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*The Night That Panicked America*
The Night That Panicked America
	DVD cover
Genre	Drama
Screenplay by	Nicholas Meyer; Anthony Wilson;
Story by	Nicholas Meyer
Directed by	Joseph Sargent
Starring	Vic Morrow; Meredith Baxter; Tom Bosley; Will Geer;
Music by	Frank Comstock
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
Production
Executive producer	Anthony Wilson
Producer	Joseph Sargent
Production location	Los Angeles
Cinematography	Jules Brenner
Editors	Bud S. Isaacs; George Jay Nicholson; Tony Radecki;
Running time	92 minutes
Production companies	The Culzean Corporation; Paramount Television
Original release
Network	ABC
Release	October 31, 1975

The Night That Panicked America is an American made-for-television drama film that was originally broadcast on the ABC network on October 31, 1975. The telefilm dramatizes events surrounding Orson Welles' famous — and infamous – War of the Worlds radio broadcast (based on the 1898 novel of the same name by English author H. G. Wells) of October 30, 1938, which had led some Americans to believe that an invasion by Martians was occurring in the area near Grover's Mill in West Windsor, New Jersey.

The Welles broadcast and the reaction to it had been earlier dramatized on television as The Night America Trembled, a live presentation that aired September 9, 1957, on Studio One.

Plot

The Night That Panicked America tells the story of the 1938 broadcast from the point of view of Welles and his associates as they create the broadcast live, as well as from the points of view of a number of different fictional American families, in a variety of locations and from a variety of social classes, who listened to the broadcast and believed the imaginary Martian invasion was actually occurring, with some people even about to commit suicide.

Cast

Vic Morrow as Hank Muldoon
Cliff DeYoung as Stefan Grubowski
Michael Constantine as Jess Wingate
Walter McGinn as Paul Stewart
Eileen Brennan as Ann Muldoon
Meredith Baxter as Linda Davis
Will Geer as Reverend Davis
Tom Bosley as Norman Smith
Paul Shenar as Orson Welles
John Ritter as Walter Wingate
Granville Van Dusen as Carl Phillips
Burton Gilliam as Tex
Joshua Bryant as Howard Koch

Reception

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction praised the film's recreation of events in the radio studio, but was unimpressed by its depiction of the resulting panic, calling it "a routine disaster movie with hackneyed characters reacting in predictable ways." Through the 1980s, some local stations in various areas of the United States made an annual tradition of rebroadcasting Night on October 30 (the anniversary of the original radio broadcast) or on October 31 (Halloween).

The movie received three Emmy Award nominations, winning for Outstanding Achievement in Film Sound Editing – For a Single Episode of a Regular or Limited Series in 1976.^[1]