I previously talked about The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and now I want to talk about the radio broadcast adaptation by Orson Welles. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the author as Wells, and the broadcaster as Orson. When adapting any piece of work from one medium to another, it is important to use the new medium’s strengths to fit the same story. That job can be rather complicated, but never impossible. In Orson’s case, he was translating a fictional text that was an allegory for British Imperialism written for a (generally) British audience, into a radio broadcast for an American audience.
Orson could have simply gone the route of the audiobook, hire a set of voice actors for each character with a lead narrator, and read the book as is without changing anything. This route would have been straightforward, and audiobooks were a recent addition to the realm of literature, having been made in 1932 with the help of The American Foundation for the Blind. But Orson wanted to do something different. He changed the book, not drastically, but made it so that rather than an audiobook, it was more akin to a radio drama, and one that made full use of the way it was broadcast. The script is acted out in the present, and is treated as an actual news story. At the beginning of the broadcast, Orson himself did make clear that it was a fictional piece of work, an adaptation of Wells’ novel, but anyone who tuned in after that had no way of knowing.
Because the main character, Phillips, acted like he was talking to a live audience on a news broadcast, it would be very easy to assume that it was a real news broadcast. The story itself plays out pretty much the same though. Martians invade, destroy a bunch of stuff, then die from germs. But the public response to this broadcast was very lively.
Reportedly, when this first broadcast, a lot of people thought the invasion was real. It got so bad that the police tried to intervene and forcefully end the broadcast. It’s a fairly well-known bit of historical trivia, and it really shows you how well Orson played to the medium’s strengths. But there has been some recent discourse as to the validity of these claims, and whether or not newspapers exaggerated the events to sell more papers.
But whether or not that public response was real is not the point of this article. Rather, I want to point to Orson’s adaptation to make a statement: The original version of a story is not inherently the better version. If you’ve ever seen a movie with a friend who has read the book the movie was based on, then they might have told you after the movie that “the book was better” but that feels a bit presumptive. That’s not to say such statements are NEVER true, there are plenty of books that can be argued are better than their movie adaptations. But I don’t believe it’s always, or maybe even generally true. To look at adaptation from a different perspective, song covers and remixes could be considered adaptations of a song from one genre into another, but there are several well-known instances of a remix or cover being better than the original. For example, the song “Hurt” by Johnny Cash was actually a cover of the song “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. But Cash’s version of “Hurt” was so popular and well-received that googling “Hurt song” brings up the Johnny Cash version, and the original writer had to admit to how good Cash’s version was.
What this ultimately comes down to, in my opinion, is preference. When a story is adapted, it becomes something new by necessity. No matter how faithful an adaptation is, there’s almost never a perfectly exact match. When going from book to screen, the director is adding a visual element that could not be present in the book. The director has to decide how to visualize the environment, the characters, as well as how to capture everything on video. Conversely, when adapting a film into a book, the author has to decide how to describe those visual elements. The closest exception I can think of is adapting a novel into an audiobook, but even then there’s still the choices of voicework. Hearing a real person speak the lines in a novel can help bring it to life but it also loses a bit of interpretation in how a character might sound in a reader's head.
In the case of Orson Welles’ adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the main thing lost is the explicit allegorical connections laid out in the book. Orson never mentions the British empire, or colonialism, but what we gain is a much more (arguably) immersive experience that tells the same overall story in a significantly shorter timeframe. Both are good versions of the same story, and neither is strictly better than the other. Ultimately, adapting a story is surprisingly similar to creating a new story, because creating a story is adapting it from your imagination into an initial medium.