Month: January 2015

I’ll Explain Later…

It is June 26, 1913. Civil War veterans begin arriving in Gettysburg, PA for the Great Reunion marking the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. A few days ago, Tiny Broadwick made history as the first woman to parachute from a plane. Chauncey Olcott’s recording of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” tops the charts. In theaters are Charles Gyblyn’s The Battle of Gettysburg and Mack Sennett’s Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life, which you’ve probably seen without realizing it because it’s the movie that invented the old-timey movie trope of a villain tying a woman to the railroad tracks. Buffalo, New York is recovering from a grain elevator explosion earlier in the week that killed seventeen men and injured fifty. Avalon, California is incorporated. The Washington Senators host the Philadelphia Athletics in a double-header.

Oh, and Earth is invaded by an advanced and hostile alien race from the planet Mars.

So, I’ll grant it’s entirely possible that I just imagined this, but I think that possibly when I was a younger man, The History Channel did not… suck. I mean, they had their share of crap shows and all, but mostly they were a respected institution. One of my professors in college got interviewed by them a fair number of times on the subject of Joan of Arc. By the time I was in grad school, they were well on their way to transitioning into being mostly about Hitler, lost treasures, historical reports of supernatural entities, and Hitler’s Leveraging of Supernatural Entities to Hide Treasures. And more and more recently, they’ve come under fire for using their once-trustworthy documentary filmmaking chops to put out works of fiction that pretend to be real documentaries about mermaids and suchlike. At least they still show stuff about the pyramids sometimes. I like the Egyptology stuff.

In 2013, the History Channel produced one of these faux-documentaries about World War I, sorta. They recast the Great War, getting rid of all that messy and inconvenient history with an adaptation of, you guessed it, The War of the Worlds. We’ve covered three “newscast”-style adaptations so far, so I thought we’d try out a “documentary”-style one. There is one more documentary-style adaptation, 2012’s War of the Worlds: The True Story, but that’s largely a reworking of an earlier traditional movie, and I’m not going to cover it because I’ve already watched the movie it’s reworked from, which was enough of a slog that I never want to do that again. So I guess this, provisionally at least, marks the end of our little trek through adaptations of HG Wells’s novel that are presented with the framing device of a real historical event being reported. Unless I can somehow find an angle to squeeze out an article about Henry Legg’s Twitter adaptation. Which I probably can’t.

So let’s do this thing. It’s a little strange to even call this an adaptation of War of the Worlds, really. I mean, is “Earth gets invaded by aliens, ostensibly from Mars” enough to make it count? There’s loads of movies where Earth gets invaded by aliens, even specifically Martians, but not all of them are considered “War of the Worlds”. The key factors seem to be that the Martians arrive in a meteor, sweep over the world without meaningful opposition, then are all struck dead by what amounts to divine intervention, because they have no natural immunity to the common cold (At least, it’s usually remembered as the common cold; the book says “putrefactive and disease bacteria”, and even this Wells qualifies as unproven hypothesis. Viruses had only just been discovered when Wells published). The war as presented in The Great Martian War 1913-1917 unfolds very differently from other adaptations. Sure, the broad strokes of the story are mostly there, but so much is changed. Most importantly, the war isn’t a complete curbstomp: humanity can and does fight back. It is still only through a bit of a deus ex machina that mankind is able to win in the end, but it’s not so much “Killed after all man’s defenses had failed,” as “This war would have gone on for years and probably ended in a slow defeat had this one big push right at the end not worked so perfectly.”

But it’s got tripods, so there’s that. We’ve talked about one adaptation using the height of 1930s radio technology, and one using 1960s radio technology and a cast of non-actors and a budget of “what we can find around the studio”, and one really cheap production that was kind of profoundly unconvincing. But if there’s one thing The History Channel is good at, it’s at convincingly pretending to document fake history, so at the least, this is going to be a lot more proficient on a technical level than what we’ve seen before.

Since this isn’t a traditional narrative,  I’m going to be a lot more light-handed on the play-by-play. While The Great Martian War doesn’t have a “story” per se, it does have an “angle”. That’s a clever choice, I think, and adds to the authentic feel. This isn’t “Ken Burns’s War of the Worlds”, a twelve-hour epic providing a semester’s worth of lecture on the history of the war. Just like a real History Channel documentary, this is very much “Hey, there’s been a recent discovery that makes this old topic timely again, so here’s seventy minutes of background to get you up to speed and then we’re going to deliver a bit of actually new information at the end,” just as you’d see in a real documentary: “We got permission to X-ray a mummy. Here’s seventy minutes about the Third Dynasty and then we’ll show you what we found.” The angle for them is a recent breakthrough in translating alien text. “2013 is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Martian War – a conflict unequaled in devastation and often mired in controversy. But the lost legacy of a forgotten hero, unearthed only last year might just ignite the biggest controversy of all.”Regardless of what you think of the History Channel’s sensationalist style (Hey, maybe they could make their motto “We put the History in Histrionic!”), this is just pitch-perfect. It’s practically Mad Libs: “<current year> marks <length of time> since <historical event>, among the <superlative> <category of events> in human history. But now, new <research | discovery | witnesses | technology> might just have unearthed the most <unexpected | startling | terrifying> secrets of all, and changed the way we look at <event | all of human history | our place in the universe | Hitler> forever.”

Our narrative frame for this little adventure through faux-history is Gus Lafonde, a Canadian Anishinaabe soldier, who’d left detailed notebooks of his observations during the war, recently rediscovered by his great-granddaughter. I think it’s a bit of a pleasant sign of the times we live in that they made the effort to do a little bit to correct the extent to which the indigenous peoples of the Americas are represented in things like 20th century history, especially in a context that implies that his work had been largely overlooked precisely because no one was expecting a major breakthrough to come from a First Nations enlisted soldier. That his discoveries are specifically linked to the translation of the alien language may be an homage to the Navajo Code Talkers, though it that’s true, it’s maybe just a bit uncomfortable that they’ve conflated the country, tribe, and which war it was. But still, props and all.

The “Martian War” will follow the broad outline of the Western Front of the European Theater of World War I, transposed one year backward in time (Presumably to keep everything at the right time of year while preempting the historical war). Lots of elements of the historical war are there — the US’s early isolationism and late entry, the von Schlieffen plan, the Battle of the Marne, chemical warfare, the introduction of tanks. Others are recast: Paul von Hindenburg is crucial in the defense of Paris; Douglas Haig is remembered as an inspirational leader and his troop losses as fully justified; the Lusitania is reimagined as an American liner, and the events precipitating America’s entry into the war draws more from Perl Harbor than the Zimmerman Telegram. Other things still are missing: there’s no references to an Eastern Front. Russia is completely absent. The Ottoman Empire is completely absent. There’s no campaign in Africa, and naval warfare is minimal.

In order for you to slot Martians into the story of World War I, of course, you need to clear out some space first. This is a little tricky; one of the reasons “Why did World War I happen?” is so hard to answer is that World War I was caused less by one specific thing happening, and more by the fact that the general trend of European History was for them all to go to war with each other every few decades, and it was just tough cookies that there’d been a technological revolution since the last one that made warfare possible on an industrial scale. The most accurate summation of why World War I happened I’ve ever heard comes from Edmund Blackadder: it was too much effort not to have a war.

Now, obviously, you can recast the story any way you like, but if you want to be able to draw from real history, both because it lets you show interesting parallels, and also because if you’re not sure what should happen next, you can just look up what happened next in real life, the simplest way to do it is to remove one of the historical players in the war and stick the Martians there instead. So that is what they did. Most adaptations move the invasion so that it occurs on the adaptor’s home turf: Orson Welles had the Martians invade New Jersey and work their way up to New York. Jeff Kaye put them in Buffalo. The 1953 Hollywood film put the aliens in California. Breaking News put them in Mojave. The Great Martian War needs to write the Central Powers out of the war to make room for the Martians, so it breaks with tradition: an American production with a very British focus places the one and only Martian landing site in the Bohemian Forest. Most adaptations have the Martians land all over the world; the only one off the top of my head that doesn’t is the WKBW version, where the invasion is centered on the east coast of North America (Interestingly, though, the novel doesn’t say one way or the other. The narrator speculates that the invaders might move outward from England — which they obviously made their first priority as it was the most important country in the world, the rest being full of foreigners — but he never becomes personally aware of invasions outside of England). Here, there’s just one mass landing, which generates a shockwave felt across Europe.

This being pseudohistory, I think parallels to the Tunguska Event are intentional, and it’s almost a little surprising that no one brings it up. The other obvious parallel is something which does get brought up, but never by name. Like I said, in 1913, World War I was already more-or-less inevitable. When an earth-shattering explosion occurred in the heart of the German Empire, everyone’s first assumption was that Kaiser Wilhelm had just test-fired some kind of new super-weapon. Everyone except the Germans, of course, who assume someone else just test-fired some kind of new super-weapon at them. “His Majesty the Emperor, in the name of God, the Fatherland, and the German people, begs the assistance of his brother nations. Germany is under attack by assailants not of this earth.” Six days after German troops enter the impact zone, however, the Kaiser sends word begging the other world powers to come to their aid against, “assailants not of this earth”. It takes less than a week for Germany to collapse, and the world is at war by the end of July.

The tripods, hallmark of any War of the Worlds adaptation, are called “Herons” in The Great Martian War, and they pay homage not only to the novel, but to the many adaptations done over the years. The “heat ray” is described as a “slow-firing energy cannon”, and, like their 1953 counterparts, the Herons are protected by an “energy shield”. There’s a rare hint at how this world’s 2013 has diverged from our own: the shields are described as “The first introduction we had to the many uses of dark energy particles.” The Herons are a bit similar in design to Warwick Goble’s original illustrations for the serial run of The War of the Worlds (Which Wells himself personally disowned and criticized in a passage he added when the book was published in novel form). The “black smoke” is a function of the Herons too, a “toxic cloud” that surrounds the machines. The effectiveness of it is greatly scaled down here, though, making it much more similar to the chemical weapons that were introduced in the real-world Great War. Gas masks prove effective against it, though interviewee Jock Donnelly describes the sense of dreadful isolation that comes with that sort of fighting.

This is another thing that The Great Martian War does well. The interview footage is really convincing. In fact, if you told me some of it was actual interviews with real World War I veterans — the bits where they’re just speaking about the horrors of war or conditions in the trenches without anything specific about aliens — I’d believe you. I’d be pissed that they’d misrepresented the real testimony of real people’s real suffering for this show, but I’d believe you. (It’s not. I checked. The interview footage is all done with actors). What sells it is the audiovisual texture. Remember, this is purporting to be a documentary made a century after the fact: hardly anyone who was alive in 1913 would be available for interview in 2013, and certainly no one who was old enough to have served in combat (The last known World War I veteran died in 2012), so this is all archive footage dated from the ’60s to the ’90s. The sound is flat. The video is grainy — and it’s grainy in different ways. Interviews dated to the early ’80s have film grain, and those from the ’90s have VHS artifacts. Some of it is in 4:3. Other parts are widescreen but have that slightly-wrong look of having been cropped and enlarged. The colors are either oversaturated or faded depending on the vintage. The only interview footage that looks really inauthentic is of an interview with author Nerys Vaughn in the 1960s, and even there, it looks quite a lot like the “reenacted” interviews they sometimes attach to this sort of documentary.

There are actually four kinds of Martian war machines in Wells’s original novel (Or three, if you don’t count the flying machine mentioned only in the original serial version). Hardly any adaptations ever follow up on this; it’s only the large tripod machines that get covered. The Great Martian War, though, wants a “whole” war story, so it takes the rare step of changing it up a bit. Like the original, there are four distinct types of Martian war machine, though they’re entirely distinct from those in the novel. The second type of machine introduced is the “Iron Spider”, a smaller form of tripod that acts as the Martian infantry. It’s a clever way to divvy things up: between the original and its many famous adaptations, there’s a whole assortment of traits associated with the Martian war machines that are kind of a clusterfrak when put together, so here, they divide up the popular tripod traits between the two different kinds of machine. The Spiders are smaller and far more agile than the Herons, whose size honestly makes them look kind of awkwardly matched against human infantry. The primary purpose of the Herons, it seems, is not to kill humans in large numbers directly, but rather to destroy cover and force soldiers out into the open, where the agile Spiders, roughly the size of a modern tank and twice as tall, could dispatch them with “ribbons of death”, highly articulated tentacles that are extremely accurate to the tentacle appendages Wells described on the fighting machines, prefiguring modern inventions like electroactive polymers and muscle-wire.

By August, the situation on the continent looks desperate — the Martians are expected to take Paris within weeks, when Paul von Hindenburg and the German Army turn up, revealing that they’d been hiding in the woods for a few months. In real history, Count von Hindenburg was a major German war hero on the Eastern Front, who went on to the German presidency, and is remembered as probably the last guy who could have stopped Hitler from rising to power except that he didn’t, and kinda sounds like the German version of Ulysses S. Grant. The fictionalized Hindenburg implemented the von Schlieffen Plan, which, near as I can figure, is basically “Slip into France the back way through Belgium,” bringing along the German army and every other surviving German he could round up. In the real world, it was a devastating strategy for defeating France, whose only flaw was that it didn’t actually work: Belgium took a certain objection to the German Army rolling through, which made everything harder, and on top of that, Russia didn’t take nearly as long to get its act together as they’d anticipated, so they had to divert troops to the other side of Germany to fight the other half of the war.

Ironically, the failure of the von Schlieffen Plan in real life had pretty much the same effect as the success of it in The Great Martian War: it caused what had been a juggernaut advance by the invading army to stall out into years of stalemated trench warfare. And it was in the trenches that the third class of Martian war machine came into play: at night, as fighting slowed down, the ground-based “lice” would scour the battlefield, sweeping it clean of the day’s debris of war. The documentary makes a big deal out of the psychological impact of this: dead soldiers could not be recovered for burial, and rumors spread of the Martians invaders making some hideous use of the dead and wounded — keep in mind, in the original novel, the Martians were vampiric (Based on some comically incorrect Victorian ideas about how digestion worked, Wells assumed that a more advanced race would evolve beyond the need to eat and would just inject the blood of lesser creatures, and this would somehow be more efficient), and herded humans for food.

It’s kind of strange, in fact, how much they make of this, since it turns out to be a red herring: about twenty minutes later, they reveal that the missing dead weren’t taken by the Martians at all, but rather simply crushed into the mud: the lice were actually just sweeping the field for spent shell casings and other bits of metal debris, which they recycled to build their war machines.

A kind of parody of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 occurs in December 1913: fighting draws to a halt on Christmas night as the Martians launch a series of “Christmas Stars” into the sky. But this “truce” has a twist reminiscent of the Racnoss Christmas Star from Doctor Who: what the Martians have launched are their fourth kind of war machine, kraken-like submarines that attack the shipping lanes.

In the real world, the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania came close to bringing the US into the war. That’s mirrored here in the sinking of the Aquitania. There’s a bit of a slip though: the historical RMS Aquitania was a sister-ship of the Lusitania, launched in May 1914. The historical Aquitania would serve in both World Wars as a troop transport and hospital ship, and operate in peacetime as a cruise ship until 1950 (It was the longest-serving passenger liner of the 20th century, surpassed only in 2004 by the QE2). But the ship is identified by narration as American (Even though the illustration they show is clearly based on the real ship and bears the historically correct Liverpool marking).

As in real history, half the American public gets all riled up and wants to join the war, but the other half still reckons that this is Europe’s war and none of our damned business, and President Wilson kept the US out of the war. And here, Theodore Roosevelt, the historical equivalent of Harrison Ford in Air Force One, reenters history. In real life, Roosevelt did push for the US to enter the war, and in 1917, he tried to raise up a volunteer army to go fight in Europe. Wilson shut him down and sent the real army instead. Roosevelt acts earlier in the Martian war, and Wilson concedes to public opinion, allowing Roosevelt’s volunteers to ship out in 1914.

Meanwhile, Gus Lafonde, our “angle” on this, had been counting coup. I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand, it has a hint of TV’s usual “Magic Indian” trope: the humble indigenous American who is able to do what the white folks can’t because of his people’s rich heritage, specifically something the white folks in the audience have probably heard of already. On the other hand, by making his contribution tie specifically to his specific cultural background, it does make his presence a part of the narrative and not just “We wanted extra credit for diversity so we spun the Wheel-of-Minorities and it came up ‘Canadian First Nations’.” Sneaking into Martian encampments under cover of night, he steals alien artifacts and makes notes on their writing which, a century later, would lead to its decipherment.

Things start to turn around for the allies when, having discovered the size of the Martian force, they undertake a daring plan to capture a Heron through undermining. The captured Heron reveals the true intent of the lice, as it’s made from locally-sourced materials. We also get to see the physical nature of the aliens. There’s a clear similarity between the alien bodies and the alien war machines. That’s a common theme in adaptations, and is suggested by the book in a limited sort of way (Wells notes that the aliens don’t use pivot joints, and this seems reflective of the fact that their own bodies, being akin to cephalopods, don’t have them). Odd when you think of it, since humans have never built vehicles designed based on the way we look outside of Japanese cartoons. These aliens look like a kind of anencephalic insect. Correspondingly, the Herons, Spiders and Lice alike all have these sort of pillbug-shaped bodies, differing mostly in size and the design of the legs.

The other thing to come out of the capture is where The Great Martian War makes its real contribution of something genuinely new to the “mythology”. Because once the Heron is down, its attendant Spiders surrender. Investigation turns up that the Spiders are unmanned, controlled instead by a “living organic metal” they term “victicite”. The victicite turns out to be not only the key to Martian technology, but seems like it’s actively trying to be helpful, causing allied war techology to advance. Though, just like the first tanks of the real World War I, the technology is unreliable at first and its impact is limited. Though the energy-weapons are effective, they’re prone to exploding, and the “landships” aren’t fast or maneuverable enough to evade Heron counterattacks — they can dispatch a single Heron, but only if it obligingly stands still and lets them. Their first real successful use comes when three ace pilots (among them, László Almásy, the real-life inspiration for “The English Patient”) using experimental energy weapons defeat a Heron that’s wandered across the Channel to London. The pilot survives, but catches glanders from police horses and promptly dies.

Unlike the other interpretations we’ve seen, then, though it’s still a disease that will ultimately bring down the Martians, it won’t be an act of nature, but flat-out biological warfare. Glanders really was used as a bioweapon in World War I along the Eastern Front to infect horses. However, it would take most of a year for the virus to be weaponized, and the Martians are expected to conquer all of Europe before that can happen.

Fortunately for Europe, the Martians inexplicably attack a group of American destroyers.  Or do they? The interviewed historian points out that there’s no hard evidence of Martian presence in the Gulf of Mexico, and notes that Allied U-Boats had the range to have done it themselves, coyly hinting that it may have been a false flag by the Allies to trick the Americans into the war. Woodrow Wilson resigns in disgrace, and for some reason — they talk around it, but it kinda sounds like a coup — this makes Teddy Roosevelt president and the US enters the war proper.

Victicite-based weapons and American reinforcements slow down the Martians enough for the final push, called “Operation Trojan Horse”. To the troops on the line, it sounds very much like it’s going to follow the general outline of the Hundred Days’ Offensive, and desertion starts to become a problem as they expect to be sent on a suicidal final charge against an unstoppable foe. “Many amongst us are tired. To those, I say hold firm. Ultimate victory is within our grasp. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.” Sir Douglas Haig, who in our world became the poster-child for the kind of disengaged aristocratic general who happily sends huge numbers of his own men to their deaths because he thinks of war as a sort of jolly academic exercise rather than a real thing that affects real people, delivers a stirring speech that restores order. The push turns out to be a feint: when the Martians easily rout the charge, they press their advantage, the Herons charging into vast pens of glanders-infected horses up and down the 50-mile line. Within a day or so, all are dead.

Continue reading Deep Ice: The war scare was over (“The Great Martian War 1913-1917”)

I’ll Explain Later…

It is October 31, 1968. I’ll get back to that in a few minutes. Since we’ve slipped back twenty years, we are, of course, talking once again about War of the Worlds. I’ll get back to Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future soon enough, but it’s a new year and I was traveling over the holidays, so I need something easier, and besides, I’m almost out of Captain Power and need to play for time so that I’ll have something else to write about when it’s done.

WWKB-AM 1520 is an ESPN Sports Radio broadcaster out of Buffalo, New York. But prior to 2013, it had been a progressive talk-radio station, before that an oldies station, before that, business talk radio, after sports, after country music, after “hot talk”. But long before that, before ABC was bought by Capital Cities and got out of the radio business, they were WKBW-AM, companion station to Buffalo’s ABC 7. The radio station, originally a religious station (WKBW, later appropriated as “The King of Buffalo”, originally stood for “Well Known Bible Witness”), predated the TV station, but with the arrival of TV and the waning of the golden age of radio, it transitioned into the more modern “top 40” format in the late ’50s, until FM radio pretty much put an end to AM top 40 stations in the late ’70s. During those years, WKBW was one of the power players in east coast pop radio — their high-power transmitter gave them a tremendous range, reportedly getting better reception in Boston than Boston’s own local top 40, was regularly received in Stockholm, and in 1967, a WKBW-exclusive Monkees performance was recorded off-air in Morocco, because mumble mumble ionosphere mumble mumble.

But the reason we care (well, the reason I care) is because in the ’60s, “KB Radio” was well-known for its Halloween specials. In 1968, program director Jefferson Kaye noticed that they were coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of the infamous Mercury Radio Theater production, and thought it would make a good subject for this year’s special. It had been done before, in 1944 in Santiago and 1949 in Quito. These were adaptations of the Howard Koch radioplay, adjusting the names, locations and current events to fit the locality. And that’s how Jeff Kaye’s version started out. But he had a problem: it was 1968, and KB Radio wasn’t in the business of making original drama. WKBW was a prominent station and its stable of talent at the time was certainly top-notch, but they were disk jockeys and news reporters, and that kind of acting just wasn’t their thing. Not to be deterred, Kaye decided to try something different. Something that sounds really risky to me, but it was a gamble that paid off.

They got rid of the script. Instead, Jeff Kaye and director/engineer Danny Kriegler produced an outline of the various events that would make up their Martian invasion, based on the events recounted in the 1938 version, and simply told their radio personalities to deliver it as though it were news. Which sounds on the surface ridiculous: take a bunch of people who aren’t trained as actors and have them do improv? And yet, somehow, miraculously, it works.

Dan Neaverth opens the show with a lengthy disclaimer, for all the good it will do, giving some background on the 1938 broadcast, and explaining how it was made, “With the techniques that were in use at that time,” and that they had therefore decided to approach it, “Not how we can copy it, but how it would be covered by a modern newsroom in this day and age.” He goes on to speak to the quasi-mythical “panic” that the 1938 broadcast generated, and how in those days, radio announcers held a “strange charisma”, that what, “A radio announcer said was true was. The same could be said for newspaper, the only other mass media at the time.” If you read my article on the 1938 War of the Worlds, you’ll know I have my misgivings about that interpretation of events, the way it casts the people of 1938 as credulous dupes like something out of that movie The Invention of Lying. But what Neaverth says next plays more to what I think is the truth of the 1938 panic: “WKBW radio has been promoting the show over the last three weeks, every hour 24 hours a day, you all know what is about to occur. This was not true when the original was broadcast. So place yourself in that position: sit back and pretend that you do not know what is going to happen. And perhaps at the end of this broadcast, you will begin to understand what took place thirty years ago tonight. This is Dan Neaverth speaking.”“So place yourself in that position: sit back and pretend that you do not know what is going to happen. And perhaps at the end of this broadcast, you will begin to understand what took place thirty years ago tonight.” Some lies aren’t meant to deceive; sometimes, it’s an invitation. Thirty years earlier, Orson Welles had invited the nation to come live in a world where the unstoppable invaders at the doorstep were from Mars. In 1968, WKBW invited listeners to try it again.

Joe Downey takes over for the eleven o’clock news. By which I mean, he actually delivers the real eleven o’clock news. So…

It is October 31, 1968. Yesterday, Soyuz 3 returned to Earth, its mission a partial failure after it proved unable to dock with Soyuz 2. Today, President Johnson has announced an end to bombing in North Vietnam“President Johnson has taken a big step on the road toward peace in Vietnam. Tonight, he ordered a total bombing halt in north Vietnam. Johnson also announced that the Paris talks will be expanded to include the Saigon government and the political arm of the Vietcong. Mister Johnson made it clear that productive talks can continue only if Hanoi respects the DMZ and commits to stop shelling South Vietnamese cities.” (The war scare was over), though the peace which seems forthcoming at the time falls through, possibly due to the intervention of presidential hopeful Dick Nixon, who didn’t want Johnson getting the credit for ending the Vietnam war. Davey Jones marries for the first time, to Dixie Linda Haines. The marriage will last until 1975. On TV tonight are new episodes of The Flying Nun, That Girl, Daniel Boone and Ironside. Tomorrow, dutifully marching toward the cancellation NBC has already predestined for it, Star Trek will air “Day of the Dove”, one of the more spectacular and iconic episodes of the third season, and the one that kinda invented the Klingons, since their appearance here is really the first time they act anything close to the characterization of their culture that would be carried forward into the post-TOS era. Here is what Josh Marsfelder has to say, in the hopes that after you’ve read it, you will come back and read this instead of going on with something more interesting in your life. In local news, Governor Nelson “Rocky” Rockefeller ceremonially broke ground on the construction of a six-hundred million dollar State University Of New York at Buffalo campus. (More men were back at work). A raid at a cab company in Lackawanna led to numerous gambling arrests, and then there’s Mars.

Downey reports, with no discernible change in tone from all the real news of the day, observations at the Mount Palomar Observatory of a series of explosions on Mars. “The observatory’s director, Dr. Benjamin Spencer, says that although they appear to have as much energy as hydrogen bomb blast, they are undoubtedly of natural origin. Dr. Spencer describe the explosions as looking like
(quote) Tremendous jets of blue flames shooting out into space (end quote).” The news report is bookended by incredibly condescending commercials for the Peace Corps, suggesting listeners come, “Build something. Like Latin America, Asia and Africa.” After the weather and another Peace Corps ad, Downey hands off to Sandy Beach.

Nowadays, Sandy Beach is a midday right-leaning talk host on Buffalo’s WBEN-AM 930. Back in the ’60s, he was WKBW’s nighttime DJ. The default mode of top-40 disk jockeying has evolved a lot since War of the Worlds, but I think a late ’60s nighttime DJ is pretty close to the platonic form of disk jockey. DJing was a lot more performative back in the 60s. A year or so ago, one of my local stations fired a long-time morning DJ, replacing him with a syndicated show that was fine, but never took off. But the frontman for the new show, early on, talked about the switch a little, and explained that the previous host was a very talented example of an older, more stylized kind of morning DJing, and that they thought that this market was looking for a more modern approach, That approach involved a lot of trying very hard to be “real”, while relating amusing anecdotes from their own lives and stories from social media, taking a lot of listener calls, and being really really judgmental (Seriously. Drive-time DJs are, as a class, possibly the most judgmental human beings imaginable. Though I’ll grant you, I might get a little judgy too if my job was to listen to callers’ stories. Protip: If you feel compelled to call a local radio station to set up an elaborate prank call to determine if your husband is cheating on you, it’s already time to call the lawyer). But here, back in the 60s, it’s much more about sounding really hip, really groovy, really with-it, and really stoned. It was the era of Doctor Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap and Wonderful WINO and even DJs who were not fictional, such as Wolfman Jack and Skinny Bobby Harper.

Sandy Beach starts off his show on “Kaybee Baybee” by speculating that the “blue flames” from Mars might be an impressive marketing stunt by the natural gas industry before playing “Eleanor” by The Turtles, this week’s #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Also in the top ten are “Midnight Confessions”, “Girl Watcher”, and “Harper Valley PTA”, and it kinda seems incomprehensible that all those songs happened at the same time. So too for Jimi Hendrix’s definitive cover of “All Along the Watchtower”, which is spending its last week on the chart at its peak position of #20). Sandy jokes about fortifying his house against trick-or-treaters, then plays a commercial for a local music store, which is selling 8-track players for $49.95, which is a lot of money back now, even if they do throw in the speakers for free.  I bring it up because the One Stop Tape Center of 1130 Main Street is one of the sponsors of War of the Worlds, as they explicitly tell us during the commercial, not that it is going to make a lick of difference. Sandy Beach has an announcement from NASA when he returns from commercial, cautioning space-watch facilities to expect unusual observations and communications difficulty, which he uses as the jumping-off point for a riff about Jeff Kaye’s inter-office memos.

That’s probably the first thing beyond the style that this new adaptation brings to the story over the 1938 broadcast. Keep in mind, that there was no such thing as a space program in 1938. There wasn’t even an Air Force (The Air Force would not become a separate branch from the Army until 1947, coincidentally, right around the time of the Roswell UFO incident…) There was no cold war to speak of. There was no such thing as a nuclear weapon. There wasn’t even such a thing as World War II. Here in 1968, it’s pretty much the height of the space age. I mean, it’s 1968. We’re less than a year from man walking on the moon. The Apollo Command Module has already done its first test flight. By 1938, the closest we’d come to space travel was when Balloonist Jeanette Piccard and her husband, Balloon-designer Jean Piccard (Yeah. His namesake) piloted the airship The Century of Progress to the stratosphere. In 1968, pretty much everyone on Earth who wasn’t too busy with the basic scrabble for mere existence was looking to the heavens, and for the first time in human history, the possibility of travel to one of those big round things in the sky was something scientifically plausible and eminent rather than speculative fiction.

Cream’s “White Room” (Number 15) is interrupted halfway through for a KB News special bulletin “KB Commuter Call: We have a condition red. All available firefighting equipment is rushing to Grand Island where an explosion has set off a series of fires. Traffic on the Grand Island bridges has been halted. All onlookers and motorists are asked to stay clear of the area.”. Sandy doesn’t react immediately to the bulletin, instead taking the piss out of fellow WKBW DJ Stan Roberts. A commercial clearly identifies this as a dramatization of War of the Worlds while advertising a sale on “monster shoes”, a then-popular wide-toed, clunky-heeled style at AM&A’s. After singing along to the KB Radio jingle, Sandy relays a request from the news department for listeners not to call in for information about the Mars explosions. I gather that the performance was prerecorded, so this was the folks at the studio anticipating rather than reacting. Sandy also makes a dig at newsman Henry Brock. I’m starting to get the feeling that most of Sandy Beach’s shtick is based around insulting his coworkers.

Right after the really good two and a half minutes of “Hey Jude“, this week’s Billboard #1, before the interminable 800 minutes of “Na na-na na-na-na na”s, KB Total News breaks in again to attribute the earlier fires on Grand Island to a meteor impact. “KB Total News Bulletin: It’s been reported that a large meteor has smashed into the ground along the East River Road on Grand Island setting off a series of fires. Several lives have been lost. KB Total News director Don Lancer on the way to the scene. Repeating: A large meteor is reported to have smashed into the ground on Grand Island, killing several people and touching off a series of fires. This has been a KB Total News Bulletin. Full details at KB Total News straight down the line on the half-hour” They’re going to spend a lot of time on the fire. I imagine that part was easier for them to perform, since, y’know, WKBW’s news reporters had probably covered those before. Unlike in 1938, this version of the story puts the initial meteor strike in a populated area. I think this is the only adaptation that makes that decision, and, again, qualifying it with the fact that they keep broadcasting disclaimers, I think that’s one of the things that sells this version. They manage to escalate the tension before introducing the fantastical elements. If you were actually seriously trying to hoax people, this is how you’d do it: you’re already tense and already invested. You’re not in the mental mode to go, “Oh, this is just a dramatic presentation” because you’ve already started accepting what you’re hearing as true before you had to make the big commitment to believe in an alien invasion.

Another commercial for “Monster Shoes” is told in the form of a Halloween narrative, about a witch cursing some shoes, only to have her plot foiled when the misshapen shoes proved popular with the teens. Sandy Beach asks listeners to neither drive out to Grand Island nor call the WKBW newsroom. Before he can play another record, newsman Henry Brock repeats pretty much the same news we just heard, and while Sandy gets a chance to let Buffy St. Marie sing a few bars of “I’m gonna be a country girl again,” (which didn’t chart until 1971, and even then, only broke the top 40 in the UK) before Don Lancer, who is stuck in traffic, calls in from the field.

Jeff Kaye opens up the WKBW news room, and Sandy Beach gives one last recap of the story before tossing to the newsroom. Even the formidable KB Total News Theme Song doesn’t buy Jeff enough time to get everyone set up in the newsroom, and he’s left having to tell Joe Downey on-the-air that his microphone is hot. Downey reminds us of the what and where, adding the new information that telephones to Grand Island are down and other communications are poor. Henry Brock is trying to get a report from the Sheriff’s office — Downey actually interrupts himself to ask Henry if he’s gotten through yet. He hasn’t, and Downey is left pretty much just stalling until he does. The deputy they finally get hold of confirms multiple deaths and fires, but can’t confirm a body count. He mentions a military presence on the scene, confirms three power outages, but can’t speak to looting. In a weird technicality, Joe Downey wasn’t able to hear the report from the Sheriff’s office, and has to ask Brock for a recap.

Before he gets very far, though, Jim Fagan calls in from the field. He’d been interviewing a Dr. Moore from Niagra University about the Martian explosions, and conscripted him to come have a look at the meteor. That would make Moore and Fagan this production’s equivalents of Carl Phillips and Professor Pierson, though the roles are considerably different here. Moore is a lot closer to Oglvy from the original book, and the reporter’s role is spread out across the whole KB News team.

Doctor Moore is a bit of an odd character. In his very first line, he seems oddly fixated on Fagan’s choice of words, and wants to make sure to clarify that the explosions on Mars could not possibly be hydrogen bombs (Fagan had called it a “Hydrogen bomb-intensity explosion”). He denies that the impact on Grand Island could be an “extraterrestrial body”, theorizing instead that it is a meteor. Fagan: Doctor Moore, can you tell us if that was an extraterrestrial body that landed on the island?

Moore: I would think not, sir, at the moment. As I say, I have not as yet seen what has happened on the island. We’re going to be getting there in a few minutes, but certainly, it’s possible. But I would doubt it. That would be just my candid opinion before I have seen it. That’s kind of weird and awkward, firstly because if comes off like Moore thinks meteors are terrestrial in origin, and secondly because his denial is kind of limp — no “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” rather a kind of cautious reluctance to commit. He’s also a bit cautious about pronouncing it a meteor, though he does consider it likely, as, “There are many meteors that have landed on various parts of the Earth in the past many years.”

Moore is far and away the worst part of this so far, offering really only one useful comment (he proposes that it might actually be multiple meteors given the scope of the damage). But before you judge too harshly, consider the context. In the scope of this presentation, I think you can redeem the Moore character by interpreting him as a professor who is crap at giving interviews.  It would have sold it, in my opinion, if Fagan had expressed some chagrin at Moore’s fumbling, though that probably would have seemed unprofessional.

Hank and Jim exchange traffic information from their respective locations on the East River Road and the Robert Moses Expressway south of Niagra Falls. Unconfirmed reports claim Governor Rockefeller has mobilized the national guard. Irv Weinstein, news director at WKBW’s  TV counterpart and coiner of the phrase “It’s eleven o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”, wants to coordinate the TV news team and commandeers Henry Brock’s newscast for a moment, by which time Don Lancer has finally made it to the crash site.

Lancer interviews a lineman, who reports power outages on streets that suggest that the impact site is right around here, though Jim Fagan, having approached from the other direction, sees leveled houses from two and a half miles away on Whitehaven Road. Fagan is close enough to see the crater, while Don Lancer manages to get a look inside it. Here, about thirty-six minutes into the broadcast, is where things finally take the turn we’ve been waiting for: It’s not a meteor. “It’s not– It’s not a meteor, Henry. I’m standing on the edge of the crater, and I can look right down into it. There’s clouds of white-hot steam rising from the face of what looks like some kind of metallic cylindrical object. It’s a very large object that’s lying in the bottom of this crater. Thus far, there’s been no one around that I’ve been able to talk to to find out what it might be. It’s hot. Intense heat around this crater at the present moment, and I just don’t — I can’t describe it all that well.” There’s a sort of two-tone high-pitched whine coming from the crater too, and boy do I wish there weren’t, because it’s awful to listen to and makes the dialogue hard to make out. Don’s signal crackles and drops out suddenly just as he’s being yelled at by the authorities to move back.

As they struggle to get hold of Don or Jim, you can hear some desperation from the newsroom, and Jeff Kaye, in the background, orders them to play a commercial to cover the lack of information. It’s the eight-track player again, along with another disclaimer no one is listening to. Jim Fagan, at the opposite side of the crater, reports having seen Don Lancer lose his footing and fall into the crater, though he doesn’t seem badly hurt. Since this is 1968 and not 1938, Henry Brock posits the obvious hypothesis that the thing in the crater is space debris — again history rears its head, because, as I mentioned, a Soyuz capsule literally just returned to Earth. The fact that it bears no markings, appears to be intact, and is making that terrible sound weighs against that idea, but no one’s sure.

Continue reading Deep Ice: One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago (Jeff Kaye’s War of the Worlds)

I’ll Explain Later…

I don’t even know how to begin. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not even sure this exists. Seriously. Google tells me nothing (You get hits, but they lead mostly to stubs, someone’s video production class project, or archives of a forum post from someone preemptively clarifying that they weren’t talking about that one. The one they were thinking of is Without Warning). IMDB tells me nothing. There’s no copyright date. There’s not even a title card. If it weren’t for the Netflix listing on it, I’d probably have concluded that I’d imagined the whole thing[permalink anchor=”coda” text=”*”].

It doesn’t really feel like a movie. I guess if I had to nail down what it feels like, I’d say at the most a DVD Bonus Feature. No, not even that. You know what this feels like? You know how sometimes in movies, there will be a TV on in the background showing something related to the main narrative to help sell the idea that these events are really happening and having an effect on the world? Like when Steve Bacic briefly played The Beast in X2: X-Men United, or when Larry King plays Larry King in pretty much any movie. It feels like that. Like they filmed this to be on in the background of some other movie, but for no clear reason — maybe they needed lots of spare footage for the editors or something — decided to film a whole movie’s worth of footage. Director Rod Pyle is also credited with an episode of UFO Files about The War of the Worlds dating from around the same time, and a History Channel documentary the following year, so I suppose it’s possible that this was, like, some kind of outgrowth of that? I mean, this movie does not feel quite intentional. Can you make a movie by accident?

The thing we’re talking about today is the 2005 film adaptation of The War of the Worlds. No, not that one. No, not that one either. No, not even that one. Starting to get the feeling that something was Up in 2005? This one is actually, when you get down to it, more an adaptation of the 1938 radio play: it’s presented as a newscast from a presumably small California station, but unlike Invasion from Mars, they maintain the artifice for the entire running length.

Frankly, we’re already in trouble here. I more often hang out back in 1987 where this isn’t so much of a big deal, but we’re in 2005. The film is entirely in 4×3, which is period-accurate; few news programs shifted to 16×9 before 2006, and it was still the most common format for local news until at least 2009, but as early as the late ’90s, local news had started shooting for a kind of ersatz “big-budget” look. When my local UPN affiliate started up in the mid-90s, one of their gimmicks was that the newscasters did the 10 o’clock news in formalwear. Your typical 2005 local newscast may not have been filmed in High Definition, but you’d typically expect professional-grade lighting and camerawork, and an actual set, usually consisting of a big wood desk and a matte painting skyline. You’d also expect intertitles and transitions, and since we’re after September, 2001, you’d expect the ubiquitous news crawl. Instead we get this. A pair of yoyos in front a greenscreen whose only purpose is to show a generic blue pattern with an occasional globe. I mean, for all the good it does, they could have filmed it in front of a sheet. I mean, the did film it in front of a sheet. But they could have used a blue one instead of filming in front of a green sheet and turning it blue in post. It isn’t shot like news, but it also isn’t shot like a film. I don’t know. What it doesn’t at all feel is modern. Not even modern-cheap. Not even retro-cheap. This feels like it was made by a local, unaffiliated station in the 1980s. And not even as news, really. I don’t know. I don’t have words. The closest thing I can think of is the little five-minute news and financial digests the local PBS station would put on between British imports to make the next program start on the half-hour twenty-five years ago, but even that had a distinctly different texture to it. And, y’know, those highly identifiable Video Toaster effects. Without Warning managed to get the texture right ten years earlier (The only thing I really recall finding distinctly wrong in Without Warning was the “We lost the feed from the field correspondent and cut to static” bits, because as it turns out, faking realistic static-snow was bizarrely difficult using 1990s video technology).

But I won’t trash it too much. I mean, I’ve watched enough terrible movies to identify the most basic levels of filmmaking competence. It’s not like it was shot on a VHS Handicam or anything. The audio quality is good (except when there’s an in-story reason for it not to be), and while the visual texture and style fails to look like the thing it’s supposed to be, it does look like something. Things are in focus. The actors don’t mumble. No one gets attacked by an animated GIF of a bird. I’m saying that Rod Pyle is better at making movies than James Nguyen or Scott Shaw, at least insofar as he seems to have a basic grasp of how the general concept of what you should end up with when you are done making a movie and which end of the camera is which. I mean, he’s no Tommy Wiseau, but still.

It’s not good, is what I’m getting at. It’s watchable, but only just. I mean, it’s not physically painful to watch. We’ll be getting most of our story from these two Channel 3 news anchors, Dave Douglas and Cheryl Storm (Credit where it’s due. That is a fantastic local news anchor name). Insofar as this narrative has a protagonist, Gideon Emery’s Dave is it. And that’s a real shame for multiple reasons, the first of which is that he’s terrible. That’s odd, since I looked him up on IMDb, and out of all the cast, he’s the one with an actual resume, having appeared in the modern Teen Wolf series, and having a long history as a video game voice actor, playing such iconic characters as John Connor and Trevor Belmont. But calling him wooden would be an insult to marionettes. I get what he’s going for, the old-fashioned hardcore-staid network newscaster who has to maintain utter unflappability. But he just can’t carry it off: rather than stoic, he seems unengaged. If you look back at Orson Welles’s radio play, the reporters there are all stoic and go out of their way not to convey emotion, but they still manage to convey intensity. The way they speed up or slow down, little catches in their voices, all work together to convey that this is SRS BSNS. Dave doesn’t have the gravitas for what he’s attempting. Instead of stoic, he comes off like he doesn’t appreciate the seriousness of what he’s reporting. And not even a “This is too big for me to process,” lack-of-seriousness; it’s more like he just doesn’t care. It’s the kind of disingenuous, “Thanks, Bob. And now, over to Mike for the weather,” kind of tone you’d expect if he were reporting on some fluff local-interest story that wasn’t even especially cute or heartbreaking. It’s almost parody, like a bored newsman trying and failing to show enthusiasm for the one hundred and thirtieth “Beloved family pet rescued from dangerous situation” story — parody, because in my experience, even very seasoned newscasters can usually manage to whip up some realistic “Aww, cute kitty,” or at least a sense of novelty at getting to report on something pleasant for once.

Caroline Do’s Cheryl is much the same. While I call Dave the lead character, she gets almost as much screen time and dialogue. I think. I’m not going to watch this whole movie again with a stopwatch to compare their relative number of lines. But as the story goes on, I think the direction shows a mild preference for him over her, and she gets her One Big Emotional Line and exits the story a few minutes before him. I actually think she’s a little better on the acting front too, as she’s clearly playing a slightly different archetype, a female newscaster who’s still staid and stoic and serious, but is allowed to show a bit more emotion. In a sense, I think one of the roles of the specifically female newscaster in this setting is to help make the audience care about the news in a way the traditional male newscaster doesn’t (I mean, Walter Cronkite could make you care about paint drying, but he was, to be blunt, really fucking good at his job). It’s a kind of ugly and sexist trope, but it’s had the net effect of putting a lot more female professionals in television news roles so I’ll let people who are better qualified than I am complain about it.

After approximately five seconds of them setting up the idea of a “meteor” strike in Mojave the previous weekend, they toss to our third character, Tiffany Heinsbocker in the field. Bree Pavey is far and away the best actor in this thing, and it’s weird that she’s apparently never done anything else (There’s an actress of the same name in IMDb, but she doesn’t look to be the same person) except for a web-based Feng Shui series for a content portal site that looks like its database crashed some time ago. She gets top billing in the credits, so maybe she is meant to be the lead, but her scenes, while the best thing in here, make up a comparatively small part of the narrative, such as it is. She reports on the gathering excitement surrounding the meteor crash, which is demonstrated by… The camera passing over a mountain, and a clip of some boy scouts running a lemonade stand. And at this point, you pretty much know what the deal is going to be with this movie. They’re going to combine “Tell, don’t show” with “Also none of these people are ever going to get a clear understanding of what’s going on”. We’re in for fifty-one minutes of being shown mostly nothing while mediocre actors deliberately avoid telling us what the hell is going on. This is practically an anti-movie. Tiffany interviews a bored child who would rather be watching TV. You and me both, kid.

But you know what? She sells it. I’m willing to believe, at least this far, that I’m watching a field reporter for a small TV station, who knows this story is big, but doesn’t have the access to actually report anything meaningful, and the chagrin in her voice when, for want of anything better to do, she ends up pestering a boy scout, seems legit.  She does assure us that the crash site is an impressive sight to behold “even from here”, though her cameraman dutifully shows us nothing that could even remotely be described as “interesting”.

We get a few homages to other adaptations of the story here too: the bored boy scout’s name is “Grover”, an allusion to Grover’s Field, the landing site in Orson Welles’s 1938 version. Scientists studying the meteor are identified as being from the fictional “Pacific Tech”, and are led by “Clayton Fielding”, references to Doctor Clayton Forrester, the hero of the 1953 George Pal film. She interviews Fielding, who is no help at all: he tells us the same thing that Tiffany has already told us twice (and, for that matter, that Clayton Forrester told us in 1953 and Richard Pearson told us in 1938): the meteor is hollow. He goes on to tell us, again twice that meteors normally are solid metal or stone. Tiffany does throw out the ET question, which I think is a good move: I imagine there was a strong temptation to have everyone play coy about that, the same way that no one in a zombie movie has ever heard of zombies, and frankly, I’d find it interminable if someone didn’t come right out with, “Hey, is this aliens?” They’re not going to do anything with it, but at least it’s there. Fielding misses the obvious response, of course, since this movie never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. He merely laughs the idea off rather than saying that the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one (they say).

Tiffany tosses back to Dave, and then I guess we cut to commercial.

After the commercial, Dave tosses back to Tiffany, who’s now standing beside a police truck and wearing Chekov’s radiation badge, though I ought to ask someone with working color-vision what it looks like, because I am utterly underwhelmed by how the green/red distinction comes out on-screen. She manages to score an interview with a General Guerro, who, in accordance with how this thing is going, pretty much just repeats what Tiffany has already told us: the National Guard has sent some folks up into the pit, they may need to push the reporters and onlookers back soon, and there’s been “some signs of activity” near the meteor. He says this is “just routine,” a phrase which, for some reason, really enchants my son. He seems a little flustered and a little incredulous, at first like he doesn’t believe the words that are coming out of his mouth. When Tiffany presses him to elaborate on the alleged “activity”, he suddenly gets evasive, but it’s the kind of evasiveness I’d associate less with “He knows something and isn’t telling,” and more with “He’s lost the next page in the script.” All the same, if they actually did something with this, it could really salvage the movie, playing up the idea of the people in power having something to hide. But that’s a very hard angle to sell without dropping the kayfaybe and stepping outside the “Breaking News” artifice, and to this movie’s credit, they are 110% committed to this narrative frame. That’s sixty percent more than Orson Welles was, keep in mind.

The general is called away with some news that visibly troubles him, and the police relocate Tiffany, forcing her to toss back to Dave and Cheryl, who share a good-natured forced chuckle over the idea of it being aliens. In a not-very-convincing attempt to make it seem more like a regular newscast and not The Plot Development Channel, Dave drops a news item about the President dismissing the latest Kyoto accord as “hogwash” and commissioning oil drilling in Yosemite. Cheryl tries to impersonate a human being by suggesting that will, “Teach those bears a lesson,” and Dave is clearly kind of scandalized by the statement. His lips say, “Yes, I guess it will, Cheryl,” but his head nod says, “What the fuck are you thinking? It’s a national treasure!”

After another ident break, we’re treated to breaking news of a disaster near Malibu. Well, sorta. We slip into “Don’t show, don’t tell” mode for a bit as instead of actually telling us about the disaster, Cheryl gives us a stilted, poorly-phrased recap of “recent events”, which consists of some new information: several large meteors fell to Earth “last week” in an annual meteor shower (She presents the fact that it’s a regular annual meteor shower as though this too is new information to the audience), one off the coast near Malibu, one in Mojave, “two in Europe and Africa”, with two unconfirmed in Russia and a third unconfirmed in the Sierra Nevadas. Which seems like the Martians have a disproportionate interest in the greater Los Angeles area. Fair enough, I guess, since Angel Grove got invaded by aliens pretty much once a week from 1992 to 1998. Cheryl follows this new information up with stuff we’ve been told multiple times: the meteors are hollow, radioactive, and magnetic. “Beyond that, we know nothing.” Nothing at all, beyond the three minute recap we were just subjected to.

The invisible earpiece Dave is wearing informs him about a plane crash, though there’s, “No reason to suspect terrorism.” We finally get to the “disaster in Malibu” when Dave hands off to the fourth member of their news-almost-reporting team, Harvey Levelle (Wayne Brian). Harvey going for a deliberately hateable sort of guy, over-dressed, over-made-up, oozing a strong “Used Car Salesman” vibe, with his hair so shellacked that he’s halfway to looking like Max Headroom. He shows us the seen of carnage and devastation in Malibu. Or rather, doesn’t, since he just shows us a perfectly ordinary stretch of Pacific coast. Harvey explains, smugly (Why smug? I have no fucking clue), that “something” rose up out of the water and walked off down Pacific Coast Highway.

What? We’re not going to see it. We’re not going to get a description (Not much of one, anyway). Of course not. Don’t show, don’t tell. Harvey uses an OpenGL cube transition to show us a clip of an interview with a local, who explains that, mere minutes ago, a wall of water rose up over this bone-dry stretch of coastline as something “Like a crane. A big mechanical crane. Like a monster,” rose out of the water. Harvey challenges him on the matter of it being a mechanical crane with the most urgency and passion anyone has, in the history of the world, ever asked someone if something was a mechanical crane. Maybe he’s supposed to be challenging someone he thinks is unhinged, but it doesn’t quite come off. The interviewee storms off in a panic, and present-Harvey explains that paramedics took him off for “observation”.

Now, of course, a lot can change in nine years. But even in 2005, it kinda beggars the imagination to suppose that a giant crane-monster capable of generating a tsunami could come ashore in Malibu without anyone snapping a grainy cellphone picture of it. The lack of one does kind of justify Harvey being kind of smug and incredulous. Assuming that’s what he’s going for and not just “I’m a giant dickbag”. He tosses over to their traffic reporter, Lisa Elfman, who reports from her traffic helicopter as she watches some stock footage of an aircraft carrier pulling up to the coast. I will note that your typical news helicopter has a range of about 300 nautical miles and a top speed around 100 knots. I know very little about aircraft carriers, but I am fairly sure that one of the advantages of having a giant honking boat that can launch airplanes is that you do not have to get all that close to the thing you want to blow up, so it kinda strikes me as unlikely that a traffic copter would just happen upon them.

When Harvey finally kicks it back to Dave and Cheryl, needing time to recharge the batteries in his smarm, Dave tries to crack wise about the possibility of someone catching “California’s Nessie” on film. Cheryl just sort of sits there with a look of dull surprise, presumably because hearing Dave make light of the situation made her realize how flat her grizzly bear joke fell.

She receives a telepathic message that the airplane crash from the last scene was actually two plane crashes, which seems like kind of a big mistake to make. Dave responds by declaring it to be Friday night, and kicking it over to some stock footage of parked airplanes and a faceless voice explaining how all the flights out of LAX are grounded, and travelers should call to reschedule. Dave makes one last noble stab at passing for human by trying to lighten the mood by declaring it a zoo at the airport, then seamlessly transitions to telling us that Homeland Security has raised the threat level to “Tell Your Wife You Love Her NOW“ red.

Tiffany calls Dave on his invisible earphone, and he kicks over to her, still wearing same red outfit and radiation badge from her last appearance, which rules out the possibility of there being large time gaps when they go to commercial. She’s relocated to firemen training on a condemned motel that’s been partially demolished, which will be playing the role of the extreme devastation at an apartment complex. She has to shout at her cameraman not to film the dead bodies that aren’t there, because it’s tasteless and against this film’s stylistic conceit of never ever showing us anything interesting.

Back at the studio, Dave confirms that the two crashed planes belonged to Universal Airlines and Western Pacific. I can’t say I’m surprised that the planes that crashed when they were being flown by, respectively,  an airline that hasn’t existed since 1972 and a railroad. He’s interrupted by a press release from an FAA director, who tells us all the things we’ve just heard about a dozen times, but throws in the fact that an EMP was detected near both crash sites. Dave asks Cheryl if there’s any more news, and she reminds us for about the fifth time that there are still no survivors.

We toss back to Tiffany, who’s in Mojave again. She looks momentarily alarmed when we cut to her, presumably because she’s trying to work out how she managed to teleport the thirty miles from Palmdale to Mojave in the past two minutes. She reconciles the paradox by assuming she’d never left, and just continues as though she’s simply reporting in after having been moved back from the meteor impact crater again. She dutifully blames the airplane sounds which keep rendering her audio inaudible on B-1 and B-2 bombers flying to the impact site. In a rare attempt to actually show us something, Tiffany has her cameraman do the world’s least convincing transition, sweeping the camera upward as they do a quick dissolve to some stock footage of three F-14s, that Tiffany thinks are all one plane. While teleporting back to Mojave, she also had time to interview an official, who, off the record, gave her the news tidbit that there was “some kind of activity” in the pit. This is about the fourth time they’ve acted as if declaring that “something happened” without further elaboration is actually news.

While Tiffany is relocated again, Harvey treats us to some stock footage of Marines on training exercises, pretending that it’s relevant. We rejoin Tiffany about five feet to the left, having put her hair up. She’s finally willing to commit to Shit Going Down now, as she’s gotten confirmation that “something” (Now that we’re taking things seriously, no one’s going to come right out and call them aliens until near the end) in the pit attacked the military, prompting the bombing, and now more soldiers are being trooped in, some, Tiffany confesses (as some soldiers just kind of run across the desert behind her), just kind of running across the desert.

We get a press conference from a White House Press Secretary who’s really poorly composited in front of a literal blank blue curtain with the White House seal floating above him. They seriously couldn’t just film him in front of an actual blue curtain and had to greenscreen him there? And I mean, this is seriously bad compositing, we’re talking early 1970s Doctor Who-bad. The only thing he tells us that we didn’t already know is that a meteor landed on the east coast near Grover’s Mills. Cheryl comments that the evacuations are “surely a surprise,” a weird little turn of phrase.

Harvey breaks his smug the next time they throw to him, when the camera shakes very gently from an imaginary explosion, but recovers quickly and still manages to sound incredulous about reports of “giant robots” leaving “death and destruction” even as we continue to hear the sounds of fighter craft and shelling. Dave kind of smirks at this report and cautions the viewers that Harvey was indulging in “speculation”. Dave, Cheryl and Harvey all seem to vacillate from scene to scene and even line to line on just how seriously they’re taking this. I mean, at this stage, it’s not like there’s any actual doubt that the military is engaged in multiple attacks on something in California. Sure, maybe you don’t believe it’s giant alien robots, but I think a reaction of “Ha ha ha, how fanciful!” is more than a little out-of-line. I mean, at this point, what would be a reasonable explanation? If anything, “It’s terrorists. Who can call down meteor strikes,” seems even more pants-crapping than “It’s aliens.”

The lone exception to this is Tiffany, the only one who seems to consistently take things progressively more and more seriously as events unfold. She tries to get some information out of General Guerro, but he brushes her off, and her frustration looks genuine. That said, as before, she seems to be obsessing a bit with the military-porn details. She begs one question out of the general, and it’s to ask what kind of munitions the bombers were carrying. I mean, yeah, it would indeed be big news if came down to nukes, but you know what question has neither been asked nor answered yet? What the fuck is the thing in the pit?

Suddenly, the army is pulling back and Tiffany reports that she’s been ordered to evacuate just before an explosion throws her to the ground and they lose the feed. Though to spare the audience from experiencing any actual suspense, they get it right back before Tiffany can even finish buttoning up her shirt. Which she’d unbuttoned for some reason. She must have fallen on some ketchup packets or something because her temple and eyebrow are dotted with it.

This is like the one unqualified good scene in the whole thing. Tiffany is shaken. She’s confused. She’s scared. She doesn’t know what the explosion was. And as she buttons her jacket, she looks at her badge.

And she says nothing. Because there aren’t any words. They’re never going to say it, never acknowledge it. But she just said she didn’t know what that explosion was, and then she looked down and saw that she’d been exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation. Her voice catches as she relates that the fleeing soldiers are shouting that “It’s coming”. And then she freaking legs it.

Unfortunately, this development takes Tiffany out of the narrative for a few minutes, so we’re stuck with the yo-yos back in the studio. The last of our yo-yos to be introduced is Will Knight, channel 3’s military consultant. He’s not great, but I think he works a good bit better than the others. He comes off as someone who doesn’t really have any practical newscasting experience, but is rather just a retired soldier who happened into this job because he knew someone. He has a fairly commanding presence, but not one that’s honed to the screen. He reports on military movements in Russia in a scene that goes on far too long before new satellite photos come in revealing really fake-looking fifty-mile-wide clouds over the meteor impact sites which Will identifies as nuclear explosions. Again, there’s a bit of obsession with the minutiae of military operations, with Dave’s first thought being to ask Will for an estimate of the size of the nuclear warheads (ten to twenty megatons, “as big as they come”), rather than, y’know, “Holy shit, Russia just nuked itself!” They blame the EMP of the detonations for knocking out satellites in the area, to excuse them not having to report any more news from Russia.

They get a videophone call from their UK field correspondant (Because channel 3 has one of those), who reports on an attack she doesn’t have any real information about in Woking, the site of the first Martian attack in the original novel. Just like every other piece of this thing, they’re interested in talking about the military response, about the fires, about the evacutions, but the reports all seem singularly uninterested in actually getting any information about what’s going on. Yes, I understand the idea that no one’s getting close enough to report back on the nature of the attackers, but the newscasters don’t even bother to ask most of the time, and even seem dismissive of any attempt to bring the subject around to the, y’know, big mechanical death machines stalking the countryside.

When we finally get back to Tiffany, she’s managed to regain most of her composure and wiped most of the ketchup off her forehead. She doesn’t really know anything new, but it feels really legit: in the heat of the moment, she does panic and lose her composure, but she recovers quickly. Harvey, on the other hand, is back to smarmy. He talks over some forest fire stock footage, again, more concerned with stuff like the damage the fire is causing than the whole “Aliens are invading” angle, before he’s forced to relocate because of encroaching smoke.

I think I get the gist of what they’re going for here; they’re harkening back to the endless newsgasm after the 9/11 attacks, where newscasters didn’t know anything but felt compelled to keep newsing at us as hard as they could anyway. But at least then, they were trying to get us some news about what had happened and why. Also, it didn’t actually take that long for us to get the basic gist of what had happened. This is… It’s like if the news channels on 9/11 were unable to determine that airplanes had been involved. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m talking out my ass here, and the news coverage really was this random, minutiae-obsessed and big-picture-blind, and it just seems different now because of the decade of time in the middle. But one thing I’m dead sure of is that the initial coverage actually had something to show us. Over and over again. A continuous loop of disaster-porn that lasted for days, and talking heads threatening disproportionate retaliation and calling for undesirables to be rounded up.

The press secretary cuts in again to tell us… Nothing new. They cut over to Tiffany, who contradicts the press secretary on one point: she reports that the military is pulling back, not standing their ground as he’d claimed. Like Harvey, she’s been cautioned about smoke as well, and is preparing to head for the hills. Dave takes over when Tiffany starts having trouble with her link-up, and then there’s an odd visual glitch.

We’ll be seeing it again later. They get Tiffany back, and she explains that their truck has died, leaving them stranded until the military can give them a lift. Though she’s regained most of her compsure, she’s started having trouble with her words, flubbing lines with increasing frequency. It’s a surprisingly realistic depiction of a reporter struggling to keep it together under stress. She comes closer to cracking when she sees soldiers in the distance donning biowarfare suits as thick black smoke rolls across the battlefield, and her expression is good enough that I almost forget to be annoyed that her cameraman doesn’t just turn the camera to the left and show us this.

When they lose Tiffany’s signal, Will gets a chance to report on some troop movements, but Tiffany’s intrepid cameraman has somehow found a payphone out in the desert in 2005, allowing her to return via low-resolution videophone, her face now partially hidden by a really flat-looking post-production smoke effect. As the gunfire dies down, Tiffany starts to panic again while she struggles to put on a gas mask, then finally falls, choking, out of frame. Her intrepid cameraman manages to hold the camera stock-still as he too presumably succumbs to the black smoke and dies, moving, like a weeping angel, only during a brief moment when the camera feed is replaced by static, to rest at an angle on the ground for a brief shot of Tiffany’s limp body. It’s really all downhill from here, folks, because we’ve got another twelve minutes or so, but they’ve killed off the most interesting and dynamic character in this thing[permalink text=”*” anchor=”ordidthey”].

After a moment of confusion, Dave asks Will if he’s still there. This will be hilarious in a few minutes, and Will seems pissed off by the question. Cheryl interrupts their speculation on the nature of the black smoke with an awkward “Hold it guys!” followed by about a second of silence while the camera gets its act together and cuts to her, still frozen in a hands-out “wait a second” gesture. She’s telepathically intuited that they have audio of a 911 call, wherein a boy named Connor utterly fails to realistically portray a child panicking over his dead parents in a smoke-filled house. He announces that something is at the door, then screams, “It burns! It burns! Mommy!” The scene would be chilling if it had felt anything like genuine. I know from the credits that it actually is a child actor (the same one who played the bored boy scout), but if I didn’t know that, I’d swear it was an adult adopting a fake child voice. I’ve heard panicked 911 calls from children whose parents are in danger. The fact that I just thought about one is probably going to ruin my night’s sleep. This is not convincing.

A shellshocked Cheryl explains that hundreds of similar calls have been recorded. One last time, we throw to Harvey via videophone, who smarms insincere concern for Tiffany. Harvey’s relocated to somewhere “far from the battle zone” but still “inside the battle perimeter,” and is the first person to identify the source of the attacks with something as specific as “Strange invaders”, and a minute later, finally, as “aliens”. He too is overcome by the smoke, using his last few minutes to wax eloquent about the “brave, brave troops,” and, “The finest America has to offer.” We get another one of those strange visual glitches.

The cat being out of the bag, everyone can start calling them aliens. Dave tries to calm the audience, while Will has somehow gotten in touch with “sources inside the military” to learn that the alien war machines can generate EMPs, the source of the various transmission glitches and lost connections. A soldier who’s fled the front lines calls the station and finally Dave asks someone about the nature of the invaders. According to Private Washington, they’re, “Huge. Horrible. They must be at least 200 feet tall.” He insists that the military can’t hold the line or repel the invaders, outraging Will, who is confident otherwise. A presumed alien advance kills Private Washington, still on the line, and Cheryl finally loses it and simply runs off-stage.

Dave, now pretty shellshocked himself, looks to Will for hope. Will angrily insists that the command must still have things in hand. A piss-poor George Bush impersonator (the same actor who’d previously played the press secretary) delivers a message of hope and no information from his undisclosed location, but his message is cut off with another video glitch. Dave’s chyron (The title graphic displayed in the lower third of the screen, named for the maker of a popular 1970s digital character generator) now reads, “Breaking news: Earth invaded by aliens”, and there’s some trouble even with the studio signal now, as Dave’s color balance is all wrong.

He tries to regain his composure, but loses it again when the building shakes and his greenscreen gives out. Will, who we finally now see is literally sitting next to Dave and has been the whole time, identifies the explosion as a nuclear detonation. He gets his PA to summon a traffic map, showing… Traffic. Another building-shake prompts Will to announce, “They’re here, Dave.”

Dave once again uselessly asks, “Are you still here?” to Will, and then, “Is there anything we should do?”

Will is now loading a handgun, and explains, “No. Just try to go with dignity. It’s them. Just breathe, Dave. Nothing anyone can do now.” As smoke starts to fill the studio, Will puts the gun to his temple and we cut back to Dave as a very muted gunshot sound effect plays. Dave shouts, “Oh God! It burns! It burns!” as the studio gives way to the movie’s money-shot:

Our one and only look at the aliens, before the screen changes to what we should probably now realize is a Martian channel ident card (Which it now occurs to me looks kinda like a pie. Specifically, this pie.), then to a test pattern, and finally an old fashioned CRT-winking-off effect.

This movie is weird. It’s wrong in so many ways. It’s probably on-paper the worst adaptation of The War of the Worlds I’ve ever seen (though I reserve the right to revise that judgment very shortly).  And yet it has a certain charm and earnestness to it. Bree Pavey’s Tiffany Heinsbocker is an absolute delight. Will Knight’s final breakdown is painfully cliche, but he carries it off well. And even Dave, who is generally terrible, right at the end, gets a fairly good scene where he has to keep ordering himself to keep it together.

Most of the cast are just terribly misjudged in their performance. They never seen serious at the right time, or try to lighten the mood at the right time, or react with the proper amount of either gravitas or horror in response to things. And the whole character of Harvey is utterly misguided. I think maybe they were going for a kind of self-aggrandizing hotshot who’s trying to get himself noticed for bigger things, but after maybe one scene of him, he’s utterly inappropriate. The absolute worst is his reaction to Tiffany’s death, which just seems so plastic and rehearsed that I’d be rooting for him to die, except that his death ends up kinda upstaging Tiffany’s.

This might be the first time that I’ve found myself complaining about an independent film for being too unambitious. We get one CGI FX shot at the very end, and a few seconds of military stock footage a few more seconds of forest fire stock footage, and one photoshop smoke effect, and the rest of the time, it’s just people telling us, in not very much detail, about destruction that we either can’t see, or which contradicts what we can see.

The real problem here is with the narrative itself. Like, you notice what’s missing from this? The bit at the end where the Martians all keel over from common Earth-bacteria. Which is close to being the whole thematic punch line of the story, but here it’s just absent. The bulk of the narrative is spent with our news reporters reporting over and over again that they don’t actually know anything. Even leaving aside the idea that they’d be reluctant to declare the invaders to be extraterrestrial (which is defensible, but even so, in the real world, the news would have been dominated by speculation, with talking heads shouting why is obviously was or was not aliens. And Fox News “Just asking questions” whether or not Obama might secretly be an alien himself), they story here is that the US Military is engaged in maneuvers against multiple enemy targets on American soil, and yet the reporters are coy even about that. It’s all about them not having much information, and there being “unconfirmed reports” of “activity”. They put off actually saying “We are under attack by a hostile force” for just as long as they put off saying “It’s invaders from Mars,” and they try to keep playing as “The reporters don’t realize that these events are related and add up to something important,” well past the point where any reasonable person could be that dense. Further, all we ever see of the “destruction”, until that final money-shot, is one not-very-burnt-down apartment complex. We’re only a few minutes into the story when, allegedly, a two hundred foot tall crane-like machine rises up out of the pacific ocean and walks down a major highway. That is a dumb thing to write into your story at the 15 minute mark, and then proceed to not have anyone see it, snap a picture, or even confirm the report. There’s a news helicopter in the area, but it goes off to watch stock-footage of a carrier group instead.

And the carrier group reminds me of another of this movie’s strange foibles: the way that the reporters keep acting as though the exact details of military operations are the real story. The copter covering the carriers instead of going to look for the war machine. Tiffany asking about the munitions being sent into the pit rather than the thing inside it. Tiffany’s speculation with her cameraman over the types of bombers. Will Knight’s detailed analysis of Russian troop movements, and speculation on the exact yield of the bombs used in Siberia. The fact that channel 3 has a chief military reporter at all. You see this sort of thing a lot with folks like Tom Clancy or Michael Bay (Though Bay’s military fetishism isn’t as detail-oriented), but, y’know, Rod Pyle is no Tom Clancy. Or Michael Bay even.

But you know what? Why should he have to be? This isn’t a big studio release. I don’t even know what this is. I did a little research on Rod Pyle. Amazon informs me that he’s written an assortment of nonfiction books about NASA, primarily focused on the Apollo missions and on the exploration of Mars. He’s written for The Huffington Post and Conscious Life News about NASA and Mars, He wrote and directed some episodes of The History Channel’s Modern Marvels, including one about Apollo 11. He’s also a ghostwriter, specializing in helping subject-matter experts render their expertise into nonfiction books.

I think what we’re looking at here is nothing stranger than a space-enthusiast who’s skilled as a non-fiction writer and documentary filmmaker turning his hand to one particular story that he has a particular fondness for, and trying to make something fun that’s a little outside his comfort zone. Maybe he made it just for his portfolio, something to show clients. Maybe it was a class project. I don’t know. The only really weird thing is that it somehow ended up on a DVD that Netflix was willing to send me.

Do I recommend this? I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. It’s not “bad movie good”, in that there isn’t really any incompetence to laugh at, except maybe Harvey. I can’t really say, “If you’re into that sort of thing,” because then I’d have to try to come up with an explanation of what “that sort of thing” is. It’s not really experimental enough for someone who’s into experimental filmmaking. Okay, you know whose cup of tea this might be? If you’re the kind of person who likes educational short films. That’s sort of what this feels like, now that I think about it. Like maybe something you’d show a High School Journalism class: show a clip, and have them identify stuff like the chyron and the intertitles and discuss technique and voice and greenscreening and whatever.

Maybe that’s why I ultimately ended up enjoying this; I actually kind of dig that sort of thing. I like narratives in things that don’t primarily exist to be narratives. The corporate ethics training video with its storyline about intrigues among the employees slowly escalating until someone accidentally commits a federal crime. The anti-drug PSA about a teenager transported to fantasy world to fight video game-style monsters representing drug dealers. The teen high school soap opera to introduce the Spanish words for objects found around the classroom. And of all the things I’ve experienced, that’s what Breaking News feels the most like. Like the actual narrative of this short film is actually beside the point of it.

I just wish I knew what the point actually was. Which is what I thought was going to be the coda to this post, but then something finally turned up in my research. See, from a narrative perspective, Breaking News drives me up a wall, because, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, they killed off Tiffany before the final act…

Continue reading Deep Ice: 2X2L Calling CQ. New York? Isn’t there anyone on the air? (Rod Pyle’s War of the Worlds: Breaking News)