WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Or to give another example, we know that some of the shots of Wind's car scene feature the back of Gary Graver in a blonde wig, standing in for Bob Random. Should the use of those shots have been vetoed, on the grounds that they don't feature the real Bob Random? Surely not, because we know that Wel...

In any case, continuity errors and the like are definitely in keeping with Welles' editing style. Obviously a lot of that is due to the conditions he filmed under, but judging from what he said in interviews, I think he certainly took delight in being a master illusionist and trying to dupe the aud...

Agreed, Roger. Hannaford's movie feels very early-70s, but I don't think that that in itself would have been a problem if the film had come out in the mid-70s - it just reinforces the impression of "You old guys trying to get with it", and Hannaford's idea of what the young are into being ...

How out-of-date would the New Hollywood hippie stuff have looked if Welles had completed the film in the late 70s or early 80s? Maybe that's why he was talking about converting it into an essay film (along with Don Quixote .) Yes, I've long thought this, based on the excerpts I'd seen, and the publ...

jbrooks wrote:That scene ends in the vimeo rough cut at the same point that it ends in the finished film.

Yes, 'A Final Cut for Orson' mentions that the scene between Hannaford and Burrowes was edited by Welles - and the final film seems pretty much identical to that Vimeo footage.

There is also testimony from one of the original editors that Welles spent months editing the bathroom orgy footage (although this seems to contradict Murawski's statement that the entire nightclub sequence leading up to the "sex-the-car" scene was newly-edited by him). It's not necessari...

The dialogue between him and Huston is another masterstroke. Yes, and the crafty little shot of him panting on the projection booth window while a nude John Dale strides across the screen, and then wiping the steam away with his handkerchief, was hilarious. It had the whole cinema laughing when I w...

After the second power outage, it really leans into the melancholia, doesn’t it? The change in tone is so incredibly masterful. Yes, but there are some wonderful variations in tone, to keep the viewer engaged - the song number, Hannaford's shooting spree, the fireworks, not to mention the light rel...

I also thought the best performance of the film belonged to Norman Foster but everyone else was good in it. That's the joy of this film - it's full of surprises. If you'd told me a week ago that I'd have walked away saying the best performance in the whole movie was Norman Foster's, I wouldn't have...

Like others, I've been bowled over and delighted by the final release of 'Wind', which I'm still getting my head around the complexity of. It's rather like sipping a fine wine. (A Domecq sherry rather than a Paul Masson...) It's already become something of a cliché of the printed reviews to say that...

At one point, Charlies Higham AKA Higgam, was part of the cast of characters. Was he cut? He was recast, and Howard Grossman plays him in the final film, but his role was sharply reduced - you can see him sitting next to Pister in the back of Hannaford's car on the way in. It looks like some of his...

Maybe Welles removed the word as he continued cutting the workprint after the AFI thing? I think that's actually highly likely. The script shows that the scene with Max David and Billy Boyle is meant to be rapidly inter-cut with lots of other scenes; whereas the AFI presentation has that scene runn...

Or to paraphrase, "Old Orson Welles said it himself nearly a half-century ago: We will sell no film before its time."

Anyway, would it have done great box office even if it had come out at the time it was shot or is it just of more interest to a specific small section of the movie audience? An excellent question. I've long thought that If the movie had come out in 1970-5 (i.e. when Welles was still working on it),...

That sounds fascinating! The lack of any "definitive" version of Arkadin, the surfeit of versions already available, and the amount of material out there, all make me wonder how many more Arkadin variants may be possible. It's a superb concept for a film, lousily executed, with moments of ...