Callow Vol. II - Callow Vol. II: the release of the year?

[akio]

Got my copy of Callow II yesterday. Pretty snappy shipping from the UK Amazon site (I've had to wait longer for things I've ordered from the U.S. site).

Just starting to dig into it, when I ran across the Benamou quote in the foreword. Anyone who's familiar with the cryptic, circular logic used by most deconstructionists will recognize the awkward phraseology and jargon (i.e., everything is "meta"-this or the author addressses the "x-ness" of x, etc.) So I can only imagine how convoluted her statements were in their original language.

Also, kinda odd that they'd include a jacket blurb from Nigella Lawson. Didn't know she was a big Welles fan, or maybe she's just a Callow drinking buddy.

I think that had he got into the more grey areas of Welles criticism/defense, instead of opting for Wellesolators/Orsonators, he could easily have taken the book past its 440 pages. Then again, we have no idea how long the manuscript was that he submitted to his editor.

[Jeff Wilson]

The Benamou quote was from an English language article, hence his jibe that it hadn't been translated into English yet. And I guess he had a page limit, since he mentioned in one of those articles that he was limited to 100 pages per year he was writing about.

[tonyw]

Somewhat above Pauline Kael, Charles Higham, and David Thomson but well below Jonathan Rosenbaum, Joseph McBride, and James Naremore.

[The Voice of Cornstarch]

The book is excellent.

Surprisingly there are some factual errors in it.

As you find them, list them here:

[Jeff Wilson]

While I'm not sure it's necessary to detail every factual slipup made (perhaps underlining our Wellesolator status?), Callow does perpetuate a mistake I've seen elsewhere. Or at least, it's my considered opinion it's a mistake. In discussing Way to Santiago, he also mentions the alternate working title of Mexican Melodrama. Given that the script partially takes place in Mexico, it's an easy mistake to make, and others have done so. But within the Welles files at the Lilly, there is a script for a Mexican project for Dolores del Rio, which I would argue is the actual project called Mexican Melodrama. It is, in fact, a melodrama set in Mexico, which was tentatively scheduled for Norman Foster to direct. For whatever reason, it never happened, and it isn't a major story in Welles' time at RKO, but I would argue that this is the real "Mexican Melodrama," and not Way to Santiago. I'll dig up my notes on it and provide more info later if desired.



Edited By Jeff Wilson on 1147455221

[ToddBaesen]

I haven't read volume II of Callows book, so don't know what kind of errors it might contain, put it surely can't be any worse than all the mistakes David Thompson manages to cram into his short review of the book in the Independent today.

Maybe The Independent should offer a prize to the person who can point out the most errors!

The complete Independent review is here:

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/article483990.ece

In the short excerpt below, there are at least four complete mistatements of the facts, based on the "It's All True" correspondence file at the Lilly Library, with several more distorations and inaccuracies thrown in for good measure! Can't wait to see part two of the review next week to see if this astounding record can be broken.

It's nice to know that such a qualified writer as Mr. Thompson is out there commenting about Welles projects, even though he obviously never bothered to do any research at the Lilly Library, even when he threw together his own lamentable book on Welles.

____


...At hectic speed, (Welles) makes a rough cut of "The Magnificent Ambersons" that is 148 minutes long. And then he sets off for Rio with a crew, Technicolor cameras and miles of film.

In Rio, there was a kind of chaos. The shooting went badly. It was said that little of it was usable. Welles was betrayed by RKO people with him in Rio. They cabled news back home that he was being stupid, reckless - it's hard to see that those reports were wrong, even if they were malicious. In Los Angeles, Ambersons' editor Robert Wise was trying to do Orson's work, but finding diminishing studio support. There were previews of Welles's cut and the audience generally mocked the film and complained that it was slow, gloomy and worthless. Word was sent to Orson in Rio, time and again, that the film was in mortal danger.

Welles did not come back to defend his work. He remained in Rio and accomplished very little, though every observer remarked on his considerable self-indulgence there. The South American film never materialised (there is footage released as It's All True). And Ambersons was brutally reduced, just as George Schaefer was fired. If Welles was gambling, he lost badly. It is the clearest occasion in his life when some mixture of defiance and self-destructiveness led him disastrously astray. It may be the moment when his life changed direction.

[Jeff Wilson]

Thomson's take on Welles is as predictable as ever. One can hardly wait for his continuation where he fantasizes about Welles' career if it had gone "right."

[akio]

I think we should all read this book before coming to conclusions. But, on the basis of Vol. 1, I doubt whether it will rise above the tone of the vicious nature of character assassination which marks the earlier novel.

I've just finished the It's All True chapter and think Callow does a remarkably fair job describing a highly complex situation. He gives equal time covering the disgruntled RKO staff in Brazil, the Mercury contingent struggling with Ambersons/Journey Into Fear, as well as Schaefer's decline within RKO. All the while tracking Welles' attempt to give some shape to a scriptless movie that he didn't want to direct. Only when he travels to Fortaleza to shoot the Jangaderos material with a skeleton crew, and without the distractions of Rio, does the film really take shape.

I'd say the overall tone (at least in the first third of the book) lacks the bitchiness of Volume One, but there's still a sense of impending doom. Particularly depressing is reading Schaefer's letter to an RKO boardmember that they may want to save the original negatives and cuttings of Ambersons.

[Tony]

Reading Callow today something really struck me: here's a quote from a 1941 letter from Roger Hill to Welles, in response to Welles's suggesting a scholarship be set up at Todd in his name:

"Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Except you, my love. And Todd. And we're going to do something about it so significant that it will be recognized in every history of education in the next five-hundred years as the Turning Point..."

And here's a December 1941 letter from a teacher at Long Island University to Welles:

"It is probably difficult for you to realize what weight your word carries with the youth of Brooklyn.They have not heard of Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, nor Cardinal Newman, but they become alive with the mention of Orson Welles."

And in early 1942, a Rio paper reported their scoop:

"Here is sensational news...Orson Welles, the revolutionary of the movies, the extraordinary actor and creator of Citizen Kane, the most complex and fascinating figure of the American artisitc world today, has his trunks packed to come to the city, in company with Delores del Rio, with whom he will be married within a few weeks."

This kind of adulation would be hard for an individual of any age, let alone a 26-year-old, to deal with. And reading this material, I was reminded of the documentary I came across just yesterday, "Lives", wherein one section is on Welles and features one Francoise Widhoff, a producer who worked with Welles in the 70's, and who says this enigmatic, yet somehow powerful statement about him:

"He had a kind of nostalgia for reality. Glory had killed him."

In my mind, the adulation of the late 30's and early 40's and their aftermath are what she is talking about.

??? hmmmmm...

[Tony]

Just in case these haven't been previously posted, here are David Thompson's articles inspired by Callow's book and published in The Independent in May:

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/article483990.ece

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/article549633.ece


And here's a Thompson piece on Bernard Herrmann, from this past week, also from The Independent:

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/article1090272.ece


No matter what criticisms can be made of his "Rosebud", he's definitely a fan! :;):

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: Thank you for three magnificent essays by David Thomson.

No disrespect to others in the field, but David Thomson, as a stylist, is the best I know on Welles because, unlike most of the others, he is not an academic or a dilletante but a poet, and a "disappointed lover" of Welles. It has long been my point here that when I saw CITIZEN KANE for the first time in fourteen years at the Baker Street Classic, in 1955, David Thomson at the age of fifteen or so was seeing it at the Tooting Classic, on the outskirts of London where he grew up.

I can possibly imagine the effect that seeing CITIZEN KANE for the first time must have had on him, for I had seen the picture myself at Age 9, and have never forgotten its transforming power. It is the perfect film for an "outsider" American or an English speaking admirer of America looking at the country from the outside. Thomson tells us again and again that he never recovered, that he eventually came to live in America, for many years to live in that most congenial of American cities to an Englishman, San Francisco, always under the spell of Orson Welles.

The difference between us (well, one of the MANY) is that I had been disappointed by THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, caught up by THE STRANGER, in love with THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, had not yet seen MACBETH nor OTHELLO, and had great hopes for Welles. Thomson, I'm sure, had to catch up with those films while realizing in the first flower of idolatry that, in the year 1955, Orson Welles was all around him -- wandering the streets, on the stage at London's Duke of York's Theater, completing MR. ARKADIN in Paris, basking in his creation of Harry Lime in THE THIRD MAN, playing Father Mapple for his friend John Huston's MOBY DICK in London, on BBC Television, getting married to the Countess Paola Mori at the Registrar's Office, making news of all kinds in Britain and on the Continent.

There would never be a time again Thomson would see his hero in such an optimistic light.

I would maintain that Welles lived only in his dreams, and from this time on, though he never gave up, he knew most of his dreams would never be realized in a form he could be proud of.

Rather than a "nostalgia for reality" of which Francoise Windhoff speaks, it was the glory he craved -- as a showman, magician, as a creative artist. It was not the past adulation of the 1930's and 1940's you bring up which was killing him because in those days, he was still completing his dreams in a palpable form. Despite the fatal mistake of misjudging the importance of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS to his career, he had continued to progress. From 1955 on he began to live the life of Charles Foster Kane after the Great Depression.

The criticism directed at David Thomson's Rosebud fails to take into account, Wellsian in their foolishness they may be, the dream-like passages in the book (some of the mistakes attributed to it, I suppose) are exercises in psychic biography on Thomson's part. Unlike clever Callow in his shrewd, documented snottiness, Thomson is attempting to empathise what despair Welles must have felt as one dream after another fell short in the light of reality.

Of Orson Welles, I should say that it was reality not glory killed the beast. The glory of worthy accomplishments, honestly criticized, would have sustained him. And Welles' failures and physical decline, the special pleadings of those who loved Welles as much as he, damn near killed Thomson, as he found out more about his god. He tells us as much in Rosebud.

Anyway, it is good to see Thomson, whom I've met casually a couple of times in San Francisco, back on an even keel. Thank you again, Tony, for cueing up for us these insightful essays, which celebrate and illuminate our tragic hero(es).

Glenn