Interview with
JACK ARNOLD
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on
DIRECTING ORSON WELLES in

MAN IN THE SHADOW (1957)��
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By Lawrence French
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The following are excerpts from an interview I conducted with director Jack Arnold, which took place in 1981 when Arnold had been invited by Mark Fishkin, the director of The Mill Valley Film Festival, to appear for a special tribute and screening of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

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LAWRENCE FRENCH: On Man In The Shadow, producer Albert Zugsmith said Orson Welles would arrive on the set in the morning having re-written his scenes the night before, turning his part (as Virgil Renchler, the racist owner of the Golden Empire Ranch), into a kind of Texan version of Charles Foster Kane.

JACK ARNOLD: Well, that�s the way the script was originally written. But I actually had a big fight with Orson on the first day of shooting. You know how films are shot out of order, as sets become available?�Well on the first day we shot the last scene of the picture, where all the townspeople go out to Orson�s ranch and start chasing him. I wanted a shot where Orson would be running away from them and Royal Dano trips him. So after there was a shoot-out with the townspeople, Orson was going to start to run away, trip and fall down. I had a mattress that was out of camera range to catch him, and as I was setting up the shot Orson came over to me and looked at me with piercing eyes and said with that deep sonorous voice of his, �Mr. Arnold, exactly what are you doing?� I told him: �In this scene you�re going to trip and fall onto a mattress that�s off-camera.� He said, �Oh no, I can�t do that. That�s not going to work.� I said, �Mr. Welles, you are a genius and a wonderful director, but I�m making this picture and it�s my name that will be on it, so if it�s the last shot I make, it�s going to be in this movie. You see Orson was testing me�he was trying to see how far he could go�but once I stood up to him, he respected me for it, and after that, we became close friends.LAWRENCE FRENCH: And Welles even narrated the trailers for The Incredible Shrinking Man, which I presume he did while you were shooting Man In The Shadow.
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JACK ARNOLD: Yes, that�s right. But after that one incident on the first day of shooting, Orson was just wonderful. He would make suggestions and say, �wouldn�t it be a great idea if we did this, or why don�t we do that?� And till this day, I still hear from Orson. He�s a genius, but Orson�s great big problem is discipline. If he only had more discipline, I think he�d be the greatest filmmaker we�re got.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: Actually, I think he�s still our greatest filmmaker.
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JACK ARNOLD: But he doesn�t make any films. LAWRENCE FRENCH: Because nobody will finance them, which is why he�s been working on The Other Side of the Wind for ten years.
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JACK ARNOLD: Yes, and that�s the problem. His ideas change, so he�ll change scenes right in the middle of shooting and then when you get them in the cutting room you can�t cut them together.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: That�s what Universal claimed was wrong with Touch of Evil, the film Welles directed for Albert Zugsmith right after he did Man in The Shadow.
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JACK ARNOLD: Yes, and Touch of Evil was a very good film, but they had to re-cut it. They called me in on that one to try and help them re-edit it. They were at it for ten months and still couldn�t figure it out.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: Did anyone at Universal ever ask you to direct any re-shoots for Touch of Evil?
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JACK ARNOLD: No, because at that time I was busy directing a picture with Lana Turner, but they did ask me to come in and look at it while they were working on the editing. I said, �fellows, there�s something wrong here.� Orson had some great shots, some really wonderful shots, but they didn�t always cut together. But in the end, Touch of Evil turned out to be a very good film.�
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: Do you recall any of the suggestions Welles made for Man in the Shadow?
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JACK ARNOLD: In that scene where Orson has to trip and fall, he thought it would be a good idea to shoot the scene from a low-angle, so we dug a hole in the ground and put the camera near the ground. (Apparently it was elected not to use this low-angle take in the final film).
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: Richard Matheson, who wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man said he originally wrote that script using flashbacks, as Welles had used in Citizen Kane, but apparently Albert Zugsmith wouldn�t allow that.
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JACK ARNOLD: No, I was the one who wouldn�t allow it. I don�t think Zugsmith even read the script. You see, with flashbacks an audience can get lost. I know I do, because you set a mood, and you set an atmosphere and then you change it. So you then have to pull the audience back into the atmosphere you have already created. You might start out with an action sequence, with a great deal of suspense to it, and then you cut away to something that is very bland. So I thought it was the wrong way to tell that story.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: But the flashback structure worked in Citizen Kane.
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JACK ARNOLD: Yes, but that was a different kind of film. It�s a dramatic story about a man�s life, which wasn�t meant to be as suspenseful as The Shrinking Man.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: What about the �No trespassing� signs at the ranch. Was that meant as a nod to Citizen Kane?
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JACK ARNOLD: No that was just part of the background for this ranch owner, the character that Orson was playing.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: What did you think about Albert Zugsmith as a producer?
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JACK ARNOLD: I got along with him very well, although I didn�t think he was a man of taste. Zugsmith was really just a businessman, lining up the projects and seeing that we had everything we needed.
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LAWRENCE FRENCH: He actually produced two of Douglas Sirk�s best films The Tarnished Angels and Written On The Wind.
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JACK ARNOLD: Yes, and Doug was a very fine director and a very good friend of mine. He�s living back in Switzerland, now. But Zugsmith�s contributions to the films we made together were really not that great.
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LAWRENCE: FRENCH: Strangely, William Alland who played Thompson the reporter in Citizen Kane was part of Orson Welles Mercury theatre in New York and he ended up as your producer for nearly all of your Universal science-fiction films. Why didn�t Alland also produce Man in The Shadow instead of Zugsmith? That would have reunited him with Orson Welles.��
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JACK ARNOLD: Well, I would have preferred Bill Alland, because I thought he was a very good producer. But back in those days, everyone was under contract to the studio and we were all given assignments. So the actors, the producers, the directors, we all had to do whatever pictures Universal assigned to us. Zugsmith was the producer Universal assigned to Man In The Shadow, and I was the director, but Zugsmith really had very little to do with it. I think William Alland was a more helpful producer. He was more involved in the creative end than Zugsmith was, and was also concerned with both the business and the technical problems when we ended up shooting It Came From Outer Space and The Creature From The Black Lagoon in 3-D.
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It�s interesting to note that Orson Welles was apparently present when the idea was initially hatched for one of Jack Arnold�s most famous movies, The Creature From The Black Lagoon. According to film historian Tom Weaver, William Alland, the producer of Creature From The Black Lagoon, was having dinner at Welles house in Hollywood, with Welles, Dolores Del Rio and the Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (which means it was probably 1941 or early 1942). At dinner, Figueroa related a story about a half-man; half-fish that once a year came out of the depths of the Amazon River to claim a maiden from a native village. Figueroa swore that this was a true story, and William Alland later developed the idea of this Amazon Man-Fish into a story he called �The Sea Monster.� Ten years later, when Alland became a producer for Universal, his story served as the basis of Creature From The Black Lagoon. One wonders what Welles thought of the story, or if he contributed anything toward embellishing it.�