Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Joseph McBride has sent along this link to a delightful interview with Betsy Blair, recorded when she appeared at The London Review Bookshop in 2005 to talk about her autobiography, The Memory of All That.

Ms. Blair candidly tells of how Welles called and asked her to play Desdemona, and how she learned only after she got to Rome that two actresses had already preceded her in the role. Also, how Welles asked her to buy her own plane ticket home once he had run out of money, but in reality had already decided that she wasn't quite right for the part!

Blair also talks frankly about the Hollywood blacklist, her husband Gene Kelly dancing in the rain in London, working in Europe with Free Cinema directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz (who became her second husband in 1963) and why Elia Kazan should never have received a special Academy Award honoring his career.

Listen to the entire fascinating interview HERE

To put Betsy Blair's comments about her work on Othello into context, here are some passages from Peter Noble's The Fabulous Orson Welles and Micheal MacLiammoir's diary about the chaotic conditions that surrounded the making of Othello.

Since Peter Noble's account is second-hand, it contains several inaccurate points, such as Blair meeting Welles at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in the company of Anatole Litvak. In her book, Blair says she met Welles after she flew to Rome and went to dinner with Welles and Alexander Trauner. Welles also told Blair he had cast her as Desdemona after seeing her in The Snake Pit. It also seems more than likely that if Welles had actually met Blair in Paris, he would have probably realized she had a screen presence that was too contemporary to play Desdemona, although Welles's own conception of the part (and one Blair says she discussed with Welles) was to make Desdemona a modern woman in the 15th Century, as Welles himself relates in his essay film, Filming Othello.

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While Orson Welles's considered The Trial to be one of his greatest films, many critics didn't agree with him. I must also say after I first saw the film, in 1978 (at Theater 80 St. Marks in the East Village), I didn't much care for it, either. In fact, truth to be told, I fell asleep!

It was only after the third or fourth viewing of the film that I began to understand it more completely, and therefore to enjoy it.

Which just goes to show that we can't really expect to unlock the workings of a master in a single brief viewing, whether it's from Welles, Picasso, Kafka, Shakespeare or Einstein. For example, just imagine if you had a chance to talk with Einstein about scientific theory. I daresay most of us would be totally baffled by his conversation. Which is why, I think Welles has never had a popular audience. The general public is simply "overwhelmed" when confronted with such complex films.

In any case, Store Hadji has just posted a link to this very interesting sequence that was cut from THE TRIAL here.

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ORSON WELLES: There was a long scene that lasted eight minutes, which I cut on the eve of the Paris premiere. Joseph K has his fortune told by a computer — that's what the scene amounted to. It was my invention. I only saw the film as a whole once. We were still in the process of doing the mixing, and then the premiere fell on us. At the last moment I abridged the scene. It should have been the best scene in the film and it wasn't. Something went wrong, and it didn't succeed. The subject of that scene was free will. It explains my attitude at the time about computers. My attitude has changed slightly since then, but only slightly. I believe that what that scene did, was to show Man’s slavish relationship to something which is really only his tool. It was a splendid thing to say in the picture, but it turned out to be rather a drag, so I took it out. The scene was tinged with black humor; that was my main weapon. I always direct the humor against the machine and in favor of freedom.

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The following scene between a Scientist (played by Katina Paxinou) and Joseph K (Anthony Perkins), was cut by Welles in the editing. It originally came after the scene where Joseph K is talking with his cousin Ermie, before he enters his office building.

Scene grabs and text for the scene can also be found at the Wellesnet film page here

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INT. JOSEPH K'S OFFICE - NIGHT.

We see K walking through his office. It is late at night and he is alone. In a luminous island surrounded by a vast sea of empty desks he works, or tries to, or imagines that he is working. Finally he cannot wait any longer. He gets up and walks across the empty office to the far corridor which contains the electronic brain, sleeping in the darkness. A pool of light from a single bulb shows the scientist in charge: A woman. She is wearing the same clothes as the men but that is all she has in common with her colleagues. The day shift workers all have expressionless faces. They are stereotyped technicians of no particular age. The woman in charge of the night shift is as old as the world. Immutable, vaguely disquieting, this venerable lady of science is the archetype of the priestess serving a powerful, millenary mystery.

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While Orson Welles spent time all over the world, and in at least five of the seven continents, I'm not quite sure if he ever made it to New Zealand or Australia.

However, I find it rather amazing that today, due to the internet, we can get input from people down under, just as easily as from a neighbor next door.

A perfect example of this is this interesting blog I just stumbled across from Christopher Banks, in New Zealand, who, like the Kiwi director Peter Jackson, obviously loves the work of Orson Welles.

The link to his site is here, which gives you an additional links to a very interesting article by Jonathan McCalmont, comparing TOUCH OF EVIL to CITIZEN KANE, complete with clips from YOU TUBE.

Here is the text of Christopher Banks recent post from his blog down under:

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Jonathan McCalmont has done an interesting post comparing elements of “Citizen Kane” and “Touch of Evil”. Some great insights into how the Wellesian style permeates two very different films, with particular regard to his clever use of sound.

(He also references the not-so-famed opening sequence of “Contact”, a film I’m also very fond of. What has happened to Robert Zemeckis these days?)

The combination of Welles’ backgrounds in radio and theatre - both very immediate media - made for some very exciting and dynamic films in “Citizen Kane” and also in the butchered masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons” as he brought the tricks of his earlier trades along with him to the cinema.

I can’t think of a better illustration of his passion for every frame of celluloid he exposed than his 58-page memo to Universal upon seeing what they’d done to the original release version of “Touch of Evil”. Without it, we would never have the restored version we have today.

The last holy grail from the Welles vault is his last narrative feature, “The Other Side Of The Wind”. Shot but never edited, it’s been stuck in various vaults for years while estate lawyers get their act together.

Given what is known about Welles’ frenetic and fast-paced intentions for the editing style, it will be a vast departure from his earlier work. Had it been released in 1972, it could well have been as ahead of its time as “Citizen Kane” was in 1941.

Just watching a strange documentary regarding Marc Welles and his sibling who changed gender; Oja makes an appearance as well.

Prodigal Sons
Sunday March 08, 2009 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld

1:01 min
Marc has had a rough life. Adopted as an infant, he was held back in pre- school (putting him in the same grade as his younger brother), failed to graduate high school, and suffered a head injury at twenty-one. His entire worldview was that he was cheated by life. Then he discovered he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.

Unlike Marc, his sister Kim's life always seemed to be easy. She was the first child born to her attractive parents, into an extended family of tall Montana farmers. She was high school class president and valedictorian, voted most likely to succeed. She was also captain of the football team - you see, Kim used to be Marc's younger brother. Having these two siblings in the same grade in a small Montana town made for a perfect storm of brotherly rivalry.

The McKerrow family before the youngest was born. Twenty years later Marc and Kim return home to their small Montana hometown, a springboard that hurtles Prodigal Sons into a year in the life of this Montana family, forcing them to face challenges no one could imagine. Seen through the eyes of Kim, the filmmaker, she is the most surprised of all as she discovers her brother Marc is still trapped in the brotherly rivalry she long ago abandoned. She sets out to unravel this complex history, and learns it is she who needs to resolve bygone days by confronting the ghost of her male past. Her rare access delicately reveals both family's most private moments and an epic vista, as the film travels from Montana to Croatia, from high school reunion to jail cell, and from deaths and births to commitments of all kinds.

Marc's grandparents Marc and Kim's relationship is an ideal polarizing test case for the universal issues every family confronts: sibling rivalry, gender, nature versus nurture, and the question of whether anyone can reinvent oneself. Their bond, which defies both Kim's gender and Marc's pedigree, exists as the fascinating heart of the film, and is orbited by a colorful, articulate cast of characters, including jailhouse chaplains, Montana farmers, intrigued high school classmates, and Orson Welles' soul-mate Oja Kodar, among others. Carol, the remarkably resilient mother who accepts her children's surprises with grace and optimism, provides a strong backbone for the family, as well as a clear-eyed entry-point to this drama of Wellesian proportions. All along the way surprising revelations abound: Marc's innate savant ability to play the piano, Kim's smooth acceptance from schoolmates and community, and their younger brother Todd's well-adjusted attitude about being gay.

In the end, we see that transformation happens when least expected. After pulling for this family through its trials and tribulations, we learn that a poignant sense of hope will carry them through.

Directed by Kimberly Reed for Big Sky Film Productions in association with CBC Newsworld, BBC Stroyville, and the Sundance Channel.

Thanks to Lance Morrison for tallying up all the votes so far of Wellesnet members ongoing ranking of their favorite Orson Welles' movies. I've taken the results Lance has posted on the message board and added in ten more votes, including my own, as well as people I've asked to send me their rankings, including Christopher Welles Feder, Juan Cobos, Richard France, etc.

The results change slightly, but rather significantly, in that now FALSTAFF comes in at number one!

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For comparison, here is a ranking Juan Cobos complied for his magazine Nickel Odeon, when he asked 100 mostly Spanish writers and filmmakers to pick there favorite Orson Welles' movies in 1999:

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Interestingly enough, a clear consensus seems to emerge if we divide the two lists into a top four, a middle four and a bottom four.

In that case, the top, middle and bottom films remain the same on both lists, varying only slightly in their final ranking within their respective tier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Orson Welles to Kenneth Tynan, 1967

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

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

—Orson Welles to Barbara Leaming, 1983

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

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

JAN AGHED: What about The Magnificent Ambersons?

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

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

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

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When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

—Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops
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What is the title that appears on the film itself of Orson Welles's 1973 movie about fakers and forgery?

1. Hoax
2. ? (Question Mark)
3. FAKE?
4. ? (Questions) about Fakes
5. Verites et Mensonges (Truth and Lies)
6. F For Fake

This question came to mind when I recently came across the program note for F FOR FAKE when it was shown at the London Film Festival in 1975. Featured is a very informative interview with producer Dominique Antoine. Ms. Antoine’s comments also helped explain when the Iranian company Les Films de l’Astrophore first “took charge” of F FOR FAKE and why it took the film so long to get released after it was first screened in 1973.

In retrospect, it now appears evident that Welles made some extremely bad errors of judgment in regards to both of the films he made with money from Dr. Mehdi Boucherie of Iran. In fact, it seems whenever Welles acted as his own producer, he was often his own worse enemy! Why for instance, would Welles not immediately want to sign a distribution deal with his friend Darryl F. Zanuck and 20th Century-Fox for the U.S. rights to FALSTAFF after Zanuck expressed such enthusiasm and interest for the film in 1965? Why did Welles not sign a deal with Joseph E. Levine’s Embassy pictures for the rights to F FOR FAKE when Levine wanted to buy the movie for the U.S. market? Why did Welles not sign a deal to complete THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND in 1976, when one of the very few viable offers he received finally came his way?

Apparently, in each of these cases, it was because Welles, acting as his own producer, was hoping he could get a much better deal if he just waited patiently. As we now know, in each instance he only received a far worse deal by waiting, and in the case of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, he got no deal at all! Which reminded me of the self critical comment made by another artistic genius, Oscar Wilde, regarding his launching an action of criminal libel against the Marquis of Queensberry who had called him a “sodomite.” After Wilde had spent three years in jail he supposedly said, “What colossal stupidity!” While it’s obvious that both Wilde and Welles were artistic geniuses, it seems they both could be “colossally stupid” when it came to dealing with mundane business matters. That is surely why Welles always needed the skills of a strong producing partner, who was in sympathy with his artistic aims. Someone who could shepherd his artistic vision through the dangers of the studio system in the forties, and in the fifties and sixties through the new found independent distribution process. Which is probably why the many strong-willed producers Welles worked with in his career seemed to have had better results in actually getting Welles's films seen. They include: John Houseman, Sam Spiegel, William Castle, Herbert J. Yates, Albert Zugsmith and Alexander Salkind. When Welles acted as his own producer, while the film may have been artistically brilliant, it was almost always never distributed properly. The perfect example of this is OTHELLO. Welles produced and financed the film himself and therefore owned it outright. He sold it to United Artists for release in the United States three years after it had won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival. The film opened at the Paris Theater in New York City, and after a brief three week run there, United Artists pulled the picture and apparently never opened it anywhere else in the U.S. (According to Variety, the picture grossed less than $100,000.) The rights then reverted back to Welles, which explains why, except on a very few rare occasions, the movie was never screened in America during Welles's lifetime.

It appears something similar happened with F FOR FAKE. Welles had completed the film on his own and was attempting to sell it, with Francois Reichenbach acting as his producer. They ended up selling the film to the Iranian company, Les Films de l’Astrophore, who were already involved with the financing of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. However, before he sold the film, Welles certainly controlled every aspect of the final print, including its title. Which is why one wonders what Welles was thinking of when he perversely refused to give his picture a recognizable name! Even after it was brought by Les Films de l’Astrophore, the film took an astonishing three years to open in America. Although looking at some of the reviews that appeared after its initial showings, it’s not that surprising that there was so little interest by any studio or distributor in acquiring the film, or for that matter, in investing in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Clearly both pictures would be very tough to market, and while they might prove to be artistic successes, there is little doubt their commercial prospects were perceived as being rather limited.

Obviously, with a “new kind of essay film,” on his hands, Welles only further hampered his own commercial success when a myriad of questions surfaced about what the actual title of the film was.

According to Gene Moskowitz’s review in Variety the picture was shown under the title of QUESTION MARK at the Club 13 screening room in Paris, on October 19, 1973. Moskowitz reports: “the film should intrigue buffs and would be a natural for school usage. Welles still shows his film know how despite the thin and sometimes overworked material. Even the title is unclear, for the word “Fake” is used at first and there is then a question mark which may also be the title and maybe more fitting for this glib but interesting pic.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum who was living in Paris at the time and had lunch with Welles in July of 1972, also saw the film at Club 13. Welles told Rosenbaum that he planned to call the film HOAX. Yet, when Rosenbaum saw the film in Paris, his report in the January 1974 issue of Film Comment, gives the title as FAKE. He also added this addendum to his article: “Department of Mystification: Two days after completing and sending off the above (article), Les Films du Prisme sends me a fiche technique of the new Welles film. According to them, the title is QUESTION MARK, Welles and Reichenbach share the director’s credit, and the script is by Oja Palinkas (Kodar), the leading actress. Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving (but not Welles) are listed as the leading actors. On the credits of the film that I saw, the word FAKE appears, followed by a question mark, and afterwards the title, “a film by Orson Welles.” For the time being I am content to call it THE NEW ORSON WELLES FILM, co-directed by Irving and de Hory, written by Jorge Luis Borges, and produced by Howard Hughes. …As Welles remarks about Chartres, the most important thing is that it exists.”

The film then apparently had it’s first public showing at The Tehran International Film Festival in 1973, at Roudaki Hall, complete with a tribute to Orson Welles, who received the Golden Winged Ibex Award for Life Achievement in the cinema. What the Persian title for the film was remains unclear, although I find it interesting that Welles was honored for his career in Iran, a full two years before he received an award from The American Film Institute. Ironically when the AFI gave Welles their Life Achievement Award, F FOR FAKE was finished, but still had not been released in America. As a result, no clips from Welles's latest film were shown, since Welles insisted that clips from his work in progress, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND should be featured. The AFI officials naturally resisted this request, since they really weren’t very interested in Orson Welles's future as a filmmaker, only in his glorious past. They also managed to give the incorrect release date and title for F FOR FAKE in their program book. Let’s just be thankful they didn’t invite Richard Nixon back to present their award to Orson Welles!

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