Too much Johnson score

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, keats: Following work created earlier for Horse Eats Hat, Bowles wrote a considerable amount of music for Too Much Johnson, and he was most disgruntled by the experience. After giving up a beautiful villa overlooking the sea at Nice to return by ocean liner to New York to deliver the score, he discovered that the play would not open the 1938 Mercury Season, as promised, and his music had been cut to a series of incidental pieces to accompany cinematic inserts. When the show was premiered at a theater near Welles' Stony Brook home, the fire marshal would not permit the use of nitrate-based film, and the production closed after three performances. Bowles considered it a disaster.

Happy Hogmanay, keats.

Glenn

[François Thomas]

Paul Bowles' score for Too Much Johnson has been released on CD under the title Music for a Farce. You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Weill-Threepenny- ... 99&sr=8-12

The Martinu piece is as full of energy as Bowles'.

You can also download at least some of the cues on MP3.

Happy New Year!

[Alan Brody]

There are actually at least three different recordings of "Music For a Farce" that I know of, but that one that Francois has linked is the best. Yes, the Martinu is a very good piece too. Also with Weill's 3 Penny suite and the Varese, the whole disc is excellent.

[Alan Brody]

One interesting thing about the Too Much Johnson fiasco, of which there are accounts in several Welles biographies, is that it marks the first of many times throughout his career that a Welles project collapsed at the film-editing stage. In this case, he apparently tried to do all the editing himself and realized too late that he had bitten off more then he could chew.

Peter Tonguette’s book Orson Welles Remembered has accounts from several different editors who worked with Welles at various stages in his career, and they all claim that Welles never did any physical editing on his pictures, merely oversaw the editing that they themselves did (although at least one of these editors says Welles liked to give the impression in interviews that he had done all the editing himself). The man who edited the battle scene from Chimes at Midnight claims Welles was not even in the country when the sequence was completed, but gave his approval later. This same editor says that Welles made him edit and reedit the scene where Hotspur leaves his wife to such an extent, that the scene was eventually spoiled from overediting.

It would be interesting to have a documented list of what scenes in what films Welles actually did the editing himself, what scenes in which he supervised the work of others, and which scenes to which he merely gave his approval later. If I’m not mistaken he attempted to edit both Arkadin and TOE himself and in both cases could not get the job done quickly enough to satisfy the producers, who removed him from the film in both cases.