The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  First came the main downstage playing area—fourteen feet deep including the apron—which rose to a gentle rake to meet a set of shallow steps running the full width of the stage. These led to an eight-foot plateau, the mid-stage playing area, then rose again to a final narrow crest, six and a half feet above stage level, before falling back down in a steep, fanning ramp that ended close to the rear wall of the theatre. This gave the stage an appearance of enormous depth and a great variety of playing areas. Steps and platforms were honeycombed with traps out of which powerful projectors were angled upward and forward to form a double light curtain (the “Nuremberg lights”) through whose beams all actors . . . were suddenly and dramatically illuminated before descending to the playing areas below.

  This production, like so much of Welles’s theatrical work, was a heady mixture of twenties aestheticism, antifascist political drama, and New Deal esprit de corps. It was not, however, nearly so didactic or leftist as The Cradle Will Rock. The confrontation between Brutus and Antony—an out-of-depth idealist and a cynical politician—was not unlike the confrontation we have already seen between Jack and Eldred in Bright Lucifer, and it resembles the pairings of characters we find in Welles’s film projects—Marlow and Kurtz, Leland and Kane, O’Hara and the Bannisters, Vargas and Quinlan. Here, as later, Welles was so honest in his criticism of liberalism that a few people took the play as an attack on democracy. Welles felt he had to explain his theme to a New York Times reporter, who wrote as follows:

  Brutus, as Mr. Welles understands him, was the prototype of the bewildered liberal in a confused world, a great man with all the faults and virtues of liberalism. So was Caesar a great man. Why present him otherwise just because the play is anti-Caesar? That is . . . the error of left-wing melodrama, wherein the villains are cardboard Simon Legrees.

  Welles’s defense was accepted by most, even though doubts lingered. Brooks Atkinson, for example, remarked that the play has “the somewhat ambiguous effect of implying that there is no use rebelling against the fascist state—which may be true, although a great many people hate to think so.”

  In any case Julius Caesar was a great success; like most of Welles’s productions it was a triumph of “director’s theater” and became one of the most celebrated American presentations of Shakespeare in this century. “Bard Boffola,” said the headline in Variety, reporting on the avalanche of critical praise. Reviewers were awed by the brutal simplicity of the staging (a “simplicity” that, as Houseman has noted, was achieved at considerable expense, using batteries of complex lights and a series of tricky ramps), by the inventiveness of Welles’s editing of the play (for one of the most impressive moments, the execution of the poet Cinna by a violent mob, he had borrowed lines from Coriolanus), and most of all by the frightening modern-dress parallels with contemporary fascism. When Caesar was followed by equally successful productions of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Heartbreak House, Welles became a sort of hero of the American theater. Time magazine, for example, described him as the “brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years. Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.”

  It was this sort of publicity that helped the Mercury company obtain a contract with CBS Radio. Here Welles continued his policy of adapting classic literature in a gothic style, and although the politics of the Mercury radio shows were seldom overt, there remained a sort of New Deal, populist urge behind the broadcasts. “Radio,” Welles said to the press, “is a popular, democratic machine for disseminating information and entertainment. . . . The Highbrows are still sniffing at it. But when television comes—and I understand it is not far off—they will be the first, in all probability, to hail [radio] as a new art form.”

  Of course Welles was not new to the popular arts; he was well known as “The Shadow,” and he would become even better known as the man who caused the Mars panic. His more important contributions, however, had to do with the form of radio dramatics. This moribund art is usually regarded as an extension of playwriting, but Welles always thought of radio (and later television) as a narrative medium rather than a purely dramatic one. “There is nothing that seems more unsuited to the technique of the microphone,” he said, “than to tune in on a play and hear the announcer say, ‘The curtain is now rising on a presentation of—’ . . . This method of introducing the characters and setting the locale seems hopelessly inadequate and clumsy.” Welles wanted to eliminate the “impersonal” quality of such programs, which treated the listener like an eavesdropper. The radio, he recognized, was an intimate piece of living-room furniture, and as a result the “invisible audience should never be considered collectively, but individually.” (This, incidentally, was an idea FDR had understood better than any other politician of the era.)

  Welles’s solution to the problem was simple and effective. With his magnificent voice, he could become the perfect storyteller. Explaining the technique, he compared radio to oral narrative: “When a fellow leans back in his chair and begins: ‘Now, this is how it happened’—the listener feels that the narrator is taking him into his confidence; he begins to take a personal interest in the outcome.” The Mercury program would therefore be called First Person Singular (a more egocentric title one could not imagine), and all of its broadcasts, from A Tale of Two Cities to Hamlet, would be done in first-person narrative, together with related devices such as stream of consciousness, diaries, and letters. Most programs were dominated by Welles’s voice reading great swatches of prose from well-known novels and by Bernard Herrmann’s music; indeed, few contemporary composers have understood so well the function of music as a narrative device. The Mercury players and the sound-effects technicians also got into the act, but passages of pure dramatic dialogue were introduced selectively. As a result, novels adapted for the program came out in something very close to their original form, moving effortlessly between pure narration and dialogue, jumping across time and space with the speed of cinema. The New York Times review of Treasure Island commented that Welles’s voice was “more personal” than that of the standard radio announcer; “this . . . abetted by just enough sound effects of surf and shouts, screams and scheming, ‘paints’ the picture.”

  The technique of Welles’s earliest broadcasts can be heard in the second half of the well-known War of the Worlds recording, where a Princeton professor, having survived the apocalypse, takes over in his own voice and brings the story to its conclusion. Of course nobody then or now has paid much attention to the second half; by all accounts, even the opening of War of the Worlds was not one of Welles’s most aesthetically satisfying productions, and, contrary to popular opinion, it received one of his lower ratings. Like his other shows, however, it was calculated to utilize properties inherent in the medium, and it did so better than anyone anticipated, catapulting Welles to international fame and linking his name forever to the greatest hoax (however unintentional it may have been) in the history of broadcasting.

  It was Welles’s idea to have writer Howard Koch update H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel by casting the first part of the program in the form of fake news bulletins, with Herrmann imitating everything from “Ramón Raquello and his orchestra” to a solitary piano playing Chopin. At first an announcer breaks into a music program to say that “disturbances” have been sighted on the planet Mars, and then gradually the whole show is taken over with reports of disaster. At the midway point, a reporter (Ray Collins) is heard from atop “Broadcasting Building” on Times Square, describing the destruction of New York and ultimately falling dead at the mike. A ham radio breaks the silence, asking, “Isn’t there anyone on the air?” and then, after ten seconds of absolute quiet, a CBS announcer gives a station break.

  Everyone concerned has recalled that they had little respect for the script, which they thought was silly, and at the last moment Welles almost withdrew the project in favor of an adaptation of Lorna Doone. But when the broadcast finally aired on Halloween eve 1938, it was acted wit
h customary intensity, and at 8:30, halfway through the program, the cast was surprised to learn that some listeners had been taking the whole thing seriously. For several hours afterward, groups of people from coast to coast were thrown into panic, believing that monsters from Mars, flying invulnerable spaceships and armed with poison gas, were destroying the earth. Luckily nobody committed suicide or died of heart failure, although people of widely different social classes and educational backgrounds behaved irrationally. They prayed, took flight in cars, or ran out to warn their neighbors that the world was ending; church services were interrupted by hysterics, traffic was jammed, and communications systems were clogged. At Princeton University two distinguished geologists rushed out to search for the Martian “meteor” that was reported to have landed nearby, and scores of citizens were medically treated for shock.

  Four times during the show listeners were told that they were hearing a dramatization, and at the end Welles jovially announced that it had all been a friendly joke: “That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian . . . it’s Hallowe’en.” Nevertheless, for many of those who tuned in late to the first half of the program, the news seemed quite real. Welles and Koch had used actual settings like Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, for the rocket landings and had taken full advantage of public familiarity with “on the spot” news coverage, such as the classic broadcast in which a reporter is heard breaking down at the sight of the Hindenburg explosion. Although a fictional network called “Intercontinental Radio” was invented for the news announcements, and although the entire destruction of the world took only thirty minutes of air time, the early sections of the program were quite good at creating the illusion of real events. Most of the names used on the show were slightly garbled versions of live persons—even “Professor Richard Pierson of Princeton” sounded rather like Newton L. Pierce, an assistant in astronomy at the university, and an announcement of a nationwide emergency was made by the “Secretary of the Interior” in a voice exactly like FDR’s. What was particularly effective was the way Welles as director had manipulated the audience’s sense of time, keeping to real duration at the beginning of the show and then dramatically collapsing the action once the basic illusion was established. At several points, notably in the beginning, he allowed dead silence on the air, and he dragged out “Ramón Raquello’s” rendition of “La Comparsita” for an excruciatingly long period; all this, of course, made the later, more speeded-up and implausible occurrences seem real.

  Listened to today, the program seems quite naïve, and despite Welles’s and Koch’s occasional cleverness one finds it difficult to believe that so many people were deceived. Several explanations have been offered for the phenomenon: the show aired just after the Munich crisis, a war scare that is alluded to at the very beginning of the broadcast and that may have influenced some to think that the reported invasion wasn’t extraterrestrial at all. Sociologist Hadley Cantril, who made a book-length study of audience response, believed that people were fooled because of an anxiety “latent in the general population,” caused by years of economic depression and in some cases by educational deprivation. The world was clearly ripe for radio demagogues, he noted, and the problem lay less in radio than in “the discrepancy between the whole superstructure of economic, social, and political practices and beliefs, and the basic and derived needs of individuals.”

  The program ultimately became important as a case study of mass hysteria, but in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast it was not clear whether Welles would be remembered as a hero or as a monster. The morning papers described public reaction as a “tidal wave of panic,” and the chairman of the FCC issued a statement calling the program “regrettable.” An angry H. G. Wells threatened to sue because of what he claimed was a misuse of his novel, and for a while there were rumors of government retaliation against CBS. When Orson Welles stepped forward to speak with reporters on the day after the show, he was taking not only the credit for the broadcast but also the possible blame. He had unwittingly become the world’s newest and perhaps most dangerous manipulator of the public.

  In retrospect, however, it is easy to see how Welles’s fascination with the media had tended to comment indirectly on the demagoguery that was latent in the times. By choosing to imitate news announcements, tinny hotel orchestras, silences, breakdowns, and various forms of wireless communication, he and Koch achieved an ironic distance between themselves and their sign system, as if they were trying not only to grip the listener but to joke about the power of radio itself. In much the same way, Welles’s films would tend to comment on movies or photographic images, and in his late work, such as The Immortal Story and F for Fake, he would become preoccupied with the relationship between fictional versions of an event and the shifting, evasive “reality” underlying the fictions. In other words, he remained both enamored of his abilities as a showman and slightly guilty about those abilities. Like Jack, the actor character in Bright Lucifer, he seemed to feel a Faustian temptation behind his talent, a danger of becoming the role he played.

  However it foreshadows Welles’s later work, and whatever its virtues as drama, War of the Worlds at least ensured that Welles would come to Hollywood on a wave of publicity. Even before the Mars panic he had been on the cover of Time and had signed a radio contract with Campbell’s Soup, but War of the Worlds made him the first true creation of what Robert Brustein has called “news theatre.” Soon his need of money to keep the Mercury stage productions afloat, plus his fame (now almost equivalent to Hitler’s), would conspire to bring him to RKO. Not that he was the reluctant intellectual or the filmmaking naïf some writers have made him seem. He had made one complete movie, and his stage work showed his interest in films as clearly as Eisenstein’s had done in the twenties. In fact, Welles had read both Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and for the Mercury Theatre production of Too Much Johnson he had shot a film that was supposed to be integrated with the play. He had projected snippets of movies in his other productions, and his massive stage show Five Kings had deliberately tried to create “cinematic” montages, fades, and dissolves on stage. In June 1938 he remarked during a lecture to a convention of English teachers in New York that the entertainment value of legitimate theater had become “vastly inferior to the movies.” Clearly he wanted to try Hollywood (although he had rejected an offer from MGM that would have required him to serve an apprenticeship under King Vidor), and it is not surprising, given his new reputation, that his early projects on the West Coast tended to be about demagogues who manipulate the masses.

  III

  MGM was known for quality, Warner Brothers for “social realism,” and Paramount for sophistication. RKO, on the other hand, was chiefly a designer’s studio. It never had a stable of important actors, writers, or directors, but quite by accident it was rich in artists and special-effects technicians. As a result, its most distinctive pictures contained a strong element of fantasy—not so much the fantasy of horror, which during the thirties was the province of Universal, but the fantasy of the marvelous and adventurous. At RKO Willis O’Brien and his team had created King Kong; the Disney group had released the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; and talents like Perry Ferguson, Van Nest Polglase, and Vernon Walker produced fascinating otherworldly sets and artwork. Given such a tradition, it is difficult to imagine Xanadu being conceived anywhere else.

  Unfortunately, the studio never quite made it to the major leagues, though it tried nearly everything, from modestly budgeted spectaculars like King Kong to low-budget horrors like Bert Wheeler and Robert Wolsey’s Cracked Nuts. One problem was that RKO was owned by a succession of people with interests outside the movies, and it was notorious for going through reorganizations; from 1926, when it was called FBO Pictures, until 1933, it had six different production chiefs, and by the mid-forties it had gone through six more. When Welles arrived, it was under the contr
ol of two kinds of money—Southwestern and Eastern—representing two philosophies of management. On the one hand was economy-minded Texas industrialist Floyd Odlum, who was interested mainly in quickie program features; on the other was an RCA–Rockefeller Center group, headed by David Sarnoff and Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted a “quality” image. (“Quality” did not necessarily mean big budgets; one reason for all those special-effects people was that the studio put a premium on ingenuity.) In 1937 the Eastern group had prevailed, hiring George Schaefer to take charge of production. Schaefer, formerly a Goldwyn assistant, tried to be a prestige producer in the mold of the Thalbergs, Selznicks, and Scharys, but he was to prove much less successful. Through him Welles was put under contract (a choice that reflected the studio’s old-time policy of bringing radio stars to the movies), and he remained a supporter of the Mercury organization until he was forced out in 1942, the year of the Ambersons tragedy.

  As long as Schaefer was in, things went relatively smoothly, but it would be a mistake to assume that Welles ever had total freedom. He had been hired as a jack-of-all-trades who would produce a picture a year, and though he seemed to have half the classic literature of the Western world on his list of proposed films, his stay at RKO was littered with rejected or abandoned scripts. The most important of these, Heart of Darkness, written entirely by Welles, has been excerpted in Film Comment, with an excellent commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Two others were Smiler with a Knife, based on a Nicholas Blake thriller, and a film with no set title that the production staff referred to as “Mexican Melodrama.” This film had been proposed in advance of Kane and then developed as Welles’s second feature for the studio, and its script can be found in the Weissberger Collection at the University of Wisconsin. Gregg Toland was to photograph the film, partly on location, and Welles would star. Welles also wrote the screenplay and was scheduled to direct, although he later announced that Norman Foster, his collaborator on Journey into Fear, would take over the job. Plans for the film fell apart, but even had Foster directed, it seems likely that Welles would have supervised much of the work.