Reichenbach Portrait

[Roger Ryan]

Now, if he had shot "The Orson Welles Show" the way he did F FOR FAKE, only four years earlier, in 1974, he would still be years ahead of his TV competition . . . .
Glenn

You see, I did think he shot THE ORSON WELLES SHOW like F FOR FAKE (or were you acknowledging this?) which is really ingenious, but completely wrong if his intent was to convey the immediacy of live television.

Have you seen Penn & Teller's BULLS#$T show on Showtime? This is exactly the kind of program I could see Welles succeeding at using his F FOR FAKE style to explore contradictions and hypocrisy in the modern world. Whereas Penn Jillette's personality is one of the "everyman blowhard", Welles would be a much more genteel and charming host who would nonetheless be worth watching as he dissected many of the same issues. In fact, the BULLS#$T program seems to be a direct descendant of F FOR FAKE in its exploration of charlatans. I just think that Welles was trying to shoehorn his personality and directing style into the wrong type of TV program, one that was too conventional to coexist with Welles' particular bent.

As to whether Welles had become too self-conscious in his later years, I would have to say that Welles in his heyday as a radio personality, columnist, political speaker, lecturer, what-have-you was always self-conscious (consider his famous "why are there so many of me and so few of you" quip shortly after the release of KANE). As a filmmaker and stage director, Welles was happy to give other performers the spotlight while he controlled the proceedings like a puppet master. But when he was called upon to be "Orson Welles" the personality, his self-consciousness was often the source of his insight and humor, his reason for being. Given that he was having trouble funding his films from the late 60s on, but remained popular as a talk show guest and personality, it makes sense that there are more projects that rely on that self-consciousness. It's the one thing that Welles felt he could count on.

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: Thank you. Am I making progress?

Roger: "You think it's a joke? Good, that's how we want it . . . for now."

Seriously, it must have been almost frightening to someone like Welles to see that the World was moving faster than he had imagined. By the 1970's, for the most part, he had been shut out of the media he had earlier transformed by his fresh visions. Empires now rose and fell in decades; celebrities, who had once had lifetime gigs, were created and destroyed within a few years; and the only medium which was swift enough to keep up with the New American Deer Park was TV. Welles must have known from the mid-1950's on that he needed to make his mark in Television, if he were to regain a viable, commercial reputation.

I don't have premium cable channels. [Baesen's bar tabs keep me in perpetual penury.] But I understand, Roger, what you are saying.

Still, I disagree.

The glowing creativity Welles showed in F FOR FAKE was nothing like the tired studio audience participation format he used for his "The Orson Welles Show." Even his mentors in that format, Jack Benny or, later, Dean Martin, stayed on their feet at least during a show. But in F FOR FAKE, Welles is everywhere, from Las Vegas to Chartres, pointing out the foibles and verites of mankind.

By the time of F FOR FAKE in 1974, Welles had developed many of the normal handicaps he would have in 1978 -- he was an overweight older man with a beard, in old fashioned clothes -- and he was using some of the same kind of props: a pretty girl, a charming romantic leading man, a magic act, a smattering of current celebrities and contemporaneous events.

The difference is that, in F FOR FAKE, he ties the quicksilver present of Watergate and Howard Hughes to the mysteriously ancient past of Chartres -- seamlessly -- by being on the move, in the center of the action.

Yet, given the tempo of movie making, F FOR FAKE was out of date in 1974 before it could reach the United States. Lawrence Harvey, Welles' "leading man," was dead in 1970, before the cameras rolled; Picasso, the dessert of the film, died in 1973, prior to the film's release; Elmyr de Hory, the "hero" of the film, and Howard Hughes, its bete noir, would be gone by misadventure before the end of 1976. And Watergate, the great counterpart to Clifford Irving's Howard Hughes celebrity hoax, was forgotten with surprising swiftness.

Presidents, not just common swindlers, had discovered that the American public would swallow ersatz nepenthe in the instant oblivion of television. For a future breed of American politicians, there were new worlds and inflated treasuries to loot, so long as fresh enemies lists could be dug from the dossiers.

And so, Roger, that left Welles with "The [lame] Orson Welles Show." The Television Networks, successors to Radio, and by 1978, complete extensions of advertising agencies, had no facilities or corps of talented technicians to devote to a kind of F FOR FAKE weekly creation "The Orson Welles Show" might have been. And it is hard to imagine even a new Gregg Toland of TV turning out that kind of program nightly. The Johnny Carson team was the best they had.

As you have so very skillfully suggested, Roger, the Networks did not need an extra chair-bound interview show, hosted by a man who had only the Little Green Men and Burt Reynolds on his side.

Now, even Spielberg and Lucas, Welles' puerile replacements, have turned entirely to "the little green men."

Perhaps, Penn and Teller, isolated on Showtime from a majority of Americans, are all we can hope for now.

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Tony . . . Roger: NOW IT CAN BE TOLD!

At 3:59 (PST) today [Sunday, May 25, 500,000.08 -- Martian Advanced Time), the Mars Phoenix Lander, otherwise known in Top Secret as the Welles Mars Project, landed successfully on the Red Planet.

Don't believe propaganda to the contrary.

Commander Todd Baesen, the Martian-in-Chief on Earth, sends his thanks and congratulations to you for all your help in co-opting Earthlings in sending valuable information back to our home planet.

Commander Baesen looks forward, one day soon, to returning to his beloved Martian Northern Polar Cape, where free, copious Gimlets flow toward our Equator by way of channels dug by Orson Welles' forebears.

Our powerful rocket ship, which Commander Baesen and Jeff Wilson are building in the basement of Larry French's Hayes Street apartment in San Francisco, is scheduled for launch late this summer, and for landing on Mars, Friday, October 31, 2008.

To the Future, Comrades!

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn: I heard a rumour that you had 100 original Augustus Owsley tabs from 1966, but I didn't believe it until today. Plus the first two seasons of the original Star Trek on 16mm reels.

Wow.

[Roger Ryan]

The glowing creativity Welles showed in F FOR FAKE was nothing like the tired studio audience participation format he used for his "The Orson Welles Show."

I was only suggesting that Welles shot and edited his TV show pilot in a similar manner as F FOR FAKE with odd juxtapositions/cutaways, some quick cutting and, standing in for the movieola used in FAKE and FILMING OTHELLO, a TV monitor that plays back video from a few days before (or so Welles claims). The style of the show is closer to Welles' film work (FAKE being a ready comparison) than it is to contemporary talk shows but, of course, the content is nowhere near as compelling as something like FAKE.

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: How'd you know all that? Actually, although I lived through that time out here in San Francisco, I had to look up Augustus Owsley on Google. The stuff I present here comes out of my memory and my imagination.

Just kidding, of course, but wouldn't you be surprised if you heard Todd Baesen's name coming back tomorrow in Earthling Time from Deep Space?

I keep telling Baesen to stop it, but when he is not at the Ha-Ra Club or the Sheba Lounge, Baesen practically lives up on the roof of that place of his at Alamo Square, top of "The Heartbreak Grade." He's doing something up there late at night.

-----

Yes, Roger, I think the crucial difference in the two works is that in F FOR FAKE, Welles is made to appear active and vital, but in "The Orson Welles Show," he is definitely avuncular and pretty stationary.

[NoFake]

Going back to Roger's observation:

As a filmmaker and stage director, Welles was happy to give other performers the spotlight while he controlled the proceedings like a puppet master. But when he was called upon to be "Orson Welles" the personality, his self-consciousness was often the source of his insight and humor, his reason for being.

This is particularly evident in Welles's guest appearances and host duties on the Jack Benny Show in 1943, where some of the funniest moments are due to Welles's ostensible pretentiousness on the one hand and equally suspect self-deprecation on the other.

[Glenn Anders]

True, NoFake: And Benny or those behind him presumably did what they could for Welles' reputation as a mainstream entertainer by allowing him to take over the show when illness knocked the established comedian down for several weeks.

[Tony]

I always got the feeling that Welles had a good sense of humour, but that he had little undertsanding of comedy. In addition, he had zero understanding of the patience and interests of an average audience; what did Truffault say: "Welles is an aristocratic director in a plebeian age". Unless my friends are Welles fans, they can't tolorate his films.

He didn't have the common touch, but he had some popularity in the 30s and 40s because there was a higher degree of literacy, or at least a higher respect for literacy then than in the 60s and 70s when the lout began to be celebrated. Blame it on Brando!

But Welles was always a weirdo for most people, and still is, if they know his name.

I've always felt he was way ahead of his time, but perhaps I just have aristocratic pretensions.

[Harvey Chartrand]

With apologies to Rod Serling
From “Requiem for a Heavy Man”

[after Grace slaps Maish on the stairway]
Maish Rennick: Do you really want to help him? Here's how you can help him. Leave him alone. If you gotta' say anything to him, tell him you pity him. Tell him you feel so sorry for him you could cry. But don't con him. Don't tell him he could be a talk show host. He's been chasing ghosts so long he'll believe anything. Any kind of a ghost. Studio backing, pretty girl... maybe just 24 hours without an ache in his back. Doesn't make any difference. It all passed him.
Grace Miller: I just thought that - maybe the next thing Orson wanted he ought to get.

[Roger Ryan]

Have you seen Penn & Teller's BULLS#$T show on Showtime? This is exactly the kind of program I could see Welles succeeding at using his F FOR FAKE style to explore contradictions and hypocrisy in the modern world. Whereas Penn Jillette's personality is one of the "everyman blowhard", Welles would be a much more genteel and charming host who would nonetheless be worth watching as he dissected many of the same issues. In fact, the BULLS#$T program seems to be a direct descendant of F FOR FAKE in its exploration of charlatans.

My apologies for quoting myself (I won't make it a habit), but I just recalled that when Penn Jillette was a guest programmer on TCM, one of the films he requested they show was F FOR FAKE which he thought was wonderful. I didn't make the connection at the time, but perhaps BULLS#$T really is inspired by Welles.

[Tony]

What's so strange is that Welles is was/is so disasterous at the box office, but I think more books are written about him than any other English director, maybe any director. Maybe he's the director of the future...like 200 years from now. Maybe Glenn is wrong: maybe Welles wasn't behind, he was ahead...like, too much ahead.

Re: comedy, he always wanted to direct a comedy; I wish I could at least read his comedy scripts to determine if he had a flair in that direction. But the Unthinking Lobster, and...what was the other one? They are not available in English, I believe. And there was one about Coca Cola taking over a town... "Operation..Something".

But I really feel bad that he and Chuck Heston couldn't get the money for "Earth Abides"; now that I can feel Welles directing! That should STILL be made into a film.

[The Night Man]

...maybe Welles wasn't behind, he was ahead...like, too much ahead.

Apart from The Orson Welles Show, I would say that was always the case!

I think more books are written about him than any other English director, maybe any director.

My guess is that Hitchcock is the leader in that category.

[The Night Man]

What's so strange is that Welles is was/is so disasterous at the box office, but I think more books are written about him than any other English director, maybe any director.

Tony, I keep pondering this comment and it occurs to me that while Hitchcock has had far more books written about his work, Welles does indeed have the edge as far as biographies are concerned.

Why is that, I wonder?

Hitchcock's films get examined from every possible angle; Welles' films do not, but his life does. Is it just that Welles lived a more sensational, less conventional life that also encompassed several careers, and that Hitchcock produced more film work, or is something else going on here?

[Tony]

I think you've nailed it; though there have been plenty of books about Welles's work, there have also been many biographies, and the biographies are multiplying as his death recedes into the past and as the authors have increasingly never met Welles. Of course he was an exciting guy with an incredible life, and Hitchcock's was relatively conventional, except for his fetishes and his mistake with Tippi Hedren. In fact, Hitch was just like a dull businessman who happened to make amazing films, and Welles was an amazing person who made amazing films. With today's general fetish for celebrity, Welles fits that, though I predict he's at the end of his celebrity period; maybe we can get to the work now.