JAD ABUMRAD: It's gonna go something like, "I'm Jad. And Robert. Radiolab. And then ...]

[audience cheers]

JAD: Oh, I can die a happy man!

ROBERT KRULWICH: [laughs]

JAD: So that was perfect. So here we go. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this ...

[audience cheers]

JAD: ... is the sound of 700 people who have come to bear witness to the recording of our show today. We are in the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota talking about the strange phenomenon that is the War of the Worlds.

ROBERT: You know, it's very great that everybody's here, of course, but this—there's one guy I really wish had been here.

JAD: Who's that?

ROBERT: The Ecuadorean guy, Leonardo—what's his ...?

JAD: Paez?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah. Because he's the guy I wanna ask, like, what were you thinking? That's what I want to know.

[laughter]

JAD: Well, he's dead.

ROBERT: He's dead, yeah.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Well, or Orson Welles? I would say to him, what were you thinking, I would say.

JAD: Uh, dead.

ROBERT: Dead, yeah. How about the guy in Buffalo? Buffalo?

JAD: Uh, missing? Retired? I don't know.

ROBERT: I wanted to ask somebody, so, I found a guy who I think is definitely alive.

DANIEL MYRICK: I am Daniel Myrick, co-writer, co-director of The Blair Witch Project.

ROBERT: Before making The Blair Witch Project, Dan Myrick heard a recording of the War Of The Worlds. He was pretty young at the time, he was a teenager.

DANIEL MYRICK: I just thought it was brilliant. Absolutely the coolest thing.

ROBERT: And more than anything else, he was impressed by the technique of the thing.

DANIEL MYRICK: There's a couple moments in particular where they cut to the kind of on-site reporter ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.]

DANIEL MYRICK: And it's almost like they cut in a second or two early, and you hear the reporter saying, "So are we on?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen—am I on?]

DANIEL MYRICK: Are we—are we on?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen ...]

DANIEL MYRICK: And then he goes into his—into character.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen, here I am. Back of a stone wall ...]

DANIEL MYRICK: And it's those little beats, those little moments that really make it convincing. I get this kind of guilty excitement when I—when I know how it affected people.

ROBERT: Myrick never forgot that sense of guilty excitement. He was fascinated by the idea that scary stories get even scarier if you think they're true. So years later fresh out of film school, he and his friend Eduardo Sanchez decided to develop their own Welles-like project. It's your basic scary witch story. Three kids go into the woods.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blair Witch Project: Okay, okay, okay. We're leaving right now.]

ROBERT: They get lost, they bump into the witch and then they die. Or I think they die. At least you never see them again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blair Witch Project: Please help us!]

ROBERT: But when you entered the theater to see The Blair Witch Project, the first thing that you'd see on the screen are these two sentences. It would read: "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found." So the suggestion here is that what we see is not a movie.

JAD: Never mind that you are in a movie theater.

[laughter]

ROBERT: Right. [laughs]

JAD: And you've paid $10 and have some popcorn.

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but when you went and sat down, what you saw was something called 'found footage,' shot by three kids who have gone missing. And so these kids, you're not sure but they might be real.

DANIEL MYRICK: Well, we picked a subject matter that was difficult to disprove to the casual observer. Martians invading from outer space is—you turn the channel to the next network and if no one's reporting about it then you're pretty well assured that it's probably fiction. But three missing students in the woods, you know, that's something that is a little harder to disprove without a fair amount of scrutiny.

ROBERT: And it worked.

DANIEL MYRICK: We were getting calls from police wondering where these three kids were, and how come they never heard of this case.

ROBERT: You're kidding!

DANIEL MYRICK: Oh yeah. I mean, it was constant.

ROBERT: Oh, so people saw the whole thing and thought they saw something real?

DANIEL MYRICK: Still do. We still get emails occasionally on what part of the story is real. You know, is there still any phenomena out in Burkittsville, and da da da da. It's all fiction and is all made up. And I think it reinforces what I think Ed and I suspected, that so much of us wants to believe.

ROBERT: Some people told Dan Myrick that after watching those three campers go in the woods, they themselves would never go camping again.

[laughter]

ROBERT: And he thought that was fabulous. He loved it.

JAD: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would you not want people to go camping?

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I mean honestly, why would you do that to people?

ROBERT: Well, I—I asked him.

DANIEL MYRICK: Well, I think that's the goal of any filmmaker. When you make a movie, whether you want people to laugh or cry or be scared, you're trying to affect people so viscerally and so emotionally that it has a resonating effect on them long after they've seen your movie. I mean, that's why you're doing it. We're not making this movie to kind of scare people. We were making the film to really scare people. No regrets on people not wanting to go camping afterwards.

ROBERT: So the question is is that what Orson Welles was up to back in 1938? Was he just trying to give people a good old-fashioned show business scare, make them scream way up in the balcony? Because remember at the time, that is what he claimed, that this was simply an entertainment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Orson Welles: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that the War Of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying, "Boo!"]

ROBERT: But 16 years later, Orson Welles changed the story. Here he is on the BBC. The year is 1955.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Orson Welles: In fact, we weren't as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian broadcast. We were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowed, so in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came through the tap.]

ROBERT: So here are two ways to think about the War Of The Worlds. One, it was a smashing entertainment using every trick they could think of—including inventing some new ones—to scare you silly. Master storytelling. Or—and it was, "We're trying to send you a warning. Don't trust everything you hear on the radio. It's not always true."

JAD: So which one was it, you think?

ROBERT: Well, I asked a professor. Jason Loviglio.

JASON LOVIGLIO: Me?

ROBERT: Yeah, you.

JASON LOVIGLIO: Jason?

ROBERT: Yeah, him. He's a radio historian at the University of Maryland. He says that what Welles understood was that a newscast is often two things at once. In a newscast, you hear something scary or disturbing sometimes, but it's gonna be told to you in a way that soothes you. Meaning the authority of the voice, the newscaster's steady voice coming through the radio, it will calm you like President Roosevelt's famous fireside chats.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Franklin Roosevelt: My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.]

ROBERT: He's so calm, he's so in charge, says Professor Loviglio ...

JASON LOVIGLIO: When you study the rhetoric that Roosevelt used, he really did convey two messages. One, we're in terrible danger; and two, I've got it covered. And that is sort of the—the authoritative voice coming out of the darkness, this sort of invisible, disembodied voice of the powerful man, the news anchor.

[NEWS CLIP: September 22, 1940.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: And we'll see this with Murrow on the rooftops of Britain.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: I'm standing on a rooftop.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: During the blitz.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: Looking out over London. Straight in front of me now you'll hear two sounds in just a moment. There they are.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: He's giving us a story of an unfolding emergency.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: I should think in a few minutes there may be a bit of shrapnel around here.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: But his mastery of the information, his mastery of his own voice, his bravery on the scene ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: You may be able to hear the sounds of guns off in the distance very faintly, like someone kicking a tub.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: This was the beginning of the formatting of fear, the formatting of crisis. It's sort of a ritual where we're sort of evoking a terrible danger, and then somehow assuaging those fears through the performance of the news. And so people go to the news not to be afraid, but to be afraid and then to be reassured.

JAD: Robert?

ROBERT: Uh-huh?

JAD: You file things for the news.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Do you buy this? That a news reporter does these two things simultaneously? Scares and then reassures and then scares ...

ROBERT: No. No, you never go—you know, go cover the governor and say, "First I'm gonna scare them and then I'm going to assuage them." No one would do that.

JAD: But why else would you talk that way? I mean, not you.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: But I mean, the anchors—well, sometimes you, actually.

ROBERT: Well, the form in—of the news is a—because the guy is always there, because he's an anchor—that's the word means—it is a reassuring thing to see them night after night, telling and telling. But Loviglio says that the real genius of the War Of The Worlds was that Welles put you into a newscast where you expect anchors to anchor and you expect reporters to report, and then—bzzzt!—he kills the reporter and the anchor, and suddenly you're left all by yourself in your own living room all alone.

[laughter]

JAD: That is exactly right. The moment of the War Of The Worlds broadcast which still frankly terrifies me, it's this moment right here.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame! Now the whole field's caught fire! The woods, the barns, the gas tanks of the automobiles! It's spreading everywhere. Coming this way now. About twenty yards to my right ...]

JAD: It's like that silence is terrifying. No anchor, no reporter, no one to reassure you. Okay, but forgetting that for a moment, what about his second lesson that he had to teach us? The thing about don't believe the radio, what about that? Did it work?

ROBERT: Well, Professor Loviglio says if that is really what Welles was trying to do, if you believe that, well then he failed—actually he worse than failed. The War Of The Worlds, not once, not twice—we've shown you three broadcasts tonight—it was so good at grabbing an audience and sucking them in that the Welles formula you might call it, the newscast that scares you enough to keep you listening has been adopted by, of all folks, news companies.

[NEWS CLIP: Right now at 11, a night of shopping turned into a night of fear.]

[NEWS CLIP: ... swarming over borders, flooding cities and towns. Muslim immigrants.]

[NEWS CLIP: Teens texting and driving, it's a deadly mix.]

[NEWS CLIP: Terror in the toilet.]

[NEWS CLIP: And sinkholes and landslides.]

[NEWS CLIP: Python in the pot.]

[NEWS CLIP: A rabid baby goat.]

[NEWS CLIP: Terrorists working at one of our airports?]

ROBERT: So many newscasts tease you with things that aren't quite true: terror in the toilet, pythons in the potty. Maybe there was some ...

JAD: Could be true.

ROBERT: ... snake somewhere near a toiletry facility of some kind, but it probably wasn't a python, and it probably wasn't your toilet. But you don't know that. You want to hear that it belongs to Mrs. James C. McGillicutty of 2214 Beaude Boulevard and not you, so you want to be reassured and so you listen and so you fall in. And if Orson Welles retelling a Martian invasion story by H.G Wells that most people already knew, if he could grab us, and then if they could do it again in Ecuador, and then if they can do it again in Buffalo, what does that tell you? It tells you that we can't help ourselves. Even if the headline is slightly preposterous, even if it's slightly scary, even if it's slightly false, we will listen.

JASON LOVIGLIO: The fear that these broadcasts generate now suck us in. And you'd think that 70 years later we'd be more sophisticated and critical when the local newscaster tells us that there's something we're feeding our children that could kill them and they'll tell us after the news—I still listen. I'm a media critic, and I still wait through the commercials to see what is it that I'm doing to kill my child?

ROBERT: Even it it's really implausible. Your shoelaces will kill you after this brief message.

JASON LOVIGLIO: Somehow it gets me every time.

ROBERT: Yeah. And Welles knew.

[applause]

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad with Lulu Miller, Tony Fields, Rob Christensen and Ellen Horne. Production support from Heather Radke, Michael O'Ryan-McManus, Laura Vitali, Arielle Lasky, Soren Wheeler, Linda Everts, Larissa Anderson, Sandin Totin, Molly Bloom, Bradley Campbell and Ambar Espinoza.]

[LISTENER: Special thanks to Chris Whittington, Tom Keefe, Billy Keating, Tony Boyle, Michael Grandchamp, Tom Campbell, Joe Bevelaqua, Laura Vitali, Oliver Conan, Nadia Rynan, Roberto Williams, Lorraine Maddox, Scott Goldberg, Andy Lancet, Ramon Tomos and Charles Michelet.]

[LISTENER: Original music for this hour was provided by cellist Zoe Keating. Check out Zoekeating.com. You'll thank us.]

JAD: Before we close our show today, I just want to remind you that anything that you heard today, anything you've ever heard on Radiolab can be found at Radiolab.org. That is our address. And while you're there, I would encourage you to email us: Radiolab(@)wnyc.org is our email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thank you so much for coming and thank you for listening.

[applause]

 

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