Don Quijote

[RayKelly]

As you say, this is no proof that Rosalba Tonti took the workprint to Paris, it's proof that some material held by Bonanni went to Paris. It's fascinating proof that such material was sent, but it's not inconsistent with Mauro Bonanni also having met Beatrice in 1971 to hand over the workprint.

I don't believe he handed the workprint over to Beatrice in 1971. I think Bonanni is confused with the passage of time. I have a hard time believing Welles used his 15 or 16 year old daughter as courier. Earlier this year, she was telling me she did not learn to drive until the family moved to the U.S.

The question about the workprint was addressed during the online chat we did on July 9th:

Guest_93 - In a recent interview, Mauro Bonnani claims he gave a completed workprint of “Don Quixote” to you in Paris in 1969. In an interview you did last year, you said that this never happened. Do you think Bonnani is making that story up, or is he merely misremembering?

Beatrice Welles - No, I met with him in 1991 in Rome for the first time about trying to pull together Don Quixote. I really tried. I could not find anybody even remotely interested.

[Jedediah Leland]

Apologies for the delayed reply, mido505

But now I think [Bonnani] does mean [what was missing was] A sequence - the final sequence that Welles was having so much trouble with after the moon landing. The fact that Bonanni then doubles back and says the work print would "at least indicate the order of the sequences" lends credence to this view.

Let me be clear - in no sense is there a version of DQ that is even remotely finished, in the accepted sense of the term. There is little dubbing, no sound, no music, and the status of the script/black book/random typed script pages is ambiguous at best. But despite all the prattle about different version of DQ, the closest approximation we have to one of these versions is the Bonanni work print. Printing new positive footage from the Bonanni and (possibly the) Cloutier negatives, and editing that footage to mirror the Bonanni work print is the BEST possible outcome we could hope for after Welles's death. Given what we know, why this hasn't been done is a scandal, and a fucking shame.

I completely agree. We can quibble over what's meant by a "finished" version. But if we can find that workprint, it sounds like it consists of ten reels, each under-length, with ten sequences with (sometimes out of sync) sound, adding up to 80 minutes, that are marked in a way that Bonanni (and hopefully others) could decipher. There is one missing sequence, which I assume would be the final or penultimate sequence. The film is meant to finish on Sancho watching the "topical event" (whether it's the moon landing, Watergate hearings, or somesuch), astonished, in the shop. That's a sequence that's actually in the middle of the Franco atrocity, with stock footage of a rocket clearly inserted by Franco. So what's possible - if that workprint surfaces, and if someone can gain access to the Bonnani negative and other negatives - is editing a good-quality, synced mirror of the Welles 1970 workprint.

I agree it would be impossible to reconstruct what Welles had in mind in the 50s, 60s or 80s, the footage doesn't exist. The 1970 workprint is another matter, though.

I also doubt we could do much about the missing score, unless we can find specific notes about the score that Welles wanted. All we seem to know is that Lavagnino was due to write it. It's not like TOSOTW, where there are detailed surviving director's notes about the kind of score that would have been commissioned, and where Michel Legrand (who Welles was certainly considering approaching for the TOSOTW score) is still alive and still composing (although with him being 83, TOSOTW's producers/restorers had better get a move on in approaching Legrand to write a score!). Instead, with DQ we'd just have pure conjecture, and it wouldn't be a Welles-commissioned score. And the music added to the Franco atrocity was so awful that it detracted from the film rather than adding to it. Better to leave a workprint-based edit free of music.

Anyway, mido505 hits the nail on the head in surmising that the three-government-investors-deal including the Spanish government backing DQ is linked to the three-government-investors-deal including the French government backing King Lear in 1985. That would also explain why Welles was so crestfallen (according to Oja Kodar, at Welles's 1986 wake) when King Lear fell through; that he had a deal to release both films in some form. That would also be consistent with his earlier approach to DQ, twinning it with firstly The Deep, and then TOSOTW, in saying that he'd only release it when he had a commercial hit first. King Lear was never likely to be a commercial hit, but 1975, 1977 and 1982 all seem to mark serious deteriorations in Welles's physical health, and so my guess is that after 1982, with TOSOTW unlikely to come out of limbo, Welles may have changed his ambitions for a commercial "pathfinder" film ahead of DQ to just releasing any film at all before DQ. King Lear would, at least, probably garner good reviews, and had the potential to restore his critical reputation if not his commercial one.

have a hard time believing Welles used his 15 or 16 year old daughter as courier. Earlier this year, she was telling me she did not learn to drive until the family moved to the U.S.

I don't have a hard time believing that he entrusted his daughter for such an errand; Welles always made a great play of telling people close to him how much he trusted them, and who to trust better than his own daughter, who had seen him disappearing off to the editing suite to work on this film for her whole life?

You do make a good point about her not driving, which I've already addressed above (the minimum driving age in Italy was 18), but there's no reason why she couldn't have hired a driver. I know plenty of households in Europe organising a removal, where an adolescent is present while one tranche of things is moved by removal men; it's no different to Welles sending his daughter off to pick up the materials in '71, and her hiring a driver for the heavy lifting work. Furthermore, it's not as if Bonnani doesn't recognise the oddity himself - he actively mentions in his account that she was about fifteen at the time. For me, this is all consistent with someone who remembers the chain of events well. And Bonnani's detailed, specific recollections of the workprint which he hasn't seen since 1970 (consistent with Braun's 1980s recollection of it) seem to be perfectly confirmed by the available facts, so I'm not inclined to doubt him on such details.

Bonnani would have been about 25 in 1971, and she'd have been about 15. I don't doubt her integrity for a second when she says she doesn't remember meeting him before 1991; but how many of us remember everything that happened to us aged 15? It doesn't sound like it was a long meeting, or as if they sat down and chatted at great length for a soul-searching conversation. According to Giorgini, they met up as complete strangers, each brandishing a torn half of a letter written by Welles, and once they'd identified each other, he transferred the workprint to her. The whole meeting may lasted only a few minutes, especially since Bonnani still doesn't speak English to this day, and I don't know how good her Italian was at 15. Again, her account comes down to her not remembering any such meeting, his comes down to all these tiny little extraordinary details like the torn letter - I'm convinced it happened. And as she's said herself, she lived a "gypsy-like" childhood full of the most extraordinary adventures with her father, I'll bet it wasn't the only (or the strangest) errand she ever ran for him.

The thing is, even if we believe the alternative Ciro Giorgini version of events that they met in Paris rather than Rome, Giorgini's source would have been Bonnani, whom he was close to. I'm inclined to believe the version straight from the horse's mouth (i.e. Bonnani), with his specifying precisely which square they met on, and what the make of the car was, rather than Giorgini's second-hand description of "Paris". Paris is undoubtedly central to this saga, not least as a repository of a lot of DQ material - I think we can all agree on that much.

Beatrice Welles's role in the DQ work print saga, real or alleged, is a red herring.

Whether or not it was her who handled the workprint as an intermediary, we are fairly sure that the workprint that was mostly finished in Rome in March 1970 found its way (via Paris circa 1973, and then being picked up from Paris in 1982) to Los Angeles for Welles to work on in 1984-5. That's where the trail runs cold.

I think most of us assume that it should have been in his LA house when he died in October 1985, and that it should logically have been among the things that Oja eventually donated to Munich in 1994. There are other possibilities, of course.
- Did he totally destroy it? (Highly unlikely.)
- Did he pick it apart, ahead of the planned re-edits? (Similarly unlikely - Braun recounts encouraging Welles to finish it, as something so close to a releaseable form, and one gets the sense that if Welles was going to do something so drastic, his then-editor would at least have had SOME idea at the time.)
- Did he send it somewhere else, in preparation for the imminently-planned re-edit? (That would explain why it never turned up, but it would surely be out of character for him to have sent it off to a third party, even if we accept the workprint was left in Paris in 1973-82. And who would he send it to?)
- Did Oja Kodar pick it up after his death, and keep it herself? (It's possible, given how deeply personal the film was for him; but I'd be amazed if she did - she doesn't strike me as someone who has the facilities to properly store such film for decades on end.)
- Did Oja Kodar pick it up after his death and donate it to the Munich Film Museum? (This would in many ways be the most plausible outcome; only they haven't given the faintest sign that this ever happened, or that they have such a complete workprint. Are they hoarding it until the end of the Bonnani litigation results in the negative being turned over to them?)
- Did someone else take the workprint from Welles's house after his death, but before Kodar got back from Yugoslavia? (Incredibly far-fetched, but possible. It would explain why she's apparently donated everything she found to Munich, and yet it isn't there. The main reason I think this is unlikely is that Welles would have had hundreds/thousands of film cans at home, many unmarked or incorrectly marked. Who would know what reels to take?)
- Did Welles hide the workprint so well that even now, it's still in its original hiding place? (He was so secretive in having the reels under lock and key, I wouldn't be surprised if they were in a hiding place. But surely they'd have surfaced by now? Oja Kodar has been though his stuff, the Munich Film Museum has sifted through the reels they've now had for 20 years, and the house has changed hands on the market several times now. SOMEONE would have come across it.)

So many questions!

I'm going to see Stefan Droessler introducing DQ footage tonight, so I'll try and see if I can ask about what he knows of the materials, and what it was that Oja gave to the Munich Filmmuseum.

[nickleschichoney]

Droessler wrote an essay on Welles's unfinished films for the Locarno Film Festival's edition of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND's screenplay. It's in French, but I translated it with Google translate (and corrected it based on what French I know):

"There is a workprint of Don Quixote which the Cinémathèque preserved in 1996 but which has sound only in a few sections, occasionally experiments on the footage with freeze-frames or slow motion here and there, and has uneven image quality. We have also found in laboratories parts of negatives that were saved and developed at great expense, as well as sound recordings of Welles that were not yet attached to the image. There are also the original negatives, held by the editor Mauro Bonnanni, as well as scenes shot in Mexico. After trying to access Bonnani’s documents in vain, Jess Franco, Welles’s former assistant director on Falstaff, attempted to reconstruct the film, very quickly, starting from the Cinémathèque Française’s workprint. The result is disappointing: In trying to give order to the work, numerous scenes from the workprint were displaced, arbitrary cuts were made, and, to fill it out, it was completed with CGI and newly-filmed sequences. The often-catastrophic quality of the image, voice changes in the post-synchronized soundtrack, film music composed by Daniel White, Jess Franco's own composer, and soundtrack not inspired by Welles’s own, destroys the many good qualities that are still found in the workprint.

"Would anyone else have been better able to assemble this material? One may doubt this. For here we are faced with a problem that concerns all Welles's projects: When a film’s preproduction, production, or post-production lingered beyond a certain time, Welles would revisit and constantly change his great ideas. Sometimes groups of scenes would be moved, dialogue given to other characters, or the whole concept behind the work overturned. For Don Quixote, he worked more than thirty years on the project. At first it was a half-hour TV movie, then a feature film for the cinema, and later a very personal essay film about Spain. There are several hundred pages of script which, however, contain only the different scenes, without any common thread. Welles, who expected to make the film's personal commentary, often filmed it without sound. The most beautiful and most impressive scene, in which Don Quixote, sitting in a movie theater, rushes to the screen, lance in hand, to intervene in the action, was removed from the working copy along with all those scenes where we can see Patty McCormack. A reconstruction of the film seems impossible, because it has always been an unfinished idea. The best solution would probably be to produce a documentary that would integrate the scenes and groups of scenes preserved and thus present the history of the project." -- pp. 84-86.

A screenshot of the script pages Droessler talks about is included in SEARCHING FOR ORSON (37:52): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95_Ymk7Rgbo

As for the Cloutier synopsis at the UofM, it's both frustrating and interesting at the same time. It's a synopsis for a screenplay yet-to-be-written by Cloutier. I kid you not, it's a synopsis for a movie about Oja Kodar, Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, and Peter Ustinov trying to reconstruct DON QUIXOTE after Welles's death! And it's not a documentary; it's a QUIXOTE-style film in its own right about these three going on an expedition throughout Spain to retrace Welles's steps, and along the way, identifying with the characters of the Cervantes book!

Cloutier closes the two-page synopsis by saying, "This can be a very intimate, moving and inspiring film with enormous universal and cultural appeal."

Wow.

[nickleschichoney]

Reading through this thread, I can't help but wonder if the almost-complete workprint Bonanni worked on between 1969-70 is just lost.

[nickleschichoney]

From Jedediah Leland:

According to Giorgini, they met up as complete strangers, each brandishing a torn half of a letter written by Welles, and once they'd identified each other, he transferred the workprint to her.

Wouldn't that encounter make it more likely that she'd remember the meeting and thus Bonanni, though? That doesn't seem like the sort of meeting you'd forget!

[RayKelly]

Let me toss this out for discussion: Someone, not Beatrice, picked up the footage for Orson and Girogini was simply mistaken on the ID. It is possible Welles received the Don Quixote footage and -- quite likely -- it was stolen, along with Too Much Johnson. (Worth noting Too Much Johnson, Merchant of Venice and outtakes of Portrait of Gina have all turned up in Pordenone, hmmm.)
The following is taken from the section on Too Much Johnson from Joe McBride's recent (superb) book, Two Cheers for Hollywood:

In the summer of 2016 I was able to obtain further information from Beatrice Welles, the director’s youngest daughter, who lived with her parents in the Aravaca home in her youth. I received the information through the kind intercession of Ray Kelly, the journalist who runs the invaluable website Wellesnet.com. Beatrice’s account shed more light on the fire and how Too Much Johnson wound up in the Rome warehouse, and she offered her speculation on how it wound up elsewhere. She confirmed that the fire was confined to her father’s study and that his cinematic workshop in the sotano (basement) was untouched. That windowless 5,000-foot space, containing film reels and Moviolas, as well as trunks of scripts and papers, was cool and safe. The film footage stored there included materials from several projects, including Chimes at Midnight, Don Quixote, and Too Much Johnson.
In 1973, Beatrice, then a teenager, was sent by her parents from their home in England to report on their belongings in suburban Madrid. She found the films in very good condition and prepared a rough inventory. Then the cans of film were sent by Welles’s longtime secretary Ann Rogers, along with the scripts, papers, and furniture, into storage in Rome, under the safekeeping of the family of his Italian wife, Paola Mori.
In late 1978 or early 1979, Beatrice’s cousin Gaia was asked to arrange for the shipment of everything in storage to the Welleses’ home in Las Vegas. But when Gaia inspected all the cans of film, she found far less footage than Beatrice had inventoried. The remaining footage was so badly decomposed that it started distintegrating in Gaia’s hands. She burst into tears and ordered it all discarded. As Kelly summarized what Beatrice told him, “Beatrice believes that much of her father’s film footage, including Too Much Johnson, was stolen while it was stored in Rome during that five-year period and the remainder decomposed.”
Just how Too Much Johnson wound up in Pordenone will probably remain unclear.

[nickleschichoney]

Maybe Quixote is in Pordenone...

[RayKelly]

Maybe Quixote is in Pordenone...

That's my guess.
Recently, I spoke with someone working on a Welles book who verified Beatrice's account that trunks of Wellesian footage took a walk some 45 years ago.

[nickleschichoney]

Well, at least the negatives are around, as is script material for individual scenes. Even if some archive (Filmmuseum Muenchen?) doesn't piece the scenes together the way Welles supposedly decided on in 1969, I would think that a workable film could emerge from the available footage.

Maybe it could be released with a documentary about Welles, Quixote, and Spain called WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FINISH DON QUIXOTE? -- after the "essay film" Welles tossed around. I mean, everyone knows there's a lot of material on Welles's relationship with Spain.

BTW, Welles did shoot footage of himself attending a bullfight in the 70s -- and it's in color. It can be seen at 30:47 of Oja Kodar's ONE MAN BAND: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7p7TWR1oxk. Could this have been meant for WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FINISH DON QUIXOTE?

[nickleschichoney]

I have to make a correction.

Droessler wrote an essay on Welles's unfinished films for the Locarno Film Festival's edition of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND's screenplay. It's in French, but I translated it with Google translate (and corrected it based on what French I know)

This was an ignorant statement of mine. It's a French translation of a German-language article by Droessler found in THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES.