1938–1940 · CBS

The Campbell Playhouse

Welles, sponsored at last

War of the Worlds bought Orson Welles a sponsor. Nine weeks after the panic broadcast the Mercury Theatre on the Air became The Campbell Playhouse, with a budget, a guest star every week and a soup company reading the credits. Welles was twenty-three and simultaneously running a Broadway company, and by 1940 he had gone to Hollywood, but the sixty-odd hours recorded here contain some of the best-cast literary adaptation American radio produced — Rebecca with Margaret Sullavan, Dodsworth, The Magnificent Ambersons two years before he filmed it.

65 broadcasts · 3 seasons held · Studio One, New York