Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Many thanks to Greg Boozell who sent along this link to The Michigan Quarterly Review SITE where this exciting news is posted:

Several years ago the University of Michigan Special Collections Library acquired two collections of materials relating to Orson Welles, including scripts, correspondence, memoranda, stills, programs, and much else. In this issue Catherine L. Benamou, the author of a recent book on Welles, curates a generous selection of correspondence related to Welles's film of 1948, Macbeth, as well as a graphics portfolio featuring images of great rarity related to that film and a document that serves as a "smoking gun" in the great mystery about the fate of the original print of The Magnificent Ambersons. A detailed introduction by Benamou precedes an exchange of correspondence between Welles and Richard Wilson, the film's producer and a longtime associate of Welles from the time of the Mercury Theatre forward. The correspondence is jaunty in places but also deadly earnest about the particulars of sound recording, thematic interpretation, and casting decisions. These documents, including the portfolio on coated paper with detailed explanatory notes, are the inaugural project of a sequence of writings drawn from the Welles collections.

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At his site, Jonathan Rosenbaum gives a more detailed description of the Welles contents in the magazine:

The 55-page Welles dossier assembled by Benamou in Michigan Quarterly Review starts off with a 1942 letter from Robert Wise to Welles about the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons, drawn from the Kodar collection. The remaining documents, all drawn from the Wilson papers, are letters relating to Welles’ Macbeth (the film), all written between 1947 and 1949 — four of them by Welles, if one also includes a memorandum to Republic Pictures — followed by an eight-page “Portfolio of Graphics”. The latter starts with 1944 instructions by RKO’s Jim Wilkinson (in charge of their film vaults) to RKO’s Sid Kramer in New York to “instruct the Brazilian office to junk” one print of Journey into Fear (10 reels) and two prints of The Magnificent Ambersons (10 reels and 14 reels). (The remaining seven pages all relate to Macbeth.)

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Unfortunately, there is no online ordering, just the quaint olden way where you mail a check or money order for $7.00 if you would like to receive a copy, to:

Michigan Quarterly Review
0576 Rackham Bldg.
915 Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1070

Meanwhile, for some background on the two different release versions of Macbeth, here is Todd McCarthy's excellent report from Variety in 1980 about UCLA's initial discovery of the longer version of the film, as well as Variety's original review of Macbeth from 1948, whose reviewer at the time found the soundtrack to be unintelligible "gibbering."

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While talking to Gary Graver a few years before he died, he mentioned a list of people that he called, "The enemies of film."

Well, I think it is quite fair to say that ADRIANA SALTZMAN will no doubt go down in cinematic history as not just the footnote she might have been, as the widow of Harry Saltzman, but also as the selfish and very wealthy woman who prevented the greatest film in Orson Welles career from ever being shown.

Yes, ADRIANA SALTZMAN is a true "enemy of film," as defined by Gary Graver. I think most of Wellesnet's readers would agree with me about this point, especially after reading the two articles below, about what has been holding up theatrical showings and a DVD release of FALSTAFF for the last 25 years. Thus the Harry Saltzman legacy becomes one that most film lovers will find truly heinous.

Mrs. Saltzman’s actions are especially despicable since, as the widow of Harry Saltzman, the co-producer of all the James Bond movies until the mid-70's, she cannot by any means be considered in desperate need of funds.

Indeed, she is quite a rich lady, which is why one has to wonder why this modern Lady Macbeth is demanding such an outrageous amount of money for the rights to FALSTAFF?

Does Adriana Saltzman really think FALSTAFF is going to be some sort of huge box-office success if it is ever re-issued in theaters or on DVD?

Is she really hoping to get back the reported $750,000. that Harry Saltzman paid for the rights to FALSTAFF?

Well, I've got some important news for Mrs. Saltzman: FALSTAFF isn’t going to make anywhere near $750,000. if that is what you hope to get for it. What's more, I don't believe any sane person could believe that Harry Saltzman paid $750,000. for the rights to FALSTAFF in 1966. Perhaps I am wrong in doubting this figure, but if so where is the documentation to prove such a wild claim?

Of course, even if Harry Saltzman did pay such a extravagant sum, it clearly would have only been as a "patron" of Orson Welles art, because he surely couldn't believe he would see any huge profits from a Shakespearian film by Orson Welles, especially along the lines of what his other 1967 release, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE would eventually gross.

Here is what Adriana Saltzman 'supposedly' wrote when she granted special permission for FALSTAFF to be shown at the Locarno tribute to Orson Welles:

"I hope that this exceptional screening will mark the beginning of the unknotting of all the ties imprisoning this great gift from Orson Welles to our cinematic heritage."

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Back in March of 1967, when Falstaff was first released in New York, it was a time of great social upheaval in America. Protests against the war in Viet Nam were about to reach critical mass. LSD made the cover of Life Magazine. Hippies and flower children were preparing for the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco. The new freedom of the screen was just around the corner. So seeing Jack Falstaff as a "swinger," as Welles so aptly called him on the Dean Martin TV show in 1968 was quite correct.

Unfortunately, the staid old reviewer from The New York Times, Mr. Bosley Crowther was so out of touch with the films of the era, he would shortly find himself out of a job!

Presumably, articles like this one by Andrew Sarris, defending Falstaff against Mr. Crowther's bad critical judgment, had considerable influence in getting Crowther fired from The Times in 1968. Of course, what speaks volumes, is that today, I doubt if many film-goers under the age of 40 even know who Bosley Crowther was. Andrew Sarris, on the other hand is still around and writing reviews for The New York Observer!

Below is Andrew Sarris' Village Voice article defending Welles's film, Falstaff, followed by Bosley Crowther's original review of the film in The New York Times.

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Orson Welles's FALSTAFF: Humpty-Dumpty from Wisconsin

By Andrew Sarris -- The Village Voice, March, 30, 1967

Orson Welles's Falstaff deserves the support of every serious moviegoer. Bosley Crowther has panned the film in no uncertain terms, but Mr. Crowther panned Citizen Kane in its time. I don't wish to single out Mr. Crowther as a critic, only as an awesome power on the New York film scene. He is certainly not alone in panning Falstaff. Happily Falstaff has found powerful defenders in Joseph Morgenstern of Newsweek, Judith Crist of the World-Journal Tribune, and Archer Winsten of the N.Y. Post. Even so, Mr. Crowther is entitled to his opinion, and he is scarcely the least enlightened of American film critics. Henry Hart of Films in Review has earned that dubious distinction with ease. The problem with Crowther is power. Not only can he still make or break most "art" films in New York; he can dictate to distributors what films they may or may not import. Lately he has been credited even with determining what will or will not be produced.

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Working with Orson Welles, he re-invented you for the purpose of his picture. From then on you became "God" and what you gave him was whatever he needed. This made you a real musician.

—Angelo Francesco Lavagnino in Roseabella

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The Italian composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino first worked with Welles right at the start of his career, on Othello in 1951 and found it to be a wonderful experience, although he says he was paid either nothing or very little.

Lavagnino's next score for Welles came about in 1965, while Welles was editing Chimes of Midnight. Juan Cobos, Welles assistant throughout the production of Chimes related his memories about Lavagnino's work on the film when I talked to him in Spain a few years ago:

JUAN COBOS: One day while working on the editing of Chimes at Midnight, Welles asked me: “Who did the music for my Othello?” I told him “Francesco Lavagnino,” so he called Lavagnino in Italy and invited him to write the music for Chimes at Midnight.

As you know, we had money troubles while finishing Chimes at Midnight, but in Italy the record companies would pay for everything to do with the recording of the music, the orchestration and everything else, because they kept all the rights. So when the Spanish producer of Chimes was running out of money, it was fortunate Welles used Francesco Lavagnino again, as it meant the producer wouldn’t have to pay for the expense of recording the score with a complete orchestra.

We already had a temporary soundtrack that was mostly made of German records I had brought when we were in Paris. Orson told me to get all the medieval music I could find and sent me to the Champs Élysées to buy any suitable records. I brought all these German recordings of medieval music that were used for the temp track. Then afterwards, Lavagnino took the medieval music and reworked it into his own score for the movie. But right up until the last moment, Welles was working in the editing room with a transcription of the German recordings and then with the music Lavagnino composed for the film.

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This explains why a soundtrack album for Falstaff was issued by CAM in Italy when the film first came out there. CAM also licensed a LP for release on the Fontana Records label in the UK, under the title of Chimes at Midnight. Presumably, CAM also attempted to get an American record company interested in putting out a soundtrack LP, but obviously, there was very little interest.

Luckily, CAM reissued the soundtrack on CD in 1993 and it is now available as a digital download at Amazon, for only $6.99 HERE.

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In these excerpts from Sir John Gielgud's wonderful book, A Life in Letters, which covers his entire career from 1930 to 1999, we get to see how his view of Orson Welles changed, starting from when he first saw Citizen Kane in 1941, to his being somewhat put off by Welles's antics at their first meeting, until he finally fell completely under Welles's spell when he worked with him as a director on Chimes at Midnight.

The letters also show that Gielgud always hoped to work with Welles again, and was especially keen on having Welles direct him as Prospero in a film version of The Tempest.

Strangely enough, after winning an Oscar for Arthur in 1982, Gielgud was chosen to replace Welles as the spokesman for Paul Masson wines on American TV, which Gielgud admits was sometimes a humiliating experience, but obviously one that paid both him and Welles a great deal of money.

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London, October 25, 1941

To Alec Guinness:

…London is full of people and plays and films in comparative abundance, rather a joy after being away for so many weeks. …Citizen Kane is quite unimaginably good, and an amazing feat all round on the part of Welles and his really brilliant cast. You must not fail to see it.

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New York, January 1, 1951

To His Mother:

I saw Orson Welles’ film of Macbeth. Not uninteresting and some fine effects of battle and Birnam Wood, but slow and dragged out despite huge cuts and transpositions and the acting unmoving and conventional. Splendid costumes but the fine language is defeated by the limitations of the screen!

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London, November 11, 1951

To Stark Young:

Orson Welles has had a certain amount of success with his Othello (the stage version at London’s St. James Theater) – I have not been able to see it myself. I gather he promises better than he can perform and the thunder grumbles but never breaks, and he is ill disciplined, they say, in the theatre and something of a terror to his company and management. Still the enfant terrible of Hollywood. He amused me when I met him, but he was rather stupidly touchy and lacked humility, must have the floor all the time or he fears he is not noticed. A pity, for he is obviously extremely intelligent and full of (rather disorderly) talent in many directions.

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After recently viewing the Movies Unlimited DVD-R of Falstaff, I was impressed (yet again) by Orson Welles's Shakespearian masterpiece, and all the many details it contains---which I had either forgotten about or never even noticed before.

As Welles remarked, "I think a film should be full of things, details that one does not see the first time. It ought not to be entirely obvious. There should always be something else to see if you go again."

So if anyone reading this hasn't seen Falstaff, you need to see it right now. Immediately! I can't describe it to anyone. You have to go look at it and describe it to yourself. It is an absolutely marvelous melding of Shakespeare’s words with Welles’s unique visual style. A collaboration between the greatest author in the English language, as interpreted by the greatest director in the history of the cinema. What more could anyone possibly ask for?

You can order a DVD-R copy from Movies Unlimited Ebay site for only $18.00 (plus shipping) HERE. While this DVD-R has no extras, it is a very nice transfer, which is of slightly better quality than the Spanish DVD.

What I also found interesting, is even though the film was not a success when it first came out, it may be one of the most extensively documented films that Welles ever made. There are a huge number of behind the scenes photos of Falstaff taken by Nicolas Tikhomiroff, a Magnum photographer who first become friends with Welles while taking pictures on the set of The Trial. Tikhomiroff appears to have been present throughout the making of Falstaff and 71 of his incredible images, many in gorgeous color, can be viewed online at the Magnum Photo site HERE.

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Orson Welles: Genius and Innovator of the American Cinema is a short documentary written and directed by a 14-year old student, David La Rosa, as part of the National History Day Competition. It won third place out of all the finalists from New York State and can be viewed on YouTube HERE.

I found it to be especially enjoyable, since in only ten short minutes it covers many of the lesser known films from Welles's career, such as It's All True and Chimes at Midnight.

By contrast, take this opening line from a 2003 book review by a so-called "professional" writer who shall remain nameless:

"The 1964 Spanish/Swiss film Chimes at Midnight, based on several Shakespearean plays, will never be recalled as one of the cinema's high points. With a budget only $800,000, there were no makeup artists on set to aid director and star Orson Welles, long exiled from the Hollywood mainstream."

Now, in only two lines, this reviewer has made between three to five mis-statements about Chimes at Midnight, simply because he believed the numerous factual mistakes from the error-ridden captions in the photo book he was supposed to be offering critical advice on: Stars on the Set.

David, on the other hand has done quite a commendable job of research. After watching the film, I asked David to write an introduction for his documentary, which I've posted below, along with the process paper he wrote, that tells how he went about researching Orson Welles career for National History Day.

Introduction by David La Rosa
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I've always liked old movies and one day I watched Citizen Kane on Turner Classic Movies. I was astonished by the film and thought it was brilliant. It made me want to see more of Welles' films. I thought that his directorial style reminded me of Hitchcock's. We went to our library and borrowed all of the DVD's we could find. As I watched them, I saw how brilliant they were and decided to learn more about Welles and his work.

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Reading Simon Callow's perceptive two books on King Henry IV, Part One and Part Two made me want to revisit Welles masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight. In doing so, I also looked at one of the best interviews Welles ever gave about a single movie, his long talk with Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio that was first printed in the Spanish film magazine, Griffith.

Since Juan had worked as an assistant director to Welles on the film, he was in the perfect position to ask especially interesting questions about Welles's shooting techniques. For his own part, Welles was in an wonderfully expansive mood, as he had studied the history plays at least since his 1938 production of Five Kings, and clearly was in his element, knowing his subject like the true Shakespearian scholar he was. What I found especially interesting in re-reading the interview, was realizing how abridged it was when it first appeared in Sight and Sound's Autumn, 1966 issue. This fact became clear when I looked at a second version of the interview that appeared later in Cahier du Cinema in English. Almost like a Welles film, the two interviews are very different translations and often contain completely different comments. So below, I have taken the liberty of combining the two and also have re-arranged the order of the questions and answers.

Interestingly enough, when talking to Juan Cobos, he told me he thought he still had the master tapes of the interview, which obviously would make for a fabulous audio commentary for any eventual DVD release of the film. Or, if the sound quality of the tapes wasn't up to snuff, an actor like Simon Callow could "play" the voice of Orson Welles for a DVD commentary track---if the daunting rights issues can ever be worked out!

Meanwhile for your visual enjoyment you can see a set of twenty beautiful German lobby cards for Falstaff HERE.

Finally, like Falstaff's banishment, Chimes at Midnight was to become Orson Welles own banishment from filmmaking on an epic scale. Over forty years later, it seems inconceivable to me that this poetic masterpiece, a film that is clearly among the greatest movies ever made and one that Welles himself felt was his greatest work, still remains so unknown and unseen.

To understand why, one only has to look at this letter written by Sir John Gielgud, from Cannes on May 13, 1966:

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I talked to Sol Levine (another of those (Sam) Spiegel--(Mike) Todd --(Otto) Preminger--film tycoons), about the possibility of getting backing for my film idea for The Tempest, with Orson Welles (as director). He (Levine) was gracious and seemed interested but unless Chimes at Midnight gets better notices elsewhere than the one in The New York Times, which is very damning, I fear no one will risk (Orson) for another Shakespeare picture.

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After reading John Gielgud's "damning" indictment of The New York Times assessment of Chimes at Midnight, one has to wonder what Welles was expected to do to get further backing to make movies.

Give up Shakespeare and go back to making thrillers like The Deep? Do a remake of War of the Worlds starring Charlton Heston? Make sherry wine commercials?

To quote Pauline Kael (who was herself quoting a young Afro-American woman), "There just ain't no way." Which essentially describes Welles commercial career after Chimes at Midnight opened and quickly closed wherever it played, although at least it did do slightly better than Othello in America, in that it actually played in about a dozen cities.

In retrospect, it seems like there was just no way Welles was going to to able to make a commercially successful movie as he so often dreamed about doing, during the last twenty years of his life.

Instead, he had to emulate Shakespeare and do wine commercials, as he so prophetically notes in this YouTube clip from The Dean Martin Show of September 26, 1968. Welles gives a marvelous talk about Sir John Falstaff while making himself up as plump Jack, and then delivers "Shakespeare's first and greatest commercial on the subject of booze"---Falstaff's witty speech about the benefits of Sherry Sack.
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ORSON WELLES on directing CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

By JUAN COBOS and MIGUEL RUBIO

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Did you do much work before you began shooting on Chimes at Midnight?

ORSON WELLES: Yes, I did a stack of research. But I had already worked on that period earlier, so I knew it rather well. But after you have done that research, the elements of that research are only a preparation, because the drama itself fixes the universe in which it is going to unroll. So you must not make museum pieces; you must create a new period. You must invent your own England, your own period, starting from what you have learned.

What importance do you give to the setting of the film?

ORSON WELLES: Very much, obviously. But a setting ought not to appear perfectly and solely real...

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Simon Callow, who is a great friend of Wellesnet, has sent along the biggest contribution I've yet to receive towards helping keep the site active and alive on the web. I know I've mentioned to everyone who has contributed to Wellesnet that we hope to add more pictures to the site in the future. Well, to my own surprise I found some very rare pictures I had never seen, that Jeff posted to the site from two brothers who were on the set of Chimes at Midnight in 1965.

These photos are especially interesting as they not only show Welles directing in his costume as Falstaff (and according to Keith Baxter, Welles designed all the costumes for Chimes himself), but several of them are also in color, giving us a unique view of the costumes and scenery. They can be viewed at Wellesnet HERE

Now, if there is ever an American DVD release for Chimes at Midnight, the producers might want to get in touch with Marc and Bruno Yasoni about including the rare production photos they took on location in Spain.

Anyway, while talking to Mr. Callow, I asked him whether his biography of Orson Welles would be concluded in one or two more volumes. He said there will definitely only be one more book, which will certainly make for an epic final volume in his acclaimed trilogy about the life and work of Orson Welles.

The last book in the trilogy, will of course, cover Welles's staging of Chimes at Midnight in Belfast and Dublin in 1960 and the subsequent movie version Welles made in Spain in 1965, which many critics (and Welles himself) considered to be his finest work in the cinema.

In 1998, inspired by Welles version of Chimes at Midnight, Simon Callow had the chance to tackle the role of Sir John Falstaff for the first time. He relates the specific details about playing Falstaff in this instructive TALK he gave at London's National Theater in 2003.

Mr. Callow was appearing at the National Theater to talk about the two (then) recent books he wrote for the Faber and Faber series, Actors on Shakespeare. Callow chose to write about Shakespeare's King Henry the IV Part One, and King Henry the IV Part Two. Both books are still available at AMAZON for quite a reasonable price.

Here is Simon Callow's forward to the books:

FOREWORD

My qualifications for writing this volume are a little oblique. Some years ago at the Chichester Festival Theatre I played Falstaff in a production of Orson Welles’s CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, a play drawn from HENRY IV Parts I and II, which he had directed on stage some years before shooting the film of the same name. Reviving Welles’s version seemed like a good idea at the time, but for a number of reasons, it failed rather badly – as indeed had the original production in Belfast and Dublin. On the face of it, the notion of compressing the two plays into one to focus on the relationship between Hal and Falstaff is attractive; many of the most memorable passages in the plays are in the scenes between them, and Welles was careful to include the scenes between the ailing king and his son as a counterpoint. In practice, though, however ably staged and acted, it creates an unwieldy vehicle which lumbers across the stage unhappily and unrhythmically, dangerously risking over-exposure for the Fat Knight and removing the context in which events unfold. (The film, of course, is quite a different matter: the entirely different dramaturgical demands of the medium made Welles’s selective process not only feasible but inevitable).

My discomfort in the performance constantly led me back to the full texts – pointlessly, since it was by this time impossible to restore anything more than a line or two. But it did give me a peculiarly keen appreciation of Shakespeare’s craftsmanship, and some insight into why he does what he does in the very particular way in which he does it. Some of the fruits of that painful reading are to be found in the following pages. In essence, I aim to take the reader through the play from the point of view of a practitioner, not becoming entangled in the tricky logistics of the actual staging, but presenting a practical view of the play, a sort of groundwork for a production, which may bring out some of the ways in which the play works. Anyone who attempts to write in this way is consciously or unconsciously treading in the footsteps of Harley Granville-Barker, for actors and directors greatest and most useful of all Shakespearean commentators: a tough act to follow, to be sure, but the most inspiring of models (fortunately, perhaps, for me, he never wrote about HENRY IV).

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As noted above, Simon Callow's first appearance as Falstaff was in 1998 at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where Keith Baxter, graduated from playing Prince Hal in Welles film to taking on the role of his own father, King Henry IV.

Mr. Baxter's very insightful comments about working with Orson Welles on Chimes at Midnight can be found in Leslie Weisman's report for Wellesnet HERE.

The Simon Callow/Keith Baxter version of Chimes at Midnight opened in August, 1998 in Chichester, with the following cast:

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT – By Orson Welles, adapted from plays by William Shakespeare. Directed by Patrick Garland.

Simon Callow (Falstaff), Keith Baxter (King Henry IV), Tam Williams (Prince Hal), Tristan Gemmill (Hotspur) Sarah Badel (Mistress Quickly), David Weston (Bardolph), Rowland Davies, Timothy Bateson, Rebecca Egan, John Warner.

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In doing research for the part, Simon Callow also wrote the following article which gives us some fascinating insights into the origins of Falstaff.

THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY

Falstaff is one of the great characters of Western literature, but he is not Shakespeare's exclusive creation. As Simon Callow prepares to play him, he explores the ancient roots of a mythic figure

By SIMON CALLOW
The Independent - 11 August 1998

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Sir John Falstaff has been widely described as Shakespeare's greatest creation and his best loved character, which in the circumstances is no mean claim. The adjective "Falstaffian" has long passed into the language. We all know what it means: fat and frolicsome, gloriously drunk, bawdy, boastful, mendacious; disgraceful but irresistible; above all, fun. Not only, as he says in Henry IV Part Two, witty in himself, "but the cause that wit is in other men," Falstaff provokes cascades of comparisons both from critics and from his fellow characters in the play; to see him is to be irresistibly impelled to describe him.

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Interview with JACK MARSHALL
Artistic Director of The American Century Theatre, on their production of Native Son

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By LESLIE WEISMAN

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It's alright to steal from each other, what we must never do is steal from ourselves.

--Jake Hannaford, in The Other Side of the Wind.

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Introduction

By Lawrence French

Francis Ford Coppola received a well-deserved tribute at The San Francisco International Film Festival, on May 1 and spoke in some detail about his long career in the movies. He was also asked about his work writing a film starring Orson Welles (more about that to follow).

Coppola was joined on stage at the historic Castro Theater by many of his director friends and family, including, most notably, George Lucas, but while talking about his new film TETRO, Coppola made these remarks, which I think make a wonderful introduction to Wellesnet contributor Leslie Weisman's interview with Jack Marshall, as they point out that Coppola was originally a theatre student, and when starting out he copied from the best, namely Tennesseee Williams, Kazan and Orson Welles:

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: When I began as a young man, I was a theatre student, from 1957 to 1960 and I saw wonderful films that were coming to America from Europe into what were then the art houses, and I think all of my contemporaries were wide-eyed at the beautiful movies we saw coming from Italy, France, Sweden and Japan.

So we wanted to do that. We all wanted to make 'cinema' and I didn't ever imagine I was going to be a real studio type of director. So when I began, I was writing a more personal type of movie. So while I was a theatre student, my Gods were Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan and when you are young, you always start out sort of copying the people you admire, even though it's really impossible to copy them. But it gets you going, that's the purpose. My father who was a composer, had this wonderful slogan. He said, "steal from the best." So I stole from the best, because I wanted to do this type of personal film.

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As Coppola notes, all artists are influenced to some degree by what they have seen and experienced, which is why I was so intrigued by The American Century Theatre's revival of three plays originally staged by Orson Welles. Jack Marshall may not have seen the original Orson Welles productions, but as Leslie's talk with him indicates, he was certainly influenced by Welles work in the theatre. And he obviously had the terrific idea to re-stage three of Welles's seminal plays at the American Century Theatre. So maybe Welles's early play, BRIGHT LUCIFER, will eventually be staged at TACT sometime in the future.

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LESLIE WEISMAN: This is The American Century Theatre's (and your) third production of a play directed by Orson Welles, the others being Moby Dick Rehearsed in 2005 and The Cradle Will Rock in 1999, that helped establish him in the consciousness of the theatre--going public as a talent to be reckoned with. They also—not always to his advantage—enhanced his reputation as a maverick who not only wasn’t afraid to tackle controversial subjects, but actively sought out and seized the opportunity. What is it about Welles and his work that first attracted you, and still holds you? Have your perceptions about him changed—either because of things you’ve learned about him in the interim, or as a result of staging his plays? Or both?

JACK MARSHALL: Welles was one of the brightest comets shooting across the Broadway skies during what I would refer to as the golden age of theatre — the period beginning around when O’Neill really burst onto the scene in the early to mid twenties, all the way through the thirties and into the mid forties is when the theatre was the most exciting and taking the most risks. And Welles really showed the same kind of innovation and daring in his theatrical productions that he later did in film. And to a great extent, I thing he merged — he really was the perfect meld of artistic sensibilities, content and a sense of showmanship, and how it would appeal to an audience and be commercial. He just had a great sense of that. So in the case of all his shows, they all were shows of substance, and he also was able to strike just the perfect balance — a balance that I don’t really think the theatre has done a very good job of finding ever since: making it exciting, making it visually exciting, making it challenging but also making it commercial. So it was the perfect meld of serious issues, serious intent, with commercial presentation. That’s what struck me about Orson right off the bat.

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