H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (Hines film) the Martian invasion. The film bases its approach on the 1938 Orson Welles CBS radio Halloween broadcast of "War of the Worlds", by presenting itself as a true account of actual events. Director Timothy Hines said, in reference to this technique, "When Orson Welles broadcast "War of the Worlds" on the radio in the late 1930s, he presented it in such a way as to not clearly identify that it was a work of fiction. He did it for the drama. And many people mistook the fictional news broadcast as a real news broadcast. People believed they were hearing an
Around the World with Orson Welles with the first broadcast scheduled for September 1955. However, Welles's other commitments interfered with his ability to meet deadlines, and much of the series was left incomplete. Welles spent much of 1955 working on writing, directing and acting in his London stage production "Moby Dick—Rehearsed", and after that flopped on the West End, he switched to shooting an (aborted) film adaptation of the play, first in London, and then in Rome - filming "Moby Dick—Rehearsed" in Rome was under the pretext of working on the "Around the World with Orson Welles" TV series. Although Associated-Rediffusion retained a number of rights,