The Deep - possible 2005 release?

[maxrael]

i just spent ages typing a detailed post when my pesky computer crashed and i lost it all before i'd pressed the post button! :angry:

Anyway, here i go again! Last night i went to see the Orson Welles: Unfinished Work and Orson Welles and TV: Programme 1 showing at the National Film Theatre (UK).

Before the Unfinished Work programme there was a brief talk by Stefan Droessler director of the Filmmuseum in Munich.
After there was a question and answer session with Stefan and Oja Kodar.

Bearing in mind, the unreliability of human memory, i'll post what i heard on the above and other topics!

In his introduction Stefan said that although the original negative is still missing they have one b&w and one colour workprint which they are currently in the process of restoring. He anticipated the restoration project will be completed in 2005, though was unsure whether it would be a fully assembled version or in documentary form.

The programme started with a restored version of the excellent F for Fake trailer, followed by a Welles-completed trailer for The Deep. Apparently only a b&w work print is currently known to exist, but i thought it looked stunning in b&w! The trailer sets the story up well, and has a heavy, pervasive air of menace throughout... it started with OW's voice introducing it as a trailer talking about the clips, then moving on to address the story... it finished with OW saying something along the lines of, What happens next?.. We'll leave that for the ticket buyers...

Onto the actual clips of The Deep, they were presented in a mixture of mostly colour with some b&w... with varying quality audio, some with camera noise, some places had complete audio dropouts. Some of it had music! kind of a double bass infested jazz workout!

I think i've previously made the foolish mistake of assuming that because The Deep was a deliberately commercial project and that Orson 'apparently' lost interest in and abandoned it that it would probably not rank amongst my favourites of his works... but the clips displayed were quite simply stunning... it felt really edgy, like it would make an amazing thriller, some really powerful scenes...

After the programme Oja addressed the events that led to the projects indefinite postponement.
She said it wasn't due to the death of Laurence Harvey or that OW simply abandoned it... but it was due to the age old problem of financing!! and some other difficulties...
I'm not too clear on the exact story behind the films production/financing but she spoke of Orson surrendering his director's fees in return for film services supplied by Yugoslavia... these services were handled at best poorly and OW was treated pretty shabbily by all involved which led to OW becoming disheartened... and it was becoming such a struggle to complete the picture OW resolved to move on and come back to the project when the situation seemed more favourable...

Hmm the first time i wrote this i'm sure it was much more eloquent!!

Oh and also Stefan indicated there is still hope for the recover of the stolen two reels of The Merchant Of Venice!

onwards and upwards,
max!

[Jeff Wilson]

Good stuff, Max, thanks.

[Glenn Anders]

Indeed, Max, you have brought wonderful news. If memory serves me, THE DEEP was another Welles' project which lacked only scene or two in order to be complete.

Oja Kodar deserves a tremendous amount of praise for conveying what (I believe that I remember) was upwards of a couple of tons of Welles material to the Munich Film museum. Her kind of diligence, tenacity and, above all, faithfulness is rare these days.

Thank you! Let us have more of these wonderful reports.

Glenn

[71-1045893605]

It's nice to see Oja Kodar come out of hibernation and take part in a Welles tribute. According to my sources (one of them being Oja's American attorney), she hasn't contacted them for almost two years or anyone else for that matter, going into a "bizarre" hibernation period of not talking to anyone...even her own lawyers! Dozens of requests are made each year (many of them by wealthy patrons) to find, re-construct and digitally save all of Welles' work, but Oja never got back to any of these people. Like Bogdanovich says, Welles needed one benefactor to finance all of his films. Now that there are wealthy benefactors who are willing to help get Welles' work out there, Oja is nowhere to be found. Very strange if you ask me.

GA

[ToddBaesen]

-

Thanks for the detailed report, Max.

And I wonder why Oja didn't respond to offers for completion money. Seems very strange...

[Narshty]

To carry on the theme, I saw the Munich Filmmuseum assembly of excerpts from THE DREAMERS yesterday evening at the National Film Theatre. I actually bought my ticket to see the new print of SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, but begged them to change it when I realised that it was the last screening of THE IMMORTAL STORY & THE DREAMERS that evening.

Well, it was very peculiar watching it at the time. Much of it consisted of one b&w monologue performed by Welles (playing Marcus, with an Eastern European accent - couldn't quite place it) lamenting Pellegrina the opera singer.

Everything else was photographed in very subdued colour. There were scenes of quiet conflict between Marcus and Pellegrina (Oja Kodar) that very much reminded me of Dreyer's GERTRUD. There's one extremely haunting sequence at night in the garden next to some iron railings where Pellegrina determines to leave. There's a terrific shot where she simply turns and walks right down to the other end of the garden away from the camera to leave, presumably forever - it feels so resolute and quietly devastating, and the camera just keeps rolling until she simply disappears among the foliage and ivy.

Some scenes had to be pasted together from footage shot (of Oja Kodar's half of a conversation) and then cutting to black where Welles gave his response (reading from a script - you can hear the pages turn on occasion, and would occasionally voice both characters). It seemed very odd and obscure at the time, but I'd give anything to see it again. Alas, that was the last screening (but thank God I saw it once!)

It was another Munich Filmmuseum reconstruction in association with Oja Kodar. I get the impression that this footage is now very much owned jointly between them, so hopefully Criterion (seeing as Welles is by far the most gaping hole in the collection) or someone could get the rights to these semi-finished snippets.

EDIT: This is what I saw. And the garden scene is every bit as stunning as the article makes it out to be.

[Le Chiffre]

According to the autobiography of Roger Hill (Welles' Todd School teacher), THE DEEP ran into financial difficulties because of the boat Welles had rented from the Yugoslavian government. Welles was unable to complete filming in Yugoslavia, so it would be completed off the coast of Florida. Because of the unusual shape of the boat however, Welles was unable to find another one like it, so he decided to build a replica of it at considerable expense (Whether this was actually done or not is unclear). Apparently Hill directed parts of a climactic underwater knife fight, so the fact that Welles was willing to farm out the directing chores to others suggests that he may have spread himself out too thin with other commitments.

[ToddBaesen]

The Deep now only exists in a color workprint, which will soon be faded beyond restoration... We need to get a rich donor to help save it... maybe those rich bay area businessmen Dave Packard and Glenn Anders.

[Glenn Anders]

Baesen, you old devil, how can we be sure of what you are up to in this post? Are you possibly suggesting that you could be given credit for restoring THE DEEP?

We know that all that is necessary is some of the mysterious "guest's" financiers, a judicious editor to make choices in the multiple materials, and a first rate score.

Get on with it!

Glenn

[Kevin Loy]

And I wonder why Oja didn't respond to offers for completion money. Seems very strange...

Perhaps because The Deep can never be truly completed (at least, according to the One-Man Band documentary). But maybe she was trying to get funds for TOSOTW instead...I'd like to think so, at least (and to chase this pipe dream a little farther, maybe TOSOTW will raise Welles' public profile enough that some of his other nearly-complete projects will be able to properly see the light of day).

[Glenn Anders]

Once again, Larry French has supplied some useful notes, this time on THE DEEP, over on the Wellesnet Main Page. French reveals that a 122 minute rough cut, a script to match, and a suggestion for the musical score exists, intact.

Speaking as a non-technical person, my impression is that THE DEEP might be tightened and clarified through editing, by the addition of a voice-over narrative and an insouciant score, turning the film into a quirky little entertaining meditation on the theme of marital madness at sea.

Having heard a cutting of Francois Rabath's jazz variations, I'm not at all sure that Welles would have used the music in his finished film. The example, as it stands, evokes a Paris nightclub, not semi-tropical slow-rolling tides off the coast of Africa or Dalmatia. I recall that one of Welles' arguments with Columbia over THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI developed when he provided a paste-up score only to suggest the kind of music he wanted. Harry Cohn took his cue, and had an obsessively cloying score composed around a song the Studio had commercial rights to. Hopefully, a more sensitive score might be contributed for THE DEEP, which would preserve a certain spirit of Rabath's music, without necessarily using the music itself.

I have nothing against a documentary approach, preserving most of the footage, but I don't see why there cannot be both a commercial film of THE DEEP, which would help generate completion money for TOSOTW, and a documentary film on the making of the picture, to preserve its archival aspects.

The latter, from Larry French's description, would appear to be already in existence from the good works of Stefan Droessler.

Let's hope that THE DEEP may escape its becalmed state under its own power.

I see the ghostly hand of Orson Welles signaling "Full Ahead!" He would enjoy the whole process, we may be sure.

Now if Todd Baesen would advance us $300,000 from his infamous "Gimlet Expense Account" ----

Glenn

[Wellesnet]

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=6789

[Wellesnet]

http://www.wellesnet.com/roger-skipper-hill-on-filming-the-deep/
By TODD TARBOX

Recently, I came upon a snapshot of Orson and my grandfather, Roger "Skipper" Hill, taken during the filming of Welles’s movie Dead Reckoning, alternately titled The Deep.

The image brought to mind a wonderful reflection Skipper wrote in his memoir, One Man's Time And Chance – A Memoir of Eighty Years 1895-1975, concerning weeks of collaboration on this project that like The Other Side of the Wind, might one day be released in a form close to Orson’s vision.

On the thirtieth anniversary of Welles’s death allow me to quote Skipper:

"Dead Reckoning is a sea-going thriller involving two yachts that meet in mid-ocean with subsequent murder and mayhem. The film was started in the Adriatic. Orson played the villain and cast Laurence Harvey and Oja Kodar as co-stars. His first message of distress came from Yugoslavia. One of his rented yachts was no longer available. I must find a duplicate and help him finish up in Miami waters. I tell him there are no empty horizons near Miami but he and his crew might come to the Bahamas. ‘Send me a picture of the boat you must duplicate. I’ll make copies and circularize yacht brokers.’ But his ketch proved to be of weird design, impossible to duplicate. ‘Never mind’ he wires, ‘We’ll shoot around any discrepancies.’ And later: ‘You must find something somewhere. Absolutely must come with cast. This is a wild cry for help.” Even that didn’t move me. I was tied tight to my chores of chartering in the Keys. What I finally fell for was his satanic flattery: ‘I know it’s impossible. All I ask is that you pass one of your usual miracles.” So, I bought miles of film, found a ketch and a cameraman and arranged a Bahamian rendezvous. He arrived with Oja only, plus costumes for the others. These we would fill with local flesh. More accurately, I would fill them. The couple departed after a few days leaving me the costumes, the cameraman and reams of instructions. Orson, it seemed, was committed to a movie in the mountains of Yugoslavia where, with Tito’s army, he was to film the storied resistance of those Partisans in World War II.

“My problems were more immediate. This film’s climax is a knife fight under water. Down there the bad guy, Welles, meets his gory end. Before leaving us, our director-star had begun this scene by falling off the ketch and sinking beneath the water. Now I must locate a super swimmer who could fill that huge costume. In Miami, a commercial conch diver was found almost big enough and completely dumb enough to believe my assurance that the dye we must put on his blonde hair would soon wear off. What I failed to solve was the problem of that brilliant red gore Orson insisted must gush from his neck during the final stab wounds. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Max Factor sold a blood routinely used in Technicolor fights. Then he wrote out these instructions:

“This liquid could be kept in the armpit of the costume. A tube will lead up to the neck where the stabs should occur. When these start, your actor, like the wily Scot with his bag of air, can eject the contents by compressing his elbow.”
“Damned if it didn’t work, too. But O woe! Down there in the depths, it came out green!

Hours before Orson’s last conversation with my grandfather, he appeared on the Merv Griffin Show and Griffin asked him. “Were there certain parts of your life that were really joyous?” Welles paused for a moment and responded, “Oh, yes. There are certain parts of every day that are joyous. I’m not essentially a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy. There’s a difference, you know, because joy is a great big electrical experience. And just happiness is, what, I don’t know. A warthog can be happy.”

I’m glad to know Orson experienced an abundance of joy. I can attest he provided enormous quantities of joyous electricity to my grandfather and grandmother as he did to millions of people during his lifetime, as he continues to do, and will for generations to come. What a fitting legacy for George Orson Welles that he so richly deserves.

Todd Tarbox is the author of "Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts." It is available from BearManor Media and Amazon.com