TOO MUCH JOHNSON Found!

[Roger Ryan]

Well, it's still unfinished (of course), but the long-lost film footage Welles shot and partially edited for his 1938 stage play TOO MUCH JOHNSON has been found in Italy. Here is a New York Times article describing the find (with film stills!)...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/movie ... wanted=all

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks Roger, fantastic news, can't wait to see it!

[A Sled in Flames]

Really excited about this news. Sorry though, I didn't realize there was a thread already and made another one in "Welles's Films in General."

Gives me hope that an uncut Ambersons could be discovered yet...

[Le Chiffre]

Absolutely. Who would have thought they would find a complete METROPOLIS as well? Welles said the JOHNSON footage was destroyed in a fire. Obviously he lied about that (not that I'm complaining). What else did he lie about?

[Jay]

I'm very excited by this. I love it when these lost projects surface.

Welles said the JOHNSON footage was destroyed in a fire. Obviously he lied about that (not that I'm complaining). What else did he lie about?

Plenty, I'm sure.

[A Sled in Flames]

Absolutely. Who would have thought they would find a complete METROPOLIS as well?

Oh God that's right! I'd forgotten about the miracle of Metropolis. Just goes to show that the world's a really big place... and seeing as how Welles traveled all over it (*fingers-crossed*), there's a great deal of Welles material laying around in odd places. Scattered Rosebuds if you will.

I'd wager that Welles would be surprised even if he was still alive today. He was shocked and excited by the discovery of all of TOE's additional scenes...

[Wellesnet]

43-second clip of Welles directing TOO MUCH JOHNSON:

http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserv ... home-movie

[A Sled in Flames]

Interesting... jeez he looks young.

[Le Chiffre]

Great to see this - as I'm not sure he himself appears in the TMJ footage - and amazing that it even exists. He does look young, probably just turned 23. One thing you can see in this, as well as in the HEARTS OF AGE short, is how bursting with energy and enthusiasm the young Welles was.

[Roger Ryan]

I can't believe I've never seen this home movie footage before - was it just recently uploaded to the internet? To think that we'll eventually get to see forty minutes of the actual TOO MUCH JOHNSON footage is very exciting.

I can't think of a logical reason for why Welles would lie about his belief that the footage had been destroyed. He could have easily dismissed the idea that the film had survived at all after the failure of the stage play. But he seemed quite excited to have rediscovered the footage himself decades later when he talked of giving the reels to Joseph Cotten as a birthday present. Since he mentioned wanting to do some additional editing of the footage, perhaps he had the reels shipped to some facility in Italy then forgot about it. After the house fire, he may have thought the reels never left the home in Madrid and presumed they were destroyed. I have a hard time imagining there was more than one copy of the footage (given the budget restraints the Mercury was always under) or that the footage would end up in Europe without Welles having his hands on it at some point.

[Jeff Wilson]

A more likely explanation (rather than Welles simply lying) comes from a Frank Brady article about Too Much Johnson from 1978:

Some thirty years later, a print of Too Much Johnson turned up in Welles's villa outside Madrid. Welles states: "I can't remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was. I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it, as though it had only been through a projector once or twice before. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present. I then went off to act in a picture, possibly The Kremlin Letter, and rented my house to Robert Shaw. Unfortunately, while I was gone, there was a fire, and almost everything I had was lost. Supposedly there are some of my belongings still intact, so it is possible, although highly unlikely, that the film still exists."

[mido505]

Hasn't that whole story about the fire in the Madrid villa been debunked?

[Le Chiffre]

I don't know about debunked, but I believe ONE MAN BAND called it into question, saying there was no documented evidence to support it.

Thanks Jeff, I'd forgotten about that excellent Frank Brady article. I'm glad to see that Welles cited Harold Lloyd's SAFETY LAST as a big influence on the film. I had the pleasure of seeing that a couple of months ago on the big screen in a brand new digital restoration that I was very impressed with. You can see that influence in some of the TMJ stills.

[mido505]

Thanks, Mike. I thought I had seen that "debunking" in ONE MAN BAND, but I could not quite remember the source.

Great article, Jeff, thanks!

[tonyw]

Eisenstein was also interested in silent comedy as I saw from the GLUMOV'S DIARY material shown at the Eisenstein Centenary Retrospective in Manchester during. Yes, Harold Lloyd was a real master of comedy.