Simon Callow 2015 BFI lecture on OW's theatre career

[Wellesnet]

[tadao]

Thanks for the link, I saw this in person last year and enjoyed it, will be good to revisit it as a recording since my memory is often like swiss cheese...

I wasn't aware that Mr Callow was interviewed last month as part the Edinburgh International Book Festival about his third volume, I was in town at the time and would have gone if I'd known. The BBC have put it online for a limited period (until Sept 17th 2016), although access may be geo-locked like some of their television programmes. I haven't seen it yet but flicked through the subtitles, a lot of it is a career synopsis for a general audience with an anecdote or two about each production, but it covers films and later periods in Welles's theatrical career in Europe that the BFI lecture didn't extend to.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p044ww0w

[tadao]

I watched both of Mr Callow's presentation videos on the train to while away the journey back to London. I thought the Book Festival interview very good, and certainly better than I anticipated from looking ober the transcript. His enthusiasm for the subject really comes through and I was particularly pleased with the autobiographical explanation near the start that as a younger man riding the crest of success and writing his first volume he was unforgiving of Young Orson's temper and behaviour, but as both the biographer and subject have aged and Callow has gone through career tribulations of his own he finds himself more empathetic! I'd felt that despite the thorough research and admiration of (Welles's) work that his (Callow's) apparent dislike of Welles's character got in the way at times in the first volume, so it was very pleasing to hear it addressed so graciously.

The time spent on Moby Dick Rehearsed and its cast (Patrick McGoohan, Kenneth Williams, Peter Sallis and Joan Plowright, still solid household names to Brits of my age and older) is well worth the visit, as is Around The World which is omitted entirely in the BFI event. Also interesting to hear Mr Callow's thoughts on the feature films, outside the brief of the BFI engagement, including high praise for Touch of Evil and some good contextual commentary on Ambersons completing photography on the day of the Pearl Harbor attacks and the change of national mood making a wistful look at a pre-industrial past less popular when the nation was gearing up production for wartime use; I got a new feeling of continuity between this and It's All True with Welles taking the war footing as a cue to exceed his good neighbor mandate from Nelson Rockefeller following the US entry into the war; having thought of that policy as primarily concerned with maintaining export markets, I really hadn't considered the risk of Latin American nations actively or passively allying with Axis powers before.

On a lighter tone, new to me also was that Judy Holliday had been a telephone girl at The Mercury, I'll bear that in mind next time I rewatch Bells Are Ringing!

Ending with an engaging ten minute reading from volume three on Moby-Dick Rehearsed that almost certainly offered more bang-per-buck than the mooted audience Q+A would have done, I'm glad the Edinburgh democracy decided that way! (The Scots have had a recent history of making better electoral choices than the English...). Reminding me of the book-on-tape version of volume one which accompanied me to and from the office for several days straight on at least two replays, I'd be very pleased if Mr Callow would make audiobook recordings of volumes two and three! I could happily listen to him read the phone directory, so to hear him on a subject of strong interest is a double positive. (I even like his affected and contrived pronunciations, I remembered CASS-ette from the recording of Road to Xanadu, Las Vey-GASS gave me a chuckle here!)


On second viewing of the BFI lecture, I reaffirmed my feeling that the less metered pace affords rich atmosphere and detail on the periods and projects covered, at the expense of the necessitating only a whistlestop tour of the second half of Welles's theatrical career. The material about Too Much Johnson and Callow's joy at interpreting the camerawork as a precursor to Kane is great fun.

With the comments about the stage and screen versions of Chimes, I'd forgotten that Keith Baxter was in attendance that evening ready to do his own introduction for that screening later. Ending on a downer with Rhinoceros which Callow with some justification considers insignificant made me glad to have had the opportunity to see the frustrating episode covered at (somewhat speculative and perhaps not always authentic) length in Orson's Shadow at the nearby Southwark Playhouse a month earlier.

So I'd say both recordings are worth listening to, having the visuals is a bonus, the BFI lecture first probably, although bear in mind that the BBC's recording of the Edinburgh session will expire quite soon!

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks for bringing that Edinburgh lecture to our attention, Tadao. Yes, it is geo-locked, at least in the U.S., but maybe someone will put it on Youtube sometime, like the BFI lecture. Callow is always entertaining to listen to, even when he''s hemming and hawing a bit.

[tadao]

Sorry to hear it wasn't available in North America. The video's expired at the BBC site now. Pending future availability, I hope it's legit to post a couple of quotations, they should qualify as 'fair use' in the context of review, and are more representative than my paraphrasing. Copyright in the text of course is not mine, presumably it belongs to Mr Callow and/or Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Interviewer:
How has your attitude to him kind of developed and changed over the period you've been working on the book?

Callow:
Well, a lot because, of course, as I've been writing about him, he's been getting older and so have I. So I suppose I'm probably rather more compassionate towards Welles than I was when I started out. I mean, I've always found Welles deeply fascinating - who wouldn't? What an extraordinary phenomenon he is altogether.
But at the beginning I was inclined to be very cross with him because he treated people badly in many cases and because he was, um...um...very... well, frankly, mendacious about himself. He made an awful lot of things up about himself, and I was a little bit in the attitude of going, "Tut tut." Well, he was a very young man and he behaved with the excesses of a very brilliant young man. And I wasn't a young man exactly but I was a YOUNGER man and so, as it were, the subject and the author were a little bit at a standoff. As the book went on and I learned more and more about Welles, my own life changed and I experienced reverses and disappointments and all this kind of stuff... Cos I wrote the first book when I was at the height of a crest of a wave, which absolutely... er...um... Which was sheer and brilliant good luck which went on right up until my mid-40s, and then life became more complicated and then I started having failures and disasters and all the rest of it, which improves your character enormously, I find. As it did with Welles, to some extent. Although also not necessarily...
Anyway, by the time I came to write this volume, which goes from 1947 to 1965, an absolutely crucial, incredibly rich but incredibly frustrating period in his life, I began to feel huge compassion for a man who was basically at the mercy of his temperament.
And that's what I have more and more understood, is that Welles's character, Welles's personality, was perhaps his greatest gift from the gods, this extraordinary, big, generous personality, this great raconteur, this fascinating and complicated man. All of that is what got him ahead to begin with and then it began to be his undoing.
And I began to understand the dynamics in that, how these things happen to a person within a person's life and I suppose what happened - maybe this is what happened - is that as I wrote more and more, it became less absolutely and exclusively about Orson Welles and more, inevitably, about... human life, about, you know, character, personality, what happens when you have extraordinary and extravagant gifts but without the - what shall one say? - psychological or even perhaps moral ability to quite handle them as you might best. He wasn't, it has to be said, a very good guardian of his own gifts.

[tonyw]

Thank you for posting this. As they say about a President who sometimes grows according to the demands of the position, Callow definitely grew and developed as a biographer. His latest volume is much better than the first for reasons Callow states.