By RAY KELLY
An overlooked archive of Orson Welles scripts and correspondence housed in a Turin film library is finally getting the attention it deserves thanks to two Italian film scholars.
Massimiliano Studer, co-founder of Forma Cinema, and Alessandro Aniballi, co-founder of Quinlan.it, are publicizing the little-known collection at Museo Nazionale del Cinema‘s Bibliomediateca Mario Gromo — the multimedia library at the National Cinema Museum in Turin. There are papers related to The Other Side of the Wind, F For Fake, The Trial, The Deep, The Immortal Story and Don Quixote, as well as unrealized movies such as Brittle Glory, Because of Cats and Soldier, Soldier. The archive also contains correspondence related to Welles’ appearances in The VIPs, The Man Who Came to Dinner and Treasure Island.
“We found this archive just by chance. I was working on my upcoming book about Too Much Johnson and talking to Professor Franco Prono of the University of Turin,” said Studer, a PhD student at Udine University. “Professor Prono told me, ‘Did you know at the National Cinema Museum in Turin that we have an Orson Welles archive?’ And I said, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Even (noted Welles scholar) Ciro Giorgini did not know anything about Turin.”
The National Cinema Museum, then chaired by Paolo Bertetto, acquired the papers with little fanfare at an auction in 1995. Turin archivist Carla Ceresa sorted through the materials, arranged them in categories and completed a detailed inventory in 1998.
The documents have been categorized in 44 files. They span the period of Welles’ career from the 1950s to 1976.
“The first time I had the opportunity to take a look at this material, my hands shook,” Aniballi said. “I felt that Welles — and his friends and his secrets — came back to life.”
Among the items contained:
- Correspondence between Welles and longtime secretary Ann Rogers regarding The Other Side of The Wind between 1971 and 1974.
- Five folders of materials related to Don Quixote, dating back to 1966. The files include expenses, correspondence and a 1972 list of sequences and reels for the unfinished film.
- Multiple drafts and dialogue passages for two movies unfinished during Welles’ lifetime: The Other Side of The Wind and The Deep.
- Screenplays and treatments for unrealized films, including Because of the Cats, The Blind Window, Black Medicine, Soldier Soldier and Surinam (Victory).
- Letters from Welles and wife, Paola Mori, about a fire at their Madrid home. The letters detail the loss of some scripts and autographed books.
The Welles collection at the National Cinema Museum can be explored online at www2.museocinema.it/collezioni/fondiarchivistici.aspx?l=en, though the contents have not been digitized. (Choose Fondo Orson Welles from the drop down menu.)
Aniballi and Studer performed what they described as a superficial review of the materials. The papers need to be thoroughly studied and compared to what is housed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, they said.
Reached at the University of Michigan, Philip Hallman, curator of the Mavericks & Makers collection, said that at first glance much of the Turin papers seem “like duplicates of things that are here, but you can’t really tell until you compare.”
“The Welles-Ann Rogers correspondence and the Welles-Mori correspondence about their home would be new material,” Hallman said.
Studer and Aniballi would like to see an international commission piece together the jigsaw puzzle of the Welles legacy, which is spread across collections in the U.S., Italy, France, Germany and Spain.
“The solution seems to be to bring together all the pieces of the puzzle in order to finally have a clear picture of the whole.”
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