Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Coming across the Autumn, 1962 issue of Sight & Sound at a flea market recently, I was struck by a John Houseman interview, who of all people, defends Orson Welles from that absurd question that seems to have plagued him ever since the fiasco of It's All True: "What went wrong?"

In 1962, Houseman had yet to write his own detailed account about guiding Herman J. Mankiewicz through writing the script for Citizen Kane, nor had he spoken to Pauline Kael. Which brings up an interesting point about the whole Citizen Kane writing controversy. From Houseman's point of view, his story is what indeed did happen, because he had no knowledge of what Welles was doing on his own in Hollywood, while he and Mankiewicz were holed up in Victorville. In fact, since the whole controversy mirrors the structure of Citizen Kane itself, is seems like it would be quite a fascinating idea to take the making of Citizen Kane, and tell it from four distinct point of views: Those of Welles, Houseman/Mankiewicz, George Schaefer and Joesph Cotten. It would certainly be far more more interesting than the lamentable mess of a movie that RKO 281 turned out to be!

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INTERVIEW WITH JOHN HOUSEMAN

by Penelope Huston - Sight & Sound, Autumn, 1962

JOHN HOUSEMAN: (The writing of Citizen Kane) is a delicate subject: I think Welles has always sincerely felt that he, single-handed, wrote Citizen Kane and everything else that he has directed—except, possibly, the plays of Shakespeare. But the script of Kane was essentially Mankiewicz's. The conception and the structure were his, all the dramatic Hearstian mythology and the journalistic and political wisdom which he had been carrying around with him for years and which he now poured into the only serious job he ever did in a lifetime of film writing. But Orson turned Kane into a film: the dynamics and the tensions are his and the brilliant cinematic effects—all those visual and aural inventions that add up to make Citizen Kane one of the world's great movies—those were pure Orson Welles.

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Given the recent discussion surrounding the New Yorker magazine's attacks against Orson Welles, whether in 1945, or most famously in 1971, by Pauline Kael, it's somewhat bizarre that today I should stumble across the May, 1972 issue of Films and Filming, right outside my house, at the Alamo Square flea market where I saw an article by the iconoclastic director Ken Russell, giving us a spirited defense of Orson Welles!

Since, at that time, Ms. Kael welded considerable power with her reviews, it's quite understandable that not many directors were willing to rush to Welles's defense, except, of course, Peter Bogdanovich, who allowed Welles to write a detailed rebuttal to Ms. Kael's charges, "The Kane Mutiny," under his own name.  But, until today, I had never heard anything about Ken Russell's "tell it like it is" piece, so without any further ado, here it is:

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KEN RUSSELL writes on RAISING KANE

Films and Filming - May, 1972

GET HOLD OF THIS BOOK—it's dynamite. Within its pages are all the good bits of every film made up till 1941 and all the good bits of every film made after 1941.

'IT'S A SHALLOW MASTERPIECE', shrills Miss P. Kael, New Yorker columnist. OK Miss Kael, but these are the only masterpieces that work on celluloid. Something to do with silver nitrate molecules, pop-corn and necking in the back row, perhaps—it's a mystery that will never be solved but it's a fact nevertheless. And this annoying, unfathomable fact explains why Godard is relegated to the half-empty Art Houses and why On the Waterfront packs them in at the Odeon.

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To celebrate the 93rd birthday of ORSON WELLES - May 6, 1915 - here are some fond memories from members of the cast and crew of CITIZEN KANE.

I'm sure they all would be wishing Orson a very happy birthday today...

PAUL STEWART - Raymond, the butler

The telephone rang and I heard the unmistakable voice of Orson Welles, speaking from California.

“I want you to come out and do a part for me in my picture,” he said. “Have you got an agent?”
“Yes,” I said. “But what’s the part?”
“Never mind. Just come out.”

Well, when Orson said he had a part for you, you went. So I left New York to play my first role in a picture at $500 a week, three weeks guarantee. I was on CITIZEN KANE 11 weeks. For the first three or four weeks, I didn’t work at all.

Naturally I stood around the set, watching. And I was amazed at the way Orson worked. In those days we had an 8 o’clock call on set – Orson had to report at 5 a.m. when he was wearing the old-man make up.

The first hour on the set, nothing happened. Orson gave Gregg Toland the setup, then everyone became anecdotal. We just sat around telling stories about radio, the theater, etc. After awhile Orson began to rehearse. He had a man who walked through his scenes for him, and we rehearsed with this fellow while Orson directed. Then he stepped in and shot the scene with himself in it. Sometimes we didn’t get a shot until 3 in the afternoon. Of course lighting was very difficult because of the depth of focus. Eastman Kodak had developed its fastest film for Gregg, but it was still not what we have today.

It wasn’t uncommon for Orson to shoot 84, 93, 55 takes of one scene. During the Senate hearing with George Coulouris, Orson did more than a hundred takes. One day he shot a hundred takes and exposed 10,000 feet–without a single print!

I’ll never forget the day Orson shot the burning of the sled. One of the stages at the Selznick studio had been made into the warehouse with a working furnace. The scene had to be just right because the audience had to see the sled go in and the word “Rosebud” consumed in flames.

When the ninth take had been shot, the doors of the stage flew open and in marched the Culver City Fire Department in full fire-fighting regalia. The furnace had grown so hot that the flue had caught fire. Orson was delighted with the commotion.

After the fire had been extinguished, one of the firemen asked me, “What’s going on here?”
“Mr. Welles is making a picture here,” I said.

Orson’s WAR OF THE WORLD'S scare was still a vivid memory, and the fireman nodded and murmured, “It figures.”

My first shot was a close-up in which Orson wanted a special smoke effect from my cigarette. I was rigged with tube that went under my clothes and down my finger to the cigarette, but somehow the contraption wouldn’t exude smoke.

“I want long cigarettes–the Russian kind!” Orson ordered. Everyone waited while the prop man fetched some Russian cigarettes.

Just before the scene, Orson Welles warned me: “Your head is going to fill the screen at the Radio City Music Hall”– at that time CITIZEN KANE was booked for the Music Hall. Then he said in his gruff manner, “Turn ‘em.” But just before I started, he added quietly in his warm voice, “Good luck.”

I blew the first take. It was 30-40 takes before I completed a shot that Orson liked–and I had only one line. That was almost 30 years ago, but even today I have people repeat it to me, including young students. The line was: “Rosebud... I’ll tell you about rosebud...”

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Fred Camper, who writes on movies for The Chicago Reader, has posted a fascinating article by Erich von Stroheim on Citizen Kane at his website.  Although it appeared in an obsure magazine called "Decision, a review of free culture" it seems amazing to me it has apparently never been reprinted or, as far as I know, even been mentioned in all the avalanche of material that has been written about Citizen Kane, since it premiered in 1941.  

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CITIZEN KANE 

By Erich von Stroheim

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This is perhaps the first criticism of a film ever written by a film-maker who coincidentally also in his time — like Orson Welles — played the "Holy Trinity." In our case "Trinity" means that the functions of the Writer, Director, and Star are combined in one person. The man executing these three functions in any case has a gigantic job on his hands which can only be fully appreciated by someone who actually has attempted the same. In fact, Orson Welles went me one better as he was also the Producer. And the Producer Welles permitted without grumbling the Director Welles to execute what the Writer Welles had planned to do. And Director Welles allowed the Actor Welles to do as he pleased.

As the man who plays the "Super Trinity" earns the applause practically alone — provided the finished product is a worthy one — so must he solely take the blame should one or more of his endeavors not have functioned properly.

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Read the whole article here:  

http://www.fredcamper.com/M/VonStroheim.html 

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The article goes well with the links Tony has posted on the messageboard to Greenbriar pictureshows, a great blog where you can see some very rare photos, posters and studio trade ads for Citizen Kane.

http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html 

In revisiting Frank Brady's excellent biography, CITIZEN WELLES,  I came across this statement that Welles issued to the press in January, 1941, to basically counter the growing impression that Citizen Kane was based on a certain well known newspaper publisher.  Given Welles own reluctance to talk about Citizen Kane in any great detail in his later years, it seems like an incredibly important piece of information coming, as it does, from the creator of the "greatest movie ever made."   

In the piece, Welles goes into great detail about why he choose to make his fictional newspaper publisher do certain things, and spells out many of the psychological reasons for them. It may be dime-store Freud, but 60 years later, it still seems very convincing and is also  quite fascinating to read.   

It's also notable that somehow this important piece, that clearly indicates Welles had a major role in writing the screenplay, was never uncovered by those early (and highly incompetent) writers on Citizen Kane,  Charles Higham and Pauline Kael.    

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January 15, 1941

Press statement issued by Orson Welles regarding his forthcoming motion picture entitled, Citizen Kane, which will be released by RKO-Radio Pictures:

ORSON WELLES:  I wished to make a motion picture which was not a narrative of action so much as an examination of character. For this, I desired a man of many sides and many aspects. It was my idea to show that six or more people could have as many widely divergent opinions concerning the nature of a single personality. Clearly such a notion could not be worked out if it would apply to an ordinary American citizen.

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I've known only one great cameraman: Gregg Toland, who photographed Citizen Kane.

—Orson Welles, 1967  

Photographing Citizen Kane was indeed the most exciting professional adventure of my career.

—Gregg Toland  

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Given the fact that Citizen Kane has long been considered the greatest film ever made, here is a wonderful piece about the cinematography for Kane, written only a few months after it premiered by Gregg Toland,  for the September, 1941 issue of Theater Arts magazine.  

In this piece, Toland predicts the upcoming fad for 3-D photography (which wouldn't become wide spread until five years after Toland had died, in 1948).   He also predicts, incorrectly, that color photography would never replace black and white cinematography. However, in retrospect, I wonder if Toland's thoughts might not have influenced Welles, who only embraced color shooting very late in his career. Welles first finished color film was not until 1968 for The Immortal Story.  And during his lifetime, Welles would only see one other of his films released in color, F For Fake.   Which is yet another reason why The Other Side of The Wind needs to be completed and shown. It's not only a very rare example of Welles using his mastery of the art of color cinematography, but also the first time he was able to use erotic scenes in a film.  And having just looked at the some of the erotic scenes from The Other Side of the Wind, and  then watched Bertolucci's The Last Tango in Paris  for the first time since 1975,  I wonder what Pauline Kael would have said about OSOTW?  Would she think it altered the face of an art form?  Probably not, but if The Other Side of the Wind had been released in 1974,  it seems likely that it would have been X-rated and certainly seen as far more inovative today than Last Tango in Paris.     

In his article, Toland also notes that a cameraman is the only one on a set who is never at rest, and also must be very quick about his his duties, a fact that Welles would later lament when he had "the criminally slow Stanley Cortez" as his cameraman on his next RKO picture, The Magnificent Ambersons.

In retrospect, it's too bad Welles didn't get Floyd Crosby, who at the time was actually working for him indirectly, under the direction of Norman Foster in Mexico, for It's All True. If Floyd Crosby had shot Ambersons  it certainly wouldn't have been delayed by the time-consuming lighting set-ups that Cortez seems to have caused. 

Floyd Crosby was also extremely left-wing, to the point of being blacklisted during the McCarthy era in Hollywood, so there seems to be no doubt that Crosby and Welles would have gotten along famously if they had actually worked together on a movie. 

Floyd Crosby had worked in documentaries under Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty, winning an Academy Award for Flaherty and Murnau's Tabu in 1931.  Crosby was not only very fast,  but extremely good at lighting,  so he ended up becoming Roger Corman's  chief cameraman from 1955 onwards, when he couldn't get any work at the major studios.  Crosby came into his own when he had the chance to show his beautifully stylish color cinematography on Corman's Freudian widescreen Poe movies made in the sixties, starting with The House of Usher in 1960 and ending with The Haunted Palace in 1963.  Amazingly, all of the Crosby, Corman-Poe movies were shot in only three weeks.

Here is what Roger Corman had to say about using Floyd Crosby when he began his career in 1955:

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Floyd Crosby was having trouble getting jobs when you hired him, because he had been a liberal New Deal Democrat, who suddenly became suspect during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the fifties.

ROGER CORMAN: Well, Floyd was certainly not a communist, but during the fifties, some studios did not like him. However, that meant nothing to me. I used him simply because he was a good cameraman. I remember Floyd talking about that, and saying it was somewhat ironic that his patriotism should come under questioning, after he had served in the Army air core command during World War II as a Captain, working with Pare Lorentz on combat documentaries and winning citations for bravery. Floyd was really a great gentlemen and a brilliant cameraman. I went on to use him for my first film as a director, Five Guns West, and he was probably the best cameraman I ever worked with. He was quick, efficient and gave me the kind of quality that you would normally associate with much bigger studio films. We got along very well, and although he was somewhat older than I was, we became very good friends and I had great respect for him and for his work.  It's not that difficult to get a good cameraman if the cameraman has hours to set up each shot. It's not difficult to get a cameraman who works quickly. He just sets up a few lights, and says he's ready to shoot. But to get somebody to work quickly and does fine work is very unusual.

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People always tell me how difficult Orson Welles is. The only people I've ever met worth working for were difficult people—because they're interested in achieving something. Just spare me the charmers. Welles in every other way might be difficult, but when it comes to making artistic decisions he's like the Rock of Gibraltar. 

                                                          —Bernard Herrmann

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Since Citizen Kane is once again making headlines as "the greatest American film," here are some  excerpts of a lecture and Q & A session with Bernard Herrmann from his appearance at The George Eastman House Museum, in Rochester, New York in October of 1973.  

One very interesting point that Herrmann makes here, is that Citizen Kane originally opened without any titles or studio logos. Since this has now become so commonplace, it's yet another inovation where Welles was many years ahead of his time. Of course,  in 1973 Herrmann had no idea that his work would one day become available in high quality versions on DVD (and most of his Fox films in the fifties were recorded in stereo),  so the next time you watch Citizen Kane on DVD,  try skipping over the RKO logo and main title, to see how the film plays beginning with the pan up to the 'No Tresspassing' sign.       

Also, be sure to check out the beautiful radio scores Herrmann did for Welles,  courtesy of Store Hadji, on the Wellesnet Forum's Radio page. Especially notable are The Moat Farm Murders which predates Herrman's work on the psycho-thrillers he later became known for.  Also, there is what may possibly be one of Herrmann's finest radio scores for Welles, the beautifully lyrical  D-Day broadcast of June 7, 1944:   

 http://www.box.net/shared/v0jh0yleu4 

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The ever witty, brilliant friend of Orson Welles, writer Gore Vidal, wrote a review in 1989 of Frank Brady's Citizen Welles and Welles own script for The Big Brass Ring. The article itself is fairly well known (it was reprinted in Interviews with Welles), but if you haven't read it, it can be accessed here:

ttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/4016 

However, what I find completely hilarious, and even more interesting than Vidal's review, was his masterful put down of some poor lawyer smuck who dared to suggest that Rosebud was not really the name Hearst gave to Marion Davies' clitoris.

Like many Welles stories, the truth on this one may be difficult to believe, much less prove, but Gore Vidal, in his reply, makes mince-meat out of his attacker, (a "blood-sucking lawyer") and offers some valuable insights into the whole Citizen Kane script controversy at the same time.

Here is their exchange:

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In February of 1941, just three months before Orson Welles first film as a director would be universally acclaimed as a masterpiece, Welles, who was only 26, had the gall, the nerve and the temerity to write a piece that was extremely critical about what he felt was wrong with the Hollywood system. 

This brilliant piece of writing is perhaps one of the key reasons Welles career as a director would never take root in Hollywood. In retrospect, I think it is easily one of the great essays on Hollywood ever written by a film director. Re-reading it today, it is especially remarkable, since it is so accurate about what is still wrong with Hollywood. In fact, if it were to be published in The New York Times next week, (with the names of the actors and producers from 1941 updated to reflect the current names in Hollywood), I doubt if anyone would even realize it had been written over sixty-five years ago!

Unfortunately, one can also see the seeds of destruction that Welles planted when he wrote this piece. After all, when this article appeared, he was a young man who was quite obviously biting the hand that fed him. Citizen Kane would not be seen for three months. Welles was considered by many Hollywood veterans as a callow 26-year old youth who had undeservingly gotten a contract with a final-cut clause. Now, here is the bearded Mr. Welles,writing a impertinent article telling Hollywood's top producers and moguls what they are doing wrong. Back in 1941, I've no idea how many established directors had written articles that had been published, but I'm sure there weren't very many. So talk about nerve. Talk about audacity. Talk about not giving a damn! Here is Orson Welles imperiously criticizing the same moguls he would need to pitch story ideas to over the next several years. The very people he needed to woo if he wanted to continue making movies in Hollywood. 

Even with his popular radio and theatrical triumphs behind him, this was not a good way to go about getting jobs as a director, or as Welles himself states in the opening line of his article, "to make friends in Hollywood."  In short, this can be seen as the young Orson Welles declaration of principles to Hollywood, before his first movie was even widely screened. But unlike Charles Foster Kane, Welles never veered from these principles. In fact he wrote a companion piece 30 years later, "But Where Are We Going" (www.wellesnet.com/?p=85) which was still  quite critical of the new direction Hollywood had taken in the late sixties.

Welles 1941 article also shows why, in all likelihood, Citizen Kane, would win only one Oscar, even though it was clearly the best picture of 1941. Hollywood and the moguls who ran it, were only too happy to put Orson Welles in his place and give him his comeuppanace. After all, you don't reward people who tear you down, even if they happen to be right. Perhaps this is why, some 65 years later, there is still no one in Hollywood who is willing to finance Welles last movie, The Other Side of the Wind. After all it's a movie by that crazy maverick, Orson Welles, which just happens to be all about Hollywood and what's wrong with it. 

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�

There is a fascinating article on the Citizen Kane trailer in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 15, No. 2.

The article runs from pages 96 to 113, and is the first article to my knowledge to�focus on�a Welles trailer. The author remarks that only recently are trailers becoming understood as works of art themselves. I can recall seeing several Welles trailers over the years: Kane, Ambersons, Shanghai, Touch of Evil, a crazy Desilu trailer for the tv presentation of the Trial, and of course the infamous F For Fake extravaganza: perhaps the longest trailer in film history.

It's certainly an untilled area; info about the article (which is by Paul Salmon) can be found here:

www.filmstudies.ca/CJFS.htm

Here is the abstract for the article:

�The People will think... what I tell them to think�: Orson Welles and the Trailer for Citizen Kane

�by Paul Salmon

�The trailer for Citizen Kane is now impossible to appreciate outside of a context shaped by decades of Welles scholarship and by the entrenched canonical status of Citizen Kane itself. Yet, it warrants sustained attention in its own right. The highly manipulative nature of its rhetorical strategies suggest the importance that Welles placed on courting a wide, popular audience on the eve of unveiling the most technically and formally advanced film in Hollywood history. A close analysis of the trailer suggests that Welles was deeply ambivalent about how far to risk alienating a mass audience, and equally ambivalent about the role of collaboration in the artistic enterprise.

And here's the Kane trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyv19bg0scg

�

�

Shortly after receiving the AFI’s Life Acheivement award in 1975, Orson Welles was asked to contribute a foreword to Marion Davies oral history, The Times We Had.

In his foreword, Welles reflects on what people assumed where some of the Hearst like elements in Citizen Kane, and purports that only one scene in Kane “was purely Hearstian.”

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Comparisons are not invariably odious, but they are often misleading. In their enthusiasm for this truly fascinating book, early readers called Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst "the Jackie and Ari of their day." And why? Because they had "more glamour, power and money than anyone else." The truth is that Hearst was never rich in the way that Onassis was rich, and the power of Onassis resided solely in his money. He could buy himself an airline, an island or a Greek colonel, but his place in history is recorded largely in the gossip columns. Hearst published the gossip columns; he practically invented them. The difference is immense.

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