Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

In Welles's second column, he follows up his quote of President Woodrow Wilson's call for peace, by reporting on the current progress of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. These proposals refer to the name of the mansion in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. where representatives from China, the Soviet Union, the United States and the UK met, in the fall of 1944, to hammer out the outline for proposals for the establishment of a General International Organization that eventually would become known as The United Nations.

_________________________

ORSON WELLES' ALMANAC

By Orson Welles - January 23, 1945

January 23 is the feast of St. Ildephonsus and a good day for fishing. It is also a good day to ask your minister to prepare a sermon of the following text:

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He said, what hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

An almanac is supposed to provide a number of services, including a certain amount of news. Okay—

(more...)

Thanks to the efforts of writer and researcher Peter Giordano, Wellesnet will be able to offer up an ongoing series of Orson Welles rare Almanac columns that appeared in the pages of The New York Post, beginning in January of 1945.

As noted recently, Welles was a great friend of The New York Post's regular entertainment columnist, Leonard Lyons, and Welles first column at the Post was actually written by Welles when he was subbing for the vacationing Lyons.

In that debut column, Welles rhetorically asked his readers: "What is it that makes a man want to write for the newspapers? ...All too often my public appearances have had more to thank presumption than equipment, so don't ask me why I think I can write a column. Compare me, if you will, to my foolish and finny cousin the salmon, who toils and labors upstream against the most fearful odds, only to lay his little eggs."

Of course, this was a favorite device of Welles, pretending he had no special talent or reason to be doing something that he was actually eminently qualified to tackle.

In his first column, Welles talks about the fourth inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and uses it as a springboard to recall past Presidential inaugurations, giving them movie like-descriptions, almost as if he were writing scenes for a script, even to the point of providing the soundtrack for George Washington's voice!

_________________________

ORSON WELLES ALMANAC

By Orson Welles - January 22, 1945

Our Astrology Department says that this is a good day for those born under all signs, and for planting all things that grow above ground.

Byron was born today, and so was D. W. Griffith, the greatest of all motion picture directors. Twenty-eight years ago today Woodrow Wilson told the Senate that it was necessary for the American government “in the days to come to lay afresh and upon a new plan the foundations of peace among the nations. It is inconceivable,” said he, “that the people of the United States should play no part in that great enterprise. Is the present war,” he asked, “a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? There must be not only a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace …These are American principles, American policies, and they are also the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

(more...)

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...)

Shortly before his 18th birthday, in the spring of 1933, Orson Welles booked second class passage on a tramp steamer, The Exermont  bound for Morocco, where Welles would stay as the guest of the Arab Sheik, Thami el-Glaoui in the Atlas mountains surrounding Tangier.

While onboard ship, Welles worked on his introduction for the books on Shakespeare he was preparing with Roger Hill for the Todd Press.  One of the letters Welles wrote to Roger Hill  contains a rare example of  Welles poetry. 

It's also interesting to imagine Welles long sea voyage by comparing it, as Welles does, to Eugene O' Neill, as well as to an early RKO movie featuring a sea voyage on a tramp steamer that had just opened in New York,  King Kong.  

****************************  

(more...)

By Lawrence French

Given the primal place both Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway hold as titans of  American culture, it seems strange that so little has been written about their memorable meeting to work on Joris Ivens The Spanish Earth. Perhaps this is because so little seems to be known about what actually took place, other than what Welles himself has reported. Even Welles only mentions this encounter in two interviews that I am aware of.  But given the flourishing number of stage shows that have re-created Welles in a fictional setting, it seems like the Welles-Hemingway encounter might provide the basis for a very interesting two man play (or even a movie).  

Joesph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? goes into some detail about their initial meeting, quoting liberally from Michael Parkinson's interview with Welles on that subject, but I thought it would be interesting to post all of  the relevent passages from Parkinson's interview, since they provide such a key to the genesis of the script for The Other Side of the Wind  (which Welles was still actively filming when he talked to Parkinson in 1974). As Joe McBride notes, Welles meeting with Hemingway was the seed that would germinate into "The Sacred Beasts," then burst into full bloom when Welles turned it into his script for The Other Side of the Wind. In fact, listening to Welles 1974 comments to Parkinson about his own experience as an amateur bullfighter in Seville, in 1933, sheds considerable light on the themes that dominate the script for The Other Side of the Wind. It is essentially the same as what Welles said to the Maysles brothers eight years earlier, in Madrid, when discussing his "The Sacred Beasts" story.  Welles aficionados such as Glenn Anders, who have read the script, or know some of the storyline, will no doubt find this material quite illuminating. As Glenn notes: "Suddenly, for me at least, the way The Other Side of the Wind should be completed, the way Welles would have done it, falls into place."   

The connections Jake Hannaford bears to Hemingway are now fairly well-known, having been reported in Joe McBride's book, but become even clearer after reading Welles comments about Hemingway. It also seems probable that Welles was inspired by Hemingway's books on bullfighting, such as The Sun Also Rises, which Welles calls a "superb book."  Of course, the main character in that book is also named "Jake" and is impotent (Hemingway never explicitly details Jake's injury, but it seems likely he has lost his testicles, but not his penis).    

Here is what Welles told to Juan Cobos in 1964 about his meeting with Hemingway:

(more...)

Given the ongoing controversy over how Touch of Evil should be exhibited - at 1.85 or 1.33 - here are Orson Welles own thoughts about filming in CinemaScope, VistaVision and other wide screen film processes, as published in the 1958 International Film Annual, No. 2 edited by William Whitebait. Strangely enough, the book was published (in London by John Calder), just as Touch of Evil was being shown in theaters.

Welles also wrote a letter in response to an article by Whitebait in The New Statesman, that touched briefly on how Welles liked shooting in the old camera format of 1.33 to 1 and black and white, rather than using the new wide screen formats and color.

From Welles comments, it's a fairly safe bet that he probably never wanted to shoot a movie in CinemaScope or Panavision. In fact, it seems likely that Universal might have tried to pressure him into using CinemaScope for Touch of Evil, since at the time it was all the rage, and Albert Zugsmith's previous picture with Welles, Man in the Shadow was in CinemaScope, as was Zugsmith's other masterpiece from 1958, Douglas Sirk's The Tarnished Angels.

Given Welles comments, it seems quite possible he may have wanted Touch of Evil to be shown in full frame. VistaVision was essentially a 1.85 ratio when projected, so it seems probable that Welles may have realized that Touch of Evil would be projected in 1.85, and thus agreed to compose it for that format, but may still have preferred to have seen it projected in 1.33. to 1.

I've also included Rick Schmidlin's comments from the message board, that explain his reasons (along with the studio documentation he found) for releasing the DVD in the 1.85 format.

____________________

RIBBON OF DREAMS

By ORSON WELLES
____________________

A sheer joy in everything big was once the hallmark of Hollywood production. People have not hesitated to chide us for thinking 'colossal' the best superlative.

What has changed? Certainly not Hollywood.

Pure size excites us as much as ever. And what are the new screens but a paroxysm of this excitement?

But now those who mocked us run most eagerly to join in our madness.

More... More...

What was the reaction, under skies one might have thought reasonable, when this monster (Frankenstein's grandest mistake) issued, head held high, from the laboratories of Southern California? Instead of charging with pitchforks, the cinemagoers of the entire world hurled themselves to embrace this monster in a tight embrace. No shape is too demented, no size too paranoiac. In the most popular process the image is blurred, camera movements are strictly limited; good montage impossible. The frame which superficially encloses its action somewhat in the guise of a frieze is ill suited to the human form, cutting it off somewhere above the ankles and below the haunches. Which means that the actors must play their scenes thrusting themselves at us like Punch and Judy. This 'giant screen' is ideally suited to a ground plan of a procession or of a serpent elongated.

These very strange proportions have been dictated by the very low overhang of the balcony in certain super-cinemas, and their object has been to prevent the spectators in the back rows of the stalls from thinking that perhaps they would be better off in cheaper seats. Note that these balconies are rare and specifically American. Yet it is here, in Europe, that the new system is most popular.

Certain other processes are even larger. Many screens are bigger: observe that they are all more uproarious like an outbreak of panic. All these new processes express an identical fear: loss of confidence in the cinema itself. Technical astuteness combines in a frantic attempt to bewitch the public while submerging it.

It is unnecessary to explain in detail how the enlargement of the screen does not augment but diminishes the possibilities of expression. Every active film-maker can testify to this; there are few effects to be got by yells and shrieks. The most exuberant stage actor would hesitate to play a piece throughout at the top of his voice. Beyond a certain point exaggeration becomes a bore. To find oneself next to the siren on the Isle de France is a magnificent experience, but one that does not gain by repetition. When the passing pleasure of physical shock has passed, the range of sensation cannot be extended by more familiarity. With the novelty vanished, we no longer respond to the appeal of the outrageous. We are content to fall asleep.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Distributors, naturally, are all of the opinion that poets don't sell seats. They do not discern whence comes the very language of the cinema.

Without poets, the vocabulary of the film would be far too limited ever to make a true appeal to the public. The equivalent of a babble of infants would not sell many seats. If the cinema had never been fashioned by poetry, it would have remained no more than a mechanical curiosity, occasionally on view like a stuffed whale.

Everything that lives and in consequence, everything commercially saleable derives from the ability of the camera to see. It does not see naturally in place of an artist, it sees with him. The camera at such instants is far more than a registering apparatus; it is a means by which come to us messages from the other world and which let us into the great secret. This is the beginning of magic. But the charm cannot work unless the eye of the camera also is human. That eye should be on the scale of the human eye.

Man is made in God's image. To enlarge that image is not to glorify but to deform it. It's a sort of joke, and one doesn't joke with God. That is not only religion but good aesthetics.

A film is a ribbon of dreams.

It can happen to us to dream in colors and sometimes in black and white, but never in CinemaScope. We never wake from a nightmare shrieking because it has been in VistaVision.

Our fantasies are not more erotic in Cinerama, and saints know no visions in Cinemiracle.

Where lies the cause for the crisis in world cinema?

In us who make films: and we have not deliberately plotted to make bad ones. Yet we attach ourselves to the dimensions laid down to us by producers. Why? Why allow the mammoths to wipe away our last normal screens?

We have discovered that the enlargement of the image, so far from enriching form or content, impoverishes the film itself. But do we not impoverish ourselves even more by abandoning the sole means which enabled us once to speak of art?

What are we referring to when we speak of the world march of the cinemas, that indispensable figment of statistics? An individual sitting in a seat, in a hall. Multiply him by quite a few millions and what do you get more than the same spectator in the plural? Unconscious of his statistical importance his dreams depend obstinately on the old human scale. No super-screen will make him a superman. He is no giant, he is only numerous.

But already he is less than this; he gets smaller every day.

Who can say that it's an accident that the public is dwindling away as the importance of the artist is destroyed? Are giant screens a symptom or a cause?

Let us joyfully admit that there will always be a place for the circus. But let us also insist that room will always be found for whatever clowning may be foisted on us. What perverse, morbid desire delivers our world cinema to an era of nickelodeons?

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

ORSON WELLES LETTER TO THE NEW STATESMAN
regarding TOUCH OF EVIL

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

May 24, 1958

Sir:

Without being quite so foolish as to set my name to that odious thing, a 'reply to the critic', perhaps I may add a few oddments of information to Mr. Whitebait's brief reference to my picture TOUCH OF EVIL (what a silly title, by the way; it's the first time I've heard it). Most serious film reviewers appear to be quite without knowledge of the hard facts involved in manufacturing and, especially, merchandising a motion picture. Such innocence, I'm sure, is very proper to their position; it is, therefore, not your critic I venture to set straight, but my own record. As author-director I was not and normally would not be-consulted on the matter of the 'release' of my film without a press showing. That this is an 'odd subterfuge', I agree; but there can be no speculation as to the responsibility for such a decision.

As to the reason, one can only assume that the distributor was so terrified of what the critics might write about it that a rash attempt was made to evade them altogether and smuggle TOUCH OF EVIL directly to the public. This is understandable in the light of the wholesale re-editing of the film by the executive producer, a process of re-hashing in which I was forbidden to participate. Confusion was further confounded by several added scenes which I did not write and was not invited to direct. No wonder Mr. Whitebait speaks of muddle. He is kind enough to say that 'Like Graham Greene' I have 'two levels'. To his charge that I have 'let the higher slip' I plead not guilty. When Mr. Greene finishes one of his 'entertainment's' he is immediately free to set his hand to more challenging enterprises. His typewriter is always available; my camera is not. A typewriter needs only paper; a camera uses film, requires subsidiary equipment by the truck-load and several hundreds of technicians. That is always the central fact about the film-maker as opposed to any other artist: he can never afford to own his own tools. The minimum kit is incredibly expensive; and one's opportunities to work with it are rarer less numerous than might be supposed. In my case, I've. been given the use of my tools exactly eight times in 20 years. Just once my own editing of the film has been the version put into release; and (excepting the Shakespearean experiments) I have only twice been given any voice at all as to the 'level' of my, subject matter. In my trunks stuffed with unproduced films scripts, there are no thrillers. When I make this sort of picture -- for which I can pretend to no special interest or aptitude -- it is not 'for the money' (I support myself as an actor), but because of a greedy need to exercise, in some way, the function of my choice: the function of director. Quite baldly, this is my only choice. I have to take whatever comes along from time to time, or accept, the alternative, which is not working.

Mr. Whitebait revives my own distress at the shapeless poverty of Macbeth's castle. The paper mache' stagy effect in my film was dictated by a 'B-Minus' budget with a 'quickie' shooting schedule of 20 days. Returning to the current picture, since he comments on the richness of the urban scenery of the Mexican border' perhaps Mr. Whitebait will be amused to learn that all shooting was in Hollywood. There was no attempt to approximate reality; the film's entire 'world' being the director's invention. Finally, while the style of TOUCH OF EVIL may be somewhat overly baroque, there are positively no camera tricks. Nowadays the eye is tamed, I think, by the new wide screens. These 'systems' with their rigid technical limitations are in such monopoly that any vigorous use of the old black-and-white, normal aperture camera runs the risk of seeming tricky by comparison. The old camera permits use of a range of visual conventions as removed from 'realism' as grand opera. This is a language not a bag of tricks. If it is now a dead language, as a candid partisan of the old eloquence, I must face the likelihood that I shall not again be able to put it to the service of any theme of my own choosing.

ORSON WELLES
ROME

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

Posts from the Wellesnet messageboard:

RICK SCHMIDLIN: 1:33 was the ratio Citizen Kane was shot in, as was the practice at the time. Touch of Evil was composed by Welles in 1:85 but shot full frame at the order of the studio. Welles was very aware on the composition he shot the film in. Welles never complained about the ratio because he screened it a 1:85. I guess those who prefer the studio version feel more is better, but that is going against the way the picture was shot and was meant to be seen in theaters. This was supported by both Russell Metty and Philip Lathrop by the records on the original studio screening and the theatrical release screenings. A little homework on this matter goes a long way.

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

SERGIO: When I was preparing a lecture that I gave on Touch of Evil last year at the National Film Theatre in London I had the chance to compare the prints of the standard and re-release versions of Touch of Evil both on a Steenbeck and projected on the big screen. I found that the ratio really should be 1.66 and was in fact indicated as such on the re-release print. The easiest way to confirm this was the simple fact that in the third shot of the film, the backward dolly shot in which Heston and Leigh run towards the explosion, if shown at 1.33 then the bottom of the dolly would be clearly visible, but was removed at 1.66. The DVD says that it is masked at 1.85 but in fact it is masked at around 1.77 so as to accommodate widescreen TVs, and I believe that this is still a little too tight, to be honest.
**************************

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. 

(more...)

Here are two pieces on approaches to acting in�KING LEAR. The first is�by Orson Welles, the second an interview with the distinguished stage star, Morris Carnovsky.��

Welles wrote his piece on KING LEAR for the January� 8, 1956 edition of The New York Times shortly before he opened in KING LEAR at the New York City Center. He mentions, in passing that LEAR hadn't been presented on the New York stage for five years, but fails to note that his old partner, John Houseman was the man who directed the 1950 Broadway presentation at the National Theater,�starring Louis Calhern as King Lear.�

Housesman's version, like Welles own production, featured music by Marc Blitzstein, as well as several actors from the Mercury theater.�In fact, Houseman's staging of LEAR�had more Mercury actors than Welles own production.� Everett Sloane was slated to play the fool, until he clashed with Louis Calhern and resigned. He was replaced by Norman Lloyd.�Martin Gabel played the Earl of Kent;�Nina Foch was Cordelia; Joesph Wiseman was Edmund and both Wesley Addy, who played�Edgar and�Arnold Moss, who played the Earl of Gloucester would go on to act with Welles (but playing different roles), in the Peter Brook TV version of LEAR�broadcast in 1953.�

As an introduction, I have taken Welles comments about Shakespeare's Othello, from�Filming Othello, and substituted King Lear where Welles actually says Othello.�

++++++++++++++++++++ �

King Lear is something more than a masterpiece.� It stands through the centuries as a great monument to western civilization. Take an arbitrary figure: Twelve.� Name twelve plays which could be called great. King Lear must be one of those twelve. Of that twelve, at least nine (which is another arbitrary figure) are by Shakespeare. That leaves three on our list for all the other writers who ever lived.� Is that putting it too strongly? Or is it too high?� You can't go higher than that, and Shakespeare remains immortally number one.� Among all dramatists the first.� The greatest poet, in terms of sheer accomplishment, very possibly our greatest man.

++++++++++++++++++++++++�

(more...)

Here is Orson Welles beautifully written tribute to one of his own favorite directors: Jean Renoir.

It was written for The Los Angeles Times after Jean Renoir died in Feb, 1979.

Re-reading this piece is quite interesting, since Welles is ostensibly talking about Jean Renoir's own career difficulties, but in retrospect, Welles seems to be echoing the kind of problems he himself faced (but with far greater severity) than Renoir ever did when dealing with Hollywood's "money men".

An interview with Jean Renoir about his own bad previews at RKO can be read on Wellesnet HERE.
__________________

JEAN RENOIR:‘The Greatest of All Directors’

BY ORSON WELLES

February 18, 1979 - Los Angeles Times

Orson Welles, whose own films include “Citizen Kane,” “Touch of Evil” and “The Trial.” was for many years a friend of the late Jean Renoir.

__________________

For the high and mighty of the movie industry, a Renoir on the wall is the equivalent of a Rolls Royce in the garage. Nothing like the same status was accorded the other Renoir, who lived in Hollywood and who died here last week.

If we exempt Islamic and Japanese newcomers, it's safe to say that the owners of Pierre Auguste Renoir's paintings in Bel Air and Beverly Hills are all connected with the movies. And it's just as safe to say that not one of them has even been connected, however distantly, with any movie comparable to the masterpieces of the painter's son, Jean Renoir.

A comparison between the movie-maker and his father is not so easy. Nor is it necessary. Jean Renoir stands on his own: the greatest of European directors: very probably the greatest of all directors—a gigantic silhouette on the horizon of our waning century.

He made his first film in 1924, his last in 1969. Here are his best-known movies: "Tire au Flanc," "Boudu Saved Prom Drowning," "Toni," "The Crime of M. Lange," "A Day in the Country," "La Grande Illusion," "La Marseillaise,'' "The Human Beast," "The Rules of the Game," "The Southerner." 'The River," "French Can-Can," "Picnic on the Grass," "The Elusive Corporal," "The Little Theater of Jean Renoir."

Some of these were commercial and even, in their time, critical failures. Some enjoyed success. None were blockbusters. Many are immortal.

"A word which in the producer's jargon has lost all meaning is the word ‘commercial’,” Renoir writes in his autobiography. "A given film is a masterpiece and has pleased audiences in minor cinemas, but is ignored by the big distributors because it is not 'commercial.' This is not to say that it does not make money, but simply that it is a type of film which does not appeal to the money men. Even after 'La Grande Illusion' had made a fortune for its producer I had difficulty in raising money for my own projects."

He had to wait, sometimes for several years, before he was able to make another film. A number of his early silents were financed out of his own pocket, and when that money was gone, he sold some of his father's paintings to get more, and to make more movies. The price of a Renoir has gone up since then. Who knows? Some of those same paintings may be hanging today in the beautiful homes of the money men in Bel-Air. For the price of one or two of those pictures, they could have bought themselves a moving picture—an original Jean Renoir of their very own.

It would be unjust, however, to reproach Hollywood for its ill treatment without acknowledging that Renoir's troubles were just as painful during his years with the French film industry. "When I think,” he writes, "of the fruitless struggle with which my life has been filled, I am amazed at myself. So many humiliating concessions and wasted smiles. And above all, so much wasted time!"

Renoir has become a father-figure, a kind of saint in the academic establishment of world cinema. But though he always had his ardent partisans, a long-winded and murky dispute has ranged through the years over the question of which films are "true" Renoir and which are, if not "false," at least what many French aesthetes speak of as "deceptions." From his earliest beginnings, and many times throughout his long career, he had been charged with abandoning social realism, or with turning away from "nature" to a candid theatricality which outrages those who would tie his work to the impressionism of his father, or who would rate the films according to their ideological content

The old critical preoccupation with what is and is not truly 'cinematic'' has never ceased to detest the unreality of the stage and to assume that film must be liberated from that unreality by a Zola-esque attention to natural detail Those who insist on an analogy between Renoir's moving pictures and the paintings of his father forget that Pierre Auguste rejoiced in the invention of photography as having liberated painting from the boring chores and dreary obligations of photographic realism.

As for Jean Renoir, he said, “The care of everyone who tries to create something in films is the conflict between exterior realism and interior non-realism." As for working "close to nature," he reminded us that "Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations."

This breath of range, this amplitude of spirit must necessarily, at some point, confound every critic. Doctrinaire leftists are ill at ease with the ardent and life-long pacifist who was a pilot in the First World War and the author of two of the great anti-Fascist films. They have repeatedly denounced what they view as his political amorality.

“A theme,” said Renoir, “is exactly like a landscape for a painter. It's just an excuse. You can't film an idea.

He wrote a lovely book about his father, a warm, perceptive and affectionate portrait in which he speaks of the painter's love for all living things. “When he walked through the fields,” he tells us, “my father would do a curious dance to avoid crushing the dandelions.” Ideologues have often found themselves irritated and not a little bewildered when Jean Renoir seemed to be performing “a curious dance” of his own. “You see,” he explained, “there is in the world one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.”

There are no easy labels for such a man. The money men cataloged him, at least as inaccurately as the critics. “Producers,” he told critic Penelope Gilliatt, “ want me to make the pictures I made 20 years ago. No, I am someone else. I have gone away from where they think I am.”

Twenty years was a span of time that turned up often in his conversation. Jean Renoir was born in Paris on Sept 15,1894. “I was always,” he once told me, “a man of the 19th century, just as my father considered himself to be a man of the 18th century.”

He also said that every artist must be 20 years ahead of his time. And this was much harder for the artist of the cinema, “because the cinema insists upon being 20 years behind the public.”

Knowing him as I did, I know there was nothing of self-pity and only a dry and impersonal bitterness in his statement to Gilliatt that, “The money men think they know what the public wants, but the truth is that they know nothing about it—any more than I do.” And when he said, as he often did, that the most dangerous mistake of all was “to be afraid that the public wouldn’t understand," he was not defending the intelligence of the public (no, “the public is lazy”), but rather proclaiming the virtue of a certain degree of deliberate ambiguity.

When we strain for perfect clarity, what we finally achieve is perfectly banal. That, he was sure, was the real trouble with Hollywood: Not that it worshiped money, but something much worse—that it worshiped an ideal of so-called perfection.

“They double-check the sound, so you get perfect sound, which is good. Then they double-check the lighting, so you get perfect lighting. But they also double-check the director's idea—which is not so good. In the case of the physically perfect—the perfectly intelligible—the public has nothing to add and there is no collaboration. A silent film was easier to make than a talkie because there was something missing. In the talkies, we have to reproduce this missing something in another way. We have to ask the actors not to be like an open book. To keep some inner feeling, some secret.”

I have not spoken here of the man who I was proud to count as a friend. His friends were all loved him as Shakespeare was loved, “this side idolatry.”

Let's give him the last word:

“To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.”

Here is Orson Welles on Hollywood, that appeared in Esquire Magazine, in March, 1959.  Strangely, even though Welles hadn't been in Hollywood for over ten years, he feels that he needed to point out that fact, even though he had left Los Angeles for Europe in 1948.  

Twilight in the Smog

Solemn suburbia crowds out the raucous old circus

By Orson Welles

It used to be easy to hate Hollywood. For me it was no trouble at all. But that was years ago. I don't think either of us have mellowed very much since then; but we are getting on a bit and our feelings for each other are scarcely as passionate as they were. For one thing, I no longer live there; I'm not just saying this—I really don't. Formerly this claim was the purest affectation; now it's a fact. It was my melancholy pretense that I was a transient, temporarily employed. There was nothing original about this self-deception. In the film colony a good half of the working population, including many of the oldest inhabitants, keep up their spirits by means of the same ruse. People buy houses and spend half their lives in them without unpacking all their bags. By now, however, I think it's safe to announce that I am one of those who got away. I chose freedom—and that was quite a while ago. Nowadays, if I do venture back behind the chromium curtain, it's never without a return ticket to the outside world. Also, I'm very careful about sitting down. This is important. In that peculiar climate one is haunted with the possibility that standing up again might suddenly exceed one's aspirations. Hollywood is a place where a youngish man is ill-advised to indulge in a siesta. Leaving a call for four-thirty won't do him any good. The likelihood remains that when he wakes up he'll be sixty-five.

(more...)

Shortly after Welles had begun filming The Other Side of the Wind, he published this piece in Look magazine (Nov. 3, 1970), about the rise in prominence of young directors who were now seen as the driving force behind Hollywood's biggest box-office hits. Films like Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider and Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice - both of whom would appear in The Other Side of the Wind as spokesmen for the hip new generation of young Hollywood filmmakers.  But, ironically, although these directors were given the same kind of freedom Welles had on Citizen Kane - a fact which Welles wryly notes in his opening remarks - they strangely succumbed to the same fate as Welles with their follow-up films. Both Hopper and Mazursky produced box-office disasters. The Last Movie virtually ended Hopper's directing career, while Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland, came very close to sinking his.

At any rate, Welles essay here is a vintage piece of his writing acumen which makes for a superb introduction to his own script that was very much written in the spirit of experimentation and freedom that the late sixties engendered.

Of special note is how prominently Welles speaks of Napoleon, whose story Stanley Kubrick was, at the very same time, vainly trying to convince MGM to finance for his own epic film about the life of the French Emperor.

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

BUT WHERE ARE WE GOING?

By Orson Welles – Look, November 3, 1970

Just at this modish moment, everybody under 30—and his idiot brother-wants to be a film director. And why not?

(more...)

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.”

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

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.

(more...)