The War of the Worlds (radio drama) The New Jersey Township of West Windsor, where Grover's Mill is located, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the broadcast in 1988 with four days of festivities including art and planetarium shows, a panel discussion, a parade, burial of a time capsule, a dinner dance, film festivals devoted to H. G. Wells and Orson Welles, and the dedication of a bronze monument to the fictional Martian landings. Howard Koch, an author of the original radio script, attended the 49th anniversary celebration as an honored guest. The 75th anniversary of "The War of the Worlds" was marked by an international rebroadcast with
Orson Welles on an idea by Orson Welles". Welles spent around nine months around 1947–48 co-writing the screenplay for "Cyrano de Bergerac" along with Ben Hecht, a project Welles was assigned to direct for Alexander Korda. He began scouting for locations in Europe whilst filming "Black Magic", but Korda was short of money, so sold the rights to Columbia pictures, who eventually dismissed Welles from the project, and then sold the rights to United Artists, who in turn made a film version in 1950, which was not based on Welles's script. After Welles's elaborate musical stage version of this Jules Verne novel,