Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Earlier this month, the Zemfira Stage company presented the East Coast premiere of Marcus Wolland's Lost Eden: The Magnificent Welles, featuring critically-acclaimed Potomac region actor Jay Tilley as the legendary Orson Welles.

Wellesnet correspondent Leslie Weisman took in the play and interviewed actor Jay Tilley.  Here is some background on the production, followed by Leslie Weisman's interview with Jay Tilley.  

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I’m not very hot about being nationalistically inclined.  ...I hate that in anybody. I do truly believe that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.  

—Orson Welles. 1974   

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I don't think a policeman should work like a dogcatcher, putting criminals behind bars. In any free country a policeman is supposed to enforce the law, and the law protects the guilty as well as the innocent.   ...It has to be tough. The policeman's job is only easy in a police state. That's the whole point, Captain. Who is the boss, the cop or the law?

—Miguel Vargas to Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil

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Orson Welles above comments certainly seem to be worth re-visiting in light of the current state of civil liberties in America,  where some of our highest elected officials seem to be acting like Hank Quinlan, feeling it's no longer necessary to obey "the fine print in the rule books" in order to catch criminals.     

In any case, after reading the text of the  26-page SLEEPY LAGOON pamphlet that was published in June, 1943, it seems rather likely that the racist statements made by Mr. Ed Duran Ayres of the Los Angeles County Sherriff's office during the trial might well have contributed to the genesis of Hank Quinlan in Welles' Touch of Evil.  

Below is the complete text of the SLEEPY LAGOON pamphlet, with a short Foreword by Welles, who relates a story told to him by Pete Vasquez, while he was waiting to be examined at the draft induction center in Los Angeles.   

However, to set the scene, let's start with this paragraph taken from Welles FBI file, which states that The Citizen's Committe to Defend Mexican-American Youths was "known to be controlled by the Communist Party."   

ORSON WELLES - FBI REPORT - April 15, 1943   

On November 30, 1942, a group of figures in the Hollywood motion picture industry staged an invitational forum at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was actually sponsored by the "Pan-African Security Council."  The purpose of the forum was to discuss the trial of the twenty-two Mexican defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon murder case, which was pending at the time in the Los Angeles courts, and to raise money for their defense. Orson Welles acted as chairnan of this forum. Welles as chairman, opened the forum by stating that the most important minority question in the country today is the Negro question, but that almost of equal importance is the question of the Mexican minorities, which is of particular interest in Los Angeles and Southern California. The above-mentioned murder case was the reason for the creation of the Citizens Committee to Defend the Mexican Youth in the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Case, which organization is known to be controlled by the Communist Party. Many of the individuals who composed the Pan-American Security Council were also members of the Communist-inspired Citizen’s Committee to Defend the Mexican Youths.
 

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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:

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The Stranger is now out on a official MGM release which apparently puts all the many public domain versions of the film to shame. I haven't seen it yet, but here is David Kehr's review of the new DVD in The New York Times: 

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The Stranger,  in a radiant new print, gains most in this (film noir)  collection. Long and, to me, unaccountably dismissed by Welles scholars for being too “commercial,” it may be Welles’s most explicitly political work, made at a time when his activism was at its height. Robinson is a soft-spoken agent of an international war crimes commission who comes to a small village in Connecticut in search of one of the architects of the Holocaust, the notorious Franz Kindler, and finds him (Welles, of course) teaching at a boys’ school under an assumed name and about to be married to the daughter (Loretta Young)  of a Supreme Court justice.  

If The Stranger  feels like the most conventional of Welles’s films, it may be because it is told in chronological order, without the flashbacks and competing narrators that give his work its cross-stitched density. But his distinctive storytelling technique remains intact, as he passes the point of view from character to character, offering a span of perspectives. He begins with Robinson’s investigator, shifts to the war criminal (made strangely sympathetic, like Norman Bates in Psycho when we see him cleaning up neatly after a murder) and finally adopts the point of view of Ms. Young’s character, an angelic figure (named Mary) who refuses to believe in her husband’s guilt.

Welles did not control the editing (a prologue, showing Kindler in South America, was chopped off) and his depth compositions are relatively restrained. But so is his taste for the bizarre and carnivalesque, making this his most naturalistic film. He seems surprisingly comfortable in this register, though he would never again return to it. (MGM Home Entertainment, $19.98, not rated)

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As Kehr astutely notes, Welles did not edit the final film, nor was the film told in his usual flashback style, as Welles intended.  To see exactly what we are missing, here are the opening three pages from Welles script, written with John Huston and Anthony Veiler.  But what may be even stranger,  is how the descriptions in Welles' script seems to foreshadow The Other Side of the Wind,  his much later collaboration with John Huston.  The wind and moon seem to become characters into themselves in these opening script pages, and what's even more bizarre, is how,  taken out of context, the script  descriptions might seem to have a distinctly sexual overtone to them, especially in light of the sex scenes Welles included in The Other Side of the Wind. 

For example:  ...as the girl mounts the stairs... she climbs (climaxes) and then she comes...  With her free hand the girl grasps what still stands upright...   

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ORSON WELLES: There is a grand place, where the ancient cliffs hold a million stories.  Where the mystic forests whisper time worn tales. Where the glacial lakes drown secrets from the ice age. There is a grand place called New Hampshire.  A brand new stage for adventure and romance...

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It's rather amazing that Orson Welles work in the arts is so vast it is still being catologued and discovered -  more than 20 years after his death.  This of course, not only applies to his own unfinished films, most of which we know about, but also to the incredible amount of radio and voiceover work Welles did, much of which is still unknown to even the most vervent of Welles scholars.

The recent posting at Wellesnet of many of Welles brilliant radio shows from the forties is a prime example.  Like a cache of hidden treasure, Store Hadji has provided us with many rare Welles radio shows that were very seldom heard.  

Suffice it to say, Welles total career is like a glacier from the ice ages of New Hampshire's lakes.  We are still discovering bits and pieces of his work which pop up at the most surprising time and places.

Such as this last week, when the biggest story about the new Transformers movie,  seemed to be that Orson Welles had provided a voice for the old Transformer movie.  Thankfully, Welles had no connection with the new one, but if he did, perhaps he could have used a one per cent cut of the $70 million opening week gross to finish The Other Side of the Wind. 

Another Welles unknown gem: In 1982, after the success of On Golden Pond, Welles did a promo piece to lure other Hollywood filmmakers to the state of New Hampshire, persumably after well-known New Englander Katherine Hepburn said "no."  It has now been revised for a new short film about filming in New Hampshire, which can be viewed here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM5REtS3hUM

As it is yet another masterpiece of Welles vocal acumen, it should be welcome viewing for all.

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Given the fact that Citizen Kane has been at the top of every international poll as the greatest film every made since 1962,  it seems like a good time to codify what real Welles scholars think are the great directors best films.

In 1999 Juan Cobos asked mostly Spanish and European film critics to do the same for his special Welles issue of Nickelodeon. For this Wellesnet poll, we will also limit the responses to 100 people, but in this case, any Welles admirer can post his own thoughts on Welles ten best films to be tabulated into the total. 

I’m also going to invite all the many Welles scholars (Joe McBride, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Richard France, Stefan Drossler, Francois Thomas, Catherine Benamou, Robert Carrington, etc.),  who frequent Wellesnet,  to either send me their list of ten favorite Welles films, or post them on the messageoard site devoted to that subject. Once we have a total of 100 responses they will be added up and we will post the cumulative results, as well as Juan Cobos list of results in Nickeleondeon for interesting comparisons.   

The Wellesnet messageboard thread, Favorite Welles Films – lay it down is where Wellesnet readers should post your own ten favorite Welles films. And since there are already about 20 ten best Welles film lists, anyone who wants to change their choices can do so be using the edit function. However, once we reach a total of 100 choices, we will compile the totals with whatever you have currently listed.  Also, to ensure a uniform count I will only be counting lists with at least ten selections. Titles, however can be  from any of Welles works, finished or unfinished, television, documentary or otherwise, but must contain at least ten titles.   

Here is my own list of of favorite Welles films:   

1.  Chimes at Midnight
2.  The Other Side of The Wind
3.  Touch of Evil
4.  The Magnificent Ambersons
5.  Citizen Kane
6.  The Lady From Shanghai
7.  F For Fake
8.  Othello
9.  It’s All True
10  The Fountain of Youth

—Lawrence French

I've known only one great cameraman: Gregg Toland, who photographed Citizen Kane.

—Orson Welles, 1967  

Photographing Citizen Kane was indeed the most exciting professional adventure of my career.

—Gregg Toland  

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Given the fact that Citizen Kane has long been considered the greatest film ever made, here is a wonderful piece about the cinematography for Kane, written only a few months after it premiered by Gregg Toland,  for the September, 1941 issue of Theater Arts magazine.  

In this piece, Toland predicts the upcoming fad for 3-D photography (which wouldn't become wide spread until five years after Toland had died, in 1948).   He also predicts, incorrectly, that color photography would never replace black and white cinematography. However, in retrospect, I wonder if Toland's thoughts might not have influenced Welles, who only embraced color shooting very late in his career. Welles first finished color film was not until 1968 for The Immortal Story.  And during his lifetime, Welles would only see one other of his films released in color, F For Fake.   Which is yet another reason why The Other Side of The Wind needs to be completed and shown. It's not only a very rare example of Welles using his mastery of the art of color cinematography, but also the first time he was able to use erotic scenes in a film.  And having just looked at the some of the erotic scenes from The Other Side of the Wind, and  then watched Bertolucci's The Last Tango in Paris  for the first time since 1975,  I wonder what Pauline Kael would have said about OSOTW?  Would she think it altered the face of an art form?  Probably not, but if The Other Side of the Wind had been released in 1974,  it seems likely that it would have been X-rated and certainly seen as far more inovative today than Last Tango in Paris.     

In his article, Toland also notes that a cameraman is the only one on a set who is never at rest, and also must be very quick about his his duties, a fact that Welles would later lament when he had "the criminally slow Stanley Cortez" as his cameraman on his next RKO picture, The Magnificent Ambersons.

In retrospect, it's too bad Welles didn't get Floyd Crosby, who at the time was actually working for him indirectly, under the direction of Norman Foster in Mexico, for It's All True. If Floyd Crosby had shot Ambersons  it certainly wouldn't have been delayed by the time-consuming lighting set-ups that Cortez seems to have caused. 

Floyd Crosby was also extremely left-wing, to the point of being blacklisted during the McCarthy era in Hollywood, so there seems to be no doubt that Crosby and Welles would have gotten along famously if they had actually worked together on a movie. 

Floyd Crosby had worked in documentaries under Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty, winning an Academy Award for Flaherty and Murnau's Tabu in 1931.  Crosby was not only very fast,  but extremely good at lighting,  so he ended up becoming Roger Corman's  chief cameraman from 1955 onwards, when he couldn't get any work at the major studios.  Crosby came into his own when he had the chance to show his beautifully stylish color cinematography on Corman's Freudian widescreen Poe movies made in the sixties, starting with The House of Usher in 1960 and ending with The Haunted Palace in 1963.  Amazingly, all of the Crosby, Corman-Poe movies were shot in only three weeks.

Here is what Roger Corman had to say about using Floyd Crosby when he began his career in 1955:

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Floyd Crosby was having trouble getting jobs when you hired him, because he had been a liberal New Deal Democrat, who suddenly became suspect during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the fifties.

ROGER CORMAN: Well, Floyd was certainly not a communist, but during the fifties, some studios did not like him. However, that meant nothing to me. I used him simply because he was a good cameraman. I remember Floyd talking about that, and saying it was somewhat ironic that his patriotism should come under questioning, after he had served in the Army air core command during World War II as a Captain, working with Pare Lorentz on combat documentaries and winning citations for bravery. Floyd was really a great gentlemen and a brilliant cameraman. I went on to use him for my first film as a director, Five Guns West, and he was probably the best cameraman I ever worked with. He was quick, efficient and gave me the kind of quality that you would normally associate with much bigger studio films. We got along very well, and although he was somewhat older than I was, we became very good friends and I had great respect for him and for his work.  It's not that difficult to get a good cameraman if the cameraman has hours to set up each shot. It's not difficult to get a cameraman who works quickly. He just sets up a few lights, and says he's ready to shoot. But to get somebody to work quickly and does fine work is very unusual.

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Greetings, all. If you have tried to log into the message board recently, you may have noticed blank screens when trying to do. This problem appears to have been rectified, so everything should be running as normal, more or less. Thanks for your patience. 

Jeff W.