“Too Much Johnson” was a failure for the Mercury Theatre when it closed after a tryout at Connecticut’s Stony Creek Theatre in August 1938.
Orson Welles had planned to run 40 minutes of silent film to accompany the William Gillette stage comedy about a New York playboy who flees to Cuba to avoid a jealous husband. A 20-minute prologue and two 10-minute bits, which would run before the second and third acts, were filmed in New York City with Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Virginia Nicolson and other members of the Mercury.
According to Welles biographer Frank Brady, Welles shot some 25,000 feet of silent film. He edited the footage in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan.
The play opened at Stony Creek Theater on Aug. 16, 1938, but without the film after Welles discovered the theater’s low ceiling did not make projection feasible. The production flopped and Welles opted not to bring it to New York.
The 40 minutes of partially edited film was never screened and was presumed lost in a 1970 fire at Welles’ Madrid villa.
“I wish you could have seen ‘Too Much Johnson,'” Welles once told film historian Joseph McBride. “It was a beautiful film. We created a sort of dream Cuba in New York. I looked at it four years ago and the print was in wonderful condition. You know, I never fully edited it. I meant to put it together to give to Joe Cotten as a Christmas present one year, but I never got around to it.”
“Too Much Johnson” is the missing link between the amateur home movie, “Hearts of Age,” Welles shot as a teenager with friend William Vance at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1934 and his Hollywood debut in “Citizen Kane” seven years later.
Too much fanfare, it was revealed last week that the 10 reels of “Too Much Johnson” footage had been found in remarkably good condition in an Italian warehouse.
George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. has overseen the restoration of Welles’ workprint.
The bulk of work on “Too Much Johnson” was made at Cinema Arts, a film laboratory in Pennsylvania specializing in the restoration of archival material.
“All but one of the reels were in relatively good shape,” said Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator of film, who supervised the project for George Eastman House. “But one of them was badly decomposed, and we initially thought it was too late to save its images.”
A last-minute rescue operation was attempted at Haghefilm Digitaal, a leading preservation lab in the Netherlands. Technicians there managed to salvage over 96 percent of the footage. “I’d call it a masterpiece of craftsmanship,” Cherchi Usai said. “What they have achieved is nothing short of a miracle — one only has to look at a photo of that reel before treatment in order to understand what kind of ‘mission impossible’ this was.”
The restored film will have its world premiere October 9 at Pordenone, Italy’s silent film fest Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. The U.S. premiere will take place a week later in Rochester, N.Y., at the George Eastman House on October 16.
“This is by far the most important film restoration by George Eastman House in a very long time,” Cherchi Usai said. “Holding in one’s hands the very same print that had been personally edited by Orson Welles 75 years ago provokes an emotion that’s just impossible to describe.”