WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

The 16mm print I used to have of KANE and watched
more than 60 times while writing my first book
on Welles was sharper and had clearer details
than any Blu-ray or 35mm print I've seen since.

I wrote the press kit for THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH. While doing so I ventured to ask director Robert Amram if he had made the film with tongue in cheek, since the prophecies in it are so ridiculous. It reminded me of Welles's reports of Doom in "The War of the Worlds" broadcast. Amram e...

And Welles's Hollywood home was not in the hills but in the flatlands . . . this
reminds me of Charles Higham writing that Kenosha is in northern Wisconsin.
Certain British writers have trouble with American geography, it seems.

I went to the Filmex (LA) re-premiere of the rediscovered, long-lost version of the 1922 OLIVER TWIST, directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Jackie Coogan and Lon Chaney. It is a good movie. Afterward I saw Coogan (by then an old man, aka Uncle Fester) talking with the film's producer, pioneer Sol Le...

Good interview about how the lying Kael-Houseman stories invalidate MANK, though contrary to this interview, Peter did tell me back at the time of the Kael piece that Welles had told him Houseman was in love with him during the Mercury Theatre days and that Welles's rejection of him sexually was the...

In fact, "Raising Kane" was shamelessly reprinted without corrections
in Kael's last collection, FOR KEEPS: 30 YEARS AT THE MOVIES.

The opening title of Leo McCarey's 1937 film MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW says, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." The film shows how the adult children in that film, to varying degrees, fail to live up to that commandment as the elderly parents are forced to separate. Welles was a great admirer ...

I always wondered why there weren't publicity
stills of the opening shot being filmed. Maybe
because in those days, studios were still
trying to keep the machinery secret. I wonder
if more exist in the studio files.

"Pizzas" meaning platters of film?

Franco's version is, as we know, a horrible travesty and is intermingled with parts of Welles's 1964 relatively conventional travelogue about Spain. But I saw forty minutes of DON QUIXOTE that was said to have been assembled by Costa-Gavras for the Cinémathèque Française, and it was beautiful and ri...

Quite a fascinating series, a tribute to a remarkable
woman who had a somewhat tumultuous but in its own way highly
successful career. Much about her has been an enigma
until now, but this goes a long way toward answering the questions.

The operative word might be Roth saying, "It's an incredible piece." We shall see.

Yes, the main thing the portraits of Welles on film usually lack is showing his wonderful sense of humor. When I would come home after a long day of shooting on OTHER WIND, my face would hurt from smiling and laughing so much. Welles would entertain the cast (most of all the cast, because he thought...

During the shooting of OTHER WIND, Welles was being driven in a convertible down Sunset Blvd. near the Bel-Air gate. The car pulled up at a spotlight. A young woman was sitting on a bench at a bus stop right there. She was reading a book on David Lean. She looked up and saw Orson Welles looking at h...

I find the long sequence of Scottie following Madeleine around San Francisco mesmerizing. The music helps a great deal, of course, but there's a mixture of mystery, obsession, and suspenseful tension in his pursuit of this enigmatic woman he barely understands but is becoming inexorably drawn to kno...