‘My Lunches with Orson" from Henry Jaglom

[RayKelly]

mido505,
Your list of who sent the OSOTW footage to Henry Jaglom omits who I think is most likely culprit (or saint) -- a third or fourth party.
Perhaps Kodar/Graver/Bogdanovich/Showtime executive/Astrophore investor/inner-circle-type made a VHS copy after Orson Welles death in 1985 for a very close friend who swore on his mother's grave he would never, ever run off copies.
Never. Ever.
Then, 5 or 10 years or so later, they "forgot" that pledge and made a copy for someone they trusted, who also swore they would never, ever...
You get the idea.
Orson has been gone for almost 28 years. The fact that the entire workprint hasn't been on YouTube already is remarkable.

[mido505]

Your surmise is very possible, Ray. For a while, several years back, a ton of fantastic Welles material got dumped onto the web, such as most of Magic Show, and then just as mysteriously disappeared. At the time, I joked that someone had gotten hold of the contents of Gary Graver's garage, but I was only half joking.

[Roger Ryan]

We know that Graver attempted to put together a rough cut of TOSOTW to interest potential investors in completion money, right? Some folks who frequent this board have supposedly seen it. I have not, so I don't know what kind of edit it is. I suspect it might just be a very rough collection of material...not unlike what was posted on the "Jaglom" YouTube page. That a number of VHS dubs had been made of this assembly back in the 90s is not a surprising notion nor is the idea that someone with a copy would now upload it.

[mido505]

Roger:

According to RayKelly, who posted his observations here at http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=302, Stefan Drossler described the Graver cut of TOSOTW as "horrible". The entire post is worth reading especially for this tidbit:

Further, the film-within-a-film footage has no storyline and even Kodar could not explain it to him. Drossler says that, in his opinion, many of the people associated with the film have exaggerated their importance, whether it was their hands on involvement in the making of the movie or claiming Welles entrusted them with the completion of the film.

Kodar, Bogdanovich, Joseph McBride, and Graver all had differing opinions as to how much of the film-within-a-film was to be included in the final edit of TOSOTW, and here we learn that Kodar herself can't explain what this footage is about. And these are the people who were closest to Welles and the production of TOSOTW! They can't even agree on this fundamental point, yet we are supposed to believe that Welles left them detailed editing notes so that TOSOTW could be completed after his death! It's no wonder nothing has been accomplished in all these years.

I'm with Drossler; some people have exaggerated their importance. Bogdanovich is no editor; Verna Fields covered his butt for years, and when she stopped editing for him his career went into the toilet (replacing the talented Polly Platt with Cybill Shepherd was another bad career move). Welles would never have entrusted Bogdanovich to cut a second of his precious footage. If that fabled conversation ever took place, it was another one of Welles's supremely sardonic jokes.

From what I hear of the Graver cut, he strung together whatever sequences Welles had edited along with various rushes to give an indication of the sequencing. Quite frankly, I'm beginning to suspect that the cut footage we've witnessed (the party scene, the car scene, the projection room sequence, and the Paramount backlot stuff) was hastily assembled by Welles for the AFI screening; little if any serious editing was done by Welles afterwards. Most of that cut material is still fairly rough, and likely would have looked very different in a final Welles version.

By the 1980's, Welles was openly discussing releasing TOSOTW as an essay film, rather than as a straight narrative. While we will never have the version Welles would have made, Beatrice was right to demand that the Showtime reconstruction take the form of a documentary. That would be closer to her father's intentions than anything these people could cobble together.

[RayKelly]

I have spoken to a few people over the years who have seen the rough cut and were impressed.
However, Stefan Drossler really dislikes OSOTW. He is a much bigger fan of "The Deep," which others feel is a lesser Welles effort.
Personally, I would like to see OSOTW cobbled together into a feature with an accompanying documentary.
At this point, I am willing to settle for more YouTube leaks

[Roger Ryan]

What I was alluding to with my previous post is that I suspect the recently leaked TOSOTW footage is from the Graver rough cut that was shopped around. If this is true then I don't think the term "cut" should even be used; this represents more of a very rough assembly of rushes with little thought to flow or continuity.

My opinion is that the film-within-a-film footage should be kept to an absolute minimum. It seems pretty clear to me that Welles was creating a parody of something like Antonioni 's ZABRISKIE POINT (which was partially shot in Carefree, Arizona not long before TOSOTW used that location) and that the footage was meant to be an incomprehensible mess. This is an actual plot point given how Billy is unable to explain the storyline to the studio head. Hannaford wants to remain current and make a hip film, but has no idea how to go about doing that. Just a little of this footage is needed to imply Hannaford's film is a pretentious bore; much less than Welles actually shot.

The advantage that TOSOTW has over THE DEEP is that the negative still exists and the majority of the dialog tracks exist. However, it is much more difficult to comprehend just how TOSOTW could be assembled into a whole. The likelihood of failure is quite high in delivering something that would be entertaining for even discerning viewers. THE DEEP is a much more straight-forward affair, but there is nothing in the work print assembly I've seen that comes close to the impact of any number of scenes from TOSOTW.

[mido505]

Roger:

Do you know what happened to the original version of Graver's TOSOTW assembly? Do you know where it is now?

[Roger Ryan]

Roger:

Do you know what happened to the original version of Graver's TOSOTW assembly? Do you know where it is now?

I assume it's still around somewhere as, apparently, several members of this forum have seen it within the past few years. Back in 2008 "Glenn Anders" posed this question to yourself and another board member:
...I assume that you have both seen several hours of TOSOTW footage, as Mr. French and Todd Baesen have...

If you add up the length of the Munich Film Museum collected scenes, plus the material from the AFI broadcast and the twenty minutes of footage recently uploaded to YouTube, you only get about 75 - 80 minutes of footage which is the total of what I've been able to see. If "Glenn Anders", Larry French and Todd Baesen have all seen "several hours" of footage then they probably saw what Graver put together. There was some talk about a Sascha Welles assembly as well; supposedly, he was doing some preliminary editing of the work print material a few years back.

More than likely, the Graver assembly was done on videotape using workprint material and rushes that had been transferred to tape (VHS?); the image quality would probably be little better than what showed up on YouTube. My understanding is that no one, not even Welles, has touched the negatives in the Paris vault.