its a dead on impression. Just again to kind of attitude that realistic flavor to show which had the unintended consequence. He had done all these things and thrown in all these devices that were in various production of the time but no one had ever brought them all together like this. The last hour before it aired cap it goes on the air 8 00 p. M. Eastern time october 30, 1938 and a show as i said was up against a very Popular Program on another network. A show starring edgar bergen and Charlie Mccarthy a ventriloquist show which i had to think about for a moment. And so not too many people were listening to orson welles. The show i think bergen and mccarthy had about 34 verso million listeners that night and wells had between four and five. But the war of the world starts off close slowly but these musical broadcasts supposedly from a hotel in new york city. That started being interrupted by these reports of the first gas explosions on mars and then martian spacecraft that land in new jersey and initially people think they are meteors and they open up the martians come out with these tripod flying machines that roam around the countryside eventually coming back to new york city. And so people who did give the broadcast came to it in all kinds of various ways. Heres a common meth that everybody was listening to the Charlie Mccarthy show tune starts spitting their dial a musical performer came on and fell into war the worlds of that is what caused the hysteria. That actually doesnt check out. Thats not exit would happen. Oftentimes people maybe they have their radio turn to cbs and right in the middle of the show they are looking for another program and found a report that seems for most people who are frightened by the broadcast they were just looking for something music or something relaxing to listen to on sunday night. That is exactly what they thought they had found. And they didnt today and we dont now listen to radio very closely. We treated as back row noise something that is on so its easy to miss these kinds of announcements and these cues that make it very clear in the show that things are proceeding more quickly than they would in real life. Famously the martians take off from mars landed new jersey in oregon minutes in the show which is impossible. But if you are not listening closely enough oftentimes people listened for previewing groups in 1938 and we have had the image of a family sitting around the radio listening as a group. If youre listening to the talking and trying to figure out whats going on youre not listening to every word carefully and not necessarily aware that this is not happening in different places. Simultaneously periods and so some fraction of wells audience perhaps as much as a million we dont honestly know. With any degree of certainty how many people believe the broadcast to be true but some people did get caught up in it. Many were kind of momentarily frightened and realized when the martians made their first appearance for example that something wasnt quite right. But depending on when you tun