On October 30, 1938 the United States experience mass hysteria because of a radio broadcast by the Mercury Theatre on air over CBS. Howard Koch wrote the script for the radio show from the H.G. Wells novel "War of the Worlds." It is crazy to think that people actually believed that it was a real broadcast about an actual attack from mars.
These are some of the stories about reactions from the Associated Press.
Woman Tries Suicide
Pittsburgh - A man returned home in the midst of the broadcast and found his wife, a bottle of poison in her hand, screaming: "I'd rather die this way than that."
Man Wants to Fight Mars
San Francisco - An offer to volunteer in stopping an invasion from Mars came among hundreds of telephone inquiries to police and newspapers during the radio dramatization of H. G. Wells' story. One excited man called Oakland police and shouted: "My God! Where can I volunteer my services? We've got to stop this awful thing!"
Church Lets Out
Indianapolis - A woman ran into a church screaming: "New York is destroyed; it's the end of the world. You might as well go home to die. I just heard it on the radio." Services were dismissed immediately.
Rushes Home From Reno
Reno - Marion Leslie Thorgaard, here for a divorce from Hilsce Robert Thorgaard, of New York, collapsed, fearing her mother and children in New York had been killed. One man immediately started east in hope of aiding the wife he was here to divorce.
Now these stories all seem a little bit ridiculous especially because it was a radio broadcast. In a society with itunes, podcasts, XM radio and the personal MP3 player it's hard to think about getting freaked out because of a radio broadcast. Imagine for a second if a filmmaker in the style of documentary fiction ran a news story about a pending war or an attack of the coast. I know that while watching Citizen Kane, Waiting for Guffman and Zelig that these stories are fictional, but the more I think about the idea of documentary fictions I see the power of these works. While most of the work screened in class would be hard to imagine as real right now it would be interesting to show a modern day documentary fiction film to someone who may not be so familiar with film.
In this technological savvy generation is it possible for something like the 1938 radio scare to happen?
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3 comments:
It would certainly be an interesting experiment to see if a technologically-savvy audience could still believe a fictional story/event...because we are so aware of the power of technology and how it can make unreal events, places, and people so very real, especially in feature films today. We are so used to seeing things that probably won't happen...happen - I wonder if we would believe if we were told a seemingly impossible/improbable event actually happened.
One man shot holes in the town water tower, thinking it was a UFO.
It's true that a radio broadcast wouldn't shake things up now, but they were used to radio back then- that is- a radio news broadcast was recognized as true. Today, we tend to recognize documentary-style work as true. That's why fiction documentaries are far more devious than fiction because they play on people's assumptions about truth.
Today we are more aware of technology that can alter images and sound such as Photoshop and even simple editing programs can recreate a horror movie to a family film. If someone was to come out with an audio streaming likeness with photos of Mars attacking New York, most would take it with a grain of skepticism.
I think that some, however, would still believe it. Take, for example, Blair Witch Project. Many people thought it was a true documentary and it even had its own website that tried to support the idea that it was real. While many didn't think it was real, the few who did are what makes the possiblity of that radio broadcast able to happen again.
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