Trivia for
The War of the Worlds (1953)

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• Reportedly, George Pal wanted to do the final third of the movie in 3-D, starting with the sequence in which the atomic bomb is used unsuccessfully against the Martians.
  
  
• The project was secured by Paramount in 1924.
  
  
• Cecil B. DeMille was due to direct the film when the rights were originally purchased in 1925, and Alfred Hitchcock was to direct a proposed version in the 1930s.
  
  

• Cecil B. DeMille's personal choice to produce the film after Alfred Hitchcock declined to direct the film was George Pal, who was renowned for his Puppetoon animation technique and two earlier live-action sci-fi films: Destination Moon (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951). However, DeMille gave complete control to Pal over the production, and Byron Haskin was ultimately chosen to direct the film, a decision with which DeMille was pleased.
  
  
• Orson Welles, who rose to prominence with his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast of Halloween 1938, was pressured into making this his first feature film, but he wanted no part of it.
  
  
• Filming was halted briefly, two days into filming, when Paramount discovered their filming rights to the novel were only for a silent version. It was quickly resolved through the kind permission of H.G. Wells's estate.
  
  
• Originally, the Martian war machines were supposed to walk on visible electronic beams. This was attempted by having electrical sparks emanate from the three holes at the bottom of the machine. This was quickly abandoned for fear of it becoming a major fire hazard. The first two shots of the first war machine emerging from the gully has this effect. During filming, the actors were under the impression that they were dealing with the walking tripod machines of the book. This explains the farmhouse scene when Gene Barry says, "There's a machine standing right next to us." However, the results of the walking can be seen wherever the Martian machines fly throughout the film even though the sparking effect was no longer used.
  
  
• The Martian machines are always seen marching from screen right to screen left with the exception of the sequence that contains the montage of the international efforts against the Martians.
  
  
• The Flying Wing depicted in the movie is the Northrop YB-49. Two were built and both crashed. Stock footage was used in the movie.
  
  
• The Martian machines were models suspended from wires. For the final sequences where the machines die, they are shown crashing into telegraph poles--this allowed the filmmakers to hide the suspension wires with the telegraph wires.
  
  
• This film had a budget of $2,000,000. Of that sum, $600,000 was spent on the live action scenes while $1,400,000 was spent on the extensive and elaborate special effects.
  
  
• Albert Nozaki based his designs of the Martian machines on the shape and movements of swans.
  
  
• The estate of H.G. Wells was so pleased with the final production that they offered George Pal his choice of any other Wells' property. Pal chose The Time Machine (1960).
  
  
• The prologue of the film shows paintings of the other planets in the Solar System which the Martians examined and rejected as being unfit for habitation, finally selecting the Earth. The planet Venus, however, is neither shown or mentioned.
  
  
• The two Martian machines that crash in Los Angeles are really the same machine from a different angle with the film image reversed.
  
  
• When Major General Mann first meets Dr. Forrester, he refers to an earlier meeting in Oak Ridge. This refers to Oak Ridge, Tennessee which was the home to three Manhattan Project plants which enriched and refined uranium in WWII for use in the atomic bombs that ended the war. Two of the three are still in operation today.
  
  
• The Martian war machines were originally going to be walking tripods as they were depicted in Wells's novel, but Pal didn't know how a tripod would walk and instead went with the flying machines.
  
  
• This is the first motion picture to film on the newly completed Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles known as The Stack. The producers got special permission to drive on it before it opened in 1953.
  
  
• The sound effects of the Martian war machines were created from three electric guitars played backwards. The sound of the Martian screaming after Forrester hit it was a mixture of a microphone scraping along dry ice and a woman's scream played backwards. The former set of sound effects became widely used stock sound effects after the film was released and were used to this day. They are still in use.
  
  
• The heat ray was burning welding wire with a blowtorch forcing the sparks off of it.
  
  
• The disintegration of Col. Heffner took 144 individual mattes. Earlier in the scene, the stuntman that portrayed the soldier catching on fire was badly burned from the flames getting out of control.
  
  
• By way of acknowledging the part that Cecil B. DeMille had played in bringing the story to the screen, George Pal wanted him to narrate the film, but DeMille suggested Sir Cedric Hardwicke instead. Pal also paid tribute to DeMille in the film by having his film Samson and Delilah (1949) listed on the theater marquee early in the film.
  
  
• A figure of Walter Lantz's character Woody Woodpecker can be glimpsed in the branches of the tree the initial Martian cylinder/meteor flies over. Lantz and George Pal were close friends and Pal always worked a Woody Woodpecker into each of his films.
  
  
• Two of the characters from Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast (portrayed in the film by different actors), Prof. Pearson (the main player in the radio broadcast), and the ill-fated journalist Carl Phillips make brief appearances at the site of the first Martian landing.
  
  
• During the scene in the farmhouse when the Martian fled from Clayton and Sylvia, Charles Gemora, who had to control the Martian by kneeling in the costume, almost fell out of the back of the suit when one of the workers pulled the platform on which the Martian was kneeling out of the shot too fast. If you look closely at the scene, you can see the Martian is tipping over slightly.
  
  
• The Martian war machines had about twenty wires running to each one. Some were for suspension and maneuvering, while others carried power to the various lights and mechanisms. This was produced before there were lightweight circuits and sophisticated radio controls.
  
  
• None of the original Martian war machines exist today. They were made out of copper, and after production, they were reportedly donated to a Boy Scout copper drive.
  
  
• In an apparent homage to the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast, when the hatch of the Martian machine begins to unscrew, the same technique, a metal lid being turned on a glass jar, was used to create the sound effect.
  
  
• In the theatrical trailer, when the first Martian meteor hits the Earth, there is a large explosion and a cloud of smoke. In the film itself, the same shot contains only a flash when the meteor hits.
  
  
• Ann Robinson hated the wig that she was required to wear for her role as Sylvia. When she finally saw the completed film at a theater, however, she claimed that no one recognized her without the wig.
  
  
• Lee Marvin was offered the male lead.
  
  
• This film premiered on NBC television on 21 February 1967.
  
  

• SPOILER: The scripture Pastor Matthew recites before he is disintegrated by the Martians is Psalms 23 from the King James version of the Bible.
  
  

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