WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Thanks Tony. Good to see Shadowplay weighing in. My pitch: an opening scene where Welles meets with Mankiewicz where it is established that there is an urgency to put something before the cameras after two initial projects have fallen through. Welles wants to do an original story about a powerful ma...

One of those B westerns might have been RENEGADE RANGER (1938), where Holt co-starred with Rita Hayworth. Maybe Welles hired Holt so he could introduce him to Rita, and persuade her to appear on Welles's Lady Esther series, which she did. https://www.filmaffinity.com/us/movieimage.php?imageId=147424...

I'll take the credit-stealing Welles of Marcy Kahan's Victorville over this mess. Hard pass. Ah Victorville, haven't heard that in awhile. Good program; I'll have to give it another listen in light of the new film. Apparently it' s not at the BBC site right now, maybe it will come back. I would hop...

The makeup tests were October 1939 -- several months before Victorville. Right. HEART OF DARKNESS collapsed in December, 1939, and Houseman/Mank started the Kane screenplay around February 1940. So the movie has them getting a call from Welles about the makeup tests for HOD, just as they're settlin...

Watched it this morning. I was disappointed but intrigued by some of it. The film has some interesting ideas, such as Bernstein being based on Louis B. Mayer, and Mank calling him Sancho Panza to Hearst's Don Quixote (with Marion as Dulcinea), but overall I found the film too static and talky, and d...

I wonder if Welles ever saw FIFTH AVENUE GIRL from 1938, where Tim Holt co-stars opposite Ginger Rogers as a snotty scion of an aristocratic family in New York. The role is not unlike George Amberson Minafer, so Holt already had some experience at this kind of thing.

From Ray's review of MANK: . Near its close, Mank includes an invented scene where Welles, played by Tom Burke, hurls a liquor cabinet against the wall after Mankiewicz demands screen credit for Citizen Kane despite earlier signing a deal that waived credit. It also has Welles offering Mankiewicz $1...

I was actually referring to the pandemic, and the possibility that it wipes out movie theaters for 2021 as well. Yes, they are the same movies no matter where you watch them, and I watch plenty of movies on streaming, especially since the pandemic hit, but rarely ever do I watch a movie from start t...

Both interesting articles. I never realized that about Criterion, but yes, there's a lot of truth to it. Of course, the Black community has been badly represented by American film in general. I don't usually even think about the Oscars until the critics awards and 10 best lists start rolling in, but...

Thanks a bunch, Steve. That's a fascinating interview.

Yes, it's good to have both versions available, but then, I can't help but thinking that, if both versions are available, the original BBC sort of makes the TNT version obsolete. There's quite a lot of good stuff that the TNT leaves out.

ARENA is definitely the version of this that I want to watch from now on. Glad to see it has stayed up for so long!

Thanks for the info, Steve. I'm not familiar with that book, but if Bernard Hermann thought it was an influence, that's worth noting, although the idea of a character being seen mainly through other people is something Welles had been thinking about since 1932, when he wrote MARCHING SONG. As Wiki s...

Ah yes, forgot about THE BIG TRAIL. Good movie. It's actually on Youtube in widescreen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8vJ4R8mkVY No, not unique, but widescreen movies before the 1950s were pretty rare, though. According to this site, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_widescreen_feature_filmogra...

It's a pretty impressive imitation of old Hollywood Black and White, but of course, the aspect ratio is wrong, so that's a bit jarring. Still looking forward to it, though.