War of the Worlds director Byron Haskins was inspired by the San Francisco earthquake
West Coast historians should know straight away!
An artist is an antenna, especially early in life. What makes for great art is a sensitivity to the world around us. While a lot of people may go through life accepting things for what they are, a creator can't help but respond to each day's idiosyncrasies. There's no telling what moments might shape one's work later in life. As children, everyone absorbs their surroundings like a sponge. The difference, however, is that the artist must reinterpret these happenings in some form, appropriating the event, changing the context, and presenting the result to the world.
Throughout history, world events have profoundly shaped art, with movies, books, paintings, and other forms of expression reflecting the seismic shifts humanity has undergone. Godzilla is a response to nuclear atrocity. The Lord of the Rings was inspired by Tolkien's experience in the First World War. Picasso painted Guernica in response to the bombing of Northern Spain in April 1937.
Even in adapting an earlier work, the best artists can't help but be inspired by the world around them.
This is true for the 1953 feature film The War of the Worlds, itself an adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel of the same name. Fifty-odd years after the novel's publication, the movie's director, Byron Haskin, drew from his childhood to tell the story in a brand new way. He reflected on how the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake inspired his film in an interview as part of the Directors Guild of America Oral History volume published in 1984.
"I don't remember the actual shock. The building was three stories high; it jumped out into the street eight feet, to the edge of the sidewalk, and leaned over thirty-eight degrees.
"The overall memory is pure nightmare, that's all I can recall. It was not a nornal experience— it was Nightmareville-lpus. Everything out of control. You can't look back and analyze, because the sounds and the effects were too far-out. I tried to create in War of the Worlds a simliar feeling that there was nothing normal left to see, or hear."
Seeing life from a perspective he'd never seen before impacted Haskin greatly and would later inform his approach to sci-fi filmmaking. While the catastrophe had an unsized negative repercussion throughout the decades that followed, it's inarguable that it also gifted us some great art.
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