Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

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

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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

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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.)

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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…

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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.

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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.

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ORSON WELLES: The Heart of Darkness could be described as a deliberate masterpiece or a downright incantation. A fine piece of prose work at the least; its best aspects are an artful compound of sympathy for humankind and a high tragical disgust. Its successful contrivance of mood hides its craft as an octopus hides in its own ink, and almost we are persuaded that there is something, after all — Something essential waiting for all of us in the dark alleys of the world: Aboriginally loathsome, immeasurable and certainly nameless.

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Orson Welles screenplay adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is now available to download at an excellent site for finding screenplays both new and old, MyPDFScripts.com. Many thanks to Sheridan for providing this valuable service for film lovers. Thanks also to Alan Tait for bringing this link to my attention in the first place!

Download the Heart of Darkness script HERE.

Heart of Darkness appears to be the very first screenplay Orson Welles ever wrote, making it especially invaluable for Welles scholars to study. Jonathan Rosebaum first discussed the script nearly 40 years ago in the November, 1972 issue of Film Comment, and his original article is reprinted in his recent book Discovering Orson Welles.

Other than the excerpts included with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article, I have never seen the script, so to finally be able to visualize it in my own mind was a great joy. The two key movies I immediately thought of while reading the script were RKO’s production of King Kong, made six years earlier, and John Ford’s adaptation of Eugene O’ Neill one-act plays, The Long Voyage Home, made a year later and photographed in exactly the style I imagined Welles would have wanted for Heart of Darkness — and by none other than that great cinematographer, Gregg Toland!

Needless to say, this is a completely fascinating and very unique script, since Welles was planning to shoot the film in about 165 long panning shots, representing the point of view of Conrad’s main character, Captain Marlow as he journeys down a long meandering jungle river in central Africa on a battered old steamboat, attempting to find both Mr. Kurtz and some clue to the meaning of existence.

In the 10-page prologue to the script, Welles “instructs and acquaints the audience as amusingly as possible with the special technique” he planned to use in filming the Heart of Darkness. However, it’s quite probable that once Welles began shooting the film he might have realized the limitations he had imposed on himself were far too constricting, and in all likelihood, may have abandoned using Marlow’s POV throughout the entire length of the film. No doubt, he would still have used many long sequence shots, but already in the opening of the movie, and in several dramatic points later in the script, it seems evident that an objective camera would be far preferable to one with a purely subjective point of view.

Initially, Welles asked John Houseman to join him in story conferences to begin adapting the Conrad story, and in his autobiography Run Through, Houseman gives an excellent account of the problems that were inherent in turning Conrad’s poetic prose into visual poetry:

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JOHN HOUSEMAN: Most of our time was spent at the studio, where we sat hour after hour in battered leather armchairs running one film after another. Like many young directors of that era it was from John Ford that Orson seemed to learn the most. Between films we wandered around the sound stages and talked about Heart of Darkness, which Orson had just announced—with considerable fanfare and without consulting me—as his first picture.

We had done this Conrad story with only moderate success on the Mercury Theatre of the Air, and while it was a wonderful title, I never quite understood why Orson had chosen such a diffuse and difficult subject for his first film. I think, in part, he was attracted by the sense of corroding evil, the slow, pervasive deterioration through which the dark continent destroys its conqueror and exploiter—Western Man in the person of Kurtz. But, mainly, as we discussed it, I found that he was excited by the device—not an entirely original one—of the Camera Eye. Like many of Orson’s creative notions, it revolved around himself in the double role of director and actor. As Marlow, Conrad’s narrator and moral representative, invisible but ever-present, Orson would have a chance to convey the mysterious currents that run under the surface of the narrative; as Kurtz, he would be playing the character about whom, as narrator, he was weaving this web of conjecture and mystery.

The attractions were obvious; so were the difficulties. In this double quest—for the body of Kurtz rotting in the Congolese jungle and for the soul of Kurtz as he moved toward his final moral destruction at the heart of darkness—Joseph Conrad had used all sorts of subtle literary devices; the evil that destroyed him was suggested and implied but never shown. In the concrete medium of film no such evasion was possible. Kurtz’s life and the actions that led to his downfall must be dramatized and shown on the screen.

Orson was aware of this, but he had not given it much thought. He had ideas about Kurtz as a young man rather like himself, with a fiancée who was rather like Virginia. And Dick Baer was sent down to the County Museum to make a survey of all the primitive races of the world—their customs, peculiarities and habits, with the idea of creating a “composite native.” Beyond that, it was left to me to develop Welles’s ideas into some kind of first-draft motion-picture script.

I was an editor and an adapter rather than a writer. On our radio show, over the past year, I had taken finished texts of varying qualities, condensed and translated them successfully into another medium: it had been one of my virtues as an adapter that I managed to retain much of the quality and texture of the original works—including Heart of Darkness. But in this new venture I was a failure. Frightened by the necessities of an unfamiliar medium, worried by the ambivalence of my own feelings for Orson and in my anxiety to give him what he wanted, I found myself unable to give him anything at all. And Orson, who was beginning to have his own doubts about the project, had the satisfaction of feeling that he had, once again, been betrayed.

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Houseman goes on to chide Welles for not finishing a script that the Mercury actors could see, which is obviously untrue, although it was the long delay in getting a script to the actors that led to the fatal rupture in the Welles/Houseman relationship. In any event, the script Welles eventually did produce ran to a whopping 184-pages and given the complex special effects work it required, involving miniatures, process shots and matte paintings, as well as huge jungle sets that would have to be constructed on a studio backlot, it quickly became apparent that the film would far exceed the initial budget estimates and cost well over $1 million!

For such a dark and difficult story, RKO can hardly be blamed for pulling the plug, but just imagine if after the critical success of Citizen Kane RKO had given Welles the green light to make Heart of Darkness as his second film! With the experience of Kane behind him, Welles would have most likely re-thought his initial script and abandoned the whole concept of shooting it from Marlow’s point of view. And unlike The Magnificent Ambersons, which was set at the turn of the century, Heart of Darkness would clearly resonate with the times if it had been made and released in 1942 when the world was at war.

In any case, this initial script is incredibly detailed in terms of the actual POV camera moves, but strangely enough, that in no way hinders the actual reading of the screenplay. Welles also indicates precisely, down to the exact word, where he wanted overlapping dialogue to occur. Since this is in practically every scene where three or more characters appear, it does hinder reading the script somewhat, since it often breaks the natural flow of dialogue you get when reading a less detailed script. Ironically, when filmed it would produce exactly the opposite effect and greatly enhance the rhythm and flow of the scenes.

One of the major changes Welles made from the book was giving all the supporting characters specific names. In the novel, everyone besides Marlow and Kurtz remained vague or unnamed which clearly would not work very well for a movie. In addition, Welles gives nearly everyone Marlow meets from the Company a German name, making it quite clear that the Company should be equated with the politics of fascist Germany under the Nazi’s.

Here is the list of the character names devised by Welles, along with the Mercury actors who would have played them. It also seems quite probable that several of the actors might easily have switched their scheduled parts before shooting began, as Welles was so often prone to do. He himself was planning to play both Marlow and Kurtz, but abandoned the thought of playing Kurtz right before the project was postponed. This musical chairs approach to casting can be demonstrated by comparing the Mercury actors who had roles in both the 1938 radio adaptation of Heart of Darkness and in Welles’s planned movie version.

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Character: – For the Radio Show – For the Movie

MARLOW: Ray Collins / Orson Welles
CO. MANAGER: George Coulouris / Ray Collins
ASSIST. MANAGER: Edgar Barrier / Everett Sloane
TCHIATOSOV/MEUSS: Frank Readick / Frank Readick
ACCOUNTANT/STRUNZ: Alfred Shirley / Edgar Barrier
KURTZ: Orson Welles / ??

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HEART OF DARKNESS

A Mercury Production for RKO-Radio Pictures

PROPOSED CAST

Marlow ORSON WELLES
Kurtz ??
Elsa Gruner DITA PARLO
Blauer RAY COLLINS
Ernst Stitzer EVERETT SLOANE
Chlodowig Strunz EDGAR BARRIER
Butz NORMAN LLOYD
Luitpold de Tirpitz JOHN EMERY
Sebert Meuss FRANK READICK
Eddie Garriton ROBERT COOTE
Carbs de Arriaga GEORGE COULOURIS
Co. Doctor VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF
Schulman ERSKINE SANFORD
Adalbert Melchers GUS SCHILLING
M’Biri, steersman JACK CARTER

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