By EMILIANO CAMPAGNOLA
In October 2023, the new edition of Alberto Anile’s book, Orson Welles in Italia, was published. This latest edition reports that the script written by Orson Welles based on Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, previously thought missing, exists and that I, Emiliano Campagnola, found it.
I was just shy of thirty when I found the script and was barely scraping a life together in Italy as a professional actor in theater, TV, and cinema. At the time, I was researching video theater. As soon as I found the script, my life changed. I am not sure whether it changed for the better; I have since decided to be not only an actor but a director. Very few people have succeeded at both of these two roles that converge in a single life, but we know one of them.
The discovery was both historic and terrifying. I suddenly found myself in a story bigger than myself, but which had come out into the light thanks to me, so it’s as if this story had chosen me to tell it.
And so, I tried to tell the story. At first, I spoke confidentially about it with a few people.
I was lucky enough to meet with some key figures as well as some friends, all of whom would help me find the reasons why the screenplay had been ignored for so long and never thoroughly researched.
My most pressing concern was respecting the copyright of the screenplay. I needed to find out who owned the rights now. After investigating everything reported in books and other publications, I looked for people to talk to about the authenticity of my discovery. I had the opportunity and honor to discuss the script with Enrico Ghezzi, Caterina D’Amico, Maia Borelli, Antonella Ottai, Daniele Borgia, Christian Uva, Mark Cousins, Carlo Hintermann, Deborah Belford de Furia, Pino Genovese e Marina Sciarelli, Massimiliano Troiani, Alberto Anile, Gabriele Gianni, Christian Carmosino, Daniele Natali, Federica Pocaterra, Matthew Asprey Gear, and Arno Klein. Thanks to them, I understood that little was known about this story and that I could have made up anything about the content while always respecting the rights owner.
I should explain how I came into possession of the script; however, I am currently developing a documentary that recounts how I found it and what has happened since. I can reassure you that there was no other material belonging to Orson Welles where I found this manuscript. So, its discovery keeps the game, mystery, enigma, and hope of finding hidden treasures of missing materials alive.
As soon as I saw the title Masquerade in my hands, and then the words underneath in parentheses “(based on a theme by Pirandello),” the famous book Welles wrote with Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles immediately came to mind. In it, there was a reference to a screenplay based on Pirandello’s Henry IV, but with a different title! That sentence came back to me as if the great Orson’s voice were resounding: “I spent months on that. If I ever wanted a script of mine to be published, that would be the one.”
So, I immediately went to look for that sentence again in the book that, as a film student, I had studied and loved and loved, like so many others have. Just as I remembered it, I found that exact sentence towards the end of the book, in the chronology under the entry for 1947, July 17. I found a few other references as I searched eagerly in the notes, such as where the title Masquerade is mentioned but not as the script based on Pirandello, but as an adaptation of Greek Meet Greek, a radio play.
Meanwhile, this discovery sparked my imagination. I was a young actor-director seeking my fortune. I felt as if I had just received a blow to the head, completely losing all memory of who and what I had been until I found the script.
When I had the unpublished manuscript in my hands and understood what it was, I felt as if I were becoming a knight on a quest to fulfill the wish of King Orson.
First, seized by a sort of divine inspiration as if I had been entrusted with a mission by the god of cinema, I began to study its content. First, I had to start with Pirandello because that was Welles’ starting point. Henry IV is a three-act play by Luigi Pirandello, written in 1921, considered Pirandello’s theatrical masterpiece alongside Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV is a study on the meaning of madness and the complex, ultimately inextricable relationship between character and man, fiction and truth.
But Welles remakes it entirely; his is not an adaptation. Newspapers of the time say he escaped to Capri to write it. Before he started, he screened the film Enrico IV by Giorgio Pastina. I watched it, too, only to understand that Welles took nothing from Pastina.
Nothing is what it seems in Masquerade. The most interesting aspect, in my opinion, is the character of Lise, a young girl who arrives on the island of Illyria, where the whole story of Masquerade is set, to visit her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in a long time. Lise is an actress but also a photographer who discovers the island, where working is forbidden. It is ruled by an eccentric American who lives as if he were the emperor, kept there at the expense of his very wealthy father, who is the cause of his son’s madness and so indulges him to do as he pleases out of guilt, supporting him for the twenty years. But then, the father decides to lobotomize his son. At this point, Lise arrives, the only one who gets close to the mad king, trying to bring him back to reality, whereas he wants to continue living his masquerade at any cost. Lise and the Emperor speak to each other using lines taken from Shakespeare while they stand on the breeze of the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Bari, somewhere between Puglia and Croatia, where there are no islands. Indeed, Illyria is the magical island of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
In 2006, the first edition of Alberto Anile’s book Orson Welles in Italia was published, and it proved to be precious for my research. I read it with mixed feelings of hope in finding confirmation that the screenplay I had seen had not been discovered by anyone else and, at the same time, a kind of dismay for the responsibility I’d have that followed. I hoped to find more information about the Masquerade screenplay, but there was none. This gave me even more chills. What I decided to do then made sense: to bring to light and provide visibility to Welles’ unpublished screenplay that he wanted to be made public. It seemed like a declaration of love for his lost writings that occasionally resurface and seem to be part of his posthumous plan.
In Alberto Anile’s book, I found valuable references to the screenplay, such as the interview with Gisella Sofio, the actress who auditioned for and studied the screenplay. But one sentence in his book shook me more than others, “Most American biographers of Welles steer clear of even the slightest mention of that script.” But when I met him with the help of some artist friends, he serenely told me that they knew nothing about the script in America.
When Alberto later called me to say he was preparing the updated edition of Orson Welles in Italia and wanted to update the information declaring the screenplay was no longer lost since I had found it and I have been working on it for years, he asked me to read it. This moment is a turning point in my documentary: it is finally time to start talking about the discovery of the script. Respecting the copyright for the screenplay was still what concerned me most, but I decided to let him read the script.
In Italy, Alberto Anile seemed like the right person to start the conversation about Masquerade publicly due to his expertise on Orson Welles in Italy and his role as Conservator of the National Film Library (Cineteca Nazionale), where I recorded a lengthy interview with him, which will be a fundamental part of my documentary, Masquerade is Over.
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