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!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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...

**********

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.

**********

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.

**********

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.

**********

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.

**********

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 / ??

**********

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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THE ORSON WELLES LIBRARY

1. Wakefield by Nathaniel Hawthorne

2. The Red Room by H. G. Wells (with intro by OW)

3. The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
4. The Secret Sharer (part two)
Sredni Vashtar by Saki (with intro by OW)

5. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling
Mandalay by Rudyard Kipling
6. Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson
Requiem (Under the Wide and Starry Sky) by Rudyard Kipling

7. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling
8. The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (with intro by OW)

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Orson Welles uses his sonorous, mellifluous, matchlessly expressive voice and his legendary gift for characterization to delineate these oft-told tales in a way that will make you hear them as if for the first time. And if you are indeed hearing any of them for the first time, it will make you want to run to the library to read them and to savor them as they were meant to be experienced.

—Leslie Weisman, Wellesnet contributor

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In May of 1985, shortly after his 70th birthday, Orson Welles went into a recording studio to read about two dozen classic stories which he presumably chose himself, as they include selections by many of Welles's own favorite authors, such as Isak Dinesen, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and Robert Graves. At the time, Welles most recent film scripts, The Cradle Will Rock and King Lear, were floundering and ultimately would never find the financial backing to be realized. However, Welles's artistic talent could not be repressed, so even if he was denied the use of his filmmaking tool kit, he could easily tell stories using only the magnificence and skill of his peerless voice, as he had done so often during the heyday of radio.

Recently, the audio engineer who recorded these sessions with Welles provided me with a list of all the stories Welles had chosen to read.
They include these classic titles:

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Stories

A. V. Laider by Max Beerbohm
Grapes for Monsieur Cape by Ludwig Bemelmans
Miriam by Truman Capote
The National Pastime by John Cheever
The Chaser by John Collier
The Outcasts of Poker Flats by Hart Crane
The Old Chevalier by Isak Dinesen
The Heroine by Isak Dinesen
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ten Indians by Ernest Hemingway
In Another Country by Ernest Hemingway
Malibu from the Sky by John O'Hara
The Summer of the Beautiful White Horses by William Saroyan
The Girls in their Summer Dresses by Irwin Shaw
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Poems

The Fairies by William Allingham
(So) We’ll Go No More a Rovin’ by Lord Byron
How Pleasant It Is To Have Money, Heigh-Ho! by Arthur Hugh Clough
A Slice of Wedding Cake by Robert Graves (with intro by OW)
Rondel by John Lee Hunt
Jenny Kissed Me by James Henry Leigh Hunt
God of Our Fathers, Known of Old by Rudyard Kipling
Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover by Sir John Suckling

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Why only 8 of these stories have ever been commercially released remains something of a mystery, although it would appear that since the 8 selections that comprise The Orson Welles Library are all in the public domain, that probably has a great deal to do with it. Yet, why it should have taken ten years before even those 8 stories were released (in 1995 by Dove Audio on 4 cassettes), is yet another mystery! In any case, in 2007 the 8 stories were re-issued on CD, and are now available from Blackstone Audio.

(more...)

This article is based on a piece by Jean-Pierre Berthome that appeared in French in The Unknown Orson Welles, the wonderful book edited by Stefan Drossler of the Filmmuseum Munchen.

Special thanks to Francois Thomas, who graciously translated key portions of the text for me.

All the sections below in bold type are taken from Welles screenplay.

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In June 1967, the professional film journals announced that Orson Welles would direct an episode of the omnibus film Histoires Extraordinaires or Spirits of the Dead as it was known in America. By September, it was made public that Welles’s episode would not be used. Instead the final film would comprise three episodes based on some of Edgar Allan Poe's lesser known stories and be directed by Roger Vadim (Metzengerstein), Louis Malle (William Wilson) and Federico Fellini (Toby Dammit, or Never Bet the Devil Your Head).

See color images from the original French pressbook at my Facebook page HERE.

Early on, Ingmar Berman may have also been approached about directing an episode. In his book Encountering Directors (1972), Charles Thomas Samuels talked with Federico Fellini about the three original directors who were under consideration for the project. Fellini said: “I was still under contract to make The Voyage of Mastorna for (Dino) De Laurentiis and was in total confusion. Then along come these French producers who begged me to participate in a multi-episode film. They assured me that of the three stories, I would make one, Bergman another and Welles the last. So I said yes. Then it turned out that they had lied about Bergman and that Welles, who didn’t trust them, refused to sign. I continued anyway, simply because this was a way of freeing myself from De Laurentiis. When they told me my partners were to be Malle and Vadim, I could have legally refused. With me, Welles, and Bergman—three visionary artists whose images have a richness of meaning—there would have been some common quality in this homage to Poe. That’s why I signed, not for monetary considerations.”

Needless to say, the mind boggles at the thought of the "richness" of images we might have received if an anthology of Poe stories had been realized by Fellini, Bergman and Welles! It certainly would have been far more memorable than what eventually emerged as Spirits of the Dead. The Bergman episode, in particular, would have been fascinating, since, at the time, the Swedish director was in the midst of his own “horror” phase, having just directed Persona and Hour of the Wolf, and soon would be filming the real-life horrors depicted so memorably in Shame and The Passion of Anna. Poe’s story The Masque of the Red Death also more than likely inspired Bergman’s movie The Seventh Seal. There’s certainly little doubt that Bergman’s 1956 film went on to influence Roger Corman when he made his own movie version of Poe's story in 1964, starring Vincent Price as Prince Prospero.

Even more intriguing is to find out that Bergman wrote a never-published 11-page story in 1938, when he was only 20-years old, entitled A Peculiar Tale which appears to have been influenced by Poe. In it we come across the figure of a personified death for the first time in Bergman’s oeuvre. Maaret Koskinen, an authority on Bergman’s work describes A Peculiar Tale as follows:

It is an emotionally charged story of an anonymous narrator who encounters a beautiful yet highly perfumed woman in a florist's. She turns out to be a prostitute, a widowed mother and an intravenous drug user. Towards the end of the story the narrator finds her beaten to death by one of her clients. Her neighbor, a garrulous old woman, tells him about the assailant:

"And last night I met her on the stairs with a man. And the way he looked gave me a chill of fear. His appearance was completely white, and it didn't look as if he had any eyes, and he had a big floppy hat, and a long black cape"

The tale ends with the narrator walking out onto the street, his collar turned up against the "rain and autumn storms", having gone up to the dead woman and stroked her forehead: “Poor little thing, I thought. You wanted to be Death's pretty little harlot, and he paid you in his fashion."

What Poe story Bergman might have chosen to make is unknown, but Welles chose to adapt two of Poe's more famous tales for his proposed segment. It should also be noted that 21 years earlier, in June 1946, Welles had adapted Poe's The Tell Tale Heart for his radio show.

Working with his companion Oja Kodar on the script, Welles used The Masque of the Red Death to frame the story of The Cask of Amontillado and cleverly changed the sex of Fortunato, from a male to female. An undated copy of the script is in the Welles collection of the Filmmuseum in Munich.

The title page indicates the principal roles and notes the script would be combining two of Poe’s short stories into one episode:

The following script comprises two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, including a free adaptation of “The Cask of Amontillado.” The two are grouped together under the title:

By Orson Welles and Oja Kodar

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THE PLAYERS:

The Narrator
The Prince
The Majordomo
Fortunata

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(more...)

I just recently received a copy of a poem Gary Graver wrote that was printed for his memorial service.

Unfortunately, there wasn't time to include it in Gary's memoir, Making Movies With Orson Welles, so I thought I would reproduce it here.

I'll also add this thought, since I've now had the opportunity to see a rough cut of The Other Side of the Wind:

I've no doubt Gary might easily have been nominated for an Academy Award if the film had been released in 1975, or maybe he could still be, if the film were to be released in say, 2012.

One scene that stands out in my mind: a beautiful series of panning telephoto shots of Bob Random, as he is walking through various different locations on the back lot at MGM, including what appears to be a field of tall grass. Welles cuts on these panning shots about five times, so the effect is almost as if the camera move is one continuous pan, except each time he cuts, the background changes, as Random moves from left to right across the screen (think of the similar cutting Alain Resnais did in La Guerre Est Finie)

It's also one of the few scenes in the rough cut that had a temp. music track, in this case a nice piece of Spanish guitar (if I recall correctly), which adds immeasurably to the poetic effect of the scene.

Needless to say, as shot by Gary Graver, the sequence is only one of many that looks quite beautiful in what is clearly Gary's masterpiece of cinematography. No wonder Welles called Gary "Rembrandt."

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And the hand scooped up a fist full of dirt
And this was life and it fell back through fingers
Earth to earth
And a foot stepped on it
And this was still life.
From the womb to the grave from lip to lip
From night to night from the touch of fingertip to fingertip
And this was beauty,
The beauty of your loved one's hair
And fresh face caught aglow in an anxious wind,
And the morning frost and smell of dew
And a fallen lonely flower petal and the smile of love
And the strength of the gift of young ambition and heroism
And from the blue crib to the naked grave
This was life

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In Celebration of the life of Gary Graver

July 20, 1938 - November 16, 2006

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"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"

With those simple words, filmmakers the world over, were given a new "cinematic" tool, as edited by Orson Welles in what everyone seems to think is the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane.

Now, strange as it may seem, I can't recall this particular editing innovation being used very often in movies after Citizen Kane was released. Maybe it's because I have a New Years Eve hangover from drinking a a few too many Gimlet's with Glenn Anders and Todd Baesen at the Ha-Ra Club (by the way, I told Todd to stop his rant against the new messageboard. Although I don't much like it, either, it's better than having nothing!)

However, to return to "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year," it seems to me it recalls the cut in Kubrick's 2001 where we cover many years in the story in a single cut.

Welles had discovered a very effective cinematic device that nobody else ever seems to be using these days. Maybe it's like the dissolve, and it has simply gone out of fashion, but it's a technique that you would think some hot-shot young director would have picked-up on.

But, speaking of the dissolve, why would should that have gone so out of fashion in today's movies? It's one of the most poetic and beautiful things a director or a film editor has at their disposal. That is why Citizen Kane's opening is so poetic. And just look at the beautiful dissolves in Terence Malick's films.

Maybe it's just because today's young MTV trained directors don't even know what a dissolve is. Could that be why they are so out of fashion?

If that is the case, it's a pretty pathetic indictment of film schools. It reminds me of Welles own comments on what was "cinematic" made circa 1948. He and Jean Cocteau were at the Venice film Festival, and both wondered what the formula was for creating a "cinematic" experience, if only so they could put it into effect in one of their future films. At the time, both Welles and Cocteau had made films from plays they had already directed for the stage. Welles had just done Macbeth, while Cocteau had just started work on Les Parents Terribles.

The point being, "cinematic" was really just a fake description for what critics wanted movies to be. What is really cinematic, would be, as Welles said in 1958, giving the camera to someone who could use it as "an eye in the head of a poet."

So let's have more poets who want to make movies, and less bastards who are raised on MTV and want to become rich and famous!

In any event, here is wishing everyone at Wellesnet a very Happy New Year, and as promised, here is the second part of ORSON WELLES autobiography that was published in Paris Vogue.

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A BRIEF CAREER AS A MUSICAL PRODIGY

By Orson Welles - PARIS VOGUE, December, 1982
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Violinist, pianist...child conductor...

This last was pretty much of a fake. By the time I was seven I was reading through the scores and waving my little baton in the presence of such people as Heifetz, Casals, Schnabel, Wallenstein and Mischa Ellman, when they gathered informally in chamber groups in my mother's house. Her own professional life was frustrated by long illness, but just about everybody was in love with her, so the celebrated musicians, when they came to visit and play, were kind enough to pretend that the midget Von Karajan in front of them was not (as I must truly have been) a damned nuisance.

(more...)

People who dream know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom… the freedom of the artist.

—Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Karen Blixen published her first stories in 1934 under the name of Isak Dinesen, the same year Orson Welles made his first amateur movie, HEARTS OF AGE.

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If I know a song of Africa…

Of the giraffe
and the African new moon lying on her back

Of the plows in the fields
and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers

Does Africa know a song of me?

Will the air over the plain quiver
with a colour that I have had on?

Or will the children invent a game
in which my name was…

Or the full moon throw a shadow over
the gravel of the drive that was like me?

Or will the eagles of the
Ngong hills look out for me?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MluSQnod-Ck&feature=related

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The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

—A. E. Housman

(Read by Meryl Streep over Denys Fitch-Hatton's grave in the Ngong Hills of Kenya, in Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa )

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Here is a link where you can hear what is probably Orson Welles only single, which was obviously never a hit, at least on Billboard's top 200, but all the same it was issued as a CD single, which in my book, is enough to call it a hit for Welles.

Hearing it for the first time, I was astonished that it seems to have captured the touch of Welles genius, transforming what might have been utterly banal lyrics into a meditation about what Welles own work was most concerned about at the end of his life: Death.

So here is the master on that subject from his proposal to make his last unfinished movie, King Lear:

"Death" is our only dirty word. And King Lear is about death and the approach of death, and about power and the loss of power, and about love. In our consumer society we are encouraged to forget that we will ever die, and old age can be postponed by the right face cream. And when it finally does come, we're encouraged to look forward to a long and lovely sunset.

"Old age," said Charles de Gaulle, "old age is a ship wreck"—and he knew whereof he spoke. The elderly are even more self-regarding than the young. To their dependents the elderly call out for love, for more love than they can possibly receive, and for more than they are likely—or capable—of giving back. When old age tempts or forces a man to give away the very source of his ascendancy over the young—his power—it's they, the young, who are the tyrants, and he, who was all-powerful, becomes a pensioner.

Link to the Youtube video of

I Know What it is to be Young:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMurd0OUbrQ&feature=related
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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.  

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Here's a rare�treat.� A long scene from Orson Welles script of... �

���
THE DREAMERS (1982)�

Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Orson Welles and Oja Kodar, based on The Dreamers and Echoes by Isak Dinesen.� Cinematography (in color) by Gary Graver.� Music by Erik Satie.�
�
Starring

Orson Welles as Marcus Kleek�
Oja Kodar as Pellegrina Leoni�
�

While no other actors were officially cast, Welles was hoping to obtain the services of the following actors:
�
Timothy Dalton as Lincoln Forsner
Oliver Reed as Guildenstern
Bud Cort as Pilot
Peter Ustinov as Baron Clootz
Alida Valli as Eudoxia�

and

Jeanne Moreau as Donna Lucetta Boscari
�
(Welles describes Moreau�s character in the script as having �a frizzled and deplorable red wig, two eyes, glittering with intelligence, which peer out at Lincoln from behind a mask of simple avarice and complicated wickedness. This is none other than DONNA LUCETTA BOSCARI herself, notorious from Vienna to Palermo, expert in poisons and aphrodisiacs, procuress to the higher clergy, and as we have seen � a hopelessly addicted gambler.�)�
�
�
Welles wrote the screenplay for this poetic masterpiece in 1978 and began shooting some short "test footage" of the picture in the garden and interior of his house in the Hollywood Hills throughout the early eighties.
�
This scene from Welles script is interesting to compare with the test footage Welles shot�that is included in ONE MAN BAND (on the Criterion DVD of F FOR FAKE).
�
The scene�takes place high in a Swiss Monastery, during a raging alpine snowstorm. Three ex-lovers of the great Opera singer, Pellegrina Leoni have converged to witness her play her final� scene� a death scene. Welles plays her Dutch friend and patron, Marcus Kleek.�
�
The script gives a much better idea of how Welles would have approached the material, since all we see in�the test footage is�a simple monologue by Welles, with no sense of the many effects he had planned to use in�the scene.� As the script indicates, these would have included long dissolves and double images, as well as reverse shots to the three men who are listening to him tell his story� �

________________
�
�
The OLD GENTLEMAN has stepped out of the shadows.
�
MARCUS KLEEK
The truth, young gentleman?
�
LINCOLN raises his head and looks at his old enemy.
�
MARCUS KLEEK
Now that you've cornered her and killed her, you want the truth?
�
LINCOLN discovers that all his ferocity has drained suddenly away...
�
MARCUS KLEEK
I have known this woman at a time when she was known to all the world by her real name. Before that I have known her. I saw her first on a small theatre stage in Venice and she was then sixteen years old. I bought a villa for her near Milan. And when she wasn't traveling, she stayed there, and had many friends around her. And sometimes we were alone together...
And then we used to laugh such at the world. And we would walk together in the garden, arm in arm. I alone, of all people, knew her.
�
GUILDENSTERN stirs in the shadows.
Until now, LINCOLN has net been aware of his presence.
�
GUILDENSTERN
You? -- you were her lover?
�
The OLD MAN meets his eye. Dismisses the word with contempt.
�
MARCUS KLEEK
Lovers!... I have seen her lovers... running about yapping around her, flattering and fighting...
No, young gentlemen � I was her friend.
�
(With great pride) At the gate of paradise when the keeper of the gate shall ask me who I am, I shall give no name and no position in the world. But I shall answer him:
"I was the friend of Pellegrina Leoni."
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To complete�the series of poems about Orson Welles�I've included�two selections from one of Welles favorite poets, Mr. Robert Graves. �Both of these poems would seem to fit neatly into the�Welles canon, as 1915 is the year of his birth and JONAH obviously needs no explaination, since Melville's MOBY DICK was quite an obssession with�Welles.�

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KENNETH TYNAN: Whom would you choose as a model of the way men ought to behave toward women?

ORSON WELLES: Robert Graves. In other words, total adoration. Mine is less total than it ought to be. I'm crazy about the girls, but I do like to sit around the port with the boys. I recognize in myself that old-fashioned Edwardian tendency--shared by many other societies in other epochs--to let the ladies leave us for a while after dinner, so the men can talk. We'll join them later. I've talked endlessly to women for sexual purposes--years of my life have been given up to it. But women usually depress or dominate a conversation to its detriment--though, of course, there are brilliant and unnerving exceptions. In a sense, every woman is an exception. It's the generality that makes a male chauvinist like me.

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