Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

The seldom seen British Arena special "The Complete Citizen Kane" has made its way to YouTube.com, courtesy of online video poster Citizen Welles.

The 91-minute documentary opens with a faux, but effective, "Heart of Darkness" and includes BBC interviews with Orson Welles filmed in 1960 and 1982. Also interviewed are Peter Bogdanovich and Pauline Kael.

"The Complete Citizen Kane," first shown in 1991, is also the only place where you can see the "colorized" test footage created by Ted Turner.

We have embedded the complete YouTube video below. (No guarantee how long it will be available).

A very special thanks to Alan Nowogrodzki for alerting us to this. (more...)

Orson Welles, Henry Jaglom

Filmmaker Henry Jaglom, whose recorded conversations with Orson Welles form the basis of an upcoming book, graciously agreed to field a few questions about his late, great friend.

Jaglom's relationship with Welles dates back to his freshman 1971 film "A Safe Place." In the interview, he discussed those legendary lunches with Welles and the ill-fated "The Big Brass Ring," as well as footage from the unfinished "The Other Side of the Wind," which has made the rounds on the web.

The tape recordings have been edited by Peter Biskind into "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles," due out July 9 from Macmillan/ Metropolitan Books.

"It is altogether Mr. Biskind's book and has turned out to be quite terrific, I feel (in) actually capturing the real Orson, my most wonderful friend and mentor, who so few knew and who so many misunderstood and thought they knew..." (more...)

"What does 'Rosebud' mean in 'Citizen Kane'?" It is perhaps the question most often fielded by Wellesnet. The most detailed answer given by Orson Welles was contained in a press statement released by RKO Radio Pictures prior the film's release in May 1941. The complete press release, uncovered by biographer Frank Brady, has been more extensively reported here in the past, but it bears repeating.
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By ORSON WELLES
January 15, 1941

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.

I immediately decided that my character (Charles Foster Kane) should be a public man — an extremely public man — an extremely important one ...

There have been many motion pictures and novels rigorously obeying the formula of the “success story,” I wished to do something quite different. (more...)

By RAY KELLY

The book "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles," which Wellesnet reported on back in October, will also be released as an unabridged audio book on July 9.

Presumably the audio book will utilize the recordings made by Jaglom during Welles' final years. While the hardcover book will carry a $27 list price, Macmillan/ Metropolitan Books has listed the audio book at $39.99. It will be issued on compact disc. A running time has not been announced.

Peter Biskind (”Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”) is editing the book using transcripts of conversations taped by Jaglom.

Jaglom has stated he recorded their frequent lunchtime chats at Ma Maison with Welles’ knowledge. However, some Welles associates have maintained he was unaware he was being taped until shortly before his death. (more...)

Oja Kodar

Interviews with Orson Welles' longtime love and collaborator Oja Kodar are rare to come by, but the Hungarian website mozinet.hu recently spoke with the Croatian actress-writer.

Sadly, none of the six questions asked of Kodar delved into the status of "The Other Side of the Wind" or any of Welles' unfinished film projects.

Even with the best (more...)

A scene from the 1966 film Orson Welles in Spain.

There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you are only going to see one and that is Ronda. That is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with anyone. The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background... If a honeymoon or an elopement is not a success in Ronda, it would be as well to start for Paris and commence making your own friends.
— Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon" (1932)

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.
— Orson Welles
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By LAWRENCE FRENCH

Listening to Orson Welles talking about Spain and bullfighting in the Maysles brothers short film, Orson Welles in Madrid, 1966, and in the 1974 Michael Parkinson interview, (both on (more...)

David Frost and Orson Welles

Orson Welles appearance on The David Frost Show recorded on May 12, 1970 came before most of the numerous biographies about Welles had been published, providing us with Welles' own point of view on some very interesting aspects of his life and work.

This interview also took place in the midst of the cultural revolution of the late sixties, when Welles was still at work on his planned TV show, Orson's Bag, and in a few months would begin shooting on The Other Side of the Wind. Both projects related rather heavily on various aspects of the counter-culture and youth movement that was so much a part of (more...)

Orson Welles, Henry Jaglom

Orson Welles' candid lunchtime conversations with director Henry Jaglom will be the basis of the upcoming book "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles."

Peter Biskind ("Easy Riders, Raging Bulls") is editing the book using transcripts of conversations taped by Jaglom. "I'm excited about it. I'm reliving these wonderful, amazing lunches," Jaglom recently told Slant.

The 240-page hardcover, to be published by Macmillan/ Metropolitan Books on July 9, is described by the publisher as "Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, (more...)

Here is Orson Welles witty Foreword to Micheál Mac Liammóir's diary of the making of Othello,  Put Money in thy Purse, first published in 1952 by Methuen in London.   Photos of  Welles and Mac Liammóir from Othello along with shots of the locations Welles used in Morocco can be seen at the Wellesnet Facebook page  HERE.

FOREWORD

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Why is it, I wonder, that most of us who are Micheál Mac Liammóir's friends-–having never been his victims–-are so very certain that at any minute we might be?

‘O that Micheál!' we say, with a knowing, a vaguely apprehensive sort of leer.

What do we think we mean? In company, 'that Micheál' of ours doesn't slash or slaughter, or even prick, but lavishly spreads about him, instead, the pleasant oils and balms of good humor. He is an entertainer rather than a conquistador, a good companion, who could certainly scratch, but who prefers to purr. If he must be excluded from the full title of wit, his lack is ruthlessness and his only fault a preference for being kind.

Why, then, do we think of him as so fatal a swordsman among conversationalists, so perilous a man to meet over a martini? I now reveal his true, his darkest secret. It is simple almost to the point of squalor: he keeps a diary!

The diarist, having arranged a sort of rendezvous with posterity, moves, for all his good manners, in a solid aura of menace. Most of Micheál’s acquaintances don't know why, but this is what makes them so jumpy in his presence. Some of us, of course, have long had our suspicions. For, as a contraction of the pupil is said to betray the dope fiend, so we are warned by a certain glitter, a cold glint of appraisal in the eye of the abandoned wretch who has given himself over to the keeping of a private journal.

I have had diaries myself. But, then, I have known how to leave them alone: an entry or two just for the thrill of it, and then back to normalcy. I count myself lucky. The addiction to diaries, the habitual keeping of a journal, a secret vice like the eating of hashish, degrades the diarist himself to something very like the moral status of a drama critic and, unlike drugs, destroys not only the character of the user but of his friends.

Having exposed Mac Liammóir for what he is, an explanation of this book requires that I make full confession of being myself an inveterate, an incurable snoop.

My friends, such as remain to me, are about evenly divided between those who do not believe that I would stoop to steaming open their most intimate correspondence, and those who, having caught me in the act, have decided to forgive me.

Knowing my curiosity to be such that I am perfectly capable of learning Gaelic in order to read it, Micheal (who not only keeps his daily journal under lock and key, but writes it in the Irish language) has guarded it with such exquisite caution that at long last I was forced into the desperate maneuver of begging him to publish it. This book is the result.

I would have preferred to have been the only reader. Indeed, my portrait emerges from the Mac Liammóir journal as a rather unpalatable cocktail of Caliban, Pistol and Bottom, with an acrid whiff here and there of Coriolanus. I am to be found (the dialogue being rendered in a peculiarly quaint version of Americanese) railing and raging against its author, a veritable force of bad nature, a withering blast from off my own Middle Western prairies.
I must defend myself against this, because the truth is that Micheál's ears, during almost every moment of our daily work together, rang with highly merited praise. A nice reticence withheld him from keeping any record of this success. The rare exceptions, for comic effect, are elaborately dwelt upon. Permit me to insist that if there is an impression that my administrative tactics are just a trifle more thorough-going than Captain Bligh's, only Micheál's modesty is to blame.

It is reported that I addressed him as 'harp'. I ask the reader to believe that I do not use or approve of that special level of slang ('kraut' for German, 'hunky' for Hungarian, 'limey' for Englishman, etc., etc.). For the benefit of those who share my loathing for even the mildest shades of chauvinism, I must explain a joke whose point was in deliberate bad taste:

'Harp', you see, brings to mind that improbable figure, the Irish-American of St Patrick's Day parades, complete with budget-sized shamrock and souvenir shillelagh, and Micheál is something else again. His far-wandering spirit has chosen never to travel without a plush knapsack, plum-colored and chock-full of the more attractive Edwardian airs and continental graces, but no shamrocks at all. Indeed Micheál, who does really look a bit like something Beardsley would have drawn if they'd taken away his pencil-sharpener, is the very last Irishman on the broad face of the earth to be called 'harp'.

So much for that. As they say at banquets, Micheál Mac Liammóir needs no introduction. He has proven himself in every one of the numerous mediums of his choice, and has done so again and again. Well, then, here is a book of his about a film we made together. I have nothing significant to add to the first of these projects, which you are evidently about to read, except to say that I hope it won’t keep you from seeing Othello for yourself.

I don’t think even Micheál would mind.

Orson Welles

As Me and Orson Welles expands this week to theatres across America, one of the primary audiences who may be especially interested in seeing the film and talking about it will be teachers and their students.

Therefore, here is a short excerpt from Orson Welles chapter taken from Everybody's Shakespeare, the book he wrote in 1934 with Roger Hill, which became a big success with teachers and students in schools across the country, especially after Harper & Brothers issued the books as companion volumes to the first full-length audio recordings of William Shakespeare’s plays, as performed by Welles and his Mercury Theatre actors. The three plays released were Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, followed a few years later by Macbeth, all of which were “edited for reading and arranged for staging” by Roger Hill and Orson Welles.

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ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE AND ON SHAKESPEARE'S STAGE

By Orson Welles - Director of the Mercury Theater
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Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.

Shakespeare speaks everybody's language, but with an Elizabethan accent. When he came squawking and red faced into it, England could carry a tune and was learning to talk. It was a kid of a country, waking up noisily and too suddenly into adolescence and bounding blithely into the sunny, early morning of modern times.

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Reading Simon Callow's perceptive two books on King Henry IV, Part One and Part Two made me want to revisit Welles masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight. In doing so, I also looked at one of the best interviews Welles ever gave about a single movie, his long talk with Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio that was first printed in the Spanish film magazine, Griffith.

Since Juan had worked as an assistant director to Welles on the film, he was in the perfect position to ask especially interesting questions about Welles's shooting techniques. For his own part, Welles was in an wonderfully expansive mood, as he had studied the history plays at least since his 1938 production of Five Kings, and clearly was in his element, knowing his subject like the true Shakespearian scholar he was. What I found especially interesting in re-reading the interview, was realizing how abridged it was when it first appeared in Sight and Sound's Autumn, 1966 issue. This fact became clear when I looked at a second version of the interview that appeared later in Cahier du Cinema in English. Almost like a Welles film, the two interviews are very different translations and often contain completely different comments. So below, I have taken the liberty of combining the two and also have re-arranged the order of the questions and answers.

Interestingly enough, when talking to Juan Cobos, he told me he thought he still had the master tapes of the interview, which obviously would make for a fabulous audio commentary for any eventual DVD release of the film. Or, if the sound quality of the tapes wasn't up to snuff, an actor like Simon Callow could "play" the voice of Orson Welles for a DVD commentary track---if the daunting rights issues can ever be worked out!

Meanwhile for your visual enjoyment you can see a set of twenty beautiful German lobby cards for Falstaff HERE.

Finally, like Falstaff's banishment, Chimes at Midnight was to become Orson Welles own banishment from filmmaking on an epic scale. Over forty years later, it seems inconceivable to me that this poetic masterpiece, a film that is clearly among the greatest movies ever made and one that Welles himself felt was his greatest work, still remains so unknown and unseen.

To understand why, one only has to look at this letter written by Sir John Gielgud, from Cannes on May 13, 1966:

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I talked to Sol Levine (another of those (Sam) Spiegel--(Mike) Todd --(Otto) Preminger--film tycoons), about the possibility of getting backing for my film idea for The Tempest, with Orson Welles (as director). He (Levine) was gracious and seemed interested but unless Chimes at Midnight gets better notices elsewhere than the one in The New York Times, which is very damning, I fear no one will risk (Orson) for another Shakespeare picture.

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After reading John Gielgud's "damning" indictment of The New York Times assessment of Chimes at Midnight, one has to wonder what Welles was expected to do to get further backing to make movies.

Give up Shakespeare and go back to making thrillers like The Deep? Do a remake of War of the Worlds starring Charlton Heston? Make sherry wine commercials?

To quote Pauline Kael (who was herself quoting a young Afro-American woman), "There just ain't no way." Which essentially describes Welles commercial career after Chimes at Midnight opened and quickly closed wherever it played, although at least it did do slightly better than Othello in America, in that it actually played in about a dozen cities.

In retrospect, it seems like there was just no way Welles was going to to able to make a commercially successful movie as he so often dreamed about doing, during the last twenty years of his life.

Instead, he had to emulate Shakespeare and do wine commercials, as he so prophetically notes in this YouTube clip from The Dean Martin Show of September 26, 1968. Welles gives a marvelous talk about Sir John Falstaff while making himself up as plump Jack, and then delivers "Shakespeare's first and greatest commercial on the subject of booze"---Falstaff's witty speech about the benefits of Sherry Sack.
______________________

ORSON WELLES on directing CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

By JUAN COBOS and MIGUEL RUBIO

______________________

Did you do much work before you began shooting on Chimes at Midnight?

ORSON WELLES: Yes, I did a stack of research. But I had already worked on that period earlier, so I knew it rather well. But after you have done that research, the elements of that research are only a preparation, because the drama itself fixes the universe in which it is going to unroll. So you must not make museum pieces; you must create a new period. You must invent your own England, your own period, starting from what you have learned.

What importance do you give to the setting of the film?

ORSON WELLES: Very much, obviously. But a setting ought not to appear perfectly and solely real...

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While looking through the lavish and quite fabulous new Taschen book, THE INGMAR BERGMAN ARCHIVES, edited by Paul Duncan, I was astonished to see how much of Bergman's career outside of his movies I was totally unaware of.

I daresay that most people in America probably know as little about Bergman's work on the Swedish stage as I did. However, like Orson Welles, Bergman's theatrical productions encompassed Shakespeare to Shaw.

It also took in Ibsen, Lorca, Brecht and Strindberg, and included several lauded productions of works by America's two greatest playwrights, Eugene O' Neill and Tennessee Williams.

In fact, Bergman's debut as a stage director in Sweden was in 1938 with a production of Sutton Vane's Outward Bound, which was revived that same year on Broadway, in a production directed by Otto Preminger and starring Mercury alumni Vincent Price. Of course, at the time Welles was at the height of his own theatrical career, before heading to Hollywood.

In the 40's Bergman, like Welles, went on to stage productions of Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice (I've included more information about this wonderful book, that I highly recommend, at the end of this article).

However, Orson Welles was not exactly a great admirer of the Swedish director, at least according to his published remarks. Here are two of Welles's statements about Mr. Bergman:

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I don't condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Bergman; it's just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman's Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen's Norway—that it was full of “the odor of spiritual paraffin.” How I sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions. He's far more foreign to me than the Japanese.

—Orson Welles to Kenneth Tynan, 1967

*****

You could write all the ideas of all the movies, mine included, on the head of a pin. It’s not a form in which ideas are very fecund. It’s a form that may grip you or take you into a world or involve you emotionally—but ideas are not the subject of films. I have this terrible sense that film is dead, that it's a piece of film in a machine that will be run off and shown to people. That is why, I think, my films are theatrical, and strongly stated, because I can't believe that anybody won’t fall asleep unless they are. There’s an awful lot of Bergman and Antonioni that I'd rather be dead than sit through.

For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn't come alive. I know that directors find serious and sensitive audiences for films where people sit around peeling potatoes in the peasant houses—but I can't read that kind of novel either. Somebody has to be knocking at the door—I figure that is the way Shakespeare thought, so I can’t be in bad company!

—Orson Welles to Barbara Leaming, 1983

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Now, given those kind of hostile remarks, it's no surprise that towards the end of his life, Bergman was not very complimentary about Welles's work as a director. Here are Bergman's comments about Welles when he spoke to a Swedish newspaper in 2002:

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INGMAR BERGMAN: For me (Orson Welles) is just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of, is the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie has is absolutely unbelievable!

JAN AGHED: What about The Magnificent Ambersons?

INGMAR BERGMAN: Also terribly boring. And I've never liked Welles as an actor, because he's not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories: you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that's when he croaks. In my eyes he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker.

—Jan Aghed, När Bergman går på bio, from the Swedish daily newspaper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, May 12, 2002.

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My own guess is both directors were probably over reacting. Bergman admits he owned a print of Citizen Kane, and Welles certainly must have found plenty to admire in Bergman's work, even if he wouldn't admit it in interviews. Which brings up an interesting point where the two men must have agreed: The Cathedral at Chartres. Here is an excerpt from Bergman's introduction to his published screenplays:

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