Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Richard Frances's play Obediently Yours, Orson Welles was published by Oberon Books earlier this year in a volume entitled Hollywood Legends: 'Live' on stage.

Besides the Welles show, it features two additional plays, one on Marlene Dietrich, the other about James Dean, along with an introduction by Simon Callow.  Dr. France has graciously given his permission for Wellesnet to post his preface to the play here.  In addition, Glenn Anders has alerted us to an audio interview with Richard France you can listen to Here.  It includes comments about Richard France's two books on Welles, The Theatre of  Orson Welles (sadly, still out of print) and Orson Welles on Shakespeare.

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INTRODUCTION TO OBEDIENTLY YOURS, ORSON WELLES

By Richard France

Orson Welles was rightfully contemptuous of academics, refusing all the honorary degrees that he was offered and heaping scorn on those of his “learned “bee-ographers” who dared to base our writings about his life and  accomplishments on anything other than the charming fairy-tales that he had so skillfully crafted over the years.

Frankly, it’s hard to fault him on either count. These, after all, were the same fairy-tales that sustained him long after the “pigeons” (as he called potential investors) stopped returning his phone calls. And had he lived long enough to witness the birth of nano-technology, there can be no doubt that he, too, would have recognized it as the only known substance on the face of this earth smaller than the mind of an academic.

I was living on a small farm in southern Maine at the time, annotating the third and final play-script – the enormous crazy-quilt known as “Five Kings”  -- for “Orson Welles on Shakespeare,” when I received an offer from the University of  Southern California to spend a year as visiting associate professor with their (so-called) Theatre Division, now even more pretentiously known as its School of Theatre.  “Stay put,” I was told, especially by the very few academics whom I respected. “That place is known on campus as USC’s own little gulag..”

I’d been eking out a living by doing voice-overs in Boston, a two-hour drive from my home. And while debt-free, there were no wind-falls awaiting me in Maine. So, the opportunity to triple my average income for a year, plus a $2500 stipend to pay for the visuals and to index the “Welles on Shakespeare” book, plus a subsidized apartment above the smog line in Laurel Canyon proved irresistible. I was also able to convince myself that since we’d be  parting company in such short order, even the vilest and most insecure of my colleagues would realize  that I was no threat to them.  Silly me !

Some years earlier, the Asian-American company, East West Players, had produced “Station J,” my epic about the evacuation and internment of our Japanese population during World War Two. So, when I alerted my good friend, Mako that I’d be in Los Angeles, he invited me to return to East West as his dramaturg. In addition, a number of my voice-over clients in Boston apprised me of a recording studio in L.A. where, through a process known as phone-patching, we could continue working together.

Did I say triple my income? Mako introduced me to an L. A. agent, and I was soon recording promos and commercials for clients out there, as well. From the outset, it was agreed to that none of these outside activities were to interfere with my primary responsibility, which was to my students. Even so, I soon found myself in the cross-hairs of a particularly venomous assistant professor.

“I don’t see how Dr. France can continue doing everything he’s doing,” she hissed at one of our faculty meetings, prompting two of the deadest of the department’s dead-wood to bob their hollowed-out heads in agreement.

“Eventually, something has to suffer.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“We hope it won’t be your classes, Richard,” the older, and even dumber, of the two dead-woods chimed in.

My assurances that I would never allow that to happen, and it never did, seemed to put the matter at rest. Or so I imagined. In fact, the poison has only just begun to spread.  When the time came, and my student evaluations far surpassed my “bitch noir,” she merely dismissed these results as “gender distinction,” and intensified her campaign to discredit me.

Early in the second semester, I was in my office, with the door open, when one of my graduate students, an acting major from South Africa, appeared, crying hysterically. “My mother!” she blurted out. “She’s dead!”  All I could think of was trying to comfort her as I guided her to a chair. We sat across from each other, holding hands, as she revealed what happened. Not only was her mother’s death completely unexpected, by the time word of it reached my student it was too late for her to return to South Africa for the funeral.

The following week, I found myself in the provost’s office, charged with sexually harassing the student whom I had simply tried to comfort. Also present was my dean, the very person who had persuaded me to spend that year at USC, looking even more sanctimonious than usual. “What would you have done” I asked him, making no attempt to disguise my anger, “let her fall on the floor?” (He didn’t know it at the time but his days at USC were also numbered.)

Confronting one’s accuser is (supposedly) a corner-stone of American justice. It wasn’t my student, that I was sure of. But when I asked who then (as if I couldn’t guess), I was denied that information on the grounds that I might also get it into my head to harass my accuser. And given my angry reaction to the disgusting charges I was facing, both my dean and the provost considered this a real possibility.

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By ROGER L. RYAN

On September 13th The Magnificent Ambersons made its very belated DVD debut in North America as an Amazon.com exclusive “add-on” for customers who buy the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray of Citizen Kane. Even though fans had been very vocal about wanting Ambersons released on DVD for a decade or more, the disc has arrived with virtually no fanfare from the Warner Home Video publicity department. There is a good reason for this: the new Ambersons DVD is disappointing.

The release feels like it just barely escaped being issued on the “Warner Archive Collection”, a recent division of Warner Home Video that provides “burn-on-demand” product to a niche audience. With an emphasis on “B-movies”, these releases are primarily un-restored existing prints transferred quickly to DVD-R and sold via a dedicated website. The discs contain little-to-no extras and cannot be purchased in stores or rented. Thankfully, Ambersons arrives on a properly  “pressed” DVD, but like many of the “Archive Collection” discs, the film looks and sounds like it received very little restoration effort and the release contains no special features whatsoever. During on-line chats and in interviews, Warner Home Video has insisted for years that the delay in releasing Ambersons on DVD was due to an on-going search to find “better elements”.  Evidently, no “better elements” have been found.
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When Welles didn't work, he drank, bragged, ran through women, ate like a beast and hated himself. He'd eat supper at his dressing table--two steaks, each with a baked potato; an entire pineapple; triple pistachio ice cream; and a bottle of Scotch. Appetite drove him. Applause wasn't enough. He wanted amazement, the gasp of a common crowd.

---From the narration of  The Battle Over Citizen Kane

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The Battle Over Citizen Kane is factually misleading...  A mean-spirited and profoundly distorted view of who Welles was and what he did.

---Ronald Gottesman,  editor of  Focus on Citizen Kane

This whole attempt to connect his life with William Randolph Hearst and imply they're similar is nonsense.

---Henry Jaglom,  film director

What's wrong with the film is that, in its zeal to show a parallel between Hearst and Welles, it overlooks (the fact) that there are enormous differences between the two and it makes certain statements about Hearst and Welles that seem to be dubious.

---James Naremore, author of  The Magic World of Orson Welles

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With the arrival of the 70th Anniversary edition of Citizen Kane, I watched The Battle Over Citizen Kane for the first time since it's 1996 debut on PBS and I once again  found it to be a "profoundly distorted documentary" on both Orson Welles, and probably William Randolph Hearst, as well. Welles may have "ate like a beast" but to suggest he "hated himself" has got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard about the man. Here is another choice bit of misleading narration from this supposed "documentary":

"Welles was a young man who courted danger. That was always an element of his success. In the theater, he demanded magic. Characters had to appear from nowhere, or levitate into the sky. Actors were at risk. There were broken bones, fistfights. He liked the reflection of light on a real dagger, but one night he ran a fellow actor through, severed an artery and almost killed him. It was a risky way to live even when it did work and audiences cheered. When they didn't love Welles or his shows, that was worse."

Welles may indeed have asked a lot from his actors, but to imply that they were at risk, is at best, a highly debatable contention. The implied suggestion that Welles as Brutus, deliberately stabbed Joseph Holland as Julius Caesar, rather than accidentally, is quite preposterous and more akin to the kind of yellow journalism Mr. Hearst liked to report about in his newspapers.

Though what is truly objectionable about the inclusion of The Battle Over Citizen Kane and the even more ridiculous RKO 281 as the two extra discs in the Citizen Kane "Ultimate Collector's Edition" is their tone. Given the kind of  puff-piece promotional material studios normally include as extras on their DVD's it boggles the mind that such misguided extras would appear alongside Citizen Kane, long regarded as "the greatest film ever made."  It is almost a replay of having the screenplay for Citizen Kane published alongside the now completely discredited essay by Pauline Kael in The Citizen Kane Book in 1971.  In contrast, when Criterion released Citizen Kane as a 3 laserdisc  set it included interviews with over 30 prominent directors and other people influenced or associated with Citizen Kane, who were all full of praise for Welles and his work. Just imagine if Warner Bros. decided to release such a questionable documentary as The Battle for Citizen Kane and a dubious fictional film in their recent box set devoted to Stanley Kubrick! I'm sure the Kubrick Estate would never have allowed such gross misrepresentations to occur.

Of course, Orson Welles was no saint and he did have a very large ego, but as the Welles scholars quoted above duly note, both extra discs hardly present us with a fair or balanced portrait of the man, since The Battle Over Citizen Kane is clearly determined to somehow make Welles life fit into a mirror image of the career of William Randolph Hearst.  One can easily see why Robert Carringer,  who wrote The Making of Citizen Kane and served as a consultant on the film,  asked that his name be removed from the credits, as they clearly paid no attention to any of his advice!

The final narration of the film recounts the same old sad and tired Welles story we've all heard many times before.   It was all downhill for the boy genius after Citizen Kane, although anyone who knows even the slightest about Welles's later career and such big-budget cinema classics as Falstaff, The Trial or Touch of Evil, could never possibly write such an error-filled passage as this one:

"In latter years, Welles was a vagabond, trying to patch together his low-budget films. He begged or borrowed from everyone he knew, including $250,000. from an old pal, Charlie Lederer, Marion Davies' nephew. The money came from her estate. Welles never paid it back. He'd do bit parts for money--ads for airlines or Paul Masson wine--between fits of temper at the journeymen filmmakers or junior execs who were now directing him. Sometimes he was so overweight he had to be ferried about in a wheelchair. He hated the fat man jokes. He hated it worse when people asked him what had he done with himself after Kane." 

As for that even more awful "fictional" portrait of Welles,  RKO 281, I will let Peter Bodanovich's comments about its many flaws tell the story:

LAWRENCE FRENCH:  RKO 281 lost me right at the start, because in the very first scene they show Orson Welles at San Simeon and everybody knows that Welles was never at Hearst Castle.

PETER BOGDANOVICH: Actually, most people don't know that. Most people haven't even seen Citizen Kane! But for anybody who knows anything about Orson Welles, it's quite clear that he was never at San Simeon and he didn't know Hearst.  To be candid, I thought that movie bore very little relationship to the Orson Welles that I knew, or to any of the facts that I knew. It was so filled with errors, that it was painful to observe!

All of that was clearly spelled out in my book, This is Orson Welles.  Also, Orson didn't base Citizen Kane on Hearst alone, but there was another press lord from Chicago, Colonel Robert McCormick, who had an opera house built for his girlfriend, who was a singer. So that whole aspect of Citizen Kane comes from McCormick, but people incorrectly assumed that it was Hearst, because they were spun to believe that by Louella Parsons.

Louella was pissed off because she had been on the set of Citizen Kane and wrote a lot in her column about Orson and the wonderful movie he was making, and then ironically, Hedda Hopper found out that part of the movie was based on Hearst—the part about the Spanish-American War—but not Rosebud, and not Susan Alexander Kane or the political scandal. So Orson always said he though it was Louella and the people around Hearst who made such an issue out of Citizen Kane. Particularly Louella, because she had been scooped by her arch-rival, Hedda Hopper. It was Hedda who blew the whistle and said that Citizen Kane was based on William Randolph Hearst, after Louella had been on the set and been friendly to Orson.

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As Peter Bogdanovich pointed out to me, most people apparently really don't know much about Welles career, including Citizen Kane. Looking at some of the internet reviews on the new Citizen Kane set, I was astonished to see one site rate the film at 8  (out of 10) and the extras at 9.5!

After the break is the complete article by Cathy Dunkley from the 1996 Hollywood Reporter that first reported on the distortions contained in The Battle Over Citizen Kane:

RAISING 'KANE' OVER PBS DOCUMENTARY:  SCHOLARS BLAST FILM AS "MEAN-SPIRITED AND PROFOUNDLY DISTORTED"

By Cathy Dunkley

The Hollywood Reporter - March 29, 1996

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