The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Online Free

Shanghai
and
Touch of Evil
, are radically different from their sources. The debate over his writing, however, has focused not on these things but on his two most famous achievements:
The War of the Worlds
and
Citizen Kane
.
    Howard Koch’s
The Panic Broadcast
(1970) reproduces the full script of the Mars invasion radio show, which Koch claims to have authored alone. “At the time I was a young playwright doing my first professional job,” he says in the introduction to his book, “which was writing the radio plays for the Mercury Theatre’s Sunday evening programs sponsored by CBS . . . built around the name and talents of Orson Welles” (12). According to Koch, a day came when John Houseman gave him a copy of H. G. Wells’s novella and instructed him to dramatize it in the form of radio news bulletins. He thoughtthe idea had no merit, but was told that it was Welles’s favorite project. Koch followed orders, and at the end of each writing day, with the assistance of what he calls his “girl Friday,” he sent a “batch of fifteen or twenty pages” to Welles and Houseman, who made “criticisms and suggestions.” These and all other pages were submitted repeatedly for “the revisions and the revisions of the revisions,” which were supervised by his two bosses (12).
    Even if we accept this account completely, it gives fragile evidence of Koch’s authorship. The basic idea of using news bulletins, which made the broadcast sensational, was entirely Orson Welles’s, and during the revision stage Koch acted in part as amanuensis for Welles and Houseman. Anyone who has heard a recording of the entire broadcast must realize that the second half, which switches to a conventional first-person narration, is pretty lame writing. Everything depends on the manipulation of sounds, silences, and accurate vocal imitations of radio news bulletins in the first half of the program, which were not only Welles’s idea but also his responsibility as “orchestrator” of the broadcast. On the morning after the show, when news headlines screamed panic and the world press converged on CBS, it was Welles, not Koch or Houseman, who took public responsibility. Nobody on the Mercury staff objected. Fortunately, most of the mail Welles received was supportive. There were, however, angry responses, the most vituperative of which came on November 1, 1938, from probate judge A. G. Kennedy of Union, South Carolina: “I would not insult a female dog by calling you the son of such an animal. Your conduct was beneath the social standing of and would be unbecoming and below the moral perception of a bastard son of a motherless whore. . . . You, if you were not a carbuncle on the rump of degenerate theatrical performers, would, as an effort toward making partial amends for your consummate act of asininity, never again appear on the stage or before the radio, except for the purpose of announcing your withdrawal” (Welles mss., correspondence, Lilly Library).
    When Princeton sociologist Hadley Cantril wrote an academic study of the panic broadcast in 1940, he credited Koch as the sole author of the script. Welles wrote to Cantril on March 26, 1940, strongly objecting. Koch, he said, “was very helpful in the second portion of the script and did some work on the first, most of which was necessary to revise.” He noted that several people had contributed, including John Houseman, Paul Stewart, and “other members . . . in our writers department.” But, he added, “The idea for the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast and the major part of its execution was [
sic
] mine . . . I have always worked with a fairly large complement of writers, but the initial emphasis and attack on a story as well as its ultimate revisedform have in almost every instance been mine, and I have always chosen to assume