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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...171975,00.html
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Spielberg and Cruise plan new War of Worlds

Treading in the footsteps of Wells ... and Welles

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Thursday March 18, 2004
The Guardian


Nearly a public disaster - Orson Welles performing War of the Worlds for US radio

It is one of the most famous moments in the mythical history of the United States. The night in 1938 when Orson Welles broadcast a radio version of The War of the Worlds that fooled a nervous population into believing the Martians really had landed.

Now two of Hollywood's most successful figures, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, have joined forces to make a new film version of the HG Wells novel. The film, to be shot next year, will star Cruise while Spielberg will direct. Both will alsobe producers.

With the backing of the two studios Dreamworks and Paramount, the film is sure to be one of the "big movies" of 2006, and is further evidence of Hollywood's obsession with adapting novels. The script will be written by David Koepp, who wrote the first two Jurassic Park scripts for Spielberg as well as the more recent Spider-Man adaptation.

The deal to make the film stems from an earlier agreement between Cruise's production company, C/W Productions, and the Paramount studio. That agreement led to a first draft of the script, which was written by Josh Friedman.

The radio version of Wells's 1898 novel, broadcast on Hallowe'en in 1938, caused widespread panic, with audiences apparently convinced by the production's then revolutionary technique of mimicking the style of news reports. Audiences are said to have taken to the roads en masse, hidden in cellars, and even wrapped their heads in wet towels as protection from Martian poison gas.

The reaction to the broadcast even generated its own news reports, which added to the confusion and the sense of panic among the public. The vivid technique used by Welles's company sounds melodramatic today, but was in keeping with the news style of the period.

In one passage, a radio news journalist reports: "Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake. Now it's another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face. It ... it's inde scribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it."

There have been several film and television versions of the novel, but none of them as high profile as the Spielberg-Cruise collaboration promises to be. In 1953, a film version was made starring Gene Barry and Les Tremayne which used Wells's tale of the invasion of earth by Martian war machines to exploit contemporary anxieties about the cold war and the Soviet threat.

A version was attempted at Paramount in the 1970s, with a script commissioned from Anthony Burgess, but the project foundered.

Spielberg became interested in making a version of the story during the 1990s, but instead of becoming a straight adaptation that project evolved into the film Deep Impact.

While HG Wells was an enthusiastic supporter of many of the film adaptations of his work, the likely attitude that Orson Welles might have had to another director taking one of the works with which he became most closely associated, can only be a matter of conjecture.

__________________
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -- Thomas A. Edison

 

BamaRN

I actually listened to that for the first time a couple of weeks back. I was quite baked driving to North Carolina so I was pretty into it. Some overacting, but cool story and when you consider the effect it had back in the 30's, it makes it really cool.
This should be interesting.