April Fool's Day has been anticlimactic ever since Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds on American radio nearly 70 years ago. He pulled this legendary stunt on October 30, 1938 ' the day before Halloween ' but it set a standard for hoodwinking the public that no April Fool's prank has ever topped. Here's Wikipedia's account: 'The first half of the 60-minute show was presented as a series of news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. Some fled their homes; others merely were terrified. The news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast.' The best thing to come of it was that it brought Welles instant fame. He'd have become hugely famous anyway, towering genius that he was, but the faked Martian attack made him a celebrity virtually overnight. Welles was 22 at the time, just three years away from co-writing, directing, producing and starring in Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest film ever made. He was a modern-day genius of the first rank, and his prodigious achievements in both film and theater serve to remind us that there is a vast gap between true genius and mere talent. The hallmark of genius is that it succeeds at nearly all that it attempts, and in a way that ordinary minds could not easily have imagined. Even when genius fails, it inspires. Welles had nearly a hundred projects in the works that he did not complete. Many of his scripts and partially shot films are in storage under the supervision of his last companion, Oja Kodar. Perhaps a hundred or even a thousand years from now Welles' luminous work will be on display in some virtual museum,
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