The Night America Trembled The Night America Trembled "The Night America Trembled" is a top-rated television dramatization of the public reaction to the 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" that aired September 9, 1957, as an episode of the CBS series "Studio One". Hosted by Edward R. Murrow, the live documentary play was written by Nelson S. Bond and uses excerpts of the radio script copywrighted by Howard E. Koch. The film centers on the panic created when "The Mercury Theater on the Air" presented a radio adaptation of an 1897 H. G. Wells science fiction novel, "The War of the
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) the consequence is you can still play with ideas of terror and conflict... It's a natural thing to do until you're right up against it." "Until it ceases to be a game," Welles said, a phrase that Wells repeated. Britain and France had then been at war with Nazi Germany for more than a year. As the Mercury's second theatre season began in 1938, Orson Welles and John Houseman were unable to write the "Mercury Theatre on the Air" broadcasts on their own. They hired Howard Koch, whose experience in having a play performed by the Federal Theatre Project in