Welles and Joseph Conrad

[Wellesnet]

Welles's fascination with the works of Joseph Conrad:
https://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-joseph-conrad/

Matthew Asprey Gear's article,
At Sea, In Port, Up the River: Orson Welles’s Conrad Adaptations:
https://brightlightsfilm.com/at-sea-in- ... g4DAW5FyUm

[NoFake]

The Bright Lights Film Journal article cited (and linked) in the interview includes a reading by Welles of Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." According to the article:

"In 1985, during the last months of his life, Welles was hired to narrate a series of audiobooks in English for the Japanese market. He seems to have had a great deal of creative control over the project, as some of the texts on his list are by his favourite writers. Only a small proportion of Welles’s readings, those of texts in the public domain, were commercially released after his death. The available recordings, which include 'The Secret Sharer,' are among his last performances of distinction. As Welles was working with the original (albeit abridged) texts rather than dramatized adaptations, he had to restrict the boundaries of his interpretation to the nuances of his marvelous reading voice. Near the end, the self-described one-man band went a cappella.

"Welles’s reading of 'The Secret Sharer' runs just under an hour. Although the shape of the plot remains intact, the text was judiciously cut to just 40 percent of Conrad’s original 17,000 words. (According to Joseph McBride, Welles abridged the audiobook texts himself.) The tone of the reading is often a near-whispered confession. Welles’s voice, now fixed in a deeper register than ever before, seems occasionally starved of breath yet retains his remarkable clarity of diction and expressiveness."

Indeed. The article includes the recording, whose sound quality is superb. Can it be included on Wellesnet, perhaps on the Audio pages?

https://youtu.be/lLaW1oLDpms

[RayKelly]

The article includes the recording, whose sound quality is superb. Can it be included on Wellesnet, perhaps on the Audio pages?
https://youtu.be/lLaW1oLDpms

Done!

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks for that Secret Sharer link, No Fake. A wonderful reading by Welles, and the fact that it's his own adaptation of the Conrad story makes it all the more valuable.

A Lord Jim screenplay, written in the early 1960s (according to Joseph McBride's WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES) does not appear to have survived in any of the Welles archives.

Don't want to be overly skeptical, but it would be nice to know what hard evidence there is that this screenplay was indeed done. Perhaps Professor McBride can help us out - I remember reading about OW's LORD JIM screenplay in Jonathon Rosenbaum's chronology for THIS IS ORSON WELLES as well. There are several other screenplays supposedly done by Welles (WAR AND PEACE, for example) for which there is no real evidence of their existence. Hopefully it will turn up someday, and If it's in some obscure archive, terrific; case closed. If it's not, then it may never have really existed, except as a figment of Welles's faulty memory. His creative bonfire was so immense, that it would be easy to toss a few imaginary logs onto it.

Which is not to take away from all of Welles's other Conrad-related achievements. Love both of his HEART OF DARKNESS radio adaptations, and I also had the pleasure of reading SURINAM at Ann Arbor, which would have made a wonderful movie. Thanks to Mr. Gear for another fine piece of research.