The Lady From Shanghai - aspect ratio

[catbuglah]

Factoid - There's a bit in a Walter Murch interview where he says that Welles was furious :angry: over the success of Psycho :angry: with its TOE look.

[The Night Man]

There's a bit in a Walter Murch interview where he says that Welles was furious over the success of Psycho with its TOE look.

Is there gold to be mined in a comparison of Welles' and Hitchcock's careers? They both came to Hollywood at the same time and with similar high expectations. There's already been some discussion of the REBECCA/JANE EYRE correspondences, as well as those of TOUCH OF EVIL/PSYCHO.

Were Welles and Hitchcock acquainted? Did they ever have anything to say about one another? Or were they too competitive to allow for that?

[jaime marzol]

i've never read anywhere about welles reacting to psycho, wonder where murch read that? i read somewhere, i think it was a kodar interveiw, where she said on occassion they went to dinner together.

[NoFake]

Re: Welles on Hitch, there's that exchange in TIOW:

PB: What do you think about Hitchcock? [A short silence.] You once said he was the first director to make you want to direct movies. (My comment: Anyone remember where he said this? I have a vague recollection, but can't place it.)

OW: That was when he made those English pictures like The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Lady Vanishes and The Thirty-nine Steps--especially The Thirty-nine Steps.

PB: That's his best English film.

OW: The American movie I liked most was the one Thornton Wilder wrote. Jo [Cotten] was in it....

PB: Shadpw of a Doubt--it's his favorite, too.

OW: Thornton's natural warmth was a big help. There's a certain icy calculation to a lot of Hitch's work that puts me off. He says he doesn't like actors, and sometimes it looks as though he doesn't like people.

Earlier, he talks about similarities between himself and Hitchcock in knowing the camera:

OW: ...I think I share with Hitchcock the abiility to say what lens goes in the camera and where it stands without consulting a finder or looking through the camera. He does that, too, I believe.

[catbuglah]

i've never read anywhere about welles reacting to psycho, wonder where murch read that?

He doesn't state his sources.:blues: He mentions that Welles was mad about the similarities and especially mad about the financial success.:angry: He also relates a conversation he had with Robert Wise who thought that Orson's problem was his short attention span.:O

[jaime marzol]

so to add to all his other problems, now we must add short attention span.

a few nights ago i rewatched RKO281, and noticed something i had not noticed before, or i did notice and forgot. they paint welles like a trecherous, hypocritical, egomaniac with no respect for any one. i wonder where the writer did his research. from what I've read about welles i never walked away with that impression. he was difficult, impossible, short tempered, but not hypocritical, and trecherous.

[Eve]

sorry for being off topic and ... although considering there's absolutely no need for it (the quote below ... and this post) ... I wondered also whether this 'portrayal' in RKO 281 was based upon little more than complete (destructive) fantasy ...
The unavoidable deep gap between presence/being and acting - it renders the majority of such attempts less than convincing and annoyingly fruitless to me ... 'The Magnificent Welles' is in my opinion the lowest example as to what one could get in this 'department' ... I walked out during a screening, it was just unbearable. Why to do these things get that kind of distribution???
Françoise Sagan once said that one couldn't make a film about him - at least she hoped so - since no man on earth could have his figure, his face (I'd like to add his voice) and above all not that special, never calming imperious splendour of genius in his eyes ...

'The private Orson is the antithesis of his haughty public persona. His friends know him as warm, caring, strangely shy. He is the man who regards 'Crazy Welles' with horror.' (Leaming)

[Store Hadji]

I like The Magnificent Welles.

Guess it just comes down to personal taste.

[Eve]

-sorry for remaining off topic ... I promise this is the last time -
Store Hadji -
certainly it is due to a big extent to personal taste. After all how much isn't?
What I meant is that I found the 'portrayal' Marcus Wolland gave in 'The Magnificent Welles' to be - in some aspects - so 'untrue' in revealing nothing (I have to apologize, since I was only able to sit through the first half hour and ... pulling myself together, the last ten minutes, so I have to admit that unfortunately I am not exactly in a position to make a judgement at all) but an essentially boring and (also physically) unattractive sketch of character - he shows absolutely no reason to think of that 'man' as a genius ... or posessing (something at least close to) grace and charm ...
What the actor recounts seems to have nothing to do with what he represents ... the connection is simply missing. I could imagine that maybe for people not familiar with his biography or the circumstances of the 'Ambersons' or 'It's all true' this is interesting - just for the facts - but I found it an altogether tedious affair to have all those (sometimes pure, if my memory is correct) quotations out of several biographies thrown at me - if this was all (not having seen the middle part) than I don't know ... what for?
Please correct me! You can't believe how happy you'd make me if you'd show me that I am mistaken ...

[jaime marzol]

i would guess that RKO281 is guilty of lack of research. remember, it was partly based on that PBS documentary, and on welles, they were way off.

had the RKO281 writer read the brady bio, he might have written a different welles. RKO281 screenplay languished for years as the scott brothers tried to get financing. i'm guessing it was written before the callow, and thomson books came out, so we can't blame those two shit-heels.

finally the scott brothers, who have a real love for welles, gave up and sold it to HBO. they retained producer credits but i don't think they did much on the movie. i have the pre- HBO screenplay, but i don't remember if it has the treacherous orson. will have to reread it. if it does have the treacherous orson, i bet ridley and tony would have changed it during filming.

imagine how little interest a welles movie has. ridley and tony could get brando to play hearst, and madonna to play davies, but they could not raise the money to make the movie.

i also could not get through THE MAGNIFICENT WELLES. i watched about 20 minutes and was very bored with it.

[catbuglah]

they paint welles like a trecherous, hypocritical, egomaniac with no respect for any one.

That reminds me of ca. 1948 portrayal of Orson in The Spirit newspaper comic section by Will Eisner. The character was named Awesome Bells. It was done as a humorous parody, but came across as fairly disingenuous considering that Eisner's cinematic film noir style was influenced by Welles and he himself has been styled the Orson Welles of comics.

Curiously another Welles-influenced, cinematically styled cartoonist, James Steranko, who belonged to the Witch-Doctors Club :angry: , open to people who are both published writers and professional magicians, of which Orson was a member - and the only printed remark on his acquaintance with Welles that I've read was a rather catty remark concerning his weight... ???

PS. Murch, in that interview, by the way, was very mcuh pro-Orson, even going so far as to stating that the history of Hollywood cinema post 1960 consisted essentially of the working out of ideas contained in the work of Orson Welles. :;):

[jaime marzol]

yes, all i've read from murch shows great admiration. he also said something about L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, that it was inspired by TOUCH OF EVIL, or something like that. after that comment i more and more saw vargas in the good cop of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.

[Jean]

Bacjk to aspect ratios. as a working projectionist, there is only one place, a museum, where I can project movies with the correct ratios (1.33, 1.37, 1.66, 1.85 and scope). In other theaters the choice is 1.85, scope and maybe 1.66. It means that 1.37 movies will be at best projected with 1.66 masking most of the time. Is the laserdisc edition of Touch of Evil framed in 1.37? Jean