Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

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. 

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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

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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!

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Here's a letter Orson Welles wrote to his good friend Joseph Cotten asking him to consider appearing in his forthcoming production of The Immortal Story, that Welles was scheduled to start shooing in September of 1966. Cotten, was at the time, apparently staying near Welles's house outside of Madrid while filming his role in Sergio Corbucci's western, The Hellbenders.

It appears that Welles wanted Cotten to play Mr. Clay's head clerk, Elishama Levinsky, a part that eventually went to actor Roger Coggio. As Welles notes, he would have enjoyed working with Cotten again, and casting Cotten as Mr. Clay's clerk would have given the film more star power, as well as better balancing the film between its four principal actors.

Sadly, after reading this letter, one also realizes just how frustrated Welles was in simply trying to cast his movies, since even when he actually had the backing to make a film, he still had to essentially ask his friends to work for nothing and then hope whoever he wanted to use might actually agree.

Presumably, after Welles gave Joseph Cotten a copy of the script, Cotten didn't especially take a liking to the screenplay or to his part - so in this letter Welles tries to convince "Jo" that while the film is obviously not "commercial" the role is still worth doing. Of course, Cotten did not do the role, and instead he went back to America to be directed by another old friend (Norman Foster), in Brighty of Grand Canyon - a sort of variation on the story of a boy and his burrow that was perhaps inspired by Foster's and Welles's My Friend Bonita episode of It's All True.

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10th August, 1966

Dearest Jo,

That remark of yours about a "radio show" has brought me down with a mild case of alarm and despondency. I know there's a staggering amount of talk in that script I sent you, but I did think there was enough story to keep it moving (admittedly at it’s own rather curious and crab-like gait). Not a film for the drive-ins, certainly — but, I'd fondly hoped, worth making all the same. If you should be tempted to comfort me by agreeing to this, you should realize that you'd be trapping yourself into ten day's hard work for almost no money. So, I’m writing this by way of fair warning.

(more...)

Just a note that I've posted (in the Film section) a summary of some fascinating facts, as well as some rare stills from an article by Willy Kurant, a terrific DP who worked with Welles on The Immortal Story (1966), The Heroine (1969), and The Deep (1969), and was also asked to work on The Magic Show. In his article, he included some previously unseen pictures, such as these two from The Heroine (unfinished, starring Oja Kodar), which are so evocative of The Magnificent Ambersons:

Kurant claims to be one of the last to have worked on a Welles "professional" film, "in 35mm and with a planned release in theatres".

Thanks to Jeff for snail-mailing me the article.

Here's the link:

http://www.wellesnet.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?s=f2aa3adff08de9a7746a8bd72e90bc57;act=ST;f=1;t=328

Tony