The War of the Worlds (radio drama) Another announcement was repeated on the full CBS network that same evening at 10:30 pm, 11:30 pm, and midnight: "For those listeners who tuned in to Orson Welles's "Mercury Theatre on the Air" broadcast from 8 to 9 pm Eastern Standard Time tonight and did not realize that the program was merely a modernized adaptation of H. G. Wells' famous novel "War of the Worlds", we are repeating the fact which was made clear four times on the program, that, while the names of some American cities were used, as in all novels and dramatizations, the entire story and all
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,