voiceover outtakes - orson audio on the web

[Alan Brody]

Cool! I didn't know it was still in business. I've never tried it, so I'll have to look for it next time at the grocery. I wonder what the eating record is for chocolate pudding?

I got the info about Welles's pudding commercial from a taped interview with Fletcher Markle at the University of Michigan's Welles archive when I checked it out a couple months ago. He said it was part of a news program (March of Time, possibly?). Maybe Store Hadji can be on the lookout for it.

[mido505]

Anyway, as I said before the caricature "Orson Welles" was created in part by Orson Welles himself in several variations on the radio and film, even TV if you look at the Lucy clip. I don't know much about his Dean Martin appearances but I guess I'll find out soon enough.

A tape recording of the making of the British peas commercial in which Orson explodes at the director subsequently found its way into circulation among the advertising executives in New York, who relished it for the candid glimpse of Orson Welles it afforded. Preparing one kind of performance--a commercial--he had inadvertently given another…But exactly how inadvertent was it? How candid? This was the role he calls “Crazy Welles” or “Imperial Welles”, and on and off he has been doing it for so many years now that we automatically assume that this really is Orson Welles…to the rest of us, it seems natural—but not to Orson…”I used to play Orson Welles all the time on JACK BENNY,” he says of the extraordinary radio skits of the ‘40’s in which he parodied himself as brusque, snobbish, insolent. “That’s the Orson Welles everybody still thinks I am,” he continues. “The secretary used to atomize the microphone before I would speak into it! You know, a lot of people believed it. In other words, the comedy figure rubbed off on me.” But it would be inaccurate to say that his public persona is just a role. Surely Orson’s early comic version of himself on the JACK BENNY SHOW was based on something tangible in his character? Otherwise, it would not have worked effectively as parody.

“I regard it as an enormous and articulated marionette, which is standing in the hallway waiting for me when I am called to do a job,” says Orson of his image. “You know, it’s completely foreign to me—and the part of it that is like me, I don’t recognize even though it’s there. You see, of course there must be a lot there, but I don’t think there is, because it’s an inexpressibly exasperating personage.”…But whereas onstage and in films the distance he maintained from his characters had been entirely deliberate, not so the distance he increasingly felt from himself…Now however, he realized that, more and more, the part he was playing, the “marionette” he activated when he went out into the world, was scaring people away, costing him work. The private Orson is the antithesis of his haughty public persona. His friends know him as warm, caring, strangely shy. He is the man who regards “Crazy Welles” with horror.

From Barbara Leaming's ORSON WELLES A BIOGRAPHY.