sentences:  In 1939, based partly on the strength of his imaginative and successful New York plays, which were produced under the aegis of the Mercury Theatre (such as an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", which featured an all-black cast and was set in the jungle), and the infamy of his October 30, 1938, radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds", which sent residents of Grover's Mill, New Jersey into a panic, Orson Welles was able to negotiate a virtually unheard-of two-picture deal with RKO Pictures, the smallest of the 'big five' major studios in this era.The deal gave him creative control under a budget limit.