WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Even if they can get to the point of improving the artifact-laden quality of the voice (which comes across like over-compressed streaming audio from twenty years ago) to approximate a warmer, more human tone, they still have a long way to go to get a good "performance" out of the AI. This ...

Unless Welles changed his editing methods (or gave someone else the reins), it's hard to imagine he could effectively turn out weekly episodes. Perhaps presenting The Orson Welles Show as a special twice or three times a year would have suited his approach better.

There is only a small group of people (Oja, Keith Baxter, Bob Random, Joseph McBride, Larry Jackson, Norman Lloyd, etc.) who should be allowed to wear the "Directed by Orson Welles" t-shirt.

Does this Orson Welles reading of the story of Noah on The Dick Cavett Show come from his unproduced Two By Two screenplay?... The film Welles says he created the monologue for is Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place (1971). The character in the film played by Tuesday Weld is nicknamed "Noah" and,...

Hasn't this taking dialogue from the radio performance already been done in The Merchant of Venice to fill in gaps? Or have I got the wrong film? Stefan Drössler did, indeed, use an earlier Welles recording of The Merchant of Venice when reconstructing the 1969 film (to replace a lost dialogue trac...

I asked Filip Jan Rymsza at the 2015 Indiana University Welles Symposium if two different aspect ratios would be used for the completed film (this struck me as a real possibility to help distinguish the "film-within-the-film" footage from the party footage) and he replied that they intende...

Roger, what I think you're forgetting is that the screenplay (or at least one of the drafts) ended with Hannaford's voice saying "Cut" at the end of the work-in-progress film screening at the drive in. In the screenplay, that voice is described as coming from "the soundtrack of the p...

I agree that the use of the word "cut" to end both "films" is an intriguing idea, but there is a slight problem with the logic: Hannaford's statements heard just prior to him declaring "cut" are from one of the recorded interviews Otterlake has provided the cineastes, n...

For contrast? He must have known from the outset that the party scenes would be filled with dialogue, so he conceived of Hannaford's film (or what we see of it) as dialogue-free to provide some relief from the barrage of verbiage the rest of Wind contained. There are other reasons as well: Max David...

...In the 1991 documentary, ORSON WELLES: WHAT WENT WRONG, a very frail-looking Cotten is seen at his home, while another actor reads excerpts from the book, as Cotten was apparently unable to speak by that time. Got to get that show uploaded sometime. Cotten's stroke made it very difficult for him...

...Another interesting thing is that, in his autobiography, Cotten barely mentions Ambersons at all, skipping completely over the recutting issue. Maybe it was too painful for him to put into writing... I think it probably had more to do with the scope/length of the autobiography which Cotten keeps...

I feel that kind of settles the issue. If RKO's prestige picture of 1941 was (eventually) double-billed with a Mexican Spitfire comedy then a similar pairing with Ambersons was par for the course.

According to the Greenbriar Picture Shows blog site... http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2018/02/samples-of-how-it-played.html ... "Double feature placement was no more degrading than for any RKO release. Yes, The Magnificent Ambersons did play with Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost in Chi...

Interestingly, as heard in the Welles-Bogdanovich interview tape excerpts included on the Criterion release of Ambersons , Welles states that it was the studio re-editing which turned the film into a series of second acts with an arbitrary ending. Twenty-odd years later, Welles seems to remember Cot...

TCM played "The Trial" in HD a few days ago. It was the Studio Canal master -- with opening titles/credits in French. I DVR'd it and watched about half. I've never seen the Blu Ray, but this transfer looked spectacular! I've seen "The Trial" in 16mm and 35mm, and this was the be...