Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Bonham's auction house in London recently sold items from the estate of Bernard Herrmann which included some truly fascinating items from Orson Welles, including this letter, which sold for 360£.

*******************

Dearest Maestro:

Your letter brought me more pleasure than I can say. Not the tone of it, which was a trifle severe, but the fact of it. It was fine, very fine to hear from you.

“Our paths,” you say, “haven’t crossed much in recent years.” If this is so, it is no fault of your obedient servant, who in common with his principals in his last movie enterprise, tried long and earnestly to engage your services for any sum of time. You have now, against the advice of your sober friends, committed yourself to the Colonel von Fox Hills, he of the air-conditioned teeth. This letter is a plea that you get out of this bondage for at least enough time to make music for the film I’m now starting (directing) and to write the score for our projected LEAR which I have a mind to put into rehearsal about Christmas. This letter is also to tell you that I love you truly and that your heart is God’s little garden.

Always,

Orson

*******************

The letter is undated, so it is rather difficult to tell which King Lear project Welles might have been referring to, but my guess it is almost certainly NOT the Peter Brook directed TV version Welles did in 1953, but more likely the stage version of Lear Welles was planning that eventually debuted in January 1956 at City Center with music by Marc Blitzstein. Welles also appears to be talking about the efforts he and Richard Wilson made to get Herrmann to score Macbeth for him.

It also seems from his remarks, that Welles would have been more than delighted to have Herrmann score virtually any film he was going to make in the fifties, if he could free himself from his work at 20th Century-Fox. But the film that Welles says he is just starting and asks Herrmann to consider scoring was probably one of Welles many unrealized projects, although if it was Mr. Arkadin or even Touch of Evil it seems likely that Herrmann would never have completed his work, as Welles lost control of both of those films in the post-production stages.

A copy of Welles letter can be viewed at Bonhams Site, where several other Herrmann treasures are also available for viewing, including a copy of a book Welles had inscribed and sent to Herrmann as a Christmas present, Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities. (Sale Price: 384 £.)

There is also a copy of the Hitchcock-Truffaut interview book (1967) that Hitchcock has inscribed to Herrmann: "To Benny with my fondest wishes, Hitch." (Sale Price: 3,120 £.)

This is rather interesting, because it comes a year after Hitchcock had abruptly fired Herrmann from his work scoring Torn Curtain and indicates Hitchcock may have hoped to mend fences with Herrmann and have him score his next film, Topaz.

Of course, once Herrmann felt he had been wronged, he was not going to say "yes" to Hitchcock unless he was courted and it seems unlikely that Hitchcock would be willing to do that, although apparently Hitchcock did ask Herrmann back to score his last film Family Plot right before Herrmann died. Herrmann, who had a full schedule of films planned for 1976, including DePalma's Carrie, The Seven Per Cent Solution and Larry Cohen's God Told Me To, was reportedly happy to be in a position to ignore Hitchcock's reunion offer.

This article is based on a piece by Jean-Pierre Berthome that appeared in French in The Unknown Orson Welles, the wonderful book edited by Stefan Drossler of the Filmmuseum Munchen.

Special thanks to Francois Thomas, who graciously translated key portions of the text for me.

All the sections below in bold type are taken from Welles screenplay.

*********************

In June 1967, the professional film journals announced that Orson Welles would direct an episode of the omnibus film Histoires Extraordinaires or Spirits of the Dead as it was known in America. By September, it was made public that Welles’s episode would not be used. Instead the final film would comprise three episodes based on some of Edgar Allan Poe's lesser known stories and be directed by Roger Vadim (Metzengerstein), Louis Malle (William Wilson) and Federico Fellini (Toby Dammit, or Never Bet the Devil Your Head).

See color images from the original French pressbook at my Facebook page HERE.

Early on, Ingmar Berman may have also been approached about directing an episode. In his book Encountering Directors (1972), Charles Thomas Samuels talked with Federico Fellini about the three original directors who were under consideration for the project. Fellini said: “I was still under contract to make The Voyage of Mastorna for (Dino) De Laurentiis and was in total confusion. Then along come these French producers who begged me to participate in a multi-episode film. They assured me that of the three stories, I would make one, Bergman another and Welles the last. So I said yes. Then it turned out that they had lied about Bergman and that Welles, who didn’t trust them, refused to sign. I continued anyway, simply because this was a way of freeing myself from De Laurentiis. When they told me my partners were to be Malle and Vadim, I could have legally refused. With me, Welles, and Bergman—three visionary artists whose images have a richness of meaning—there would have been some common quality in this homage to Poe. That’s why I signed, not for monetary considerations.”

Needless to say, the mind boggles at the thought of the "richness" of images we might have received if an anthology of Poe stories had been realized by Fellini, Bergman and Welles! It certainly would have been far more memorable than what eventually emerged as Spirits of the Dead. The Bergman episode, in particular, would have been fascinating, since, at the time, the Swedish director was in the midst of his own “horror” phase, having just directed Persona and Hour of the Wolf, and soon would be filming the real-life horrors depicted so memorably in Shame and The Passion of Anna. Poe’s story The Masque of the Red Death also more than likely inspired Bergman’s movie The Seventh Seal. There’s certainly little doubt that Bergman’s 1956 film went on to influence Roger Corman when he made his own movie version of Poe's story in 1964, starring Vincent Price as Prince Prospero.

Even more intriguing is to find out that Bergman wrote a never-published 11-page story in 1938, when he was only 20-years old, entitled A Peculiar Tale which appears to have been influenced by Poe. In it we come across the figure of a personified death for the first time in Bergman’s oeuvre. Maaret Koskinen, an authority on Bergman’s work describes A Peculiar Tale as follows:

It is an emotionally charged story of an anonymous narrator who encounters a beautiful yet highly perfumed woman in a florist's. She turns out to be a prostitute, a widowed mother and an intravenous drug user. Towards the end of the story the narrator finds her beaten to death by one of her clients. Her neighbor, a garrulous old woman, tells him about the assailant:

"And last night I met her on the stairs with a man. And the way he looked gave me a chill of fear. His appearance was completely white, and it didn't look as if he had any eyes, and he had a big floppy hat, and a long black cape"

The tale ends with the narrator walking out onto the street, his collar turned up against the "rain and autumn storms", having gone up to the dead woman and stroked her forehead: “Poor little thing, I thought. You wanted to be Death's pretty little harlot, and he paid you in his fashion."

What Poe story Bergman might have chosen to make is unknown, but Welles chose to adapt two of Poe's more famous tales for his proposed segment. It should also be noted that 21 years earlier, in June 1946, Welles had adapted Poe's The Tell Tale Heart for his radio show.

Working with his companion Oja Kodar on the script, Welles used The Masque of the Red Death to frame the story of The Cask of Amontillado and cleverly changed the sex of Fortunato, from a male to female. An undated copy of the script is in the Welles collection of the Filmmuseum in Munich.

The title page indicates the principal roles and notes the script would be combining two of Poe’s short stories into one episode:

The following script comprises two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, including a free adaptation of “The Cask of Amontillado.” The two are grouped together under the title:

By Orson Welles and Oja Kodar

*********************
THE PLAYERS:

The Narrator
The Prince
The Majordomo
Fortunata

*********************

(more...)

Thanks to Lance Morrison for tallying up all the votes so far of Wellesnet members ongoing ranking of their favorite Orson Welles' movies. I've taken the results Lance has posted on the message board and added in ten more votes, including my own, as well as people I've asked to send me their rankings, including Christopher Welles Feder, Juan Cobos, Richard France, etc.

The results change slightly, but rather significantly, in that now FALSTAFF comes in at number one!

*****

*****

For comparison, here is a ranking Juan Cobos complied for his magazine Nickel Odeon, when he asked 100 mostly Spanish writers and filmmakers to pick there favorite Orson Welles' movies in 1999:

*****

*****

Interestingly enough, a clear consensus seems to emerge if we divide the two lists into a top four, a middle four and a bottom four.

In that case, the top, middle and bottom films remain the same on both lists, varying only slightly in their final ranking within their respective tier.

I recently received a letter from a 7th grade student in Mass. who asked me a series of interesting questions about Orson Welles. By a strange coincidence, I had just been talking with Joseph McBride about the upcoming group of younger Welles scholars. In any event, I was quite impressed by the intelligence of the questions about Welles and his career, especially coming from a student who was only in the 7th grade. So I thought instead of giving only short one or two sentence answers, I'd provide the answers to his questions here at Wellesnet, just in case there are any other budding Welles scholars out there who may also be writing about Orson Welles as an important "individual in history" for National History Day.

To begin, here is some background about the National History Day contest:

***************

The National History Day contest engages students in grades 6-12, who engage in discovery and interpretation of historical topics related to an annual theme. Students hone their talents and produce creative and scholarly projects in the form of exhibits, documentaries, historical papers, performances, or web sites. After a series of district and state contests, the program culminates with a national competition at the University of Maryland in College Park each June.

***************

Here is the letter I received along with my replies:

Dear Mr. French:

Hello, my name is Valentin Prince and I am a seventh grade student at a middle school in Somerville, Massachusetts. I am taking part in National History Day and I am writing my paper on Orson Welles. This project is a nation wide competition, and I hope to do well, so I am looking for more information on my topic. I have used your site as a large source of information for my project already, but I still have a few questions about Welles that I hope you have the time to answer:

Most of Orson Welles’ movies were very unpopular at the box office upon release, but some of his movies are now regarded as staples in the movie world, and Citizen Kane is widely regarded by critics as the best movie of all time. My question is: why do you think that Welles’ movies are so revered now, but when first released so unsuccessful?

This is the classic dilemma that all true artists face, but particularly artists who are considered "ahead of their time." Many movie classics from years ago were not very successful when they were first released. The prime example of this is The Wizard of Oz, which like Citizen Kane took years to break even. As did Walt Disney's Fantasia. All three of these movies were re-released in theaters after their initial runs, to much greater success and eventually all became movie classics.

But in terms of a different artistic medium, just think of important artists like Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Van Gogh. In their lifetime of creative work, they could barely support themselves. In ten short years, Van Gogh completed nearly 1,000 paintings, each of which today is worth millions of dollars. But in his own lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two of his canvases!

Thankfully, Orson Welles was a success on the stage and in radio, before he ever went to Hollywood. But just imagine if Welles had only been able to make his living as a director of movies. In that case, it is very unlikely he would even been able to complete the 12 films he managed to finish in his career, although today most of these 12 films are widely considered to be milestones of the cinematic art.

The point to be made here is that great art rarely has any connection to great success, especially in the cinema. Citizen Kane was pretty much hailed as a masterpiece by every critic in America from the day of its arrival in 1941 (except for people writing for the Hearst press). However, it was simply a movie the public didn’t like. As a matter of fact I didn’t like it, either, the first time I saw it, when I was in High School. At the time I had no idea why people said it was the greatest movie ever made. However, when anything is difficult to understand or demanding, people seem to look to the experts to help them make up their minds. So it has now become almost impossible to say that Citizen Kane is not the greatest picture every made. Which is rather absurd, because Welles himself made a much better picture with Falstaff. Unfortunately, these "best of" lists which used to be fun to look at, have now become nothing more than marketing tools. In any case, it's dangerous to believe in the opinions of the so-called “experts” who tend to believe they are always right and you are always wrong.

This of course, was the theme of one of Welles's own later films, F For Fake. The public is supposed to blindly follow these experts, and believe everything they say. This seems to happen in all fields of the arts. Just look at the work of the sculptor Richard Serra. I personally find most of his work incredibly bad, not only conceptually but in execution. But art critics and museum curators tell us that these ugly slabs of steel are important works of art. Yet, a sculptor like Oja Kodar, who may make more beautiful works of art, is mostly unknown. Presumably, for exactly for the same reason Van Gogh was not discovered in his own lifetime, and why many minor painters who are now forgotten were considered to be great artists in their time.

So as Welles says in F For Fake, most experts views can often prove to be quite incorrect in the eyes of history. True art is in the eye of the beholder. So if you think Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, then for you, it is. If you don’t like it, why agree with the pack who parrot each other, if you in your heart disagree? Welles himself thought his best film was Falstaff, as do I and many other Welles scholars. Of course, that film is nowhere to be seen in the lists of best movies ever made. Probably one good reason why, is because many experts haven’t even seen it, including presumably most of the members of the AFI!

Orson Welles is a very popular man in the movie world, but he also is widely known for his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938. Why do you think that this was such an important event for the world, and why did it make Welles so famous?

It was this event that really made Orson Welles career and contract at RKO possible. Welles had already established himself as a brilliant director on the stage in New York, and had appeared on the cover of Time magazine earlier in 1938, before the broadcast of The War of the Worlds. So when Welles’s famous broadcast caused such a panic in October of 1938, the massive coverage it received across the nation insured that there was literally no one in America who didn’t wake up on Halloween morning who didn't know the name of Orson Welles. The immediate result was that Welles's weekly radio show got upgraded with a sponsor, Campbell’s Soup, which allowed Welles's to hire name co-stars to act with him on the air, such as Katherine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Helen Hayes, Lionel Barrymore, Ida Lupino and Walter Huston. It wasn't long after that that Hollywood studios began to court Welles services as director and actor, with RKO winning out with it's offer of total artistic freedom.

(more...)

By exclusive arrangement with Nick Louras, the editor of PENNY BLOOD magazine, Wellesnet is able to provide these excerpts from Harvey Chartrand's extensive and fascinating interview with Orson Welles late, great cinematographer Gary Graver.

The full text of the article can be read in PENNY BLOOD magazine #11 featuring a cover story on the films of British author Dennis Wheatley. It can be ordered online here: http://www.pennyblood.com/

And by a strange coincidence, Dennis Wheatley's movie adaptation of Hammer Films version of THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, features two superb performances from actors Orson Welles knew quite well: Christopher Lee (from the film version of MOBY DICK - REHEARSED), and Charles Gray (from THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and ORSON's BAG.)

___________________________________

CINEMATOGRAPHER GARY GRAVER:

THE MAN WHO SHOT EVERYTHING, FROM ART HOUSE TO GRIND HOUSE TO BLOCKBUSTER - AND BEYOND

*****************************************

Interviewed by Harvey Chartrand

*****************************************

In 2004, outré film director Curtis Harrington, whom I had interviewed several times as he attempted to revive his long-dormant career, suggested that I speak to Gary Graver, the veteran cinematographer he had lined up for his next project – what would have been the first film version of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd. Although Graver accumulated several hundred credits over a 45-year career, he is best known as Orson Welles’ chief cameraman during the Great One’s terrible final years – a dreadful shambles of wine and whisky commercials, walk-ons in bad pictures, movie trailer voiceovers, talk show blather, magic tricks, unsold scripts, unfinished directorial projects, lost footage, escalating obesity and declining health. Stepping out from under Welles’ hulking shadow, Graver enjoyed a varied and prolific career, and – to make ends meet – had a sideline as a director of classy porno movies, using the pseudonym “Robert McCallum” for these triple-X efforts. (The best of the “McCallums” – 3 A.M., made in 1975 – features an infamous lesbian shower scene edited by Welles, supposedly to repay a debt to Graver.)

So I contacted Graver and he agreed to an interview. Although lengthy intervals separated our telephone conversations (delays I attributed to Graver’s non-stop schedule and protean output), he couriered me samples of his short subjects, feature-length films, documentaries and works-in-progress, which I viewed enthusiastically. I later discovered that Graver was also battling throat cancer at this time.

During our freewheeling talks, Graver discussed several low-budgeters he directed in the hopes of breaking into mainstream films (these B pictures included The Boys, Moon in Scorpio, Trick or Treats, Evil Spirits, Crossing the Line and The Attic); rarities that he worked on with Welles; collaborations with Spanish horror king Paul Naschy and the prolific American B-movie director Fred Olen Ray; and such cinematic oddities as Free Grass, Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, Doctor Dracula and The Mighty Gorga.

Screenwriter William Martell reports on his Sex in a Submarine blog that Graver did second unit work on John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Color Purple (1985). Graver shot Grand Theft Auto for Ron Howard in 1977 and was cinematographer on over 200 movies, directing more than 100 himself. He did second unit or additional photog on “zillions of movies,” Martell writes.

In 2000, Ray Manzarek, The Doors’ keyboard man and a graduate of UCLA’s film school, asked Graver to serve as cinematographer on his underrated thriller Love Her Madly, based on a story outline by the band’s debauched lead singer Jim Morrison.

“I had a sense while I was making the picture that I had a winner,” Manzarek said. “I had great actors, a great cameraman – Gary Graver, who worked with Orson Welles. Gary had so many ideas on how to set the mood. I told him, now we’re into the darkness, and he would light the darkness. Gary was just a great lighting technician. He contributed to the beauty of every single shot in the picture. His wife Jillian Kesner was the production supervisor, running around with clipboards and paper. She did a fabulous job too. They’re a great couple.”

Since the Ray Manzarek interview was recorded, Gary Graver died of cancer on November 16, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 68. Eighty-year-old Curtis Harrington died on May 6, 2007, at his home in the Hollywood Hills, of complications related to a stroke he suffered in 2005. And Graver’s wife Jillian Kesner (a former actress and martial artist) died of the combined effects of leukemia and a staph infection on December 5, 2007, at a hospital in Irvine, California. She was 58.

These macabre circumstances may account for the fragmentary nature of this fascinatingly disjointed interview with the late Gary Graver.

-Harvey Chartrand

*****************************************

HARVEY CHARTRAND: Discuss your collaboration with director Curtis Harrington. You lensed his final horror masterpiece Usher (2002).

GARY GRAVER: I’ve known Curtis since I was a kid. I met him through a friend at a film festival in San Diego. So I’ve known Curtis through the years, but our careers went in different directions. We see each other socially all the time. I run into him at film festivals in Europe. Curtis hadn’t done a movie in about 10 years. He called me up and said he wanted to make Usher, a short film. He wanted to go back to his roots in experimental film. Curtis asked if I would help him and I said “sure.” Next to Orson, Curtis is the most intellectual director I’ve ever worked with. I was happy to help out.

(more...)

Art should never try to be popular; the public should try to make itself artistic.

--Oscar Wilde
The Soul of Man under Socialism

________________________________

Director Marc Forster has claimed in nearly every interview he's given while promoting his new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, that since he had never made an action movie before this, he didn't really want to accept the assignment. So why did such a supposedly "non-commercial" director finally agree to take on such a "commercial" kind of movie?

Well, it turns out Forster "was inspired when he remembered Orson Welles's famous statement that his biggest regret was never having made a commercial movie."

The only problem here, is that as true Orson Welles aficionados know, Mr. Welles never made any such statement. In fact, Welles experience after attempting his first commercial movie, The Stranger, for producer Sam Spiegel was so artistically unpleasant for him, he vowed never again to direct a "commercial" movie. So I find Mr. Forster's attempts at bringing the name of Orson Welles up as a defense for making such a blatant "commercial" movie, not only to be factually wrong, but rather offensive.

Most of us know that Welles would indeed act in movies of the lowest calibre to make the money he needed to finance his own projects. But never in his darkest hour would Welles have ever thought about directing a James Bond movie! Of course, Welles did act in Casino Royale, but quite obviously he would never have considered directing any of the Bond entries, where everything is essentially decided by the studio or the producers, or the 2nd Unit action director (Dan Bradley in Quantum of Solace).

These thoughts came to mind after having viewed Forster's new Bond movie, and I'd have to say that Mr. Forster is probably the kind of director Welles was talking about when he said so many directors can go through their careers without being detected as frauds. For me, this kind of director is a real fake, because he pretends to be "an art house" director but the moment he gets an offer to direct something commercial (along with the multi-million dollar fee it brings to him and his agent), he throws all artistic worth to The Other Side of the Wind.

As Welles would no doubt say, here is a man who may go on making movies for years without being discovered for the "phoney" he may be.

The truly ironic thing is that this latest Bond movie gives Forster a budget of at least $200 million and probably a fee of at least $5 million. For that same $5 million, Orson Welles final masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind could easily be completed and shown, albeit to a much smaller audience than Quantum of Solace will be reaching.

Which invariably leads to this question: How can Orson Welles be taken to task for acting in a James Bond movie, (or wine commercials, for that matter), while a supposedly "classy" director like Marc Forster can be praised for taking on one of the worse James Bond movies ever made? Actually, the action sequences aren't at all bad, but then of course, they were directed by Dan Bradley, not Mr. Forster, who as he notes so ironically, isn't an action director.

My real interest in life is education. I want to be a teacher. All this experience I've been piling up is equipping me for that future ...I shall know how to dramatize the art of imparting knowledge.

One day I shall leave all this behind me, go back (to Todd School) and give full rein to my ideas. That's when life will really begin for me.

--Orson Welles, The Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1945

_______________________________

Simon Callow has undoubtedly written more about Orson Welles and the happy times he spent at Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, then any other Welles biographer. So I'm quite pleased to announce that Mr. Callow has sent along this message of support for all the citizens and politicians of Woodstock, who are now attempting to save Grace Hall from it's slated demolition: (more...)

Q: Where is home for you?

ORSON WELLES: I have lots of homes ...I suppose its Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere. I went to school there for four years, and if I think of home, it’s there.

It may be a tedious cliché to say that school days are the happiest days of your life, but Roger Hill and his staff were so unique, and the school so imbued with real happiness, that one could hardly fail to enjoy oneself within its boundaries.

_____________________________

Besides Orson Welles connection to The Todd School, the place he considered his "home" the unsung hero and possibly the biggest influence on Welles, was his headmaster and teacher at Todd, Roger Hill. (more...)

For anyone with an interest in the University of Michigan's two collections of Welles papers, here's an update as to their status from Welles scholar/U of M professor Catherine Benamou:

"Thanks to a special grant from a library donor, processing (the physical organization and labeling) of the Richard Wilson-Orson Welles archive at the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan is nearly complete, scheduled to be ready for full public use in September, 2008. Details of this processing include (according to Sally Vermaaten, specially assigned processing librarian):

· Arranging and describing the Wilson-Welles Papers in a way that will allow scholars to access an accurate and complete description of the collection’s content and better understand the collection’s context. Arrangement and description will also allow researchers to find relevant information without having to hunt through a large number of boxes.
· Creating an XML finding aid that will be available and fully searchable online.
· Preserving the collection by removing harmful elements such as rusty metal paperclips and placing collection materials in proper archival containers, for example, acid-free manuscript folders for documents and clear mylar sleeves for photographs.

According to Vermaaten, the holdings of the Wilson-Welles collection originally amounted to 42 boxes containing "correspondence, photographs, playbills, scripts, posters, and other papers;" and 15 boxes of audiovisual materials and objects. As soon as processing is complete, the finding aid (a searchable list of boxes and their contents) will be posted to the Library website, and a link will be available to post for Wellesnet users.

Next will be the Orson Welles-Oja Kodar papers, which should be open to the public sometime in early 2009.

Processing is a crucial step towards cataloguing: it lets us know *exactly* what we have, and already, based on peeks at material processed thus far, there have been some eye-opening discoveries."

Thanks to Sir Bygber Brown for posting the letters Orson Welles wrote that are currently for sale at www.abebooks.com

You can visit the site to see more details about buying the letters, but since they are selling for $2,000 and up, I don't imagine many people can afford them! However, because they are all quite interesting, I thought I'd post some excerpts from them below.

Several of the letters are written to Leonard Lyons, an early champion of Orson Welles, whose career as a journalist was nearly wrecked by William Randolph Hearst in 1941 - (see the Time Magazine article, below). After being blackballed by Mr. Hearst, Lyons became the entertainment writer for The New York Post (pre-Rupert Murdoch, of course) and Welles became his good friend, writing frequent letters to him, giving him inside information, in hopes of getting news about his projects before American producers and readers.

In this first letter (circa 1960), Welles talks about his plan to follow bullfighters in Spain, especially Antonio Ordonez, the great matador and friend of Welles, whose farm outside Ronda is where Welles ashes were eventually interred. Ordonez also provided the germ for the idea that became Welles's script for The Sacred Beasts. That screenplay, in turn, morphed into The Other Side of The Wind. In this letter, Welles also mentions a play he's written, Brittle Glory, which I've never heard any mention of. Could it still exist somewhere among Welles's many papers?

Hotel Esplanade
Zagreb, Yugoslavia

Dearest Lennie:

Here’s our news: Paola, Beatrice and Rebecca are in the Austrian Alps. As soon as I’m done with this dreadful picture (probably THE TARTARS), we’re joining up for a few weeks in Spain. We’ll be following Ordonez (the bull fighter), which means the south for the first ten days of September. I was in Valencia for the feria and for a few more of Antonio’s dates after that. After Spain--? Probably London. Somebody sent me a really good play from America called “The Guide” and I expect to be producing it in London either before or just after the pantomime season. Also, there’s a play of my own called “Brittle Glory.” If I can cast it right, I’ll be doing that, too. For the past few months I’ve been in a light but lingering sulk over your repeated references to Olivier’s “Rhinoceros.” (no mention of your obedient servant.) Well, now you can fix all that: (Leo) Kerz has offered me the job of directing his N.Y. production (which eventually featured Zero Mostel, Eli Wallach and Morris Carnovsky and was directed by Joseph Anthony), and in mentioning that I’ve turned it down you can right a great wrong, and finally associate me with this play!

Much love to all of you always,

Orson

___________________________

Welles was understandable upset that he wasn't given much credit for directing Eugene Ionesco's RHINOCEROS. But check out the program for Orson Welles' staging of the production of RHINOCEROS when it moved to the Strand Theater, London, after opening at the Royal Court Theater:

http://www.wellesnet.com/Rhino%20program.htm

The cast list alone is astonishing. Besides Sir Laurence Oliver, Welles directed Maggie Smith - later to appear in Oliver's version of OTHELLO, along with a host of interesting British actors, who would later become well know in hit films, such as Michael Gough (BATMAN, DRACULA), Miles Malleson (Michael Powell's THE THIEF OF BAGDAD and Terence Fisher's THE BRIDES OF DRACULA), Michael Bates (Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), Peter Sallis (TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA), etc, etc. And strangely enough, notice how many actors in the Orson Welles production of RHINOCEROS also appeared in DRACULA movies! They include Lord Olivier (Van Helsing), Michael Gough (Arthur Holmwood), Miles Malleson, Peter Sallis and of course, Welles himself in his own famous Mercury Theater on the air radio production. Plus, Christopher Lee, who Welles directed in MOBY DICK, had a flat on Cadogan Square, only a few minutes away from The Royal Court Theater (as did Boris Karloff, who lived next door to Christopher Lee on Cadogan Square, and would soon play a vampire for the first time in Mario Bava's BLACK SABBATH!)

(more...)

With the impending release of Warner Bros. last man on earth story, I Am Legend, I recently re-watched Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, the second abortive attempt at bringing Richard Matheson’s classic end of the world novel to the screen, and noted a few interesting similarities between it and Welles’ Touch of Evil, as they were both shot by that superb cameraman, Russell Metty.   

Most intriguingly, I recalled a piece by columnist Marilyn Beck, claiming that Charlton Heston wanted to do the movie after reading Richard Matheson’s novel at the suggestion of none other than Orson Welles, while they were working together on Touch of Evil.

Here is Marilyn Beck's column from 1971, which leads off with a bit of gossip about the steamy interracial sex scenes that, if they occurred at all, ended up on the cutting room floor:
 

HOLLYWOOD - Feb 10, 1971.    The Charlton Heston-Rosalind Cash "I Am Legend" love scenes must be something else again. All still photos and negatives which recorded that bit of business have been, locked in the Warner, Bros.’ vault, and no one's quite sure when they'll be released — if ever! Rosalind, the shapely black singer who gets her first big movie break in the Heston starrer, wasn't too happy about that explicit bit of footage right from the beginning. She didn't mind doing it for the sake of theater audiences, mind you, but in front of all the cast and crew she considered it more man a trifle embarrassing.

Heston, who's now in the midst of "I Am Legend" post-production, hasn't decided what his next cinema venture will be. But chances are, whatever develops, his wife of 27 years will be involved in it, too. Lydia Heston is such an expert with a camera that she's been employed as a special photographer on both "I Am Legend" and Chuck's "The Hawaiians."

No, she didn't shoot those love scene stills now cooling in the vault. But she did do some layouts of Chuck and Rosalind at the Hestons' hilltop home.

Charlton Heston is terribly excited about "I Am Legend." Actually, he has been for the last 14 years. The story first grabbed him back is 1957, after be read the novel at Orson Welles' suggestion. Chuck, who's a whiz on the big things, but who frequently has trouble remembering mundane matters like his phone number and book titles, asked producer Walter Seltzer in 1957 to hunt down "My Name Is Legend" for a possible film project. Seltzer eventually found a work bearing that name. It was a 1,400-page anthropological text. And when they finally located the science fiction novel Heston was actually interested in, a European film company was already adapting it under a different title, (“The Last Man on Earth”).

Now that, 14 years later, Seltzer and Heston have finally gotten together to film the tale of the few who survive a biological holocaust, much of the original story has had to be changed to make it believable to today’s more with-it, more sophisticated audiences.

___________________________

Like many stories involving Welles, the facts seem to have gotten a bit garbled by Ms. Beck.  According to Charlton Heston’s own published journals, the book Welles gave him to read was not Matheson's I Am Legend, but George R. Stewart’s 1949 book Earth Abides, also about a worldwide plague that leaves only a handful of people alive.  It was turned into an effective two part radio show on "Escape"  in 1950 that had echoes of Welles' own famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. 

In his fascinating journals, Heston talks about how he and Welles planned a filmmaking partnership towards the end of shooting on Touch of Evil, with Earth Abides being considered as one of many possible projects. Other titles bandied about, included Lord Jim, and Don Quixote.

(more...)

Two prevailing and diametrically opposed attitudes seem to dictate the way most people currently think about Orson Welles. One attitude, predominantly American, sees his life and career chiefly in terms of failure and regards the key question to be why he never lived up to his promise—"his promise" almost invariably being tied up with the achievement of Citizen Kane. Broadly speaking, this position can be compared to that of the investigative reporter Thompson's editor in Citizen Kane, bent on finding a single formula for explaining a man's life. The other attitude— less monolithic and less tied to any particular nationality, or to the expectations aroused by any single work—views his life and career more sympathetically as well as inquisitively; this position corresponds more closely to Thompson's near the end of Kane when he says, "I don't think any word can explain a man's life.

—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Battle over Orson Welles, 1996  (Reprinted in Discovering Orson Welles).

_____________________________

THE BATTLE OVER ORSON WELLES - ROUND TWO

By Lawrence French  

_____________________________
 

As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes throughout his recent book, Discovering Orson Welles, the old legends and outright lies that followed Welles around for the last years of his life die hard,  even when many were so obviously false. In fact, despite the major strides made by Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, and Mr. Rosenbaum’s own book, many of the old Welles myths are prominently regurgitated in two error-ridden articles that appeared in national magazines this week. 

First there is “The Player Kings” a long piece by Claudia Roth Pierpont in the November 19 issue of The New Yorker that contrasts the Shakespeare adaptations of Welles and Laurence Olivier.  Secondly is a much shorter piece (as far as Welles is concerned), that compares Francis Ford Coppola to Welles in the December issue of Vanity Fair.  Of course, The New Yorker is where Pauline Kael’s now thoroughly discredited piece “Raising Kane” first  appeared, and following in that stellar tradition of excellence, we get a piece where facts are ignored to better suit the agenda of the writer.  Actually, Ms. Pierpont appears to have done some research and read a couple of Welles biographies, including Simon Callow’s (where she apparently borrows most of her information).  But unlike Mr. Callow, she fails to get the “facts” straight.

However, one thing she certainly can’t be accused of, is plagiarizing either Joseph McBride’s or Jonathan Rosenbaum’s recent books on Welles. She clearly hasn’t read either one. 

First, here is the official New Yorker press release on the article, which notes that Sir Laurence had many successes in Shakespeare, while Welles had many failures.  

How the Rivalry of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier Made Shakespeare Modern
 

In “The Player Kings” (p. 70), Claudia Roth Pierpont looks back on the parallel careers of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, “the twentieth century’s two greatest dramatic illusionists.” Pierpont writes that the two actors “had more in common and, ultimately, had more effect on each other’s work—as friendly, if occasionally cutthroat, competitors; as reinventors of Shakespeare for a modern audience—than has been noted even in the mountains of books that each has inspired. . .  Growing up an ocean apart, they had emerged independently, in the mid-thirties, as the biggest theatre personalities and Shakespeare revolutionaries of the age.” Pierpont traces their twin oeuvres through decades of successes and, in Welles’s case, failures as they attempted to bring Shakespeare to the screen—from Olivier’s celebrated “Henry V” through Welles’s neglected late masterpiece “Chimes at Midnight.” In the process, they tackled many of Shakespeare’s titanic roles, including Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III, in projects that seemed to feed into each other even as the two men endeavored to upstage each other.

Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:

_____________________________

The rise of this looser aesthetic has been a boon to Welles's reputation. In the nineteen-eighties, "Macbeth" was restored to his original version, and in the following decade "Othello" was restored to a version superior to the original, in terms of sound—just when many English-speaking critics were coming around to the idea that technical flaws it were part of his works "raffish" charm. Yet, while books and seminars on Welles today abound ad nauseam, the audience for his Shakespeare trilogy remains small. Although "Macbeth" and "Othello" are available on DVD, neither has received the deluxe treatment awarded to Olivier's Shakespeare films, to "Citizen Kane," or, for that matter, to Welles's unfinished botch of a film, "Mr. Arkadin."  "Chimes at Midnight," caught in a legal wrangle, has not been shown theatrically in this country since its initial failure, nor has it been released here on DVD. In recent years, Roger Ebert has campaigned for its release ("How can it be that there is an the Orson Welles masterpiece that remains all but unseen?"), and scenes have started showing up on YouTube, which may help bring it back to light at last. Welles, who considered "Chimes" his finest work—"If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I would offer up"—ruefully told of a Hollywood producer who, during Welles's later years, inquired if he had ever thought of playing Falstaff.

By then, he was famous for being grotesquely fat, for appearing on talk shows, for selling cheap wine on TV. But he was famous most of all as the man who had got everything he wanted, and then—as a reporter says of Charles Foster Kane— lost it. The more often "Citizen Kane" showed up on lists as the best movie ever made, the steeper his descent appeared. By now, Welles's monumental failure is as ingrained in the notion of who he was as the sound of his voice, even though "Othello" and "Chimes at Midnight" are more humanly rich achievements than "Kane," and among the greatest Shakespeare movies ever made. Welles admitted to "thousands" of regrets, but he did not offer blame for the way things turned out: he did not care to look back at all. The real masterpiece was always the movie waiting to be made. Like Olivier, Welles kept on working to the end. He died of a heart attack, at seventy, in 1985, apparently in his sleep. He was found the next morning with a typewriter balanced on his belly. He had been working on the script for his latest project, a video version of "Julius Caesar" in which he was to play every role. His plans for filming "King Lear" were also well under way.

(more...)