Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Orson Welles, Tim Holt

RKO executive Charles Koerner assumed Breen’s duties, supposedly on a temporary basis, but as can be seen, one of the first things Koerner did as the “temporary head of the studio” was to write a memo to RKO executives making sure that no commitments were made with Welles or Mercury without his explicit permission. (more...)

By LAWRENCE FRENCH

I was trapped down there (in Brazil), I couldn't leave, and all I kept getting were those terrible signals about this awful movie I made. My own chums were running frightened — not just RKO...  Even those people who truly had my interests at heart felt that I'd gone too far. I didn't believe I had and I still don't...  They got so spooked because of a bad preview, and there had been no preview of CITIZEN KANE. Think what would have happened to KANE if there had been one... On Pomona on Saturday night—you can imagine what would have happened!

— Orson Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, THIS IS ORSON WELLES (more...)

By KYP HARNESS

Finally released last month on DVD to little fanfare, having been unavailable for 20 years in its country of origin, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is surrounded by a mythology (more...)

When Welles didn't work, he drank, bragged, ran through women, ate like a beast and hated himself. He'd eat supper at his dressing table--two steaks, each with a baked potato; an entire pineapple; triple pistachio ice cream; and a bottle of Scotch. Appetite drove him. Applause wasn't enough. He wanted amazement, the gasp of a common crowd.

---From the narration of  The Battle Over Citizen Kane

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The Battle Over Citizen Kane is factually misleading...  A mean-spirited and profoundly distorted view of who Welles was and what he did.

---Ronald Gottesman,  editor of  Focus on Citizen Kane

This whole attempt to connect his life with William Randolph Hearst and imply they're similar is nonsense.

---Henry Jaglom,  film director

What's wrong with the film is that, in its zeal to show a parallel between Hearst and Welles, it overlooks (the fact) that there are enormous differences between the two and it makes certain statements about Hearst and Welles that seem to be dubious.

---James Naremore, author of  The Magic World of Orson Welles

_______________________________________________

With the arrival of the 70th Anniversary edition of Citizen Kane, I watched The Battle Over Citizen Kane for the first time since it's 1996 debut on PBS and I once again  found it to be a "profoundly distorted documentary" on both Orson Welles, and probably William Randolph Hearst, as well. Welles may have "ate like a beast" but to suggest he "hated himself" has got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard about the man. Here is another choice bit of misleading narration from this supposed "documentary":

"Welles was a young man who courted danger. That was always an element of his success. In the theater, he demanded magic. Characters had to appear from nowhere, or levitate into the sky. Actors were at risk. There were broken bones, fistfights. He liked the reflection of light on a real dagger, but one night he ran a fellow actor through, severed an artery and almost killed him. It was a risky way to live even when it did work and audiences cheered. When they didn't love Welles or his shows, that was worse."

Welles may indeed have asked a lot from his actors, but to imply that they were at risk, is at best, a highly debatable contention. The implied suggestion that Welles as Brutus, deliberately stabbed Joseph Holland as Julius Caesar, rather than accidentally, is quite preposterous and more akin to the kind of yellow journalism Mr. Hearst liked to report about in his newspapers.

Though what is truly objectionable about the inclusion of The Battle Over Citizen Kane and the even more ridiculous RKO 281 as the two extra discs in the Citizen Kane "Ultimate Collector's Edition" is their tone. Given the kind of  puff-piece promotional material studios normally include as extras on their DVD's it boggles the mind that such misguided extras would appear alongside Citizen Kane, long regarded as "the greatest film ever made."  It is almost a replay of having the screenplay for Citizen Kane published alongside the now completely discredited essay by Pauline Kael in The Citizen Kane Book in 1971.  In contrast, when Criterion released Citizen Kane as a 3 laserdisc  set it included interviews with over 30 prominent directors and other people influenced or associated with Citizen Kane, who were all full of praise for Welles and his work. Just imagine if Warner Bros. decided to release such a questionable documentary as The Battle for Citizen Kane and a dubious fictional film in their recent box set devoted to Stanley Kubrick! I'm sure the Kubrick Estate would never have allowed such gross misrepresentations to occur.

Of course, Orson Welles was no saint and he did have a very large ego, but as the Welles scholars quoted above duly note, both extra discs hardly present us with a fair or balanced portrait of the man, since The Battle Over Citizen Kane is clearly determined to somehow make Welles life fit into a mirror image of the career of William Randolph Hearst.  One can easily see why Robert Carringer,  who wrote The Making of Citizen Kane and served as a consultant on the film,  asked that his name be removed from the credits, as they clearly paid no attention to any of his advice!

The final narration of the film recounts the same old sad and tired Welles story we've all heard many times before.   It was all downhill for the boy genius after Citizen Kane, although anyone who knows even the slightest about Welles's later career and such big-budget cinema classics as Falstaff, The Trial or Touch of Evil, could never possibly write such an error-filled passage as this one:

"In latter years, Welles was a vagabond, trying to patch together his low-budget films. He begged or borrowed from everyone he knew, including $250,000. from an old pal, Charlie Lederer, Marion Davies' nephew. The money came from her estate. Welles never paid it back. He'd do bit parts for money--ads for airlines or Paul Masson wine--between fits of temper at the journeymen filmmakers or junior execs who were now directing him. Sometimes he was so overweight he had to be ferried about in a wheelchair. He hated the fat man jokes. He hated it worse when people asked him what had he done with himself after Kane." 

As for that even more awful "fictional" portrait of Welles,  RKO 281, I will let Peter Bodanovich's comments about its many flaws tell the story:

LAWRENCE FRENCH:  RKO 281 lost me right at the start, because in the very first scene they show Orson Welles at San Simeon and everybody knows that Welles was never at Hearst Castle.

PETER BOGDANOVICH: Actually, most people don't know that. Most people haven't even seen Citizen Kane! But for anybody who knows anything about Orson Welles, it's quite clear that he was never at San Simeon and he didn't know Hearst.  To be candid, I thought that movie bore very little relationship to the Orson Welles that I knew, or to any of the facts that I knew. It was so filled with errors, that it was painful to observe!

All of that was clearly spelled out in my book, This is Orson Welles.  Also, Orson didn't base Citizen Kane on Hearst alone, but there was another press lord from Chicago, Colonel Robert McCormick, who had an opera house built for his girlfriend, who was a singer. So that whole aspect of Citizen Kane comes from McCormick, but people incorrectly assumed that it was Hearst, because they were spun to believe that by Louella Parsons.

Louella was pissed off because she had been on the set of Citizen Kane and wrote a lot in her column about Orson and the wonderful movie he was making, and then ironically, Hedda Hopper found out that part of the movie was based on Hearst—the part about the Spanish-American War—but not Rosebud, and not Susan Alexander Kane or the political scandal. So Orson always said he though it was Louella and the people around Hearst who made such an issue out of Citizen Kane. Particularly Louella, because she had been scooped by her arch-rival, Hedda Hopper. It was Hedda who blew the whistle and said that Citizen Kane was based on William Randolph Hearst, after Louella had been on the set and been friendly to Orson.

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As Peter Bogdanovich pointed out to me, most people apparently really don't know much about Welles career, including Citizen Kane. Looking at some of the internet reviews on the new Citizen Kane set, I was astonished to see one site rate the film at 8  (out of 10) and the extras at 9.5!

After the break is the complete article by Cathy Dunkley from the 1996 Hollywood Reporter that first reported on the distortions contained in The Battle Over Citizen Kane:

RAISING 'KANE' OVER PBS DOCUMENTARY:  SCHOLARS BLAST FILM AS "MEAN-SPIRITED AND PROFOUNDLY DISTORTED"

By Cathy Dunkley

The Hollywood Reporter - March 29, 1996

(more...)

I had never read Andrew Sarris's reply to Pauline Kael's infamous article "Raising Kane," that was first published in The New Yorker in 1971.  So it was a very pleasant surprise to see it turn up in the archive section of  The Village Voice online.  Mr. Sarris makes many salient points about the numerous flaws in Ms. Kael's piece, which unfortunately was published alongside the original script for Citizen Kane in The Citizen Kane Book.

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FILMS IN FOCUS by Andrew Sarris

The Village Voice -- April 15, 1971

**********

Pauline Kael's two-part article on "Citizen Kane" ("Raising Kane" -- the New Yorker, February 20 and 27, 1971) reportedly began as a brief introduction to the published screenplay, but, like Topsy, it just grew and grew into a 50,000-word digression from "Kane" itself into the life and times and loves and hates and love-hates of Pauline Kael.

My disagreement with her position begins with her very first sentence:

"'Citizen Kane' is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened." I can think of hundreds of "American talking pictures" that seem as fresh now as the day they opened. Even fresher. "Citizen Kane" is certainly worthy of revival and reconsideration, but it hardly stands alone even among the directorial efforts of Orson Welles. To believe that "Citizen Kane" is a great American film in a morass of mediocre Hollywood movies is to misunderstand the transparent movieness of "Kane" itself from its Xanadu castle out of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to its menagerie out of "King Kong" to its mirrored reflections out of old German doppleganger spectacles. Not that Miss Kael makes any extravagant claims about the supposed greatness of the film on which she has devoted so much newsprint. "It is a shallow work," she decides, "a shallow masterpiece."

One wonders what Miss Kael considers a deep masterpiece. "U-Boat 29" perhaps? Actually, the closest she comes to comparing "Kane" with the higher depths of cinema is in a parenthetical aside of dubious relevance: "Like most of the films of the sound era that are called masterpieces, 'Citizen Kane' has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release. Yet, unlike the others, it is conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, 'Rules of the Game' or 'Rashomon' or 'Man of Aran,' which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms)."

(more...)

You can read an interview with David Thomson by John Carvill  Here.  It' s an interesting but at the same time quite an idiotic interview. Why? Not because of the questions asked, which is usually the case, but because of the answers given, by Mr. Thomson.

I think the interview makes a very nice piece to discredit David Thomson as any kind of authority on Orson Welles, or for any one else in the cinema, for that matter.

Mr. Thomson’s answers to Mr. Carvill's questions on Orson Welles, which come at the very end of the long interview, seem to me to be very condescending.  That Mr. Thomson prefers  the 93-minute original cut of TOUCH OF EVIL,  which Welles himself detested, is obviously very revealing. It shows us where to place Mr. Thomson on the level of Orson Welles scholars.  Namely, way below Pauline Kael.  Obviously anyone who loves Welles work and the cinema would wish these people had never existed!

As Webmaster of Wellesnet, I don’t know anyone who would give David Thomson’s book ROSEBUD, anything less than an “F” except my good friend,  "Glenn Anders."  I'm sure Glenn and I will be talking about our differences when next we meet, and obviously if Mr. Thomson views Wellesnet, he is invited to reply, but as far as I know, he is the only writer associated with Orson Welles and his work who does not visit this site.  Unlike  most other Welles scholars and friends, such as Joe McBride, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Simon Callow, Christopher Welles Feder and Beatrice Welles, to name only a few.  But of course, Mr. Thomson feels he knows more about Welles than all of these people, as a reading of his discredited book, ROSEBUD will show.

Actually, I find it ironic that Mr. Thomson could bring Welles two daughters, who agree about little else, together in agreeing that Thomson's ROSEBUD is a complete abortion. But beyond the fax pas Mr. Thomson committed with ROSEBUD, I must also note the superior, John Simon-like attitude Mr. Thomson projects throughout his interview with John Carvill.  The tone is that Mr. Thomson is right, and everybody else is wrong. For example, Mr. Thomson’s view of Martin Scorcese and Leonard Di Caprio’s work. Obviously, it’s fine to say their films are bad, or you don’t like them, but to suggest they have both not been recognized widely elsewhere, because you don't like them, is simply idiotic in the extreme.

I don't know how old John Carvill is, but when I first met Mr. Thomson in San Francisco, in 1981, shortly after seeing THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS for the first time, I would have told Thomson to (excuse my French) go fuck himself if he had said what he did to Mr. Carvill.  So would two directors who were friends of mine, that Thomson professes to admire, Nicholas Ray and George Cukor.

Mr. Thomson's  suggestion that Mr. Carvill is too young to "appreciate "THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is, in my humble opinion, simply beyond the pale.  Orson Welles is obviously a far greater artist than Mr. Thomson, which I assume even Mr. Thomson would agree with (well, maybe not).  And how old was Orson Welles when he made  THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS?  26... So how does Mr. Thomson explain that?  "You are too young, Mr. Carvill."  My God, that has got to be the stupidest answer I have ever heard!  How old were Picasso and Van Gogh when they painted their earliest masterpieces on canvas?

Just imagine if in 1937,  GUERNICA had been "re-touched" by another artist who felt it needed a bit of color to dramatize the black and white and "CinemaScope" canvas Picasso had painted.  Picasso, as a true artist  would have burned the painting rather than seen it displayed in any version other than what he had intended.

Welles, as a film artist,  was in the same position five years later, except in 1942, he couldn't burn the negative of his original film.  It took the idiots at RKO to do that for him.  Ironically, they wanted to burn the negative of CITIZEN KANE,  but to destroy the artistry of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, they dumped it into the Pacific Ocean.

The bottom line is this:  David Thomson is no fan of Orson Welles or his legacy.

To anyone interested in Orson Welles or his works, please avoid Mr. Thomson and his trashy books like the PLAGUE!

Here is what Jonathan Rosenbaum had to say about Mr. Thomson's book  A Biographical Dictionary of Film:

"Rather than focus on its omissions and denials, which I've already done elsewhere, I'd like to raise my eyebrows at the notion that the book, whatever its merits as criticism, is any kind of reference book at all. Apart from skeletal and often incomplete filmographies, its facts are few and far between."

Read more by Jonathan Rosenbaum on David Thomson HERE.

GEORGE ORSON WELLES

May 6, 1915 — October 10, 1985

25 years ago the great artist and poet of the cinema, George Orson Welles met the end of his adventure on Earth.

But not really--if you listen to what Ray Bradbury told the American Society of Cinematographers in 1967.  Strangely enough Mr. Bradbury made these comments in Hollywood, while Orson Welles was making his adaptation of Isak Dinesen's The Immortal Story in Madrid, Spain. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ORSON WELLES: Let us—Let us raise our cups then standing, as some of us do, on opposite ends of the river and drink together to what really matters to us all—to our crazy and beloved profession.

To the movies—to good movies—to every possible kind.

–AFI tribute to Orson Welles, February, 1975

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

RAY BRADBURY: I had a wonderful experience three or four weeks ago that I want to tell you about. I went to the Los Feliz Theatre to see a revival of George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight. My wife and I just wandered into the theatre by accident because we couldn’t get into various other shows around town. I said, “I haven’t seen this film since I was 12 years old. Let’s go in and see it again.” We went in and sat there with a bunch of teenage kids and guys and girls in their twenties, who didn’t know Marie Dressier from the side of a barn, who hadn’t seen Lionel Barrymore or John Barrymore, or Billie Burke in their heydays.

I was in tears by the end of the evening, because, when Billie Burke finished the great scene where she’s mad at the whole world—upset because the food hasn’t been prepared right for the dinner that night, when she finishes her big tirade which ran two minutes in the middle of the film—this audience of teenagers—to a person—broke into applause for this tour-de-force. My hair stood up on the back of my head, and I thought “A thousand years from tonight, the work you people did and that she did and all the people in this industry do will be immortal.” You are all immortal. You have beat death at the game because that scene is going to be repeated a thousand years from tonight and ten thousand years from tonight—and there’ ll be other teenagers who don’t know any of you from Adam, but they’re going to break into applause because of something excellent you did once in your life, maybe—or twice, or three times when you had the breaks, and you had a good director, and you had the decent script, and you had these actors working for you and that magical thing happened.

So I sat there and I broke into tears. I thought: “everyone in that film has been dead for 20 or 30 years. Marie Dressier died in 1934—but she is still alive!”

This is the science-fictional business you are all tied into. You’re really tacked onto the future—like it or not—so you’re going to be changing people 100 years from tonight and 500 years from tonight and a thousand years from tomorrow noon. That’s the kind of business you’re in and I’d like to remind you of that, because you’ve been downgraded so often. I’ve been downgraded because of my love for what you do—but I won’t have it because it does work even once in a while—and we all know the moments when it works. So my evening at the Los Feliz was great—we came out and all those people were living that we had seen!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ciro Giorgini has written to let us know that his fine documentary Rosabella is now available on DVD, with new interviews with Elsa Martinelli and Suzanne Cloutier as extras.  It can be ordered from Minimum Fax in Italy For 19. Euros, and comes with the book Orson Welles: Interviews on the art of the Cinema .

CORRECTION:  The DVD is in Italian and  DOES NOT have optional English subtitles, so although it is worth having only if  you understand Italian.

ROSABELLA:  Orson Welles's Years in Italy
A film by Gianfranco Giagni and Ciro Giorgini

Italy 1993; 60 min.

Thanks to Tony for posting these notes to the messageboard that were written by the directors of ROSABELLA:

Rosabella is the absurd name given to Rosebud in the Italian version of Citizen Kane, but it may also indicate the contradictory relation between Orson Welles and Italy.

At the 1948 Venice Film Festival the disastrous criticism of his Macbeth made him declare:  "This film is for an audience that understands. I am not liked in Italy. My love for this country is not returned".

Yet in the same Italy he lived for twenty years, and the life in Italy of Welles left a chain of memories in those who lived close to him at the time.

Thus our seeking of direct evidence became a fascinating journey across Orson Welles' Italian years, far from the folklore of the Dolce vita and the Restaurants of Rome.

Italian years that were mainly relations with cinema technicians (cameramen, editors) whom he involved in his endless projects, many of which - so many times - remained unfinished, often through no fault of his.

Cameramen editors and producers who lived for months or years with him as in a tunnel. After their Welles experiences some no longer worked, some changed their profession, others felt a certain responsibility for the rest of their lives. And his life in Italy was full of private sentiments. From Lea Padovani to his great love for Paola Mori who became his third wife. Then his attachment to Venice and other unexpected places: Tuscania, Viterbo, the castle of Bracciano, the EUR area of Rome, that we find transformed in films he completed (Othello), that remained unfinished (Don Quixote) or remained only projects (Julius Caesar).

Our attempt has been to trace the story of his life in Italy but this is also the story of a number of Italians who narrate how their lives were marked by Orson Welles, the one and only Welles, and how much they missed him.

Includes interviews with:
____________________

Gary Graver (cinematographer and friend of Orson Welles)
Alessandro Tasca di Cutò (producer, Chimes at Midnight, Don Quixote, In the Land of Don Quixote)
Suzanne Cloutier (actress, Othello)
Walter Chiari (actor, Chimes at Midnight)
Arnoldo Foà (actor, The Trial, Narrator for the Italian version of In the Land of Don Quixote)
Francesco Lavagnino (music composer for Chimes At Midnight, Othello, The Merchant of Venice)
Mauro Bonanni (editor, Don Quixote, Merchant of Venice, The Deep)
Renzo Lucidi (editor, Othello, Mr. Arkadin, Don Quixote)
Giorgio Tonti (Camera operator, The Deep, The Merchant of Venice)
Oberdan Troiani (camera operator, Othello)
Roberto Perpignani (assistant editor, Don Quixote, The Trial, In the Land of Don Quixote)
Mariano Faggiani (assistant editor, Don Quixote, In the Land of Don Quixote)
Maurizio Lucidi (sound editor Don Quixote, In the Land of Don Quixote)
Lello Bersani ( Journalist )
Rosalba Tonti (production secretary, The Deep, The Merchant of Venice)

and  ORSON WELLES

IT’S ALL TRUE

You can now Download 12 selections from the many songs Orson Welles was considering using for the original soundtrack to The Story of Samba episode of It's All True.

Thanks to João Perdigão / Canhotagem for providing this valuable link and compiling these vintage songs from the Brazilian artists Orson Welles was planning to use in his movie. Astonishingly enough, Welles was once again clearly ahead of his time.  It's All True would never see the light of day in either Brazil or the US,  but  several of the  singers and songwriters he chose for the film all went on to have substantial careers in Brazil. Four of the most prominent are:

Grande Othelo, Linda Batista, Herivelto Martins (Trio de Ouro)  and Pery Ribeiro. Interesting clips of their work after appearing in It's All True can easily be found on YouTube. You can also read more about Brazilian singers and Praca Onze in Popular Song at Daniella Thompson's excellent website on the subject.

For the song titles below I have attempted rough English translations, but obviously these may be incorrect, so anyone who can help with better translation of the song titles or lyrics in English, please let me know.

Citizen Samba / by Canhotagem

1) Linda Batista – Batuque no Morro (3:05)
(Drumming on the Hill)

2) Anjos do Inferno – Nós Os Carecas (2:27)
(Hell's Angeles – We the Bald)

3) Pixinguinha – Carinhoso (2:57)
(Affectionately)

4) Trio de Ouro – Ave Maria do Morro (2:59)
(Gold Trio w/Herivelto Martins – Hail Mary of the Hill)

5) Dom Um Romão – Escravos de Jó (4:04) 2001
(The Slaves of Jó)

6) Época de Ouro – Um a Zero (2:12)
(Time of Gold – One for Zero)

7) Vadico – Se Alguém Disse (2:12) 1959
(If  Somebody Said)

8 - Anjos do Inferno – Nega do Cabelo Duro (2:59)
(Hell's Angeles  – He Denies them Hard Hair)

9) Orlando Silva – Lero-Lero (3:21)

10) Trio de Ouro – Lamento Negro (2:52)
(Gold Trio – Black Lament)

11) Ataulfo Alves – Ai, Que Saudades da Amélia (2:43)
(The Lament for Amélia)

12) Trio de Ouro with Castro Babosa – Praça Onze (3:08)
(Plaza Eleven)

*****

EXCERPT FROM A TIMELINE ON THE  MAKING OF IT'S ALL TRUE:

*****

THE OCIAA BOARD REJECTS COMPLETION FUNDS FOR "IT'S ALL TRUE"
May 25, 1943

In May Welles tried to get the new head of RKO, Peter Rathvon to allow him to finish IT’S ALL TRUE for a reduced budget of $100,000 but was once again rebuffed. 20th Century-Fox was now out of the running as a possible backer, but Samuel Goldwyn had showed a glimmer of interest in the project, which quickly faded after the OCIAA was now officially withdrawing it’s offer of $300,000 to complete the picture.

Thus, the OCIAA essentially orphaned a project they had lobbied Welles to undertake in the first place! Despite this setback Welles’ continues to write several proposals for the film. In these excerpts from later treatments, Welles adopted the style of his later essay films, F FOR FAKE and AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES where he would inject himself into the story by becoming both host and commentator on the events we are being shown on-screen.

In this treatment, Welles would arrive in Mexico, where he would be told (and tell) the tale of Bonita the Bull. From there it would be on to Brazil for the Carnival in Rio, which would be followed by the story of the Jangadeiros, when they arrive at Rio’s Harbor.

ORSON WELLES TREATMENTS (excerpts)
September 2, 1943

This is a picture divided into several parts. It is not, however, an arbitrary selection of short subjects, nor is it vaudeville. This is a new sort of picture. It is neither a play, nor a novel in movie form–it is a magazine.

(I am) ready to leave elaborate historical pageants to other movie-makers. The way (I) look at it, people are interested in people, and I’m going to use the camera to show American people to each other. Since the focus of the main part of our picture is on simple people, the incidental characters in the linking sequence are, wherever possible, presented as cultivated and well-to-do. The purposes of this tactic are I am sure, self-evident.

For FOUR MEN ON A RAFT, Welles would have read passages from Jacare’s own diary:

JACARE: We are part of another land. We belong to a great nation - Brazil. There is a President in a capital city. He is just. If he knew of these things, he would never permit them. We will go to him and he will help us …since the producer’s relations with the President of Brazil were of the very warmest, no possible official objection need be expected.

Here are some of Welles’ different approaches to the CARNIVAL footage:

We watch the people pouring into the city, dressed in as many different costumes as there are individuals. We see them swarming on the trolleys, like flies on a piece of sugar; we stop to watch the magnificent parade of floats; we listen for a moment as a lovely sambista stops the show at a swanky Rio night club...

In one treatment, Welles would turn over his hosting chores to a young boy:

Pery, this tiny, captivating child has lost his mother somewhere in the milling crowds... Making his way through seas of dancing feet with unperturbed good cheer, Pery becomes our guide... takes us places and shows us sights a stranger might easily miss during this first night of the Carnival.

Then, in the hills above Rio, Welles would meet Grande Otelo, and introduces him to us:

His name is Otelo. Remember that name. It belongs to the performer himself and this isn’t the last time you’ll encounter it. This is only his first American picture, and he’s a big hit in it, for sure. Otelo likes to be compared to Mickey Rooney, but he’s closer to a young Chaplin.

…From here we will come upon (Otelo) often as a type among carnival celebrants, a personalization of many popular aspects of the institution. This we think has been managed in the completed film in terms of truly uproarious entertainment.

Welles explained his plan to cross-cut between singers Grande Otelo and Linda Batista performing the song Batuque no Morro (Drumming on the Hill), noting the contrast between Otelo on the street and Batista at the Orca Casino.

…The contrast is one not only of voices, but of directions: The Carnaval of traditions is a celebration of the streets alone. But recent years have seen a trend indoors to the Baile and the Casino. The contrast, as it’s illustrated by this song, isn’t extreme—but the raucous raggle-taggle jamboree of the streets and the more professional, if equally enthusiastic atmosphere of the nightclub, is interesting in juxtaposition.

For the grand finale, Welles stresses the reason he was sent to Rio in the first place:

…when it seems that everything has been shown, the star enters to top everything. In our case, the star is the Americas. Rio’s carnival becomes Pan-America's carnival... the Americas, all Americas together, are joined in fact as well as in idea, today rather than in the future.

…we see Rio awakening in the dawn of the morning after.

Richard Wilson’s shooting log of June 7, 1942 describes this ending for the CARNIVAL episode:

…This scene showed the lost child who had been featured throughout, now alone and asleep against the lamppost, surrounded by mounds of confetti and the debris of revelry in empty streets stretching for blocks. Dawn is breaking. As distant figures of street sweepers appear with their brooms, a policeman tenderly picks up the sleeping boy, asks his name and where he lives. The boy's answer is a sleepy murmur of his favorite Samba, featured throughout. Their walk away is inter-cut with Grande Otelo saying farewell to Plaza Eleven as that song, also featured, plays like an echo. The lamp above the street sign goes out.  Silence.

From this fade out, we’d go back and see Welles on the roof of a building overlooking the Praca Onze, which would soon be demolished to make way for the more modern Avenida Vargas. With Welles is Dona Maria, a representative of President Vargas' government.

WELLES: Rio is one of the only beautiful old towns where new things are even more beautiful than the old ones.

DONA MARIA: …the hills up there, for instance, where the poor people live, where the school of the samba comes from, you were up there photographing one of them Senor Orson, do you know we’ve got new housing projects for all those places – model homes. They’re going up right now.

*****

No doubt President Vargas liked Dona Maria's report on the progress of the new housing projects that were supposedly replacing the slums in the hills above Rio, but Welles was clearly shooting footage that would have made Rio look more like the trash-filled Mexican border town that displeased another Senor Vargas in TOUCH OF EVIL. Welles recalled shooting in the slums in a later interview:

ORSON WELLES: I remember the night we tried to photograph one of the tenement districts in the favelas, in the hills above Rio when thugs surrounded us and after a siege of beer bottles, empties of course, stones, bricks, and I hate to think what else, we retreated to a more photogenic district clutching our Technicolor cameras as we went...

Welles would have ended the film, just as the original Time magazine story did, by observing a Beechcraft airplane flying the four Jangadeiros over Rio harbor to their home in the north:

TIME – December 8, 1941: …Swept away by the spirit of the occasion the directors of Navegacio Acrea Brasileira offered the fishermen a Beechcraft to fly them home. Air time from Rio to Fortaleza: Nine hours.

ORSON WELLES: The flight back really happened. This picture is all true. Bonito was pardoned; carnival was just as you’ve seen it; the four men from the North really sailed all those long miles to Rio in five logs of wood with only the stars to guide them, so they could talk to the President of their country. Naturally our cameras weren’t always on the spot. Some of the action we had to reconstruct. Here, for instance — before we’d finished with our work, Jacare, the leader of the jangadeiros, had died in the sea. But this is still the end our picture, because this is the best place we know to stop. Also, it’s true. Jacare did go back to Ceara, and, of course, he’s still there — alive in the love of his fellows; still with us, like the Dragon of the Sea who told the slave traders he’d carry no more slaves. For Jacare lives now in American history. This picture is his; a humble, solid declaration. To Jacare, then! To his sixty days on the open sea, and the eight hours it took a plane to fly him back through the air, over fields and mountains and jungles to his family on Ipacema Beach; to the hours less it’s going to take to fly there tomorrow; to all brave flights and voyages; to his dream of the future.

******

FARWELL, PRACA ONZE

They’re going to raze Praca Onze
They’ll be no more samba schools
The tamborin is weeping
The entire hill is weeping…
Favela, Salgueiro
Favela, Salgueiro

Put away your tambourines,
Because the samba schools won’t be parading today
God bye my Praca Onze
Good bye

Already we know that you will disappear
Yet we have our memories
You will be forever in our hearts
Some new day we’ll have a new square
And sing of your past

******

Vão acabar
Com a Praça Onze
Não vai haver mais
Escola de samba, não vai
Chora o tamborim
Chora o morro inteiro
Favela, Salgueiro,
Favela, Salgueiro,
Mangueira Estação Primeira
Guardai os vossos pandeiros, guardai
Porque a escola de samba não sai!
Adeus, minha Praça Onze, adeus

Já sabemos que vais desaparecer
Leva contigo a nossa recordação
Mas ficarás eternamente em nosso coração
E algum dia nova praça nós teremos
E o teu passado cantaremos
Favela, Salgueiro,
Favela, Salgueiro,
Mangueira Estação Primeira
Guardai os vossos pandeiros, guardai
Porque a escola de samba não sai!
Adeus, minha Praça Onze, adeus

******

(more...)

The Spring, 2010 issue of DGA Quarterly has just come out and features a fabulous 8-page collection of stills of Orson Welles directing on the set of 11 of his movies, ranging from Citizen Kane to The Immortal Story.

Jackie Lam, the DGA photo editor has done a splendid job of searching out some rare photos, many of which I'd never even seen before! You can download the DGA photo essay in PDF format HERE. It also makes quite a nice companion piece to the special Orson Welles issue of La Furia Umana.

The DGA Quarterly also has reprinted the 1969 reminiscences of many of the cast and crew who worked with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane in their Spring, 2006 issue HERE.

From the introduction to the article:

"The interviewees were found in many places: John Houseman at the Julliard School in New York, Richard Wilson at his beach house at Santa Monica, Ralph Hoge at his camera rental house, William Alland at an investment firm of which he is a partner, Paul Stewart at his home above the Sunset Strip, Agnes Moorehead on the Bewitched set, Joseph Cotten in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Robert Wise in his Universal Office, James G. Stewart at Glen Glenn Sound, Mark Robson at 20th Century-Fox. Curiously, since working on Citizen Kane, Wilson, Hoge, Stewart, Wise and Robson have all become directors themselves."

The Italian online multi-language film magazine LA FURIA UMANA (The Human Fury or WHITE HEAT) edited by Toni D’Angela has just come out with their fourth issue, devoted to the work of that great genius of the cinema, ORSON WELLES.

Their past three issues have featured detailed examinations on the films of Raoul Walsh, Andy Warhol and John Ford.

Given the sorry state of today's print magazines on the cinema, including the once great Film Comment, it is quite heartening to be able to turn to the internet and find far more interesting writing on motion pictures for free.

As LA FURIA UMANA #4 has just appeared (it will be online from April 1st to May 1st and then archived), I've only had time to read two of the extensive articles, and both have been excellent: The poet Richard Hell on The Lady From Shanghai, and Richard Naremore on Welles's unfilmed script for Heart of Darkness, which I found exceptionally interesting, as I only recently read Welles's fascinating screenplay for Heart of Darkness.

I am also honored that two of my own articles on The Other Side of the Wind and Filming Othello are included!

One problem for English speaking readers is that many of the articles appear in the writers native tongues, but I've found that by using the Google translation helper, you will get a slightly distorted but still readable version of the articles that are in Italian or other languages.

Below is the link and the contents page for the special ORSON WELLES issue of LA FURIA UMANA.

____________________________

CONFIDENTIAL REPORT
____________________________

The Other Side of the Wind (started in 1970) / Lawrence French

Infinity: The Cinema of Orson Welles / Toni D’Angela

Orson Welles Today (1966) / Gianni Rondolino

Orson Welles's Dracula on the radio / Ross Wilbanks

Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles / James Naremore

Hearts of Age (1934) / Rinaldo Censi

Citizen Kane (1941) / Denis Lévy

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) / Giulia Carluccio

It’s All True (1942) / Alessandro Cappabianca

Journey Into Fear (1942) / Renzo Pellizzari

The Stranger (1946) / Marzio Pieri

The Lady from Shanghai (1946) / Richard Hell

Macbeth (1948) / Michele Goni

Othello (1952) / Chris Fujiwara

Don Quixote (begun in 1955) / Elena Dagrada and Sigismondo Sciortino

Mr. Arkadin (1955) / A. S. Hamrah

Touch of Evil (1958) / Alfonso Cariolato and Sergio Wolf

The Trial (1962) / Marzio Pieri and Alessandro Cappabianca

Chimes at Midnight (1966) / Giona A. Nazzaro

The Deep (started in 1967) / Renato Zorzin

The Immortal Story (1968) / Sigismondo Sciortino

F for Fake (1973) / Jonathan Rosenbaum

Filming Othello (1978) / Lawrence French

____________________________

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

--T. S. Eliot

**********

I lost my battle to go to the swamps and do Heart of Darkness in a real place. That was at the height of the period when nobody left the studio. The studio had to have control, as it is called—the famous studio control—well, I was more a victim than an authoritative pro like (Howard) Hawks would have been, because I was the stage actor and director who didn’t know what he was doing. In other words, there was the theory that the cameraman himself and the unit manager on location couldn’t control things as well as in the studio. We had that terrible late 1930’s–1940’s look in which people kept riding by in front of painted backdrops. You know that scene in the westerns with the little gas fire burning away under the twigs when they’ve drawn the covered wagons around (the campfire) and all? I was shown that and told that nobody could tell the difference. I said, ‘I can tell the difference.’ That was regarded as very eccentric. That was a long and bitter fight. It was almost as definitive a reason why we didn’t do Heart of Darkness as the fact that we couldn’t get $50,000 to $75,000 off the budget. I claimed that the extra money came from the fact that we were going to do it in the studio.

Finally, I gave in and said, ‘All right, it’s going to have to be all trick shots.’ I wanted my kind of control. They didn’t understand that. There was no quarreling. It was just two different points of view, absolutely opposite each other. Mine was taken to be ignorance, and I read their position as established dumb-headedness.

—Orson Welles to Barbara Leaming

**********

Reading Orson Welles screenplay for Heart of Darkness, written in 1939, several important scenes stand out today, mostly because it shows us just how far in advance Welles was, not only as an artist, but as a progressive thinker. This is demonstrated by several scenes, including a long voice-over narrative by Marlow right at the beginning of the script, where Marlow wonders about the first explorers who sailed into New York harbor over 400 years ago, noting that what basically happened in the conquest of the new world was genocide for most of the indigenous peoples:

MARLOW
I was thinking of very old times when our fathers first came here, four hundred years ago – the other day… Imagine the feelings of a skipper or a civilized man, four hundred years ago, hove to off the Battery here – at the very end of the world. Imagine the trip up this river. With death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here four hundred years ago. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. It has a fascination, too. The abomination – you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate. Maybe we wouldn’t feel like that. I don’t know. They were conquerors, of course, the men who first sailed into this harbor – They grabbed what they could get from the weak of what was to be got. It’s not a pretty thing when you look into it too much, the conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion, or slightly different shaped noses than ourselves. What tries to redeem it is the idea at the back of it; sometimes it’s a sentimental pretense, something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.

*(Curiously, the last lines in this speech, coming after "What tries to redeem it is the idea at the back of it;" do not appear on page 4 of the on-line version of the screenplay. I felt that something was missing when I first read it and apparently something is, as James Naremore points out in his excellent article on Heart of Darkness HERE. Naremore cites the same November 30, 1939 script at the Lilly Library as his source for the extra line, so perhaps the online version is a re-typed copy of the script that may have simply left the line out, or else it came from one of Welles's earlier drafts of the script.)

***********

Welles would have made Marlow's very long opening speech visually interesting by having it run over a series of 10 or more lap dissolves showing Manhattan at twilight, just as all the city lights begin to light up the night sky:

EXT. HARBOR – MARLOW’S BOAT – DUSK – (SET & PROCESS)

Marlow is leaning against the mast of his boat. Behind him can be seen Manhattan Island, its buildings lighting up in the deepening dusk.

Lap dissolves of:

The Bridges of both the Hudson and the East River

The parkways

The boulevards

The skyscrapers

Snatches of music in Central Park (Jazz from radios)

The beginnings of night-life in the city

Dinner music in the restaurants of the big hotels

The gala noodling of big orchestras in concert halls and opera houses

The throb of tom-toms foreshadowing the jungle drums of the story to come...

**********

At the end of the script, Welles expertly condenses this important passage from the book into a few concise words. Here is the text from the novel:

MARLOW: Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.

I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through.

True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.

**********

Here is Welles's version of the above section as he has Marlow speak it in his screenplay:

MARLOW
They buried something in the river... and then they nearly buried me... I nearly died of fever myself... I nearly said my own last words there on the river, and I found that probably I'd have nothing to say! But Kurtz had something to say. He'd summed up -- he'd judged. 'The Horror!' True, he died and I lived. Maybe that's the whole difference; maybe all the wisdom and all truth are just compressed into that moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. I saw him again. -- Months later, at the foot of the river -- I saw those eyes -- that wide immense stare condemning, loathing the whole universe -- piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.

**********