Marguerite H. Rippy: Orson Welles - Unfinished RKO Projects

[Eve]

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago Press; 1 edition (May 20 2009)

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects
A Postmodern Perspective
Marguerite h. Rippy

http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/Rippy,%20Orson%20Welles%20and%20the%20Unfinished%20RKO%20Projects.html


Tracing the impact of Orson Welles from Rosebud to The Colbert Report

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects.

In this landmark piece of scholarship, Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography.

[nextren]

I wouldn't spend any money on this book.

From the publisher's description (which Eve linked to):

"It was in early, unfinished projects such as F for Fake where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction,"

F for Fake, of course, was neither an early project (it was made in 1972-74 and released in America in 1975) nor "unfinished."

This does not bode well for the accuracy of the rest of the book, does it?

(And is it possible the author is under the impression that F for Fake was an RKO project?)

[Skylark]

Probably just a publisher's typo. I doubt that it reflects on the book itself. I think any book that deals with relatively unexplored facets of the Wellesian corpus is of interest. Just the amount of unfilmed film scripts he left behind is staggering. I think one advantage of a postmodernist perspective is that it allows to approach Welles on something akin to Welles' own expansive polyglot terms - (a dream of mine being one (multi-media) work that manages to encompass all facets of Welles' life and work). Although I personally don't feel that Welles is post-modern in the same way that someone like Thomas Pynchon is, for example.

[ToddBaesen]

What I find ironic is that a University Press could issue such an idiotic press release about a supposedly "academic" book as this:

Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. It was in early, unfinished projects such as F for Fake where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction, and the pleasure of this interplay still resonates with contemporary culture. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.

Thanks to NEXTREN for pointing out what has to be considered a disaster of research, even before anyone has read the book.

When the only Welles film mentioned in a press release is about a 1973 Welles film that is clearly a non-RKO project, and also one that was indeed finished, one wonders about today's publishers. We're supposed to question all the facts you may get on the internet, but believe all the fake stories that appear in print, simply because they are published?

"It's probably just a typo?" Really... but it takes a poster here at Wellesnet to figure out what anyone with even a slight knowledge of Welles's work would know?

No, I don't think so. I think most of the people posting here know far more about Welles than the author of this book probably does. The press release is so convoluted, it hardly makes any sense, and the title of the book itself indicates the author has no idea of what she is talking about.

"The RKO unfinished Projects?"

What exactly are these "projects" besides IT'S ALL TRUE?

Obviously, there were several concepts Welles was working on before KANE was approved by RKO, but these were not unfinished projects, but films that were never approved for production by RKO.

Now, quite strangely, not one of these RKO projects is mentioned in the press release for this book. Could it be because the author thinks they are F FOR FAKE (and who knows what else... maybe THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND!)

So let me echo NEXTREN's warning to steer clear of this book which looks like it is probably destined to join the ranks of such inaccurate tomes as the books on Welles by such expert scholars as Charles Higham and David Thomson!

[Glenn Anders]

Another possibility presents itself: Who is Marguerite H. Rippy? And who is Todd Baesen . . . really?

For those of us who have sat next to Baesen at the Ha-Ra Club in San Francisco, night after night, examining his sensitive face, far gone now in multiple gimlets, even a "Peat and Ginger " or a "Blood and Sand" or two, who could not entertain that ruin without suspecting our own Todd Baesen IS David Thomson -- and perhaps, Marguerite H. Rippy herself, to boot. For who else could confuse "News on the March" with F FOR FAKE? One can see it whenever his eyes roll back in his head.

Right?

RIGHT!!

Glenn Anders [who met David Thomson once or twice, but has always been puzzled by the obvious resemblance of Baesen with Thomson, especially in their scholarship.]

[Roger Ryan]

Perhaps in her book Ms. Rippy draws a through-line from IT'S ALL TRUE to F FOR FAKE (a logical idea) and the publisher's publicity department substituted the wrong film title in the synopsis? That's being generous, of course. I can't see how something like HEART OF DARKNESS or SMILER WITH A KNIFE could be shoehorned into the thesis of Welles' "exploration of 'truthiness'"; only TRUE and KANE seem to dance around that idea during the RKO years. WAR OF THE WORLDS would be an even more predictable choice. As much as I am amused by Stephen Colbert, I can't see Welles being much of an inspiration on his style of satire.

The misinformation found in so many books on Welles can be astounding. Just yesterday I was paging through a recent book on iconic film directors which features a chapter on our obedient servant: for the RKO years alone, the book claimed that the original cut of AMBERSONS was 160 minutes long and that Welles was forcibly removed from directing JOURNEY INTO FEAR and replaced by the studio-appointed Norman Foster.

All the same, it is good to have more books published on Welles and Ms. Rippy's one should give us plenty to talk about.

[ToddBaesen]

####

As Keats rightly points out, I probably overstated my objections to the book based only on the press release. However, the title itself certainly can't bode well for the accuracy of its contents, although once again authors sometimes don't get to pick the titles of their own books.

Perhaps when we discover exactly what mysterious RKO projects the book discusses - none of which are named in the press release - we'll have a better idea of what to expect.

Might one of the projects be Welles's little-known script for his long cherished but never filmed BATMAN project - destined to be his triumphant return to RKO after the fiasco of IT'S ALL TRUE?

Welles script and casting notes provided these possibilities for whom he wanted to use in the film:

James Cagney as The Riddler
Basil Rathbone as The Joker
George Raft as Two-Face
Marlene Dietrich (showing off her legs) as the Catwoman

and

Orson Welles as Batman

Welles of course would once again be playing another rich and powerful tycoon, this time the multi-millionaire Bruce Wayne.

[Glenn Anders]

One conclusion is clear: Ms. Rippy should get a new agent, one who can proofread, if she expects to impress readers who have even small knowledge of Orson Welles and his works.

Indeed, it is no doubt premature to judge a book, which as of yet, appears not to have been reviewed anywhere -- but is represented by a ubiquitous press release containing that clearly ludicrous reference to F FOR FAKE.

Glenn

[Jeff Wilson]

I highly doubt most academic writers have agents, as most of their books are not exactly chartburners, or even moneymakers in any fashion. And the reaction to what was probably some PR person's mistake is a bit out of proportion, I have to say. Should the mistake have been made? Of course not. But to degrade someone and their work based on this is ludicrous, especially without having actually seen the book in question.

[Kane76]

Let's read the book and then comment. If anything new is provided, we'll all be happy to hear about it. After all, it was during a period of a Welles great creativity period.

[Kane76]

I just got the book in from Amazon yesterday and began reading it last night. Rippy seems passionate about her subject and I believe she comes to praise our boy not to bury him.

It's an expensive book, as these things usually are. But if you're as fascinated with Orson's RKO period, as I am, this could turn out to be essential reading. Rippy will cover everything from Heart of Darkness to It's All True.

I'm looking forward to getting into it further.

[ToddBaesen]

Well, M. Rippy's book is now out and apparently she took Glenn Anders's advice and changed her agent as well as her publisher!

Anyway, having just read Jake Hannafo... opps -- I mean Jake Hinkson's interview with Ms. Rippy, I think she brings up some very valid points in her interview.

Unfortunately, I also think she brings up several points that are going to be rather controversial here, which in this initial post, I'd simply like to point out and see if anyone else here, besides myself, finds they do not agree with them.

The major points I refer to include these quotes in the interview with M. Rippy:

I think (Welles) didn’t see a clear line between truth and fiction when it came to either narrative or self-creation.

On HEART OF DARKNESS as a racist tract:

Welles’s concept for Heart of Darkness struggled to differentiate itself from jungle pictures of the day—he specifically refutes any connection to “love in the tropics” films. But the economics of film production would have, I think, confined the film within the racist practices of its era. While Welles himself was certainly averse to racism, Heart of Darkness had two limitations placed upon its radical potential: Welles’s interest in modernist primitivism and the racist structure of Hollywood at the time. As a result, I think the film reproduced contemporary patterns of both racism and oppression. For example, Welles was evidently going to incorporate a fair amount of stock footage from films like Sanders of the River to depict African native life, and every single white actor was paid more than the highest-paid African American actor, Jack Carter, who earned about $200 per week. In other words, racism was inherent in just the process of putting the film together and paying the actors.


On The MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS:


Perhaps he was also tired of double-dipping in his radio and cinema projects—he experimented with Ambersons on the radio in 1939, and there’s a great deal of evidence that at the time it was not a favorite project of his.


On the final release version of Orson Welles movies:


In terms of appreciating Welles’s work, it really doesn’t matter how projects got to be in their final states, whether mass marketed, or scripted, or just conceived.

[ToddBaesen]

_

Keats:

Since we appear to agree on this issue, I just want to point out I'm only taking quotes "out of context" from the interview on the main page where they obviously can be seen totally "in context."

I haven't read the book, and now, after reading the interview with Jake Hinkson, who I think asks some very pertinent questions, which I don't think were answered, I don't plan to, either.

Which is why I just wanted to make it quite clear that all the quotes I posted are taken from the interview with Ms. Rippy, and not from her book, which as I note, I haven't read.

[Glenn Anders]

Let me leave the finer criticisms of Marguerite Rippy's scholarship to Keats, now teaching culture and latter popular uses of Wellsiana to the Chinese, and for Toddy Baesen, that assiduous student of Darker Academia (to which the Ha-Ra's Master of Revels Carl will attest).

Happily, I only pleaded originally that Ms. Rippy be judged on the content of her scholarship rather than her publisher's PR -- or her possible resemblance to David Thomson. I'll confine myself to the points Dr. Baesen has excerpted from Jake Hinkson's interview:

1) "I think (Welles) didn’t see a clear line between truth and fiction when it came to either narrative or self-creation."

It would seem obvious by now, much though it was protested when I first posted here, that Orson Welles from his earliest years wanted to live as one of his clone radio programs ESCAPE would have described it, "a life of romantic adventure." He recognized long before most of his contemporaries in popular culture that compelling drama or fiction required a strong line of factual truth, and that "truth," history, even factual analysis (if you will) was best served up to a mass public as a story which contained imaginative, yea exotic details, and personal references.

2) "Welles’s concept for Heart of Darkness struggled to differentiate itself from jungle pictures of the day—he specifically refutes any connection to “love in the tropics” films . . . ."

Unless Westerners have had the full education of being a racial or other minority (far less those middle class who came since), few alive now can fully appreciate the depth of racism (unspoken recognition of class and color, simply, which made [makes still?] another inferior). The bigotry which in Welles' time was freely acted upon by custom, by law, to punish others for having been born "different" has now become forbidden, at least (until the New American Century) looked down upon in our country.

It is hard for me to accept that Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," with its scathing artistic condemnation of these attitudes in British Imperialism and Leopold's Belgian Congo, should have been found at a certain point between "modern" and "post modern" literature to be a racist tract in itself. [No doubt Welles' startlingly courageous film adaptation of "Heart of Darkness, had he managed to produce it in 1940, might be regarded in our day as "racist," too, given the definition I've presented above.]

I was struck how the two matters so far discussed were illustrated and linked by "The Heart of Darkness" in connection with the life and career of Orson Welles:

In Conrad's novella, the depraved, fascistic, imperialistic Kurz was described by some who knew him in adulatory terms. He was thought to be a masterful ivory collector [director?] who had at some moment hubristically gotten out control; "a great musician[!]," a writer of considerable ability, a promising painter, and most telling of all, 'a universal genius.' How could "Heart of Darkness" not have appealed to Orson Welles? From his earliest major efforts to his very last, Welles was obsessed by his contradictory drives toward control and democracy. One can almost see the gears grinding nearly to halt as he contemplated the model and threat of Erik Kurz.

It explains, in some small way, why Welles' work and person often struck those who met him during his lifetime in opposite ways.

The dualities of his genius were perpetually in conflict.

3) "Perhaps he was also tired of double-dipping in his radio and cinema projects—he experimented with Ambersons on the radio in 1939, and there’s a great deal of evidence that at the time it was not a favorite project of his."

It should be remembered that until he went to South America in 1942, Welles was often under the influence of his teacher Skipper Hill and his guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, both of whom, from different motives perhaps, saw their prodigy as potentially a great popular teacher and a "bringer of culture to the masses." Once he was beyond their advice in Brazil, other influences began to draw him in different directions, toward pan-Americanism, politics, Brechtian theater, European aristocracy, etc.

It may explain why Welles invented his sardonic changes in the scripts of CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

Late in his life, during that delightful home movie Stefan Droessler brought us, Toddy, we can observe Skipper Hill mildly berating Welles for not continuing his educational efforts with sufficient zeal.

4) "In terms of appreciating Welles’s work, it really doesn’t matter how projects got to be in their final states, whether mass marketed, or scripted, or just conceived."

I quite agree. Except to dry academics, purveyors of arcane theories (which occasionally do not fit the realities of the time), and drooling fans like ourselves, it really does not matter how many drafts and false starts Welles' projects went through, the important thing is the final product. If that missing print of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS were ever "found," if THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND" is ever actually released, all our speculations may become understandable, perhaps commendable and justified. If not, those and other possible changes to his earlier works are merely "lore."

They are moot.

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you, keats: The Graphic Novel is Back to the Future.

Relax. We are being globalized, whether we like it or not, and you are a prime example of that process at Wellesnet.

An Ubisoft to you, sir!

Glenn