Don Quijote

[mido505]

Roger, thank you for that lengthy remembrance/clarification. I found it intellectually stimulating and very helpful.

A scene where Sancho Panza finds Quixote in a cage felt the most complete of anything shown, but even this scene had Welles himself dubbing all of the dialog. Is this something he would have wanted for a final product or was this still at an intermediate stage?

As far as I can tell, Welles planned to dub all the dialogue of the Don and Sancho himself, having decided on the "voices" he would use as far back as the initial Mexican shoot. Interestingly, Welles made this choice for artistic rather than economic reasons. According to Mauro Bonanni, as told to Audrey Stainton, Welles, after shooting a sequence, would record the dialogue "wild", into a tape recorder, without looking at the footage. In doing this, he established a rhythm that the editor would then follow in cutting the scene, adapting the footage to the dialogue as Welles conceived it. Once the scene was cut, Welles would view it and record a guide track that was more in accord with the actor's lip movements. Welles would then listen to the guide track, and then dub from memory until the dialogue was perfectly in synch.

Welles, of course, used variations on this method on all of his movies as far back as Ambersons (including, I was surprised to learn, the climax of Lady From Shanghai).

I reread Stainton this week end, along with Esteve Riambau's excellent essay on DQ included in THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES. They are our best sources for DQ info available in English; both mention the work print, and both consider it the great "missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle" that is DQ. Stainton, who published her essay in 1988, described the footage shown at Cannes a year or so earlier (the Costa Gavras edit) as "scraps" in "pitiable condition", and that footage is superior to Franco's stuff!

Stainton does point out that the work print collected by Beatrice from Rome in 1970 was not completely post-synched, because Welles had changed some of the editing. But most of it was. Yet very little of the DQ footage made publicly available includes Welles's dubbing. That's a little strange, isn't it?

Stainton acknowledges and describes Welles's maniacal secrecy regarding DQ during his lifetime, but feels that, after his death, his secret "belongs to the world". I suspect someone feels differently.

[Roger Ryan]

In reviewing Ray Kelly's 2008 Wellesnet article on THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES presentation at Harvard, I noticed this line in reference to DON QUIXOTE...

The Munich Film Museum is in possession of an 80-minute silent work print.

So is this the same work print that was previously in the possession of the French Cinematheque? The 80 minute length seems longer than the collection of scenes shown in Locarno in 2005 (although I really have no idea how much time passed during the screening).

[RayKelly]

@Roger,
I took notes throughout the Harvard presentation and spoke (briefly) with Stefan Droessler at the conclusion. I may have saved the notebook. If I can locate it, there might be more details on the workprint. I will dig through the boxes in the basement tonight.

[mido505]

I noticed that reference too, Roger. In the book version of THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES, Droessler writes that "SCENES FROM DON QUIXOTE contains all the sound segments and some silent sequences of a work print of DON QUIXOTE, which was preserved by the Cinematheque Francaise in 1996".

Therefore, I suspect the Cinematheque workprint and the workprint mentioned by RayKelly are one and the same. Whether this is the fabled "missing" workprint we have been discussing remains to be seen, although the 80 minute run time sounds about right.

Whether the workprint now resides in Munich, or remains in Paris is also a question. Let's see what Ray uncovers.

[halfaorson]

Hi everybody,
I'm the one who started this post. I am very impressed by the fact that it is still active. My name is Sigismondo Sciortino, I told you all about the tragedy of Don Quixote, the impossibility of resolving this situation. Amazing how time has passed. Yet the situation is still the same. The film in possession of Bonanni is still abandoned, nobody does anything. Since 2006, I have knocked on hundreds of doors, waiting for a suggestion, help never came. Not finding other solutions I wrote and published a book here in Italy, which I presented in Rome last March. I feel that it is a useless attempt ...perhaps useless. But I feel I have to give back to Orson, to Mauro, to this whole story. I know what this movie really means, as you'll know if one day you will have the chance to see it, which I wish with all my heart. In a sense, I am another victim of this never-ending, wonderful story.

take care you all

[GlennandersFraser]

I can't believe that one of you guys did not notice the article by Jonathan Zakarin in yesterday's THE WRAP, but perhaps you are tired of the subject (or it's just August vacation time), but Zackarin reports that Terry Gilliam, looking very like our man Welles, is quoted as saying that his DON QUIXOTE movie is on the road again. He says that he has financing and plans to start shooting after Christmas.

Guilliam and others connected to the project report that the script has been considerably revised, bringing the story up to date.

Sound familiar?

Welles is not mentioned in the article proper, but a number of commentators invoke his name. Someone else here no doubt knows more about this matter.

Glenn Anders

[Le Chiffre]

I'm not a huge Gilliam fan, but I respect him as a genuine maverick. Here's hoping he gets it finished this time.

From Wiki:
"Gilliam has attempted unsuccessfully to relaunch production several times since 2005. He restarted preliminary work in 2008 with Robert Duvall as Quixote. Depp was still attached to play Grisoni, but because of his tight schedule he had to leave the project and was replaced by Ewan McGregor. In 2010, Gilliam announced that the funding had collapsed."

BTW, I skimmed through this thread again last night, which I believe is the longest Wellesnet thread. It's both funny and depressing, and In the end it's pretty hard to think that anything other then a documentary could be made from all the DQ footage. Now would be the time.

[GlennandersFraser]

Indeed, Le Chiffre, today is the time to make the move. I rather think that Wellsian fans, who have heard about about THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND since childhood are growing weary. Any chance of renewed financial possibilities for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND raises hope in their hearts, Let's speculate that they are correct!

It struck me that Terry Guilliam might have used Welles' script, and brought TOSOTW into possibility.

Glenn Anders

[Roger Ryan]

I suspect the successful Monty Python reunion shows in London helped give Gilliam a little steam to relaunch his QUIXOTE film. One thing I noticed when this was announced last week was that Gilliam now says the story will take place exclusively in modern times (there was a time travel aspect to his original script) and will incorporate a meta-commentary on the difficulties of making a film. This made me think of Welles' joke in later years when he said his film would be called "When Are You Going To Finish 'Don Quixote'?"

[Jedediah Leland]

I've just found that earlier this year, there was an absolutely fascinating three-part interview with Italian Welles expert Ciro Giorgini (Co-Director of the Rosabella documentary).

The third part is all about Quixote, and is bursting with fascinating material. It's all in Italian (which I don't speak), but viewing it in Google Chrome with the auto-translate feature switched on, it's easy enough to follow:

http://quinlan.it/2014/01/02/intervista ... rte-terza/

Apologies for any misreadings arising from the translation, but among the most interesting points, he seems to say:

*that he's tried to bring Oja Kodar and Mauro Bonanni together around the same table to reconcile their differences, even inviting them to dinner - the last time was in 2008, but they couldn't reach agreement;

*that the Kodar/Bonanni lawsuit is being fought in Italy (not Spain or the USA, as previously speculated in this thread) with Bonanni having lost the first two rounds/appeals, and that if he loses the third, he will have to hand over his materials, which will most likely then go to the Munich Film Museum;

*that Bonanni is sitting on 25,000 metres of Quixote negative, contrary to misleading/untrue reports that he only has a handful of material;

*and he confirms that the much-praised 1986 Costa-Gavras 45-minute edit of Quixote shown at Cannes that year was based on Welles's workprint - the very same workprint which Beatrice picked up from Bonanni in Rome in 1971 and which Bonanni insists was a more-or-less-complete film just in need of post-synching and music/sound effects - and that that is indeed the workprint held by the Paris Cinematheque, and that Jesus Franco did not have access to that workprint when he assembled his footage. (Bonanni's assertion that a workprint was near-complete in 1971 is, of course, no guarantee that it remained near-complete by the time of Welles's death, since Welles's editor Jonathan Braun remembers re-cutting Quixote in the early 80s - though Braun went on to say it "was close" to being in a releasable form - see his interview in Orson Welles Remembered, p. 188.) He also suggests that the Cinematheque has just been sitting on the footage since 1986, and hasn't done anything with it, other than let several scholars see it.

[Jedediah Leland]

If the above is all true, I can see why the court case drags on, with the stakes being very high for Oja Kodar.

If a near-complete work print still exists in Paris, and the negative can be recovered by the Munich Film Museum, then it would not be beyond the realms of possibility to use the negative to create a fully restored print that echoes the work print. It might still be a little rough in places with the sound synchronisation and the lack of music (Welles approached Lavagnino for a score in early 1970, but one was never written), but it would be "genuine" Welles, largely free of re-edits and re-mixing.

This is clearly years off from resolution, but there is hope...

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks for that info, Jedediah. Sitting on it since 1986? That's sad. I can remember reading how the Costa-Gavras cut had really wetted everyone's appetite for more, until the Franco assemblage a few years later practically ruined the film's mystique overnight. Of course, to be fair, Costa-Gavras was working with better materials.

[Jedediah Leland]

I'm not sure I'd see it as sad. It's a missed opportunity, certainly, and it's sad that the Franco abomination has had a wider release while the Welles cut remains locked away.

But personally, I'm thrilled to know that a print of a more-or-less fully edited Welles film (admittedly, still without sound synchronisation/soundtrack) is tucked away in a safe place - the Cinémathèque Française really is one of the best possible places to look after the material for future generations. Also, the reality is that however painful the decades of litigation may have been, the original DQ negative is in a safe place - allegedly a vault in the Cinecittà, rather than the "leaky garage" rumoured at the start of this thread - and so the elements are in place for a meaningful release in the future.

That doesn't mean I'm not as impatient as everyone else!

The real tragedy seems to me to be the way that Oja Kodar and Mauro Bonanni have fallen out so badly and so irreparably over this. Both were confidantes of Welles's over different aspects of the film. I completely understand Bonanni's loyalty to "his" Don Quixote, as worked on full-time by him and Welles for over a year at the start of his career, and I completely understand Kodar's loyalty to "her" Don Quixote, as the man she lived with for nearly twenty years described the further changes he intended to make. Both have been acting out of the highest motives, understandably unwilling to compromise on a vision they see as the "true" DQ, faithful to the Orson Welles they knew. That's a shame, because as Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, if they could have got Bonanni to have been hired to work as Editor on the material, to decode the markings he left on the workprint 45 years ago, he would have almost certainly been the right person to finish off & clean up the synchronisation, ready to release it with minimal changes/re-editing to the existing cut (even if part of the film would consequently be silent - although I'm sure a DVD release could add a "reconstructed" soundtrack as a second audio track). Sadly, that won't happen - which is a tremendous waste of Bonanni's unique insight into the material.

In the eyes of the Italian courts, Bonanni is in the wrong, and will most likely have to hand over his negatives sooner or later. They'll most likely end up in the Munich Film Museum. Again, that's not a bad thing, in terms of being in a place where they can be properly cared for.

My main worry is that Oja Kodar might insist on going through with the editing out of the Patty McCormack material. As well as containing (reportedly) some of the best sequences in the film, it seems to me misguided to take a complete cut prepared by Welles in 1970, and to remove the things he wanted to remove in 1984/5 without the existence of the material he was going to substitute it with. At the moment, at least we have the film Welles intended to make in 1970.

(It is, of course, quite possible that her position has changed since 1991-2, when this issue was what caused her breach with Bonanni, and maybe she'd rather see the release of work that Welles later decided to change, compared to no release at all; on the other hand, if she and Bonanni didn't manage to patch up their differences over dinner in 2008, it's likely that this is still a sticking point.)

The main problem with the workprint is that no-one really knows what order the reels come in - Welles reportedly kept that a secret, even from his editors - and so in the absence of a narration, it's pure guesswork. Still, in the DVD age, this needn't necessarily be a problem - the ten or so reels could be released as ten or so separate chunks on the same DVD, with it being up to the viewer how they watch them. That way, Welles's original editing is left intact, and no assumptions are made that second-guess his intentions.

I have another big concern: wading through the Franco atrocity, it appears that Franco did indeed have access to something of the Welles workprint, since there are chunks of Welles narration/voiceover in the 1992 re-edit, including in some scenes which were reportedly also in the Costa-Gavras edit (like where Quixote takes a bath on a rooftop). Did Franco cut up the workprint? There are certainly some scenes (like where Quixote is in a cage) where Welles's editing & narration has had further footage spliced in, which is apparent from the different grade of film stock, and a short mid-scene switch to modern voiceovers. (This is confirmed by Lawrence French's 1994 interview with Oja Kodar, in which she complains about Franco having further edited Welles's scenes that had already been fully edited.) I can only hope that that Franco made his edits to a copy of the workprint, not the workprint itself.

For that matter, I hope Costa-Gavras left the workprint intact, too. His assemblage of footage, variously described as 35/40/45 minutes, was described as being in snippets with white frames between the individual scenes that had been edited by Welles. That's consistent with his assemblage having been a "best of" selection of scenes taken from the ten reels making up the workprint, without necessarily knowing which order those scenes were in, or having a soundtrack to guide him on the narrative. But then, Costa-Gavras is a professional, and Jesus Franco, erm, wasn't.

[Jedediah Leland]

I recently had another look at the online memoir of Andre Vicente Gomez, the Spanish Producer who worked with Welles c.1972-4, until they fell out around March/April 1974 (he was accused by Welles, Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich and Gary Graver of embezzling money from the TOSOTW shoot).

The memoir is at http://www.lolafilms.com/en-us/who-we-a ... elles.aspx and it notes that when they worked together,

we signed a three-year agreement of mutual exclusivity through which we expressed our intention to complete all of Orson's unfinished projects. We worked together in 1972 and 1973.

This would have included DQ. Interestingly, he elaborates that amongst the various projects,

we had a meeting with Henri Langlois - the mythical director of the French Cinematheque (Film Library) - to retrieve part of the negative of "Don Quijote" and, above all, we restarted and almost finished shooting "The Other Side of the Wind."

We've established that the workprint Welles worked on in Rome with Bonanni in 1969-70 was almost certainly the same workprint which Beatrice Welles picked up c. 1971, and which Welles was still tinkering with in California in the early 1980s; which formed the basis of the 1986 Costa Gavras assembly of footage (supervised by the Paris Cinematheque); and which has been in the Paris Cinematheque ever since.

But I'm curious as to what negative material was doing in the Cinematheque in 1972-3 in the first place? Had Welles deposited it there in the 60s, during one of his spells in Paris? Had one of his French friends/collaborators donated it there after he'd left it behind, in the same way he'd left behind other things in France like the tapes of Portrait of Gina, and the unfinished material for L'Affaire Dominici?

The main area of interest is this: the bulk of the negative resides in the Cinecitta, held onto by Bonanni, having been left in Rome by Welles in 1970.

So what was the stuff left in Rome which needed to be picked up in 1972/3?

Could that be the material that Suzanne Cloutier had wanted to ship back to Welles in the 1980s, which is variously described in different sources as workprint material, and negative material?

Or does Gomez have any of this negative? As I've speculated elsewhere, one of Gary Graver's comments strongly implies that Gomez was the last person to have possession of the "Filming Othello" footage shot in the Venice canals in the 1970s.

[mido505]

On May 18, 1986, shortly after Welles’s death, DON QUIXOTE footage, assembled by Costa-Gavras, was shown at Cannes under the auspices of the Cinémathèque Français. At that showing Oja Kodar made these comments:

“But it was easy for me, thanks to the warm and friendly presence of Costa-Gavras, to give the Cinémathèque, which Orson liked and respected, the negative of Don Quixote. It was much more difficult for me to accept that certain portions of the developed film should be shown on the occasion of this tribute, portions which I was able to find quickly in our place in Los Angeles.”

So, according to this, Oja donated the “negative” of DQ to the Cinémathèque in 1986, but the footage edited by Costa-Gavras and shown at Cannes was not derived from this material, but was put together from other material that Oja possessed in LA. This explains why reports of that showing state that the footage was in barely passable condition. This is what the critic from Variety wrote:

“Just 35 minutes of the film was shown here in a very rough state with white spacing inserted between shots. Some of the sequences were seemingly edited, while other scenes were merely rushes…The assembly of the footage seemed haphazard, and it was not even certain that it was in the correct order.”

Here is how Oja described the Costa-Gavras material:

“For this reason, I hope you will feel a sense of discovery when you see these pictures, for this is not even a first editing. At times, you will see rushes where Orson had not yet made his final choice. It is a sketch, a quick study, a rough of a working copy that is old and well used, scratched and not even marked off.”

Esteve Riambau, in his essential article on DQ, notes that the Gavras/Cannes material from 1986 did not include any of the important material filmed in Mexico from 1957-1958.
On the other hand, the material shown at Locarno in 2005 seems to have been extensive, containing “all the sound segments and some silent sequences of a work print of DQ, which was preserved by the Cinémathèque Française in 1996, as well as outtakes from earlier states of the project,” as stated in THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES, the book published under the auspices of Filmmuseum Műnchen to coincide with Locarno. Footage from the Mexican shoot, including the Patty McCormick footage, was shown at this festival.

Based on this information, I think we can state, fairly conclusively, that the Costa-Gavras edit was not based on our mysterious work print, but on some stuff Welles and Oja had lying around the house in LA in the 1980’s. This explains a number of discrepancies in the DQ narrative that have hitherto bothered me, including Audrey Stainton’s assertion that the Costa-Gavras edit consisted of “scraps” in “pitiable condition”.

Furthermore, I think we can state, fairly conclusively, that the Locarno footage was based on the work print, but only a portion of it.

Now, that “1996” date is odd, and telling. It’s a late date, years after the donation to Spain and the Franco debacle. The late date led me to think that some mysterious person squirrelled away the work print and donated it on the sly, but I missed the obvious. The date is likely a typo; it should read 1986, which is when Oja donated the “negative” of DQ to the Cinémathèque. No, she donated the fabled work print, in whatever form she found it, right after Orson died. Being leery of showing Orson’s beloved DQ to the public, but wanting to give the world a sense of the beauty and majesty of the project, she turned over some rushes to Costa-Gavras, which he quickly put into semi-coherent form. Mystery solved.

Perhaps Oja did turn over some negatives to the Cinémathèque, as Suzanne Cloutier had, at Orson’s request, shipped over some of the material that she held for him, although Welles had passed away while it was in transit. I think it important to observe that no source anywhere states that material derived from the "negatives" held by the Cinémathèque has been shown; it is all from "work print" material printed by Welles over the years. Later, strangely, Cloutier was still in possession of about 10,000 meters of negative “that had not been developed by Welles”, according to Spanish producer Patxi Irigoyen, footage that ended up in Spain, but which could not have been included in the original work print. Jess Franco had access to this and other negative material, but it seems certain that Mauro Bonanni holds the important negatives for the essential Mexican and Italian shoots from 1957-1959, footage which forms the bulk of the work print. However, it is important to note that Bonanni did not gain control of those negatives until 1974, when his wife luckily discovered the material abandoned in a Roman storage facility. Until then, Welles was shipping the negative all over Europe. So the negative material that Gomez retrieved from the Cinematheque in 1972 could have been anything. For all we know Welles had Gomez move some or all of the negative from Paris to Rome. Nothing of consequence there, I think.

I hope this helps.