A Sketchy Account of The Martian Broadcast

 The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles. 

 

 Welles by Welles

 In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums. 

 

 

 Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do. 

 And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."