Book Review—Paul Heyer, The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934–1952

Abstract

Just imagine what Orson Welles might have done with today’s technology: a “The Boy Wonder” blog to publicize cuts made in his films by studios fighting his cost overruns; the Internet to link the crossover influences among Welles’s theatrical, film, and radio works; podcasts of his radio dramas; or DVDs of original sound effects, complete with demonstrations of how they were created. The list is endless. As it was, Welles was the original King of All Media. In his superbly researched book, The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934–1952, author Paul Heyer remains true to his mission of completing the unfinished chapter of radio in what is the collective biography of the director, actor, writer, and “stage magician” (p. xiii). Heyer does so by thoroughly describing Welles’s radio contributions but also by showing how influential radio was in Welles’s other work. “It was,” he writes, “a time when the evocative power of radio put the auditory in popular culture more on par with the visual than is the case in our current image-laden era” (p. 129). Part of the Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture series, the text is broken into three chronological parts comprising nine chapters, an introduction and an epilogue, and what the author calls a “Selected Radiography,” listing “most, but not all of the broadcasts Welles did during his radio years” (p. 217). The first of the three parts, “The Road to CBS,” provides a brief biography and description of Welles’s early theater work, which led to his anonymous—difficult to imagine now—debut on radio following several unsuccessful auditions. Given both a voice that was “so suited for the medium” (p. 17) and his success on stage to that point, Heyer raises the implausible question of who could have beaten out Welles for a part. Success soon followed, including his work for The Columbia Workshop, as the star of The Shadow and with the Mercury Theater on the Air—the platform, of course, for the War of the Worlds broadcast. The book’s second section, and middle three chapters—“Genesis,” “Exodus,” and “Revelation”—are devoted to the October 30, 1938, Panic Broadcast on CBS. This is the most interesting part of Heyer’s study, not only for the technical descriptions of the broadcastbutalso for theanalysisofhowit all came together.Although it seems incredible today, when episodes of so-called reality television programming are filmed and the results embargoed for months, the War of the Worlds broadcast was put together, as most of the productions were then, in a week. In fact, Heyer writes, Welles did not even discuss the idea of “capitalizing on the escalating tensions in Europe by dramatizing an interplanetary conflict” (p. 78) until just 10 days before the actual broadcast. Heyer attributes the success—depending, of course, on one’s perspective—of the broadcast in large part to what he calls the play’s “radio vérité style”: “It effectively