Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

I find it quite fascinating to compare the legacy of two of America's greatest theatrical and film directors, Orson Welles and Elia Kazan.

Both were famous stage directors who started out in the thirties, and went on to make their best-known work in the movies.  Mr. Kazan, however, became much more famous for his "naming names" in April, 1952 before that ridiculous and shameful side show of Congress known as The House Un-American Activities Committee. As Kazan was later to admit, this was a disgusting act on his part. Yet, like Orson Welles, Kazan was a lifelong liberal, and was (unlike Welles), actually a member of the communist party in 1935, when he was also a member of the Group Theatre, which shared the limelight on Broadway with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in the thirties.

Of course, there is no doubt that Kazan was a great director of actors. Yet sadly, Kazan would never accept any responsibility for his “naming names.” In his autobiography, A Life, Kazan also goes into some detail to denigrate Orson Welles, for becoming fat and doing television commercials as he got older. Which made me think, “I wonder how I would view Orson Welles if he had appeared before the HUAC and had named names as Kazan did.”  That probably wouldn’t change how I feel about Welles work as an artist, but I certainly would have very little respect for Orson Welles as a moral voice if he had done what Kazan had done.  I think this is something any political artist must consider.  For instance, Jean-Luc Godard essentially turned down his Academy Award this year, which certainly gives him a great moral authority,  given that this same Academy had given Elia Kazan a Oscar for "Life Achievement " in 1999 .  Of  course, one of  Kazan's most famous discoveries,  turned down his Oscar in 1972 for The Godfather.

Welles, essentially did the same thing in 1970, by not showing up for his "honorary Oscar" even thought he was in Los Angeles to start work on The Other Side of the Wind.  In fact Hollywood's hypocrisy is well demonstrated by Welles receiving an "Honorary" Oscar in 1970 and then getting the third AFI life Achievement award in 1975.  It was precisely during those years that no Hollywood studio would come forth to back Welles and his new film.  In a way, who could blame them, as a Welles movie would probably be released to baffled reviews, and certainly not make very much money.  Today, there are still many who feel the The Other Side of the Wind should never even be shown. Yet in the seventies it was the era where everybody created whatever they wanted... and it often made money.  So the studios heads would back any young director, yet  "old man Welles " couldn't get any backing for his experimental movie  which was far more worthy than anything done by Michael Sarne, Barry Shear,  or any of the other young directors of that era!

Interestingly enough, both Kazan and Welles were very  political artists who naturally  made very political films, just as Godard does.  Kazan's last film was based on F. Scott's Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, who also wrote the short story Pat Hobby and Orson Welles, about Welles arrival in Hollywood in 1940.

Given the view Welles showed us about friends who later become traitors in Touch of Evil, Falstaff, and many of his other films,  I don’t imagine Welles would have ever have caved into pressure to testify against anyone he knew, as Mr. Kazan did.  Which is why I found it so strange to read Kazan  complaining about Orson Welles supposedly “selling out” by doing TV commercials in his book!

Meanwhile, for the the record, here are the names of the 11 people Kazan’s testimony helped to ruin when he betrayed them by naming their names before the HUAC in April, 1952:

Clifford Odets
Morris Carnovsky
Phoebe Brand
Tony Kraber
Sid Benson
Art Smith
Ann Howe
Paula Miller (Strasberg)
Lewis Leverett
Robert Reed
J. Edward Bromberg

So here is the young Mr. Kazan writing about Orson Welles direction of the Mercury Theatre in 1938, taken from Kazan on Directing.  I'd say that the young Kazan was envious of  Welles directing talent, and the "style" of his direction for the Mercury Theater.  Of course, at the time Kazan was  a mostly unknown name.  He had acted in several plays with the Group Theatre, and although he had already directed five plays, he was certainly not the big name he would later become, when he staged an acclaimed play by one of Welles'  first sponsors, Thorton Wilder (The Skin of my Teeth), followed by the sensational work he did with playwrights Arthur Miller (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman)  and Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real).

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

STYLE IN THE THEATER

By Elia Kazan (1938)

Style in considered an arty term in the theatre. Yet when an agent advises a playwright that the only director for his play is George Abbott (for farce or musical) or Jed Harris (for drama), they are talking about “style,” the style of production. Even safe directors have a style. Any sensible agent would be only too happy to entrust his client’s play to Guthrie McClintic, for McClintic gives his play “tone.” He’s definitely the modern expression of the old school who believes that the theatre had to sell glamorous, mysterious, and legendary beautiful personalities, and surround them with sterling actors, and beautiful décor—featuring flowers and the latest chapeaux. Thus Mr. McClintic takes an energetic, wholesome, intelligent woman with considerable beauty but with about as much mystery as a bar of soap and creates out of her a theatrical personality. (Kazan is referring of course to Katherine Cornell, who Welles appeared with as an actor, in his first major theatrical production of a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet) .

(more...)

Here is an excerpt from Nora Ephron's article on the filming of Mike Nichols CATCH-22, that appeared in the New York Times on March 16, 1969 .  I find the piece to be hysterically funny, given how many facts Ms. Ephron gets wrong concerning Orson Welles.  Many sections of the article are clearly second-hand  fabrications, probably "influenced" by Raymond Sokolov's earlier on location report on the filming  that appeared in Newsweek  on  March 3, 1969.  Welles refuted Sokolov's own "second-hand" version of  events in THIS IS ORSON WELLES.  Ms. Ephron also seemed to think that back in 1969, when Mr. Bogdanovich had only made TARGETS with Boris Karloff, he was some kind of  "experimental"  filmmaker!

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

GENERAL DREEDLE (Orson Welles)  is alive and well and in the  Mexican Desert

The arrival of Orson Welles, for two weeks of shooting in February, was just the therapy the company needed: at the very least, it gave everyone something to talk about. The situation was almost melodramatically ironic: Welles, the great American director now unable to obtain big- money backing for his films, was being directed by 37-year-old Nichols; Welles, who had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy "Catch-22" for himself in 1962, was appearing in it to pay for his new film, "Dead Reckoning." The cast spent days preparing for his arrival. "Touch of Evil" was flown in and microscopically reviewed. "Citizen Kane" was discussed over dinner. Tony Perkins, who had appeared in Welles's film, "The Trial," was repeatedly asked What Orson Welles Was Really Like. Bob Balaban, a young actor who plays Orr in the film, laid plans to retrieve one of Welles's cigar butts for an admiring friend. And Nichols began to combat his panic by imagining what it would be like to direct a man of Welles's stature.

"Before he came," said Nichols, "I had two fantasies. The first was that he would say his first line, and I would say, 'NO, NO, NO, Orson !'" He laughed. "Then I thought, perhaps not. The second was that he would arrive on the set and I would say, 'Mr. Welles, now if you'd be so kind as to move over here. . .' And he'd look at me and raise on eyebrow and say, 'Over there?" And I'd say, 'What? Oh, uh, where do you think it should be?'"

Welles landed in Guaymas with an entourage that included a cook and experimental film-maker Peter Bogdanovich, who was interviewing him for a Truffaut-Hitchcock-type memoir. For the eight days it took to shoot his two scenes, he dominated the set. He stood on the runway, his huge wet Havana cigar tilting just below his squinting eyes and sagging eye pouches, addressing Nichols and the assembled cast and crew. Day after day, he told fascinating stories of dubbing in Bavaria, looping in Italy and shooting in Yugoslavia. He also told Nichols how to direct the film, the crew how to move the camera, film editor Sam O'Steen how to cut a scene, and most of the actors how to deliver their lines. Welles even lectured Martin Balsam for three minutes on how to deliver the line, "Yes, sir."

(more...)

I had never read Andrew Sarris's reply to Pauline Kael's infamous article "Raising Kane," that was first published in The New Yorker in 1971.  So it was a very pleasant surprise to see it turn up in the archive section of  The Village Voice online.  Mr. Sarris makes many salient points about the numerous flaws in Ms. Kael's piece, which unfortunately was published alongside the original script for Citizen Kane in The Citizen Kane Book.

**********

FILMS IN FOCUS by Andrew Sarris

The Village Voice -- April 15, 1971

**********

Pauline Kael's two-part article on "Citizen Kane" ("Raising Kane" -- the New Yorker, February 20 and 27, 1971) reportedly began as a brief introduction to the published screenplay, but, like Topsy, it just grew and grew into a 50,000-word digression from "Kane" itself into the life and times and loves and hates and love-hates of Pauline Kael.

My disagreement with her position begins with her very first sentence:

"'Citizen Kane' is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened." I can think of hundreds of "American talking pictures" that seem as fresh now as the day they opened. Even fresher. "Citizen Kane" is certainly worthy of revival and reconsideration, but it hardly stands alone even among the directorial efforts of Orson Welles. To believe that "Citizen Kane" is a great American film in a morass of mediocre Hollywood movies is to misunderstand the transparent movieness of "Kane" itself from its Xanadu castle out of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to its menagerie out of "King Kong" to its mirrored reflections out of old German doppleganger spectacles. Not that Miss Kael makes any extravagant claims about the supposed greatness of the film on which she has devoted so much newsprint. "It is a shallow work," she decides, "a shallow masterpiece."

One wonders what Miss Kael considers a deep masterpiece. "U-Boat 29" perhaps? Actually, the closest she comes to comparing "Kane" with the higher depths of cinema is in a parenthetical aside of dubious relevance: "Like most of the films of the sound era that are called masterpieces, 'Citizen Kane' has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release. Yet, unlike the others, it is conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, 'Rules of the Game' or 'Rashomon' or 'Man of Aran,' which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms)."

(more...)