Don Quijote

[Harvey Chartrand]

Orson's cry for help in his old age certainly explains why "Don Quixote" and "The Other Side of the Wind" were never completed, and why they probably never will be. I quote from Lawrence French's recent posting entitled "Gary Graver on making THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND with Orson Welles":

The (1975 AFI) “Tribute” should have been a turning point. It certainly created for me a notable renewal of interest on the part of the Hollywood Community. During the year that followed, and for several months after that, I received any number of film, theatre and TV offers—all of which I turned down. What I could have accepted (without any conflict in time) comes—according to (L. Arnold ) Weissberger’s documentation—to something more than two million dollars.

... (During this) time lost in simply waiting for the chance to work—time utterly wasted (...) my “market value” both as a performer and filmmaker has slipped to the lowest point in all my career (and) today I find myself not only without income, but without prospects. With my professional credit destroyed, it’s not too easy—in the sixty-second year of my life—to make plans for a fresh start…

One pities Welles as he enters his twilight years in a dire financial predicament, but he should have seen it coming, with his track record of many unfinished projects. Why didn't Orson take the money when the going was good instead of putting his career on hold to finish TOSTW? The genius kept taking on Tinseltown, and it kept beating him down.

[Glenn Anders]

Harvey: I think one important reason for Welles' career and financial failure was that, early on, he got into implacable debt to the IRS. They routinely garnished his substantial wages whenever they could find a source, and he no longer had the Mercury Theater to act as a kind of cover and holding company. It partly explains the number of times [--e.g., MACBETH, TOUCH OF EVIL, etc] he left the United States, abandoning some of his best work to the hands of others.

By the time of DON QUIJOTE and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, not to mention THE DEEP, he was living both hands to mouth, completing very little sustained work in that last long stretch of his life.

The amazing thing is that he seems never to have stopped working at something, never stopped trying.

Glenn

[mido505]

Harvey, you bring up an excellent point.

With Welles's lament to Boushehri in mind, I looked at Welles' entry at IMDB. Although quality of the roles and films vary, Welles was a prolific actor, sometimes accepting 4-5 parts a year, up until 1972, when he chooses to focus all of his attention on TOSOTW. From 1972-1976, the period when Welles' attention was almost exclusively focused on TOSOTW, Welles has 4 credits, 2 of which are voice work. From 1977, when the letter to Boushehri was written, and hope for completion of TOSOTW had completely collapsed, until his death in 1985, Welles' meager credits are confined to voice work and desultory appearances in bottom of the barrel atrocities like Butterfly and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Welles still has his television appearances and his commercial work, but his acting career is, for all intents and purposes, finished. It is a sad picture.

I do not think it is unfair to state that TOSOTW debacle, combined with growing health problems, came close to breaking Welles' indefatigable spirit. Although, as Glenn correctly points out, Welles "never...stopped working at something, never stopped trying," the creative work after 1977 was aimless, desultory. It was just him, and Oja, and Graver, fiddling about. As I wrote in another context, after TOSOTW fell apart:

"There is no grand project. He shoots a little of this; he shoots a little of that; he puts some money into this; and he puts some money into that. I never bought THE OTHER CRITIC WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS'S "fear of completion" theory, because, up until TOSOTW Welles, while often finicky, slow, and obsessive during the editing process, was a man who moved heaven and earth to get films made, his way. After TOSOTW, there seems to be this...dimunition. He's going through the motions, like one of those writers who writes a couple of pages a day, even when inspiration is lacking. I really only see the old Welles coming back, the Welles that made Othello, near the end."

And the old Welles does come back near the end. He becomes energized, inspiration returns, he gets cracking on The Big Brass Ring, The Cradle Will Rock, and King Lear. He contacts Bonnani about finishing up Don Quixote. He gives a thoughtful, delightful, thoroughly Wellesian performance, for his friend Henry Jaglom, in Someone To Love. Unfortunately, by then, it was too late.

[mido505]

From Juan Cobos' Don Quixote article: "In the 1980´s—Welles died in 1985—he returned to Los Angeles with a work print of his Cervantes’ adventure, to do more work on it by inventing a new structure in the editing that he hoped would enable him to show it to the world so it wouldn’t be considered a film maudit."

WHERE IS THAT DAMNED WORK PRINT???????!!!!!!!!!

[mido505]

Here are some interesting quotations from Audrey Stainton's essential Sight and Sound article on the making of Don Quixote:

"I do not claim to know the whole story. I doubt if anyone does. Not one of his collaborators worked on the film from beginning to end: either they gave up after a while, or he dropped them or left them behind when he moved on to a different country. Hardly any of them were allowed to know more than the minimum indispensable to their work and he was often reluctant to tell them even that. Imparting information was against his principles."

"...the facts concerning Welles are hard to ascertain. He had such a mania for secrecy that he resented any attempt to probe into his thoughts or his life or his work; and he delighted in telling stories about himself that were notoriously, sometimes fantastically, untrue."

"Some people say he didn't finish it because he was afraid of completion, but I doubt if Welles was ever afraid of anything. Dissatisfied, yes. It was his perpetual dissatisfaction that was his undoing, his perpetual craving for perfection. 'There's always a better way,' he used to tell another editor, Renzo Lucidi, who was the first to set his hand to the editing of Don Quixote, in 1959. And it was in search of that 'better way', in all his work, that Welles would go on chopping and changing, rewriting and recutting, till he spent more than he or anyone else could afford. Big producers would fire him and sometime dump the work he had done. Small producers crumpled and gave up. But Welles himself was well-nigh heroic in his persistent, fanatical endeavors to go on with Don Quixote year after year after year, when the practical odds against its ever being completed appeared to be rocketing day by day."

"He never began at the beginning of a script and worked through to the end; he went straight to the heart of the drama and gradually developed it outwards from the core. Or lost interest and dropped it almost at once. The curious thing is that he insisted on my using a new carbon for every page that I typed. This small but significant fact leads me to wonder if he was more orderly than he allowed anyone to know. Even when he was finally satisfied with any single page of a script, he would let no one see it. But somewhere, hidden away, he kept an immaculate carbon copy of everything he wrote, a habit in striking disaccord with the legend of a man so untidy that he even lost his own films."

"Yes, he post-synched both parts himself and he did it superbly, giving Don Quixote a distinguished British accent and Sancho Panza a homelier, more American type of speech. I cannot imagine anyone doing it better, nor who but he could have handled the section he had shot without a guide track. Who but he, carrying the script in his head (for it appeared to exist nowhere else) could have caught the pauses and the faltering words that Reiguera was seen silently mouthing on the screen and miraculously matched them with his own powerful rendering of the same lines?"

"Mauro is convinced that it was entirely for reasons of secrecy that Welles refused to follow the customary post-synching procedure by having loops made and screened. He would allow no one to see bits of Don Quixote for any reason whatsoever. He even locked the door of the cutting room when they were working on the editing. For the same reason, he refused to involve outside experts in the execution of opticals. Whether these were speed-ups or slow-downs or any of the devices that modern technology handles with ease, he and Mauro laboriously achieved the required results by hand, removing alternate frames for speed-ups or inserting alternate white frames to slow the pace. Whatever had to be done, they did themselves, so that no one else need enter the enchanted circle."

"Poor Mimmo Salvi [producer of David and Goliath] was no match for Welles, who took the attitude that anyone who dares involve a genius in a piece of trash can expect to be punished for his impudence. And punished Mimmo Salvi was, with a vengeance. I don't think Welles considered David and Goliath a film at all, only a source of finance for Don Quixote, and as such to be pumped dry without a qualm in the name of true creativity."

"Towards the end, he was loathing every moment of what had become a self-imposed ordeal [David and Goliath]. At the same time, he was intent on dragging it out. He adopted all kinds of ruses to slow up the shooting, because the more nights it lasted, the more days he could afford to go on shooting Don Quixote, thanks to Mimmo Salvi's incautious agreement to pay him five million lire per night, without limitation. He would excogitate complicated set-ups that took two hours to prepare, such as a great tower of scaffolding by virtue of which, while David was playing his harp, he and Saul were inexplicably perched high up in the air instead of on the ground. This had everyone baffled, but the whole crew kept a straight face until Paola Welles came breezing in and said, 'What are you doing up there?' and just for once Welles looked like a little boy caught stealing the jam."

"Welles used to hoard close-ups the way a squirrel hoards nuts for the winter. It is a pity he was not equally provident with his money. But a good stock of close-ups was worth more to him than gold, when his actors were gone and he was sitting at the moviola with nothing to play with but his cans of film."

"The image of Welles I retain is of a man devastatingly alone. In his good moods, in company he enjoyed, no one could be wittier or more charming, but what I remember most are his long silences, his impenetrable scowls. I see a solitary man in the back seat of a hired car, driving here and there to collect missing shots one by one..."

"'When I'm finished with it, I'll release it,' he had said on Italian television in 1964. Not 'when I've finished it,'; but 'when I'm finished with it.' He loved playing with it at the moviola, trying it this was around and then that. When was he ever going to stop?"

"...he [Welles] departed, leaving the cut copy of Don Quixote with Mauro. 'I'm entrusting my child to you,' he told him. 'Take good care of him.'"

"More than a year passed before Welles phoned to say he was sending his sixteen-year old daughter Beatrice to collect the cut copy. Mauro met her in the late summer of 1971, in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, where he helped her load Welles' big black suitcase containing the cut copy into the trunk of a silver-grey Austin Mini Minor."

"Mauro assures me it was a complete film lasting one and a half hours. Some parts of it were not post-synched and some parts needed to be revoiced, because Welles had repeatedly changed his mind regarding the editing and inserted different close-ups that were out of synch. There was no music or sound effects. But all the principal photography had been completed... "

"...in September 1974 Welles sent a letter authorizing him [Bonanni] to take the negative into custody. Mauro has been guarding it ever since with loving care, along with the secret of its whereabouts [now at Cinecitta], shouldering the expense of its storage out of his own pocket all these years."

"What is certain is that he was intensely jealous of it, utterly unwilling to let it out of his loving hands. Why should he? It was his. He had made it with his own sweat and blood. He had no commitments to any distributors or investors. There is no law that says a film, once made, must be turned into a public thing that anyone may feel entitled to discuss, any more than there is a law that can compel a father to expose his son to the ribald remarks of an ignorant crowd. He loathed the theorizing of self-important critics, the bombast of 'experts' who think they know it all. What had they to do with his Don Quixote, which was intensely private and personal..."

"As late as June 1985, four months before he died, he was on the phone to Mauro, inviting him to Los Angeles so that they could have some more fun together with the editing. In other words, he was still engrossed in the passionate problem of editing Don Quixote right up to the end of his life."

[Alan Brody]

"Yes, he post-synched both parts himself and he did it superbly, giving Don Quixote a distinguished British accent and Sancho Panza a homelier, more American type of speech.

That's interesting, given that Welles began his film right after staging a production of Moby Dick (the great American novel) in London, and a production of Shakespeare's King Lear in New York. He spent most of his career cross-breeding European and American culture.

"'When I'm finished with it, I'll release it,' he had said on Italian television in 1964. Not 'when I've finished it,'; but 'when I'm finished with it.' He loved playing with it at the moviola, trying it this was around and then that. When was he ever going to stop?"

Sounds like another piece of proof that Welles was addicted to making movies, and that Don Quixote was a private emergency stash that he kept handy just in case he couldn't make a "connection" with the money men for another project. I really don't think he ever had any intention of finishing it, much less releasing it.

[mido505]

Well, I've finally bitten the bullet and sat down and watched Jess Franco's cut of Don Quixote, via the recently released Image DVD. Yes, it is conceptually atrocious, worthless as either an approximation Welles’ vision or as a stand alone interpretation. But the viewing was valuable, in that Don Quijote de Orson Welles does provide several clues helpful in my ongoing attempt to unravel the DQ mystery.

Don Quijote de Orson Welles is basically constructed from four major components:

1. Long sequences obviously edited by Welles, sometimes voiced by him and sometimes voiced by actors brought in by Franco. Featuring Francisco Reiguera as Quixote and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza, these sequences obviously come from the material shot by Welles in Mexico and Italy from 1957-1959. These sequences are, for the most part, of atrocious visual quality.

2. Sequences taken from the footage filmed by Welles in Mexico and Italy from 1957-1959, but which do not appear to have been edited by him. These sequences are also of atrocious visual quality.

3. Sequences taken from the footage filmed by Welles in Spain in 1961, footage in which only Tamiroff appears, as Reiguera, a refugee from Republican Spain, was not allowed in the country (please note that some sources claim that Reiguera was eventually allowed to shoot in Spain). This footage is of surprisingly good visual quality, although these sequences do not appear to have been edited by Welles.

4. Sequences taken from Welles’ documentary for Italian television, Nella terra di Don Chisciotte, a project that has only a tangential relationship to DQ, in that Welles undertook the project primarily to provide funds for his own picture, and to get him into Spain on somebody else’s dime. This footage is used in a dire attempt to structure Don Quijote de Orson Welles, as Oja forbade Franco to use Welles’ original structuring device, the Patty McCormack footage.

Based on this evidence, I suggest the following:

Franco had access to some kind of workprint, as long sequences of Don Quijote de Orson Welles are obviously edited, and occasionally dubbed, by Welles. Whether this was the infamous nearly complete workprint given by editor Mauro Bonanni to Beatrice Welles in 1971, and which has popped up in various collaborators’ recollections up until Welles’ death, is difficult to ascertain. Wellesnet contributor robertdavidmonell, who is working on a book about Franco, and who has interviewed Franco on the subject, confirms that Franco told him that he had access to workprint materials. But Joseph McBride, in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles, reports that a workprint is currently held by the Cinematheque Francais. In that case there are several possibilities to consider:

1. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in Spain when Oja donated all her available footage, was seen by Franco, and still resides somewhere in Spain.
2. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in Spain when Oja donated all her available footage, was seen by Franco, and then somehow ended up at the Cinematheque.
3. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint somehow ended up in France after Welles’ death, and that Franco was working with other workprint materials.
4. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint is still MIA, and that both Franco and the Cinematheque received alternate materials. In that case, what exactly is the Cinematheque “workprint”?

Because all of the Mexican/Italian footage in Don Quijote de Orson Welles is comprised of dupes, Franco likely did not have access to negatives for this material. This jibes with the reports that Bonanni has the negatives for the Mexico/Italy shoot in Rome, which he withheld from the project. Bonanni’s negative material would include the Patty McCormack sequences, filmed in Mexico, which were not used in any form in Franco’s cut, per orders of Oja.

Oja has claimed in interviews that she turned over 40 minutes of fully edited footage to Franco, which pretty much coincides with what we see in Don Quijote de Orson Welles. If Oja’s claim is literally true, then she did not turn over, and likely did not possess, the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint, which is rumored to be a nearly complete 80-90 minute cut, and which, according to Audrey Stainton, included the Patty McCormack footage, at least in 1971. But Oja’s claim could be figuratively true – she possessed and turned over the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint to Franco, forbade him to use the Patty McCormack footage, and left him with only 40 minutes of useable edited footage, which he duped and incorporated into Don Quijote de Orson Welles.

We know from several articles that Franco did have access to 10,000 meters of negative supplied to him by actress Suzanne Cloutier. Based on the quality of the footage in Don Quijote de Orson Welles that is obviously taken from material shot by Welles with Akim Tamiroff in Spain, I suggest that Cloutier possessed the negative for the initial 1961 Spanish shoot, as well as the negatives for material shot during the murky period 1962-1968, when Welles lived in Spain and continued to work on DQ; and for material shot in 1969, when Welles moved back to Italy, finished shooting DQ with the now 81-year old Reiguera, who died that year, and began editing again in earnest with Mauro Bonanni. Franco could have printed rushes off these negatives before editing, explaining the rather decent quality of these sequences in Don Quijote de Orson Welles.

Little if any of the Spanish material included in Don Quijote de Orson Welles appears to have been edited by Welles, leading me to question how much of that stuff was included in any workprint footage that Franco had at his disposal. Given that Franco had possession of negatives from the Spanish shoot, he could have edited to Welles’ template with newly struck rushes; or Franco could have had access to fully edited workprint footage that he chose to disregard, choosing instead to edit from newly struck rushes according to his own design; or there was no available edited material relating to the Spanish shoot, and Franco had to start from scratch. The latter surmise lends credence to the notion that Franco did not have access to the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint, but only to the 40 minutes of footage edited by Welles from the Mexico/Italy footage that Oja says she turned over. The long, if intermittent Spanish shoot, which included footage of the running of the bulls at Pamplona, strikes me as containing vital material; and it seems to me highly unlikely (although not impossible) that the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint would not contain significant sequences derived from it.

Having brooded over this, I have come to the conclusion that Franco did not have access to the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint, although I could be wrong. I think he just had the 40 minutes of edited material that Oja says she handed over. So where is the missing link? In Paris? That is a possibility; I wish someone would look into it. Did Welles so radically reconceive DQ towards the end of his life that he pulled apart his own film to start anew? Possible but, I think, highly unlikely - all available reports are of a nearly finished film that Welles wanted to “tweak”. Did Oja destroy all or part of it? Also possible but, quite frankly, she strikes me as being both too lazy to make the effort; and too respectful of Orson’s genius to take such a drastic step. Forbid, yes; destroy, no. So the mystery continues…

[mido505]

As we all know by now, Oja Kodar forbade Jess Franco from using the Patty McCormack footage in his "reconstruction" of Don Quixote because Orson had once told her that he intended to reshoot the footage with his daughter, Beatrice. Let's look at that claim for a second.

Patty McCormack was twelve years old when she shot her most of her role as Dulcie in Don Quixote for director Orson Welles. This fertile shooting period in Mexico was called to a halt when Welles ran out of funds some time in 1957. Because of Welles' chronic financial problems, shooting did not resume on DQ until 1959, when Welles started up again with Tamiroff and Reiguera in Italy.

Patty McCormack was by then fourteen years old and did not resemble her twelve year old self enough for Welles to complete her sequences. Welles, in his inimitable fashion, hired a double who resembled the twelve year old McCormack in shape and stature, dressed her from a photograph of McCormack taken during the 1957 shoot, and shot a few desultory long shots. Displeased with the result, Welles put the McCormack scenes out of his mind and concentrated on other things. Audrey Stainton claims that Welles, at this time, had no intention of reshooting McCormack’s scenes in full with another actress.

At some later point, as the shooting of DQ dragged on, Welles apparently told Oja Kodar that he wanted to reshoot the Patty McCormack footage with his daughter, Beatrice. Beatrice was born in 1955. She would have been 12, the same age as Patty McCormack when McCormack played Dulcie, in 1967. Welles met Kodar during the filming of The Trial, in 1962; she became his constant companion some time in the mid Sixties. It would make no sense for Welles to want to use an older Beatrice to reshoot those scenes, because the problem was not conceptual, but pragmatic, in that McCormack was too old to finish her part. So Welles must have said something to Oja about reshooting the scenes with Beatrice around 1967, if not earlier (Welles used Beatrice in a small part in Chimes At Midnight in 1964 or so). If Welles did say this to Oja, it seems to have been more as a surmise than as a fait accompli. According to Stainton, “As late as 1970, Giorgio Tonti [Welles’ camera operator] tells me, he started to search for yet another girl who looked like Patty McCormack. Had he found one, it would have been a good excuse to shoot some more.”

Welles never did get around to filming those scenes with Beatrice, and for good reason: he seems to have decided on keeping the McCormack footage, having solved his problem without having to use his daughter. According to Audrey Stainton, the Patty McCormack scenes were in the nearly complete workprint that Welles took possession of in 1971. I quote Stainton:

“Mauro assures me it was a complete film lasting one and a half hours. Some parts of it were not post-synched and some parts needed to be revoiced, because Welles had repeatedly changed his mind regarding the editing and inserted different close-ups that were out of synch. There was no music or sound effects. But all the principal photography had been completed; Francisco Reiguera had finished shooting his part long before he died; and Welles had solved the problem of Dulcinea by a masterly combination of close-ups of Patty McCormack and long or half-concealed shots of a girl resembling her whom he had found in Spain.”

I would hate to think that much of this nonsense regarding DQ resulted from a musing comment that Orson Welles made to his girlfriend over forty years ago.

[Roger Ryan]

I think it's also important to point out that Welles stated in a letter to Tamiroff circa 1961 (according to the article written by Juan-Lopez Cobos) that the Patty McCormack footage was shot at a time (1957) when DON QUIXOTE was conceived as a TV show or special and that the tone of the footage lent itself more to that medium (half-hour, episodic?) than to a feature film. He claimed in the letter that this is the reason he was considering eliminating the footage.

I'm fairly certain the workprint material held by the Cinematheque Francais is what was screened at the Locarno retrospective in 2005. Approx. 30 to 40 minutes of 35mm footage was shown during the presentation; all of it in excellent quality, but very little with audio. Included were the 1957 scenes of McCormack discussing the Quixote legend with Welles on the grounds of a hotel and in a moving horse-drawn carriage. As I recall, only McCormack's lines were dubbed in; Welles never got around to dubbing his own lines. While this footage looked decent, I would agree with Welles' opinion that it looked more like something you'd see in a TV show (as in AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES) than in a feature film.

Other scenes shown included Quixote battling a herd of sheep who comically leap over his prostrate body, a dubbed scene of Panza talking with Quixote who is imprisoned in a large cage, Panza giving Quixote a bath in a tub on the roof of a highrise in modern Spain (an ironic sign advertising "Don Quixote Beer" is visible on an adjacent rooftop) and Quixote and Panza riding down a modern Spainish city street and stopping to look in the window of an electronics store (where they see a television showing a news story about the duo). The majority of the footage shown seemed to come from the material shot in Spain when only Tamiroff was available. There was quite a bit of Panza cavorting with young children and women (much of this apparently caught "on-the-fly" during a festival since many of the bystanders look directly into the camera) and I seem to remember the bit where Tamiroff (as Panza) was actually running with the bulls. One stunning moment that stayed with me showed Panza looking into the back of an auto and locking eyes with Welles himself who glared at him before the car pulled away. A subsequent shot filmed through the rear window showed Panza growing smaller in the distance as the car continued onward.

[Skylark]

Here's a clip of Welles talking about Don Quijote, and other things in French at Cannes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao5OahSp ... re=related

[The Night Man]

I think it's also important to point out that Welles stated in a letter to Tamiroff circa 1961... that the Patty McCormack footage was shot at a time (1957) when DON QUIXOTE was conceived as a TV show or special and that the tone of the footage lent itself more to that medium... than to a feature film. He claimed in the letter that this is the reason he was considering eliminating the footage.

Which raises a question: Has Bonanni ever stated clearly whether or not the the McCormack footage was part of the "nearly complete workprint that Welles took possession of in 1971"?

So much has been said now about DQ and its convoluted history that I can't remember!

[mido505]

Roger:

Thank you for the memories of Locarno. That sent me to perusing the old Locarno Wrap Up thread where Jonathan Rosenbaum posted the following:

"It appears that Bonnani is the only one who possesses the Patty McCormack footage. The Filmoteca Espanole in Madrid has ten hours apart from this, however, and I have an appointment to look at all of this in November...As far as I know, the only other significant Quixote footage is some edited silent material held by the French Cinematheque, some of which was seen in Locarno."

So it does not look like the Cinematheque holds anything vital, such as the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint.

Interestingly, when Rosenbaum finally got to examine the footage held by the Filmoteca Espanole in Madrid (ostensibly all the material donated by Oja), he found that it consisted primarily of footage from Welles' Italian TV documentary, Nella Terra Di Don Chisiotte, along with a few bits and pieces of DQ proper that ended up in Franco's cut. No footage relating to the initial shoot in Mexico in 1957 was found in that 10 hours of footage. The director of the Filmoteca told Rosenbaum that its negative material for DQ (which I suggest are the negatives donated by Suzanne Cloutier consisting of material shot by Welles in Spain in 1961 and 1962-1968) is now housed in Barcelona, and that Bonanni's negatives (likely for the Mexico/Italy shoots from 1957-1959) are located in Rome at Cinecitta.

Note for the curious: Director Costa Gravas put together a forty minute assembly of DQ from material given to him by Oja that was shown at Cannes in 1986. All reports state that the footage shown in that assembly was in pretty good shape. Esteve Riambau, in his essential article Don Quixote: The Adventures and Misadventures of an Essay on Spain, reports that “the scenes included in these forty minutes do not belong to the three main blocks that the director had filmed in Mexico.”

Regarding the Tamiroff letter, it does look as if Welles was questioning the appropriateness of the Patty McCormack footage as early as 1961. Here is the quotation:

"Reviewing it over and over during the editing, I’ve made a very surprising discovery: the long hotel material with little Dulcie is important to the movie on a superficial level, and in themselves these scenes are very good, pleasing and simple. But they were also written and filmed before the full dimension of the work revealed itself. It must also be considered that this material was going to be shown in two or three TV shows of half an hour. I’m sorry to say, that me thinking of TV is reflected in the scenes of Dulcie, in that they speak personally to a great distant public, those soap and detergent consumers that inevitably get targeted by TV. The anachronism of Don Quixote and Sancho in modern times has to be justified and even apologize for itself again and again…"

It looks to me as if Welles was concerned that the Patty McCormack scenes were too expository, that they explained and justified too much to a mass audience of assumed average intelligence and limited attention span. As Don Quixote grew in scope and conception, and became a theatrical venture, Welles might have grown to believe that such explanation and justification was unnecessary.

Against the varying reports of Welles dissatisfaction with the Patty McCormack footage we must stack Audrey Stainton's insistence that Welles was unhappy with these scenes only in that he was unable to complete them properly because Ms. McCormack quite rightly grew up over the course filming. Editor Mauro Bonanni has also insisted that Welles never intended to trash the McCormack scenes.

Night Man has asked if "Bonanni ever stated clearly whether or not the McCormack footage was part of the 'nearly complete workprint that Welles took possession of in 1971'?"

The answer, to my mind, is "yes", but there is some ambiguity. Here is Stainton's quotation:

“Mauro assures me it was a complete film lasting one and a half hours. Some parts of it were not post-synched and some parts needed to be revoiced, because Welles had repeatedly changed his mind regarding the editing and inserted different close-ups that were out of synch. There was no music or sound effects. But all the principal photography had been completed; Francisco Reiguera had finished shooting his part long before he died; and Welles had solved the problem of Dulcinea by a masterly combination of close-ups of Patty McCormack and long or half-concealed shots of a girl resembling her whom he had found in Spain.”

Since Welles was notoriously secretive with DQ, rarely letting anyone other than his editors view the footage, I am assuming that Stainton is getting her information here from Bonanni. He described to Stainton ("Mauro assures me") what was in the workprint, telling her that Welles had "solved the problem of Dulcinea".

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that "when I suggested to Bonanni in 1992 that perhaps, given Welles' penchant for revisions, there were not one but several Quixotes to choose from, he angrily replied that if Welles had truly decided to delete all the McCormack footage, he would have surely thrown it out (as, indeed, he did discard some of the earliest Quixote footage he shot...)"

On a final enigmatic note Jonathan Rosenbaum reports that Welles told Dominique Antoine, the French coproducer of TOSOTW that “he could finish Don Quixote only if he ever decided NOT to go back to Spain, --apparently because each return visit suggested further revisions.”

[Jedediah Leland]

This is a fascinating thread, and I'd like to pick up the question of what happened to this workprint Welles worked on.

So other posters have established:

-Welles had a practically complete edit of Don Quixote he cut with Mauro Bonanni in 1969-70. This print has 2 sets of markings, one by Welles (in code!) and one by Bonanni, recording the sequence.
-He sent Beatrice Welles to collect it in Rome in 1971.
-He appears to have received that copy - he told Rosenbaum at their 1972 lunch that he had practically completed it, implying he was in possession of it in some form.
-Jonathan Braun worked with Welles as an editor between c.1975 and 1982, and refers to their working on re-cutting this old workprint, with yellowing tape peeling off.
-In 1984 he was editing it again, and in the last 3-4 months of his life in 1985, he re-established contact with both Suzanne Cloutier and Mauro Bonnani, both of whom held (negative?) materials, lasting about 10 minutes and 30 minutes respectively.

So far, so good.

Then Welles dies, and mido505 suggests the following possibilities:

1. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in Spain when Oja donated all her available footage, was seen by Franco, and still resides somewhere in Spain.
2. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in Spain when Oja donated all her available footage, was seen by Franco, and then somehow ended up at the [Paris] Cinematheque.
3. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint somehow ended up in France after Welles’ death, and that Franco was working with other workprint materials.
4. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint is still MIA, and that both Franco and the Cinematheque received alternate materials. In that case, what exactly is the Cinematheque “workprint”?

Other posters have suggested the following as well:

5. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in Spain when Oja donated all her available footage, was seen by Franco, and was dismembered by him when making "his" version (which he saw as an interpretation). If so, the materials probably still survive.
6. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in the possession of Gary Graver, who apparently saw/worked on it in Welles's lifetime (he certainly did that small bit of second-unit photography in colour in 1972).
7. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint ended up in the possession of Beatrice Welles, and is held by her today.

In addition, I'd like to suggest the following:

8. That the Bonanni/Beatrice workprint was dismembered by Welles himself over the years, as he took out the best bits to integrate into a new documentary.

[5] and [8] are consistent with one another.

[6] is highly unlikely - not just because (as others have mentioned) GG is unlikely to have kept this a secret to his grave when he was screening Welles footage all over the place, but also because it would have surely surfaced after his death.

Regarding [7], it remains a (slim) possibility. Yes, Welles was working on DQ at his Los Angeles house (not Las Vegas) at the time of his death, and so Oja Kodar is far more likely to have had the print. But the fact remains that Oja Kodar never had a full workprint (or if she had done so, Costa Gavras would never have just presented 35 minutes of jumpy-but-excellent material from "her" print, and Jesus Franco would never have needed to do as much editing as he did for the 1992 release). That puts [1] and [2] out of the question.

As others have mentioned, Oja was out of the country when Welles died, allowing Paola and/or Beatrice to take the print. What no-one's mentioned on this thread so far is that Paola Mori was in the movie - so she may have had a sentimental attachment to this film, in a way she didn't about other Welles projects. Likewise, Beatrice had been slated to appear at one stage, so may have had a sentimental attachment to the project. If (as some have speculated) Beatrice has the workprint, then the rights impasse, with Oja Kodar successfully holding all intellectual property of Welles's unfinished films - may be what's keeping her from doing something with the footage. If there's a complete workprint, Beatrice has it.

But I think [8] is most likely. 15 years is an awfully long time to be tinkering with something, and as Welles's conception changed from Don Quixote in the modern age to a documentary on modern Spain clashing with the old Spain, he'd have needed to discard material. Welles's films were all designed to be under 2 hours, and the Bonanni/Beatrice print was 90-120 minutes, depending on the source. (It might have been both, at different times.)

My guess is that sometime in the late 1970s/early 1980s Welles discarded most of the film (including the Patty McCormack episodes, which had been in the Bonanni edit in 1970), leaving him with about 35 minutes of his favourite scenes, which he could insert as picaresque digressions/counterpoints in an essay-film on Spain, unfilmed at the time of his death. These scenes were tightly edited, and included about 10 minutes of the provisional voiceover he'd done c.1969-70. But they were self-contained episodes. Oja Kodar then inherited these fragments, and it's these which Costa Gavras pieced together for his 35 minute presentation in 1986.

I've never seen the 1986 presentation, but from the descriptions I've read, it looks like everything in it went into the Franco monstrosity, albeit with further editing. (When Quixote's in the cage, most of the scene was obviously cut by Welles, since it has his dubbing, but a few non-matching shots are spliced in by Franco, and during these the dubbing switches to someone else for a few sentences).

Conclusion? Depressingly, as Welles changed his conception of Don Quixote, he must have junked at least two-thirds of the 1970 workprint (just as he had junked most of the reels of Don Quixote Goes to the Moon that was mostly finished circa 1967, when he thought the concept became out of date with the moon landings - see Berthomé and Thomas on this.) What survived were fragments, which are almost all included in the Franco atrosity (albeit with some further editing), while Bonanni has at least some of the McCormack material from the 1970 edit, but even he's unsure he could ever reconstruct it all. Barring BW having been hoarding this for all these years, I think this one's gone for good.

[atcolomb]

Sad news about seeing Welles's cut of Don Quixote but you never know. Sometimes cans of lost film have surfaced somewhere and lets hope Welles's cut does survive somwhere in someone's basement or bank vault.

[mido505]

Jedediah:

Thank you for reviving this thread. As you can plainly see, it has been a long time since I lasted posted, mainly because I never came up with any new information to take me any further in my speculations. Your post, however, has inspired me to reread this thread, and think anew, for your theory that perhaps Orson himself cut up his work print may be on the money. Here are a few observations.

DQ was shot in several location/time period blocs: 1) in Mexico and Italy from 1957-1959 w/ Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff; in Spain in 1961 w/ Tamiroff only; intermittently in Spain from 1962-1968; and a bit more in Italy in 1969 w/ Reiguera just before he died.

The negatives for the 1957-1959 period are held by editor Mauro Bonanni at Cinecitta in Rome. No one but Bonanni has had access to this negative material, which is why the footage from this period that has surfaced is of atrocious visual quality.

The rest of the negatives were held by actress Susan Cloutier, and were being shipped to Welles at the time of his death. Cloutier probably also held and turned over the negatives for Nella terra di Don Chisciotte, the documentary on Spain that Welles shot for Italian television, some of which Jess Franco used as the "framing device" for his cut of DQ. Gaining control over these negatives after Welles's death, Oja Kodar turned them over to the Spanish government. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, the Nella terra footage is now stored at the Filmeteca Espanole in Madrid, and the footage of the Spanish shoot(s) is in Barcelona.

Oja turned over roughly 30-40 minutes of cut footage to Jess Franco, along with everything else in her possession. Based on my viewing of Franco's cut I have determined that this cut footage was from the Mexico/Italian 1957-1959 period, as it is of atrocious visual quality. Franco would not have been able to print fresh takes of this stuff, because Bonanni held the negative in Rome.

All the good quality footage in Franco's version is obviously from the various Spanish shoots, 1961 and 1962-68; in possession of the negative, he would have been able to print fresh takes. Interestingly, none of this footage looks like it was edited by Welles. Franco had to have done it, without a template. Without a work print.

Now here is where things get interesting, and where I failed to put two and two together previously.

The Costa Gravas version shown at Cannes in 1986 was pretty much comprised of the same 30-40 minutes of edited footage that Franco had at his disposal, which makes sense, as Oja turned everything she had over to Franco and his producer when the deal was made with the Spanish government. However, Esteve Riambau has noted that none of the earliest footage shot in Mexico shows up in the Costa Gravas cut, probably because Oja forbade the use of the Patty MacCormack sequences.

The version shown at Locarno in 2005 was likely the "workprint" held by the Cinematheque Francais, according to Roger Ryan. This 30-40 minutes of footage overlaps some of the Gravas and Franco footage, but contains some of the missing Mexican scenes, specifically the footage related to Welles telling the DQ story to Patty McCormack, in a courtyard, and in a traveling coach. That version also contains footage from the various Spanish shoots, which unlike the footage in the Franco version, seems to have been edited by Welles.

None of these versions contain the marvelous, fully edited sequence that surfaced on YouTube, set in a crowded movie theater, w/ Quixote trying to "save" the onscreen damsel in distress. Along with the negatives described above, Mauro Bonanni seems to have this in his possession, along with fully edited workprint footage of all the "forbidden" Patty McCormack scenes.

So perhaps Welles did break his own work print up into blocks, when he decided to refashion DQ in the 80's. One block was the 30-40 minutes of edited footage Franco got (and that Costa Gravas used). Another block was the 30-40 minutes that ended up at the Cinematheque Francais, that Franco never saw (how did they get this? Everything was supposed to go to Spain. Graver?). The last block ended up with Bonanni in Italy; horrified at what Oja and Franco were doing with DQ, and concerned that Oja would destroy them, Bonanni may have absconded with the edited Patty McCormack scenes when he high-tailed it back to Italy.

Let's get a few others to weigh in.