Sixty years ago, Orson Welles took his $5,000 paycheck for a recent I Love Lucy appearance and shot a pilot for a proposed TV series, Orson Welles and People.
The trial episode, Camille, the Naked Lady and the Musketeers, was a portrait of Alexandre Dumas. Future episodes might have focused on P.T. Barnum and Winston Churchill.
The pilot came during a busy year for Welles. He had started 1956 starring in King Lear at the New York City Center Theatre, followed by a month-long stint at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas doing magic tricks and readings from Shakespeare. He tackled Twentieth Century with Betty Grable for Ford Star Jubilee on CBS and then appeared in friend John Huston’s big screen version of Moby Dick.
Welles clearly had his eyes on television with two pilots: The one-man Orson Welles and People and the more ambitious Fountain of Youth.
Film historian Joseph McBride has called Orson Welles and People “an early example of the ‘essay film’, a genre that would increasingly occupy Welles.”
Welles discussed the unsold 27-minute pilot with This Is Orson Welles interviewer and friend Peter Bogdanovich some 15 years later.
“I made it for myself. I spent my own money. I wanted to do a series of half-hour portraits of people. This was just me telling the story of the three Dumas with pictures of them and drawings by me. In a purely narrative form, but quite visual in spite of that. Nobody would have any part of it. I thought I could sell it – syndication or something. Not a chance; nobody would look at it. I don’t know what’s ever happened to that; I wish I could find it.”
On the surface, Orson Welles and People sounds similar to his 1955 BBC television offering, Orson Welles’ Sketch Book.
In addition to Orson Welles and People that year, Welles shot Fountain of Youth, a pilot for a weekly anthology series for Desilu. Unsold, it aired two years later on NBC’s Colgate Theatre. It was honored with a Peabody Award for excellence in television.
While Fountain of Youth can be screened at the Paley Center for Media and poor copies on YouTube, Camille, the Naked Lady and the Musketeers and the promise of more episode of Orson Welles and People are lost.
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