F For Fake - Superb Personal Film

[colwood]

With Christopher's description and Film Forum's disclaimer, I'm guessing that they couldn't get a print of the Immortal Story so they just showed the Italian DVD.

Glenn, I have to agree with blunted here. I don't believe that Macbeth, Othello, The Trial, or The Immortal Story were damaged to the point of destroying Welles' intentions. In fact the latter three were all released by Welles as he wanted them, even if they were made under less than ideal conditions. I can't really comment how the Stranger was damaged since we may never know how the deleted scenes would have affected the movie as a whole. Personally though I think the Stranger is a good movie.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

Like most of them, Welles said Macbeth was altered after he left, but by now i'm like: yeah, and what's new... But whenever The Trial is brought up in This is Orson Welles, all of a sudden Orson gets fragile and sensitive. Bogdanovich asks him about this, and he says (as you all know, i'm just reminding you) that The Trial is special to him because its the one main time where what you see is completely what he intended. There was no studio interference or anything. I don't think its the only one, though, aside from Kane... Othello was marred terribly by production conditions, but the final version was all Welles (to my knowledge, which is always happy to be updated). And i always thought Falstaff had no intereference - is this incorrect?

I'm unaware of Welles' intentions for Mr Arkadin and Magnificent Ambersons, but (and this is off-topic for this discussion), regardless of Welles' intentions, i think they're major achievements. I just saw Arkadin for the first time, btw, and i was shocked by how much great stuff there is in it. For this discussion, which is about intentions, i'll agree its not perfect and probably was a disaster compared to what Welles wanted, but i loved the hell out of it. I couldn't understand a lot of the dialogue, and despite the fact that i was watching the chronological version, i'll be buggered if i could follow half of what was going on (i'm exaggerating) but i was transfixed by the visuals.

And Ambersons is simply one of the most beautiful films i've ever seen. If that's not a major achievement (again, intentions aside), i don't know what is.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

And also, the more i see The Stranger, the more i'm mystified by its general derision. Welles' performance and a 2D good-evil story are the only things which nag at me when i watch it. I mean, its no Touch of Evil, but it has some great scenes - the opening sequence, especially the airport, the gym scene, the death of meinke. Visually, its great (though very controlled, necessarily). At the risk of causing uproar, i'd much prefer to watch it than Lady from Shanghai (but this is more a matter of accents - i can't bear to listen to the accents in Shanghai and Macbeth, hard as i try - and i try often. i think one day i'll try Shanghai without sound).

[Glenn Anders]

Blunted, as often is the case, we differ.

As for the rest of you, I simply mean that the four films I listed, as they now exist, need no apologies. You may be right about THE TRIAL, but I remember some stuff Jeff came up with that I believe might have added to its impact.

MACBETH, in its restored version, is very creditable, too, I must admit. (Try reading a little Macbeth in a Scots accent, Sir Bygber, and you soon realize that Shakespeare's dialogue for many of his characters was written with Scottish actors in mind. Welles was on to something.)

I love THE STRANGER, but I can only image what impact it would have had in 1948, had the 20 minutes about the Ratline operation smuggling Nazis out of Europe into the U.S. not been deleted.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, likewise, has about 20 minutes taken out of it, destroying much of its continuity and the final sequence. Here, however, I agree with you about Welles' Irish brogue. On the other hand, if we had the whole film, it might have worked.

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is the above, in spades.

"The Imortal Story" is essentially a TV movie, not really feature length.

Aside from the unfinished projects, like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, we can only look forward to, some with much hope, some with less so.

Glenn

[blunted by community]

we don't differ glenn, you just swung over to this side by agreeing that trial, stranger, and macbeth have not had catastrophic damage. you were fantasy posting again.

your statement, The damage done to the rest was catastrophic to their intentions." i feel can only be applied to ambersons, lady from shanghai, and touch of evil. touch of evil had catastrophic damage because welles' intention of a very delicate balance between narrative, form, and style was tinkered with. he told heston, it's not the type of film that you can mess up a little bit.

to date there is no solid proof that anything extra was filmed for the stranger. but i will know soon. the guy that was cast to play the nazi in the farbright kennel scene in south america passed away about 5 years ago. i contacted his estate a week ago, and maybe we'll have an answer. does anyone remember brother theodore from the old david letterman show when he was on after johnny carson? that is the actor on the stranger call sheets listed to play the nazi! i loved brother theodore, he was hillarious.

[marcoshark]

to date there is no solid proof that anything extra was filmed for the stranger. but i will know soon. the guy that was cast to play the nazi in the farbright kennel scene in south america passed away about 5 years ago. i contacted his estate a week ago, and maybe we'll have an answer. does anyone remember brother theodore from the old david letterman show when he was on after johnny carson? that is the actor on the stranger call sheets listed to play the nazi! i loved brother theodore, he was hillarious.

Brother Theodore was supposed to play a Nazi?!?! I just checked the IMDB and he is listed. Now I have to hunt down The Stranger!! It has been years since I saw that movie. I thought he didn't get to the USA until later on. This is news to me!!

When I was in High School, a few of us Chess player types use to play chess against him years ago. He use to live in the upper west side of Manhattan and use to hang around the local chess club on 72nd street. Back then, I had no idea that this nice old gent was THE Brother Theodore who use to do his one man show for years at a small theater on 13th street.

Oh, he would wipe the floor with us chess wise. I did find out from him that when he first came to America, he use to support himself hustling Chess. I can believe it!

But to think, I actually hung out with someone who knew Welles?!?!

Oh, I loved Theodore in "The 'Burbs'!! Please let us know if his estate does get back to you!!!

[blunted by community]

i have not heard anything yet. i contacted a guy that produced theodore's last record and he was contacting the estate to contact me but have not heard from guy yet.

in a few more weeks if i don't hear from them i will call SAG and get estate number.

in the article about his death it said he left california when welles started making moves on his young wife. welles seemed to always be on the prowl for babes.

[R Kadin]

Speaking of babes (by way of a tortured segue), there's no lack of same on OW's life or works - including a little-known blonde looker by the name of Joi (sic) Lansing who starred in an unsold Welles TV pilot in the 50's. The show was to have been called "The Orson Welles Show" and the episode produced was titled "The Fountain of Youth." (Trust me, it's all about to tie together with this thread.)

How it connects with "F for Fake" is in both the TV show's style and its tone. In fact, in my first viewing of it, I could hardly believe how much one reminded me of the other - let alone the realization that, if F4F seemed ahead of its day in the 70's, how much more adventurous, still, must this pilot have appeared to its Eisenhower-era test-heads.

In it, we have Welles in close-up as our talking-head guide, with wry amusement clearly evident in his expression. As in F4F, he puts himself on the move knowing that stasis is the very opposite of what a moving-image camera wants to see. This he accomplishes ingeniously and, one must assume inexpensively, despite it's being only a single camera shoot inside a small soundstage. Whereas in F4F he is able to roam about outside, here he's walking on the spot, seemingly on the move, while a backdrop scrolls constantly behind him, ferrying the viewer seamlessly from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

Always ready to play with his artifice, Welles even has great fun stopping, rewinding, and restarting the backdrop's lateral course - very much as he makes self-conscious play of the editing and camerawork in F4F. Also as with F4F, his snippets lead deftly to the characters in question caught in action at the very crux of each scene he's been describing. The story gets ahead of itself more than once and Welles must cut back in so as to assist the friendly viewer back to a firmer narrative foothold. Sound familiar?

The whole enterprise simply breezes along with such inviting wit and playful energy that its stylistic connections with F4F might make an unsuspecting audience imagine there to be no more than fifteen days between them - forget 15 years!

[Glenn Anders]

R Kadin: A marvelous rundown of "Fountain of Youth." I have never seen it, but I can imagine the connections with F FOR FAKE. It all goes back, of course, to Welles' theories for Radio as an intimate companion. The Mercury Theater on the Air was thus conceived as First Person, to carry on the line between the storyteller around a fire through the development of Theater to the new medium. Welles wanted to make personal a technological process. He clearly applied that idea to Movies in his intentions for THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Later, he came to see Television as the successor to Radio. In his Sketchbook series for the BBC, and in "Fountain of Youth," which he hoped Desilu would produce as a series, he carried his radio experience over into Television. Finallly, in F FOR FAKE, he circled about, as you suggest, applying his BBC and "Fountain of Youth" techniques to Cinema -- still attempting to personalize the sterile and inanimate.

His failure is perhaps epitomized in Movies by CGI and Blue Screen effects, which so obsess current film buffs; and in Radio and TV by the expensive, artistic, and increasingly cynical commercials, which destroy all continuity and personalization in those mediums.

Speaking of obsessions, and closing the circle, I might note that James Elroy (LA Confidential) was fixated on Joi Lansing (aka, Joyce Wassmandoff) and her real or imaginary sister (murdered by a serial killer, he says). Joi Lansing was memorable in the dozen pictures, and the two TV series (not counting "Fountain of Youth") she made.

Dead at 44 of breast cancer but given new life by Elroy.

Glenn

[mteal]

Glenn,
Very interesting about Elroy and Joi Lansing. LA CONFIDENTIAL is one of my favorite films in recent years.

Regarding Welles and Desilu, I found a very interesting passage recently in Bill Krohn's interview with OW, which is reprinted in the Munich Museum's superb UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES booklet (highly recommended). Welles says that, after FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH won a Peabody award, Lucille Ball was very angry at him for not coming back to America to continue the series with Collier's GREEN THOUGHTS. What a shame he didn't- Green Thoughts is a great story that could have been even better then Fountain. I was always under the impression that there was no interest on Desilu's part in continuing the series. Apparently not true.

[R Kadin]

Glenn, with your comments we move from "Fountain of Youth" to "Fountain of Information". Fascinating stuff you've added to the mix, the sort of things that make this site such a worthwhile place to visit. From NY radio in the 30's through 50's TV astride the Atlantic and on to cinema from the 70's to the late 90's: it is all, as they say, a continuum. That said...

(Start of sponsor's message...)
I sure hope that any lurkers still out there are now that much more inclined to doff their "Shadow"-like obscurity and join likewise first-hand in the fray. I'm sure nothing would delight OW more than to be discussed even more widely as a force still in effect or to encounter fresh new perspectives and connections regarding efforts one can be sure he never intended to lie somewhere in stale and dusty irrelevance. (Okay - end of commercial; we now return you to the program already in progress)

All glad-handing, aside, there IS a further discussion proposition I've been wanting to work up to, which is as follows:

Consider: Welles and the cinema were inherently unsuited for each other; that's why his relationship with it could not have been other than a lifelong struggle.

"WHAT?", you say! "Heresy and outrage! Who let this R Kadin bumpkin in the door? Show him the exit he mistook for an entrance!"

Wait, I urge you; hear me out a little, at least. I merely offer the thought by way of inciting some spirited debate - and not entirely devoid of some support for it. To wit...

Welles could envision thousands of possible ways of conveying ideas, images, impressions, experiences - each one replete with excellent reasons to choose it above all others. Small wonder, then, it took him forever to piece his films together because each editing choice necessarily precludes all other possible, and equally valid, choices. In the end, each film can only really be one way, it cannot be all ways. Once done, it's done, locked in its imperfection with its warts, however little or concealed, still frozen in time for future audiences eventually to expose like a magician's trick repeated once too often and at too close a range.

How unlike the theatre and live performance, in general! Each night is a brand new challenge and the unknown hangs excitingly in the air. Each appearance is a chance to try something new and each extended run is an opportunity to essay all possible and reasonable variations so that, perhaps over time, one might manage to stitch individual moments of interspersed brilliance into a legacy of perfection in their aggregate.

And how unlike the radio of Welles' day, where "live to air" and one-off performances were the rule of law. Once done, a show was done, unlikely to be heard again. The fact that many were also recorded was secondary and very much beside the point. For most practical purposes, over meant over. And usually for good. Bad readings, missed cues, lost opportunities - these all disappeared into the very ether that played host to the signals that carried them.

Next week was always beckoning out there, offering yet another reason to hope, another summit to scale, ever a chance to edge that much closer to the perfection that all know can never truly be achieved. Gone was the immediate evidence of failures to date; in the "here and now" one could be fully intimate with the promise of greatness that had yet to be.

Not so, I fear, with film. Film does not disappear. In fact, its very essence lies in its slavish repetition of choices committed to celluloid that become fixed for the ages, too late, by and large, to be called back. To a mind and spirit such as Welles, then, it could readily become an immutable catalogue of everything that was not done, every other nuance that had not been tried, every angle there had not been adequate time or funds to shoot.

It comes, then, as no surprise that Welles returned to his many film projects again and again, sometimes in the guise of new incarnations entirely but - as perhaps in Fountain of Youth and in F for Fake or Kane and Arkadin - joined creatively at the hip. Perhaps he wanted them to possess the same ongoing and unfettered promise as the theatre and radio media with which he had first fallen desperately in love.

Yet, suspecting that such could never truly be the case, he opted for multiple-version offerings (Arkadin/Confidential Report) and enterprises (It's All True, Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, e.g.) that would never see their completion. It might also explain why he did not publish more in his lifetime, despite no lack of acumen in that department.

Perhaps these films' unfinished fates came about as much by Welles' unconscious design as by the outward misfortunes to which we have traditionally ascribed the blame. Perhaps Welles fell so deeply into film's embrace because it seemed so much like his beloved theatre and radio and yet still, enticingly, and maddeningly different. Perhaps he became inescapably intent on re-casting his cinematic mistress into something that could offer it all, only to become entralled in a struggle that was doomed inevitably to failure because, in her essence, she simply could never be what he hoped she could be.

But, before we draw the wrong conclusions entirely about our man, let us remember this one thing above all others: Welles was in love with his art, first and foremost. Truly, madly, deeply. If he was locked in a doomed embrace, it was as a lover: willingly and happily so, laughing more and more heartily with its each successive hug. We should all misspend our lives in such blissful and overreaching delight. Therefore, Good night, OW, wherever you are.
(Curtain. Fade to black.)

[marcoshark]

R Kadin,
One thing that stuck me when I saw OMB some months back, was when we the viewer were shown what was in Orson's Travel Suitcase. Namely, a very small (and probably very advanced for it's day) editing system, his Camera and Lenses. What stuck me was that in this day and age, I have my own laptop complete with editing and animation software and a small and powerful DV camcorder. But when Orson was doing his thing, this was simply amazing. If he had a creative whim, he acted on it. I think Orson wanted to keep up with the means to tell stories.

I like your observation about radio and movies. In live radio, you have spontaneity. In movies, if a scene goes bad, you just re-shoot or fix it in editing.

If somehow, if Orson could still be around today, I think he would really like the tools available for people who want to tell stories. When I went for training years ago for the Avid Media Composer system, I was thinking that someone like Orson would just love this.

[Glenn Anders]

Dear mteal and R Kadin: Thank you.

I would expect, mteal, that we would need further substantiation of Lucille Ball's regrets. She was, after all, a disarmingly good business woman. It would seem strange that she did not nail Welles down to some sort of contract for a series, if she considered it commercially viable. Perhaps, as one who, if not discovered by Welles, was championed by him, she may have just been salving the hurt over at a later date, when nothing could be done.

[She certainly had the money and clout to re-launch the series, had she wanted to.]

Welles did admire, no doubt, the stories of John Collier, whose long writing career would have gone back almost to Welles' boyhood. And he would certainly have liked the idea, at least, of Collier's movie script of Isherwood's Berlin stories and Van Druten's play, for I AM A CAMERA, which would have been shooting in England and Europe, when he was there, in 1955.

[Perhaps, that's the Lawrence Harvey connection?]

R Kadin: I think the insight you provide in your sketch is valid. It was the immediacy of storytelling which Welles craved. It is a common observation that many movie actors come to loathe their careers. There they are, growing more decrepit year after year, from film to film, sometimes shockingly so, with all their mistakes (or worse, imagined mistakes) on display, through grind houses, bad TV transmissions, butchered or indifferent cassettes and DVD's.

One can see how Welles might have procrastinated because each time he let go of the dice, he was being judged anew. It is significant how he was drawn back to the Faust Legend. With his apparent inefficiency, only his genius and energy driving him on could produce any finished product at all.

I think, too, it is fair, as has been said here before, that Welles was a superb and original artist, but a terrible businessman. His only talent in that field was, early on, having a good lawyer and John Houseman, and afterward a horseplayer's penchant for borrowing.

Finally, markoshark, I completely agree that Welles would have loved this new computer medium. He might be right here now, organizing a new cyber-Mercury Theater on the Internet.

Glenn

[blunted by community]

think about it, welles using digital editing? endless possibilities. recutting without cutting the negative, just stretching the clip marker to cut again, and again, and again? being able to do dozens of one frame cuts in 30 minutes. you think welles would benefit from this, or get stuck in the editing room and never be seen again.

[Glenn Anders]

True, true, Blunted. I think he would revolutionize this medium, as he did all the others.


Glenn