"Fountain of Youth" on YouTube!!!

[Glenn Anders]

The Fountain of Youth, indeed, gang: Young Jay Leno, Fran Dresher, and a rejuvenated Orson Welles. If Tim McIntire wasn't Welles' son, he was playing Alan Freed as if he were Welles; the hand in the pocket, the slightly avuncular shamble, the cigar, the throwaway conversational style with that great voice! [Perhaps, the idea is that Alan Freed wanted to be Orson Welles, too, but I never saw much evidence of that during his rumpled performances in Cleveland. And believe me, I would have noticed.]

Well done. Well done.

Cruel Carl, Aleister Crowley and Todd Baesen are doing cartwheels with our new hero, Colby Buzzell, down in the cellar.

Glenn

[mido505]

Glenn:

Is your doppelganger posting again?

[Glenn Anders]

You may have a point, mido. According to Cruel Carl, whenever I'm at The Ha-Ra Club with Baesen, and play the Jazz at the Movies Band's arrangement of "Key Largo," I am my own doppelganger. He threatens to pull the plug on the juke box.

Once, he did pull the plug, and ordered a dozen customers out into the chilly night until I would leave. [I didn't, and he relented.] Carl doesn't want me to get too close to the secrets he and Crowley keep in the cellar.

Meanwhile, Larry French will testify to you that I am not Todd Baesen.

Glenn

[Tony]

I am Glenn Anders.

[mido505]

I am Spartacus!

[Glenn Anders]

NO!

Tony is George Macready.

I'm Spartacus!

[The Night Man]

According to Cruel Carl, whenever I'm at The Ha-Ra Club with Baesen, and play the Jazz at the Movies Band's arrangement of "Key Largo," I am my own doppelganger. He threatens to pull the plug on the juke box.

Sounds to me like you may be getting the Casper Gutman treatment at the Ha-Ra. Maybe you should try the Zam-Zam.

Just a thought.

[Glenn Anders]

You are right, Night Man.

I spent many an evening with Cruel Carl's mentor, Bruno of Lebanon and Belize, and then, later, after Bruno's passing, kindly Big Bob Clark, whom I first met at The Gold Cane.

The Zam-Zam, in the Upper Haight, is a bit of a trek for me now, I'm afraid. And Todd Baesen likes to stay close to the cheap Gimlets, when he makes a Wellesnet triumphal visit. The Upper Tenderloin is more his style. He and Larry French appeal to Carl. I'm NOT sure that Big Bob would feel the same rapport, though his juke box would be as intoxicating to the Wellesneters, I'm sure.

Perhaps, with your help, I can lure them all out of that Infernal Cellar, and out to the beautiful Art Deco Zam-Zam!

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

You might want to look at a little article I adapted from a wellesnet. org post on the above subject, however, over in The Red Room, where I now have an Author's Page:

http://www.redroom.com/articlestory/anc ... -aleister-

That's some pretty wigged-out stuff, Glenn, but I like it. The Red Room makes me think of the short story by H.G. Wells which Orson Welles read as part of series of classics for that Japanese company a couple of years before his death. I thought the relationship between Mormonism and Freemasonry was supposed to be the subject of Dan Brown's new novel, but that was supposed to out years ago. Maybe some of Howard Hughes's bodyguards got to him.

That's also not the first time I've seen CK linked with Rosicrucianism. That connection is also mentioned in the Illuminatus books of Robert Anton Wilson. Here's an excerpt:

"(The Illuminati) dominate the motion picture industry too. They had a hand in the making of hundreds of movies, the best known of which are Gunga Din and Citizen Kane. Those two movies are especially full of Illuminati references, symbols, code messages, and subliminal propaganda. "Rosebud", for instance, is their code name for the oldest Illuminati symbol, the so-called Rosy-Cross.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for RosyCross, which takes us back towards Crowley:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_Cross

This rosy-cross website also contains an interesting reference to Rosebud:

http://www.goldenrosycross.org.au/glossary_frame.htm

'Naturally, alot of people are going to ask, "What's a ham actor think he's doing as an expert on international affairs?" (My) participation in public affairs will prove that international matters are not as mysterious as Rosicrucianism or something.'
Orson Welles, January 1945

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Alan, these studies all do begin to sound like mumbo-jumbo, but a lot of intelligent people have delved into them. I don't think that it would be too far-fetched to posit that Welles may have at least incorporated a few of the ideas and images into his work.

I found the bracketing of CITIZEN KANE and GUNGA DIN interesting because they were both RKO pictures, bits of stock footage from GUNGA DIN are included in "The Newsreel" sequence of CITIZEN KANE, and Bernard Herrmann's score "quotes" some of Alfred Newman's music for GUNGA DIN. [The IMDb notes Newman as having provided "stock music (uncredited)" for . . . KANE.] And so, perhaps it is not so strange that the two films might also have shared symbolism.

Something more may turn up on this subject.

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

I don't think it's far-fetched either. I think Welles was fascinated by all kinds of strange phenomena, including conspiracy theories, voodoo and other forms of the occult, eastern philosophy, prophecy, goddesses, paganism and magick. I think quite a few of these musings found their way into his work, although he never admitted it or explained why. As with so much of Welles's work, all we can do is speculate.

[Tony]

Didn't welles say something about the moon in that Q@A session he filmed for Filming The Trial?

[Alan Brody]

Yes, something about having to look at a crescent moon with the purest gaze or you'll have bad luck. Welles apparently told someone that he had looked at one with an impure gaze and that's why he had such bad luck. I assume he was being tongue-in-cheek, but one never knows.

From this excerpt from the second in the series of OW Almanac columns that Robert and Larry French are posting, it seems we can also add astrology to the list of strange things Welles was fascinated by:

Our staff astrologer announces (and is willing to bet ten to one on it) that the President’s activities in foreign relations are accentuated and that the stars indicate an important agreement with our Allies at the Big Three meeting.

I noticed there was no astrological reference for the third column. I wonder if Welles's editor said something to him.

[Alan Brody]

Sorry Peter. I Should've had that first cup of coffee before posting. Collier's Youth From Vienna is well worth reading. It can be found in a good compilation called Fancies and Goodnights.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, and anyone who has read the 50 stories which make up Fancies and Goodnights knows that, although they often have similar themes and twist endings, they do not cloy. Almost every one of them has crisp invention, and well-drawn characters. In theme, for instance, "The Chaser" resembles "Youth from Vienna," on which FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH is based, but its mordant study of the curdling of hot passion is quite different in style and development. These are not formula stories.

Had Welles been able to procure the Television rights in order to dramatize all of them them, plus a Network and producer with some guts, these Fancies and Goodnights would have kept him happily turning out little gems for two years or more. He might well have done for Television what The Mercury Theater on the Air and The Campbell Theater did for Radio: create a new benchmark for the medium.

But that's another one of those Wellsian "might have been's." Almost the premise for a good John Collier short story.

Glenn