“Othello” restoration producer Michael Dawson concludes his interview with Wellesnet with a discussion of the plans for a celebration in Woodstock, Illinois, for the 2015 centennial of Orson Welles’s birth, and also discusses his documentary “Citizen Welles.”
What is Woodstock Celebrates?
Woodstock Celebrates is a nonprofit organization formed to make better known the association of the City of Woodstock, Illinois with several celebrities and highly-regarded people in various fields, chief among them Orson Welles, student there at Todd School for Boys from 1926 to 1931. The first big venture of WC will be the two Welles festivals, first in 2014 for the 80th anniversary of the 1934 theatre festival Welles staged with Michael MacLiammior and Hilton Edwards, followed by a festival in 2015 celebrating the centennial of Welles’s birth.
How did you get on the board of directors for it?
I talked with WC president Kathleen Spaltro and rejuvenated the idea, which seemed like a good one but was losing steam. My enthusiasm and ideas got her and her husband John back on board with it.
She alerted us last year of the impending destruction of Grace Hall, where Welles lived during his time at Todd. Some of us wrote protest letters and emails to the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce, but in the end it was torn down. That was the last remaining building from the old Todd School, wasn’t it?
No, there is one other building from it that still stands, Roger Hall, which was the old Todd Theatre. But everything else is now gone.
It’s nice to see a separate celebration for the 1934 Woodstock Fest, because it was there that Welles actually made his professional debut as an actor/director, playing Svengali in his own production of George DuMaurrier’s Trilby. A lot of people don’t realize that. The Opera House is such a nice place for live theatre. I still recall seeing a very good one-man show about Welles there in the mid-90’s.
Yes, I remember that show as well, by an actor named Ronnie Welsh. It would be nice to have some kind of live theatre at the 2014 celebration, and in fact, they are planning on doing a live recreation of the War of the Worlds broadcast. There’s also an excellent one-man show written by Richard France, “Your Obedient Servant, Orson Welles”, which has been a big hit all over the world, but has never been performed in America. There are all kinds of things that can be done, all kinds of tie-ins, but the basic idea is to get people out to Woodstock. I also think there’s a Kenosha trip to be made. The cemeteries, the houses, all that is still there.
We’ll be advertising on billboards all over Chicago. Plus we’ll be doing a story about it on National Public Radio. We even see a whole big thing on CBS This Morning being a possibility. For the 100th anniversary in 2015 we’ve been talking with people like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and David Copperfield, and have gotten some positive feedback from them, but to get names like that, you’ve got to show that this is not just some schlocky local thing. We want to go national, if not international with this.
According to Stefan Drossler of the Munich Museum, Oja Kodar is also planning some celebrations for the Welles centennial in London and Tokyo.
That would be great. I know they’re going to want to invite her to Woodstock too; that’s something that is on the blackboard, so to speak. I think the whole year should be a Welles celebration, with individuals doing globetrotting to celebrate. There will also be an effort to get Christopher Welles Feder to come back because she actually attended the Todd School. You only have one building left from Todd, Roger Hall, but you do have Woodstock itself, certainly the Opera House and the town square, and all the affiliate restaurants and bars. It’s a beautiful setting.
Yes, as you’ve said, it’s a wonderful little oasis in the middle of the cornfields. Any possibility that we’ll see any of Welles’s unfinished work at either of those fests?
That would be great, although we don’t own or control any of that footage. I do have a pristine print of the “Othello” restoration that could be shown, however. As far as unfinished work goes, it would be relatively easy to get it into some kind of shape for either fest if someone was willing. But they probably wouldn’t be unless it was going to be for long-term releasable, or potentially profitable use.
How would you evaluate the potential for completion, based on the various footage you’ve seen?
I think I could edit “Don Quixote” together myself, but of course, one has to be careful about two iambic pentameters. One is that you don’t have a whole lot of leeway, because there isn’t a ton of footage that would allow for a lot of editorial flexibility. Secondly, there are certain rhythms and patterns that need to be respected, as with a Rock cover band that wants to be as homogenous as possible with the band that they’re covering. So you can’t just go in and do your own vision; you have to do it within the context of what the original artist has already done.
There’s also a very broad and rough work print that exists of “The Deep”, much like “The Other Side of the Wind”. And anyone with half a brain could go in and finish it, but where it gets weird is the sound mixing and the music. He has certain notes about music to indicate what he was thinking of, but after that, you might have to be creative with original stuff. You’re probably gonna get some of that, otherwise it’s going to remain in an uncompleted state. There’s enough meat on the bone to finish both of them, though.
I think the centennial celebration could really use something really big like that. But Todd McCarthy from Variety said recently that he worked on the “Wind” set and that he thought Welles never completed it because he didn’t think it was good enough, and Welles even admitted in a later interview that he thought the material was dated.
Well there may be a simple solution to that. All you would have to do would be to put a title card at the beginning of the film saying “Los Angeles, 1970”, and you’d have an instant period piece. A period piece that would be pretty expensive to reproduce with today’s dollars.
Maybe she was keeping her cards close to her, but in all the conversations I had with her, she never mentioned having it. I did watch some of that footage with Oja Kodar at the 1989 NYU Welles symposium. Frank Brady was also there, after he stole the title “Citizen Welles” from me. We had pinned a “Citizen Welles” button on him that was being used to promote our project!
It’s funny because some of these biographers like Brady, they write very good books on Welles, and then you never really hear from them again. They just move on to other things.
MD: Yeah, and in the case of another Welles author, a lot of the Woodstock-related materials that were provided for the book were never returned. The Tarbox family is just furious about that, and I know Roger Hill was upset too. One of the Tarbox family who was helping me with my project told me in an interview that the material the author was given to use for interviews was never returned.
You’ve said that interviews were a large part of your project.
Interviews are a whole section of my documentary, but one of the things I’d also like to do is interject every now and then, something interesting to do with Welles, like a parade honoring the 50th anniversary of “War of the Worlds” or a Nikka Japanese Whiskey commercial.
Those are great. I’ve seen about half-a-dozen of those.
I got a few from Gary Graver, and they’re hilarious. There’s one in particular where you can hear a dog barking in the background, and the look in Welles’s eyes is priceless, like “Oh, how low I’ve gone’. But what’s interesting about that is that he was ahead of his time in that regard as well. If you go to Japan today – and you saw a little of it in Sophia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” – you see tons of ads being done by serious artists, like Meryl Streep. They’re done as a matter of course now, whereas he was doing it at a time when there was still good reason to be reluctant about it.
But he was paid well for those commercials. In fact, in his last year – he died in October – but for 1985 his income was about $300,000. So it wasn’t like he was D.W. Griffith, poor-ass broke, and drinking-at-the-bar down and out. Welles had two homes, and maybe a third in Sedona.
‘CITIZEN WELLES’
Tell us a little more about your documentary, “Citizen Welles”. You’ve been working on that for quite awhile now, haven’t you? What caused you to want to make a documentary on Welles?
As you know, I recently attended the Opera House Orson Welles stage dedication, an idea conceived by Chuck Workman for his project on Welles, called “The Magician”. I was also shooting some footage for these little spots that we’re going to release for promoting the 100th anniversary festival, and the 80th anniversary fest next year. Chuck was wondering why there were cameras there at the stage dedication, because he knows I have my own project. I told him that the joke was originally, since my project was started in 1988, “was ‘Citizen Welles’ going to be finished before the 20th Century was over?” Now the joke is, “Is the film going to be finished before the end of the 21st Century?”
I’ve since been approached by several people, including an affiliate of the BBC which surprised me. They had done the Arena documentary back in 1982, probably one of the better documentaries on Welles. We put together this expansive 30-minute work-in-progress trailer, which we did copyright…and one of the original investors, who wanted us to at least get Volume One done in time for the 100th birthday, was concerned that I might be giving away things in my interview for Chuck that they wanted kept secret for my film. So there’s been a bit of pressure from my friends and investors in the project not to “show my cards”, so to speak.
I remember you discussing the film at the 1990 Woodstock fest. A thing that struck me in the collection of Welles articles and photos that you had displayed at that fest was one newspaper obituary that said “Actor Orson Welles dies at 70”. At the time of his death, apparently many people still thought of him primarily as an actor.
Yes, I remember watching news footage of his death and thinking what a shame it was that so many people were essentially unaware of his filmmaking career. Even among those who knew of his work as a director, there’s a whole school of thought that Welles did “Citizen Kane” and then never did anything else meriting the kind of scholarship and reverence that that film receives. That’s a perception that my film attempts to rectify, and it was a big part of the impetus for my project. I think Welles continued to make masterpieces after Kane, but he did so under more and more difficult circumstances.
I’m going to take a lot of stuff from Volume One and use it for these one-minute promos, for both next year and the 100th. It’ll be showing bits and pieces of it to promote both the fests and my documentary; hopefully it will serve a two fold purpose. So one thing I’ve thought about is releasing Volume One at the beginning of 2015, then a few months later release Volume Two, then at the end of the year release Volume Three. That way, we can get the whole thing off the shelf. Next year would be a perfect opportunity to show the Woodstock stuff, so it’s certainly possible we could show some of it as a “work-in progress”.
There’s a company working on a project based on one of Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished works, and they’re interested in my Welles project as well. And I said to them that if they let me do this thing all at once, my per-unit post-production costs would be greatly reduced, like the way Peter Jackson did it with “Lord of the Rings”. There’s also a greater sense of cohesion there. I may have three different narrators, in fact. I’m even thinking of using a well-known Chicago actress, for one of them, if she’ll accept the job, and if she’s not too expensive. Volume I deals with Welles’ childhood, so a more feminine, maternal voice might be more appropriate.
I’ve been down this road many, many times before, but it’s forced me to put together a huge budget breakdown on what it would cost to do it all at once. Where are the cost savings? You have to be as itemized as you can be. And then break it down into actual demarcations that are specific as you can be to a documentary treatment, because documentaries are like wet, slippery fish in a boat. There are always new things being discovered, new ideas taking place. So they’re a lot more fluid then a regular narrative-structured film. But to get financing you still have to come up with a treatment that lists the topics you want to cover.
The great thing about the Internet, which didn’t exist when I began the project, is that there is really no excuse about not having resources, so there’s more pressure to finish things up. Someone sent me a site for Welles quotes, and one of the things I’d like to do in this documentary is to have some nice segues using a topic title on the screen with a quote from Welles that infers what the segue is all about.
But I don’t want to lay too much out there because, as I mentioned, I’ve been down this road so many times before. As people say, an Orson Welles project is like a Peter Pan’s shadow: by ignoring it, it follows you even closer. But I’ve had distributors come to me and look at my footage and say “it’s fantastic”, and then you never hear from them again, and in some cases you don’t know what the hell happened.
Of course, I’m not sure how to handle some of the Woodstock material I’ve got, such as Roger Hill referring to Hilton and MacLiammior as “those two queers”. But there’s some nice footage there, and then there are some other nice resources that we’re using, like a scrapbook that was loaned to Coach Roskie’s daughter, Carolyn, that has rare images that we’re scanning in to use in combination with the new footage.
Old scrapbooks can really be invaluable sometimes. I’ve got three Welles scrapbooks myself.
I’m still kicking my ass about a guy in Darien about 1989 or so, who heard about our project and contacted us to come over to his house. And he showed us this incredible Welles scrapbook that someone had put together. He had gotten it from his Uncle who had picked it up from some garage sale. He wanted $200 for it, and I just didn’t have the money. It wasn’t a large scrapbook, but it had all kinds of goodies in it. I only hope the guy contacts me again. Of course now the price would probably be $500.
I’ve also had contact with other people involved in other Welles projects, who’ve told me that if I ever need help with anything Welles-related, to contact them. We’re trying to come up with completion funding for Volume 1, so we’re thinking of doing a Kickstarter for that, and once that’s completed, we think it will be a very viable instrument for propelling the completion of the other two volumes.
Yes, your Volume 1 deals with his childhood, which I think is an area of his life that’s been somewhat glossed over in previous documentaries.
Not only has it been glossed over, but I’ve got stuff that I know no one else has used. Others have touched on it, but I’ve got stuff that is much more involved with the Todd School For Boys. The Todd School almost deserves it’s own documentary just because of who else went there.
There’s still a little bit of jealousy on the part of the Hill descendants, not just because Welles was Welles, but also because of this special relationship he had with Roger and Hortense Hill; he almost became a kind of foster child of theirs. So there’s still a little bit of sibling rivalry with the sibling who wasn’t really a sibling. And the fact that he was on the phone with Roger almost every day up until shortly before he died, as documented in Todd Tarbox’s recent book, “Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.”
So I’d like to do it in a kind of Magnificent Ambersons Gothic style, to make Woodstock look almost like the small town in the Tarkington story. I want to be as dynamic as I can. On some levels, when you get into the childhood of people, some people are fascinated by it and some people are impatient for you to get into the part where he’s really rocking and rolling. But if I can make the childhood – and Volume One is really the childhood up to Kane, so obviously there are some highlights like “War of the Worlds”, “Les Miserables”, the Harlem Macbeth – but the idea is to make it as exciting and dynamic as possible.
That sounds good. I think the key to understanding what he was trying to say as an artist often seems to point back to his childhood, which has been shortchanged in the various tellings of his story.
Oh yeah, I think Welles basically became Welles at the Todd School. It was an environment that he just suddenly blossomed in. Of course, all the personal and psychological motivations applied by Roger Hill and Hortense were instrumental in this. His parents essentially were replaced. And they weren’t just replaced by anybody.
Speaking of highlights from Welles’s early career, I think the “Les Miserables” CD set that you produced for Radio Yesteryear in 1994, is one of the finest commercial releases of Welles radio material that I’ve heard.
The cleanup on that was real good, and what’s so remarkable about it, is that it is in many ways his “Citizen Kane” of radio, perhaps even more so then the “War of the Worlds” broadcast. You hear certain things in terms of environmental sounds and special effects sounds, and the concadence of how that performance went down just as an audio track, separate from, as well as in harmony with the performances of the actors and the dialogue, you would swear that there’s no way that that’s a performance of something that’s being broadcast live, much less over a seven week period between July and September of 1937.
It seems too flawless to be live.
It’s almost flawless, right. And it’s remarkable. You would think “Oh no, that’s obviously mixed and added in, etcetera, etcetera.” But it’s not, and that’s what is really amazing about it. Not only one of the best, but one of the most underrated works of his radio career. LES MISERABLES really demonstrated what kind of an artist this guy really was.
The Kane comparison is apt, since it was his first big opportunity as a director in radio and he knew he had to make the most of it. And you hear pretty much the whole Mercury Theatre too.
Yes, when you think about what he had going on, just in terms of sound, both foreground and background, he had an army. The potential for making a mistake was huge and constant, even if it’s just a situation where something is too loud, or the timing is off, but even if there were any mistakes being made, it’s already at such a point of perfection that we don’t know. Usually, for most old-time radio programs, especially at that particular moment in the history of radio, you had just one or two sound guys in the corner doing stuff, even during the best shows, but Welles had an army of sound people, and what he did with them was amazing. He created a symphony of effects.
That’s a good word. In fact, that’s a good word to describe just about all of Welles’s work: symphonic. The way all the aspects of the storytelling process work and blend together.
Yeah, it is. It’s symphonic, no doubt about it.
Any other Welles projects that you’ve produced? I’ve heard that you were involved in the Citizen Welles DVD set some years ago.
Yes, around 1997 we put together that DVD package which included “The Trial”, “The Stranger”, and a near pristine copy of Welles’s early short film, “The Hearts of Age”, which was filmed around the Todd School at the time of the 1934 Theatre Fest at the Opera House. We showed “Hearts of Age” last February, at the dedication of the Woodstock Opera stage to Orson Welles.
In a way, one could say that the festivities actually began with that event.
Chuck Workman is the one who came up with the idea of the Welles stage dedication so he could make it part of his upcoming Welles documentary. Chuck says there are 41 documentaries on Welles. I thought that figure was way too high.
We took a tally on Wellesnet and there are quite a few. I think we counted 30-35.
I guess he wasn’t too far off the mark, then. That’s a tribute to what an immense subject Welles is, and that’s why my documentary is planned as a three-parter, 90-minutes each. I think you need that much time to fully do justice to such a great artist.
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