How did Welles achieve deep focus...

[Christopher]

I almost forgot: Happy Birthday, George Orson!

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Christopher: Such matters as birth dates, time of birth (7 a.m.) and birth weight are a matter of record. But if you want a specific reference to check, David Thomson in his biography of Welles, Rosebud, begins Chapter 4, "Lovely Boy," with this sentence: "He weighed ten pounds at birth, and began to grow." [p. 16]

While we are at it, under my nom de plume of Macresarf1, I have just published (late) at Epinions.com an homage in honor of Welles' birthday, listing every review I have written on Welles' films, or on matters which may appertain in some interesting way to Welles:

http://www.epinions.com/content_3896680580

Enjoy, my friends.

Glenn

[Christopher]

Dear Glenn,

I thought perhaps you had access to a copy of Orson Welles's birth certificate. David Thomson, in my view, is the least reliable of the Wellesian biographers, and the quote from ROSEBUD implies that Welles was gargantuan at birth and continued to grow to even greater proportions, which strikes me as yet another example of the malicious and unfounded claims Thomson makes throughout ROSEBUD. I don't want to make too much of this, but neither do I want the image of Orson Welles weighing ten pounds at birth to be incorporated into his legend, since I doubt that it is true.

I'd just like to add here how much I have enjoyed reading your posts on various threads since you are a fund of information on a great many topics related to Welles and the era in which he worked.

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Christopher: Thank you for the praise.

As for Thomson, you must remember that Rosebud is a "modern" biography, a "creative" biography, like the one of Ronald Reagan: Dutch. Thomson has a thesis, a kind of love/hate/ what might have been, thesis. You and I may prefer the older scholarship, in which the researcher never intruded him/herself into the work, but on the basic facts, I've found, Thomson is pretty good.

It's the interpretations that may make our hair rise.

I will root around and get you further confirmation. You must remember in those far off days when there were lots of miscarriages and still births, a baby coming to term tended to be well nourished and healthy, and had a higher birth weight than the average today. Ten pounds was large but not that large. I remember a woman in my town who said that she was 12 pounds at birth, and she was a tiny thing.

I'll return, when I have time, with another source.

Glenn

[blunted by community]

thomson's book left me with a bitter taste, as has carringer's work, and of course, kael and higham.

i think it was rosenbaum that said thomson didn't do one bit of original research for his book but got all his facts from newspaper articles, which are full of 'stories' rather than fact.

the other book that came out about the time thomson's did, ROAD TO XANADU didn't turn my screws either.

there are so many distingushed writers that covered welles, why bother with these mean spirited BS books.

[blunted by community]

glenn, you crabbed up our thread. we were talking technical crapolla, and you throw in a 10 pound baby boy. couldn't you remove your ten pound baby boy and start a new thread?

[Christopher]

I find the best sources of information about Welles are books written by people who either knew him personally, worked with him at various times throughout his life, or had extensive one-on-one interviews witih him (although I would exempt Barbara Lemming from the later category because she was too google-eyed and infatuated with Welles to see through his confabulations and, in effect, wrote a biography of Orson The Great Confabulator). The sources I go to when I have questions about Welles are John Houseman's memoirs, particularly UNFINISHED BUSINESS, both of Micheal MacLiammoir's books, ALL FOR HECUBA and PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE (which captures better than anything I know the experience of working for Welles on location), and finally Frank Brady's CITIZEN WELLES, by far the most objective of the books mentioned thus far. Brady had no ax to grind and even he makes some mistakes, but overall, he has written an earnest, balanced and well-researched book. Both Houseman and MacLiammoir saw Welles "through a glass darkly" but they still provide a fascinating portrait of him, provided you allow for Houseman's ambivalence, envy and hurt feelings and MacLliammoir's disgust with Welles's appetite for fame, self-promotion, and so on. Of course, there are many other fine books written by film scholars about the Welles opus, but I've picked these three as the most reliable sources on Welles's life and personality.

[Christopher]

Blunted, I apologize for getting "off thread" with my last post, but I wanted to share with y'all the books about Welles that I find worth reading.

[blunted by community]

ah, screw the thread, chris, glenn already threw in the ten pound baby. once the 10 pound baby is thrown in, the thread goes to hell in a vacum cleaner.

chris, i feel the same way about the brady book. i loved PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE, didn't dig ALL FOR HECUBA a lot, but have read it.

didn't know of houseman's UNFINISHED BUSINESS, i have A RUN THROUGH, which is great, and i feel not real far off the mark.

i remember reading somewhere that leaming never met welles till she was at the end of her book and the parts that she wrote after meeting welles were all the modern day welles stuff, which is the only reason to read the book really. the modern day welles stuff is interesting, and revealing. the historical stuff is pretty edgeless.

other books worth reading are FOCUS ON OW, FOCUS ON CK, the bazin book, the maurice bessy book, the bret wood book is a must, it's filled with analysis you don't find in other books. wood has also written some informative articles on shanghai, and stranger. the mcbride book on welles' films, have not read the mcbride book on welles yet. stephen heath wrote a bitching 3 part article on TOUCH OF EVIL, and wrote quite a bit about welles in his book QUESTIONS OF CINEMA, the harlan lebo CK book, david bordwell wrote prodigously about welles, and on a lot of other classic films we love in his holy grail, FILM ART (which should be the bible for all serious film maniacs), JAMES NAREMORE'S magic world of orson welles i like a lot.

undecided about the michael andreg book

AND NOW, THIS NEXT AWARD, "the worse of the no ax to grind books, just damn boring." AND THE WINNERS ARE, "peter cowie's orson welles, and the book that has the tantalizing title, something about orson welles documentary style in F-FOR-FAKE! tantalizing title, totally flacid within the covers.

and of course, in the DUMPER, PORK FACED LIAR CATEGORY, WE HAVE, "carringer, higham, kael, and thomson."

AND A MARVEL GLOSSING OVER THINGS USING NON SPECIFIC WRITING - simon callows' THE road to xanadu.

[Glenn Anders]

Naremore and Brady are the best, would you not agree? Maybe Rosenbaum will write one someday.

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Some baby, Blunted!

Peace.

Glenn

[blunted by community]

agree, brady and naremore at top of the heap.

[Christopher]

Blunted, I have the Harlan Lebo book and the excellent James Naremore book. I'd like to check out the Bret Wood and Maurice Bressy books you mentioned. Could you please post their titles?

John Houseman's UNFINISHED BUSINESS, put out in 1989 by Applause Theatre Book Publishers, is a compilation of three earlier memoirs by Houseman: RUN-THROUGH, FRONT AND CENTER and FINAL DRESS. It also contains additional material throughout. It covers Houseman's association with Welles during their theater days in New York, then moves to Hollywood until their working relationship dissolved. I don't know if it's still in print, but if it is, you may well find it interesting.

ALL FOR HECUBA is as mannered and high-flown as MacLiammoir was himself -- not nearly as witty or as much fun to read as PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE -- but it offers a revealing portrait of Welles as a sixteen year-old arriving in Dublin and working for six months in MacLiammoir's and Hilton Edwards' Gate Theatre, the only professional training Welles ever got in the legitimate theater. It is also interesting because of the influence Mac and Edwards had on Welles's acting style and theatrical ideas, and when you read about the productions at the Gate, you can see parallels with Welles's own theatrical work for the WPA Federal Theater Project and his own Mercury Theater.

Finally, an anecdote about Lemming who wanted to interview someone closely connected to Welles for her biography-in-progress. That person asked Welles if it would be all right with him to grant the interview. "By all means," he boomed, according to my source, "Barbara Lemming is a delightful woman. Tell her anything you want about me...provided it isn't the truth!"

[blunted by community]

will have to check out houseman book.

bret wood, ORSON WELLES - if you can find it it will cost you 50 bucks. go to amazon.com, do a search for the book, write down isbn#. go to local public library, ask for inter library loan slip, fill it out, write isbn#, it will be there in 2 weeks.

don't let the counter librarian bull you around. they are facists and would rather stand at counter and not perform the service they are getting paid for.

do same with bessy book, also called ORSON WELLES. the bret wood book is quite good. it's a resource book and offers a lot of original views on welles' work.

i love PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE. reading it makes me want to drink wine.

[Jeff Wilson]

The Bret Wood book is fully titled Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, and it is well worth looking at. It is almost 15 years old in terms of using it as a resource, though, meaning that the last 15 years' worth of work done on Welles isn't in there.