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‘War of the Worlds’: A Look Back

They’re baaaaaaaaaaack!

Tom Cruise. Steven Spielberg. Aliens. It’s a mighty triumvirate that has proven to work well in the past (at least in some variation or another). And now they have regrouped to give us the summer blockbuster extravaganza: a retelling of H.G. Wells’ immortal novel The War of the Worlds. Of course, Spielberg and Cruise aren’t the first ones to try to tackle Wells’ dense story about a hostile alien takeover. Here’s a look back at the original source material and the few–famous and infamous–War of the Worlds incarnations thereafter.

Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds
The Book

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You can thank the adventurous novelist H.G. Wells for coming up with the first alien-invasion scenario. His 1898 novel The War of The Worlds was a misunderstood marvel for its time. The story revolves around Martians who flee their own dying world and attempt to take Earth by force. They land in an ill-prepared Victorian English township and begin their devastating reign of terror, sweeping aside all resistance in their tripod legged war machines shooting out heat rays. Narrated by an English gent, we get a firsthand account of the invasion as he traipses through the countryside, witnessing the destruction. But after days of the relenting attacks, in what seems like a hopeless situation, the invaders are stopped in their tracks and eradicated, not by the weapons and guile of man, but by the simplest of all things–tiny microbes, to which the Martians lacked any resistance. Ironic, huh?

But in trying to adapt this dense novel into movie, there’s has always been one inherent problem: the original material is–how shall we say?–less than cinematic. It doesn’t have a love interest, there are no children in jeopardy, no mass rallying of the people to fight back and win the battle. In other words, not at all a typical Hollywood blockbuster. It’s just a story about a nameless narrator wandering around the late 19th-century England, commenting on how the mean aliens wreck stuff and plant extraterrestrial shrubberies all over the place. Not too exciting.

“[The book] is not very cinematic,” Steven Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly. “Besides, I never wanted to do it as a period piece. For one reason, I can’t stand the style of those times. All those horrible mustaches and britches and frock coats. I wanted to make a movie that was faithful to the spirit of the book, but a movie about contemporary America. About an American refugee experience.” A refugee experience that takes place in New Jersey, no less–an obvious homage to the infamous Orson Welles‘ radio play (see below). Spielberg actually owns the only surviving copy of the radio play.

Literary purists may also have a problem that the invaders are no longer from Mars. Spielberg felt the planet had lost too much mystery since NASA’s rovers started snooping around. He’s right. Mars is so old hat. We know all about it now, as well as knowing about any other planets in our galaxy, for that matter. We are now far more savvy space travelers.

Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds
The Radio Play

By the 1930s, radio was changing the face of America. It provided a connection to events and news like never before–from listening to President Franklin D. Roosevelt conduct his “fireside chats” to hearing about major news events, such as the hunt for the kidnapped baby son of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh or the fatal crash of the airship Hindenburg. Yet, the most troubling, unsettling broadcasts during this period came from Nazi Germany. During the 1938 Munich Crisis in September of that year, more radios were sold to anxious Americans than ever before, as Hitler rallied his forces and the world slid inexorably toward war.

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It was in this tense atmosphere that the young Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater staff prepared their fateful broadcast on the night of Oct. 31, 1938. The Mercury Theater had broadcast radio dramatizations of such novels as The Count of Monte Cristo and Dracula, so adapting Wells’ The War of the Worlds was just another night’s work. That’s what Welles and his co-writer Howard Koch thought, at least.

Instead, the broadcast, which transplanted the action from Victorian England to contemporary America– specifically Grover’s Mill, N.J. (sounds familiar)–created a panic among American citizens like never before. Welles and Koch told the story as a series of news flashes which interrupted, without warning, into what sounded like a perfectly routine music program. Thousands of listeners, who may have missed the beginning of the program in which Welles introduced the story, believed it was real–that America was indeed under attack by aliens from Mars.

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Did Welles stage this panic-inducer on purpose? Probably not. Over the years, Welles told conflicting versions of the events, and even tried to claim credit for planning it, but as newsreel footage at the time clearly shows he was fairly rattled by the events himself. He also said on occasion that “seventy five percent of what I say in interviews is false”, so we’ll never know for sure. But the significance of the broadcast can’t be denied. It clearly stands as a testament to the man who would make Citizen Kane, displaying his talents as a showman as well as the skills and dedication of his cast and crew.

A scene from War of the Worlds
The First Movie

George Pal‘s 1953 The War of the Worlds, a Cold War version starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, is a classic in its own right. It not only was the first feature film adaptation of the book, but it also employed hair-raising special effects never seen before for its time. Many of today’s more special-effects laden directors name the film as one of their inspirations, including Spielberg.

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But it had a long and difficult journey to the screen. Wells, who died in 1946, sold the rights in 1925 to Paramount director Cecil B. DeMille, but after several versions of the script went through the ringer, the film never got off the ground. Even Alfred Hitchcock took a shot at it in the 1930s, to no avail. It wasn’t until 1951 that George Pal took a look through the Paramount script archive and found the pile of un-produced scripts for The War of The Worlds–and a light bulb went on. He chucked the old scripts and teamed with screenwriter Barre Lyndon to portray as realistically as possible the details of an alien invasion.

Once again, studio execs insisted the original material be thrown out to fit in with the times. Set in 1950s California, Gene Barry makes for a stoic leading man as Dr. Clayton Forrester, while his love interest, Ann Robinson, does an awful lot of screaming and emoting as the damsel in distress. Still, the actors are really secondary to the action. Pal brought on the brilliant Al Nozaki as his art director, who conceptualized the Martian war machines. Certainly the film looks a little dated now, but anyone who watches the movie cannot deny its electrifying effect. The film deserves its place in history as one of the best and most important science fiction movies of the time.

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise
The Future

Now, we have the Spielberg/Cruise extravaganza, which sets the action in contemporary America and focuses on a wayward dad trying to save his kids and find his ex-wife. Spielberg returns to his sci-fi, alien roots. But unlike his kindler, gentler versions of extraterrestrials in his classics Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., the wunderkind director is going balls out with this one. That’s right, children may actually die this time.

“We made a lot of changes to bring [the book] up to date, but we didn’t want it to have any alien-movie clichés, either,” screenwriter David Koepp explained to EW. “So we made a list of things we weren’t going to have in the film. No destruction of historic landmarks. No shots of world capitals. No scientists or government officials as main characters. The idea was to show everything from [Cruise‘s character’s] point of view. If Ray doesn’t see it for himself, it’s not in the movie.”

A smart move, considering the alien-invasion films that have been made in recent years. This Worlds sounds like a right mix between Independence Day and Signs. And, by God, if it’s a Spielberg movie, there’s going to be a spectacular special effect or two.

Plus, there’s the timing.

“We didn’t set out to play upon the tremendous paranoia and anxiety about terrorism paranoia and anxiety about terrorism in the environment right now,” Spielberg told EW. “But we do live in the shadow of 9/11. And every iteration of this story has occurred during anxious times in history. Orson Welles made his radio play right before World War II. George Pal made his movie in the middle of the Cold War. And now I’m making mine. I’m not asking a lot,” he added. “I just want it to scare the crap out of the audience.”

That’s comforting, Steven.

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