Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

A few months ago I found several old issues of Theatre Arts magazine in the tenderloin district of San Francisco, a few short blocks from where Wellesnet "legend" Glenn Anders lives. The mags were priced at a big 100% mark-up over their original price.

Well, since the original price was only .50 cents, they were actually great bargains, so I quickly grabbed several issues, including the September, 1951 copy that featured an article by Walter Kerr assessing Orson Welles career in both theatre and film, up to that point. Indeed, in 1951 Welles had only been active for 15 years in radio, the stage, and on the screen, and he had already become something of a legend. Or, according to Walter Kerr, a legendary "has-been."

Which is why I thought Kerr's article was way off the mark. (more...)

Heart of Darkness is a story we came to Hollywood to make a movie of---we never did and maybe someday we will---but I think it's particularly well suited to radio. Here it is, one of the best regarded and most typical of the works of Joseph Conrad. The Heart of Darkness could be described as a deliberate masterpiece, or a downright incantation. Almost, we are persuaded, that there is something after all, something essential, waiting for all of us in the dark areas of the world, aboriginally loathsome, immeasurable and certainly nameless...

I think I’m made for Conrad. I think every Conrad story is a movie. There’s never been a Conrad movie, for the simple reason that nobody’s ever done it as written. My (Heart of Darkness) script was terribly loyal to Conrad. I think that the minute anybody does that, they’re going to have a smash on their hands. Any of them; think what Lord Jim could have been, if some attention had been paid to the original book.

--Orson Welles

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Listening to Orson Welles reciting Joseph Conrad's masterful story The Secret Sharer from the audio recording he made for The Orson Welles Library, reminded me of Welles's longtime love of Conrad's work, starting with Heart of Darkness, which formed the basis for his first film project at RKO. Welles also did two different radio productions of the novel, and later wrote scripts from Conrad's novels Lord Jim in 1964 and Victory - An Island Tale, in 1971 (under the title of Surimam).

While none of Welles's screenplays based on Conrad's work were ever produced, it seems more than likely he would have been delighted to make a movie from The Secret Sharer.

In any event, hearing Welles reading the story, it is obvious it would have certainly made a terrific Welles's movie, containing as it does several themes that relate it to Welles's other film work. And strangely enough, the story was made into a picture at (of all studios) RKO, in 1952, starring James Mason as the Captain, and Michael Pate as the first mate of the Sephora. Directed by John Brahm, it features some beautifully atmospheric camera work by Karl Strauss, who was the cinematographer on Welles RKO production of Journey Into Fear. The short 45-minute episode was released under the title Face to Face, along with another short film based on Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.

The entire episode can be watched on YouTube HERE.

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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.

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Kudos to Jack Marshall, the artistic director of The American Century Theater for bringing yet a third Orson Welles production back to the boards, after previously reviving Welles's Moby Dick-Rehearshed (twice!) and Marc Blizstein's The Cradle Will Rock. Since The American Century Theater concentrates on 20th Century American playwrights, it is too bad that precludes them from mounting a revival of Welles's epic adaptation of Shakespeare's Five Kings for a future season!

Judging from the reviews, however, their revival of Native Son is well worth checking out if you live in the Washington D.C. area.

Below is the press release for Native Son, followed by Time magazine's report on the original 1941 production, which sadly, marked the last time Orson Welles and John Houseman would work together on a Mercury Theater production.

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Novelist Richard Wright’s searing novel Native Son aroused violent controversy from the moment it was published. The saga of a young American black man who becomes an unrepentant killer, the book was hailed as an uncompromising indictment of the nation’s racial divisions and social injustice, and condemned as feeding white bigotry while excusing crime. Naturally, Orson Welles, then the most dynamic force in American theater, thought it was just the kind of story his Mercury Theater needed to tackle. He commissioned Wright to do a stage adaptation in collaboration with playwright Paul Green, and the production, much to Welles’ delight, was as controversial as the novel.

At a very different time in our nation’s history, The American Century Theater (TACT) is giving Washington area audiences a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience Native Son, in a new production of the Right-Green-Welles adaptation that still raises disturbing and important questions. The production opens April 14 and will continue through May 9 in Theater II, at the Gunston Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia.

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Grace Hall, is the last remaining building of the Todd School, in Woodstock, Illinois, where Orson Welles studied, wrote, and essentially formulated his whole future life and career, under the direction of headmaster Roger Hill.

The Woodstock City Council will meet on April 21 2009 to decide the fate of Grace Hall. Some options include demolition(!!) or adaptive reuse.

There isn't much time, since they are meeting Tuesday night, but I just happened across this piece from Time Magazine in 1942 about Orson's Alma Mater. It might be a simple and effective way to let your view be known by simply copying and sending this piece from Time to the Mayor and City Council Members. (more...)

While I've already personally thanked everyone who has contributed to the drive to raise funds to keep Wellesnet alive and well on the internet, I want to take this opportunity to publicly express my thanks to Jeff Wilson for starting Wellesnet in the first place.

I can't remember exactly how Wellesnet was born, but I do recall Jeff e-mailing me when the old "Touch of Welles" message board that was based in Spain, had gotten completely out of control.

Jeff told me he thought he might like to start a new message board and Orson Welles internet site and from that point onward, Jeff established Wellesnet all by himself, until it has now become the best site about Welles on the internet. That was certainly made clear to me by the range of the many contributions I received, both great and small, over the last two weeks. What I also found very gratifying is where these contributions came from. Places from all over the globe, and in many cases from people in cities that had meant a great deal to Welles, such as Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Paris and Rome. There were also many contributions from the good old USA as well, ranging from small towns in Virginia, Iowa, Maryland and Ohio, to California and New York, as well as Canada and even from below the Mason-Dixon line, although strangely enough, nothing from Wisconsin.

In any case, I think it is important to realize that Wellesnet has certainly helped further Welles scholarship in many important ways. Just recently a Russian publisher contacted me about reaching Oja Kodar about the rights for publishing THIS IS ORSON WELLES in Russia. I was able to direct the publisher to Oja Kodar and I have just heard that Oja has concluded an agreement for a deal for the book to come out in Russia!

Likewise, Criterion's Mr. Arkadin DVD might never have appeared in a 3-disc special edition, without members of the Wellesnet messageboard pointing out that there was a "comprehensive" restored version put together in Europe that they should include in their set.

Which is why I want to thank Jeff publicly here on the site, because although he wants to move on from dealing with the day to day chores of maintaining Wellesnet, I think in spirit he will always be the "Godfather" of the site. So on behalf of everybody who has contributed and sent along messages about how much the work Jeff has done over the past ten years means to them, I'm sure he has every reason to be very proud with what he has accomplished.

Perhaps the best tribute to Jeff's work on Wellesnet has come from Orson Welles's oldest daughter, Christopher Welles Feder, who reads the site and has offered her praise for what Jeff has accomplished.

So, to quote Mr. Welles, let us raise our glasses, to Jeff Wilson, "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."

Bonham's auction house in London recently sold items from the estate of Bernard Herrmann which included some truly fascinating items from Orson Welles, including this letter, which sold for 360£.

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Dearest Maestro:

Your letter brought me more pleasure than I can say. Not the tone of it, which was a trifle severe, but the fact of it. It was fine, very fine to hear from you.

“Our paths,” you say, “haven’t crossed much in recent years.” If this is so, it is no fault of your obedient servant, who in common with his principals in his last movie enterprise, tried long and earnestly to engage your services for any sum of time. You have now, against the advice of your sober friends, committed yourself to the Colonel von Fox Hills, he of the air-conditioned teeth. This letter is a plea that you get out of this bondage for at least enough time to make music for the film I’m now starting (directing) and to write the score for our projected LEAR which I have a mind to put into rehearsal about Christmas. This letter is also to tell you that I love you truly and that your heart is God’s little garden.

Always,

Orson

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The letter is undated, so it is rather difficult to tell which King Lear project Welles might have been referring to, but my guess it is almost certainly NOT the Peter Brook directed TV version Welles did in 1953, but more likely the stage version of Lear Welles was planning that eventually debuted in January 1956 at City Center with music by Marc Blitzstein. Welles also appears to be talking about the efforts he and Richard Wilson made to get Herrmann to score Macbeth for him.

It also seems from his remarks, that Welles would have been more than delighted to have Herrmann score virtually any film he was going to make in the fifties, if he could free himself from his work at 20th Century-Fox. But the film that Welles says he is just starting and asks Herrmann to consider scoring was probably one of Welles many unrealized projects, although if it was Mr. Arkadin or even Touch of Evil it seems likely that Herrmann would never have completed his work, as Welles lost control of both of those films in the post-production stages.

A copy of Welles letter can be viewed at Bonhams Site, where several other Herrmann treasures are also available for viewing, including a copy of a book Welles had inscribed and sent to Herrmann as a Christmas present, Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities. (Sale Price: 384 £.)

There is also a copy of the Hitchcock-Truffaut interview book (1967) that Hitchcock has inscribed to Herrmann: "To Benny with my fondest wishes, Hitch." (Sale Price: 3,120 £.)

This is rather interesting, because it comes a year after Hitchcock had abruptly fired Herrmann from his work scoring Torn Curtain and indicates Hitchcock may have hoped to mend fences with Herrmann and have him score his next film, Topaz.

Of course, once Herrmann felt he had been wronged, he was not going to say "yes" to Hitchcock unless he was courted and it seems unlikely that Hitchcock would be willing to do that, although apparently Hitchcock did ask Herrmann back to score his last film Family Plot right before Herrmann died. Herrmann, who had a full schedule of films planned for 1976, including DePalma's Carrie, The Seven Per Cent Solution and Larry Cohen's God Told Me To, was reportedly happy to be in a position to ignore Hitchcock's reunion offer.

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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