George Hickenlooper and THE BIG BRASS RING

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you, F.X., for your inside history of THE BIG BRASS RING.

I thought George Hickenlooper's handling of the characters and central relationships in THE BIG BRASS RING was quite good, but would you agree with me that the absence of a clarifying Congo or Madrid sequence made the melodramatic ending too abrupt? If not, can you shed any further light on why the artistic choices were made for the climax or denouement (or lack of one)?

Let us hope you will continue to contribute here, perhaps attract other talented people with similar interests to Wellesnet.

Glenn

[F.X. Feeney]

Thank you, Todd!

Let me set the record straight in defense of Taschen. The brevity of the little book we did publish was NOT their choice, either, and certainly was neither their fault or oversight.

After I turned in my novella length text in 2002 my editor, Paul Duncan, made every effort to secure clearance for photos and drawings from Beatrice Welles. This was a direct necessity because Taschen simultaneously publishes its film books in several languages at once. France has laws protecting artists' rights that their offspring are free to enforce. You might recall that TOUCH OF EVIL was prevented from showing at Cannes in the restored version in 1998, owing to an injunction from Ms. Welles. When approached by Taschen, her lawyer made an unreasonable demand and would not budge.

This is maddening, but understandable. I don't blame Ms. Welles. Her father left behind a radically disorganized estate. She sees others getting rich from her Dad's legacy and having been (as Fanny Minafer would put it) left in the lurch, will take every step she can to honor her own position in such exploits. Fair enough... and yet? Here we all are. No OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, no proper re-mastered DVD of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT -- my personal favorite of her father's masterpieces.

Taschen backed off, and with Paul as my editor, I wrote two Taschen books on a scale with my Welles work that DID see print -- one on Roman Polanski, the other on Michael Mann. The WELLES ICON book, published in 2006, came about because its photo illustrations are licensed solely from the Kobal collection, who have globally secured the rights to their archive.

One of the few people who has read the Welles book Taschen and I hoped to publish is Stefan Drossler, and I am grateful for his enthusiastic response. But Taschen didn't "slash" me. As (by default) the firm's Welles-guy-in-residence, I was happy to salute Welles with an 800 word essay and a few hundred captions that would advance SOME of my ideas in microchip form. Paul Duncan and I were hoping that this might have served as a "coming attraction" for the big Welles book. But the world economy has dictated other destinies.

This past summer I dusted off the old text. I'm very proud of it, but -- now that a whole decade has intervened, in which I have talked in depth with the late Gary Graver as well as Oja and others, and seen some of the amazing fruits of the archive Stefan Drossler oversees in Munich, I'm ready to use my earlier efforts as the sturdy skeleton of an ampler and even more thorough book length essay.

As Richard Ellman wrote of James Joyce, "We are still learning to be his contemporaries." True of Welles as well!

[F.X. Feeney]

A reply to Glenn Anders --

Thank you, Glenn! ... What you say gives me hope that all the brilliance George brought off in BBR will come to be more fully appreciated, in time.

I know what you mean about the "clarifying" properties of the Congo sequence in Welles' original. George and I both did. At one point, early in our work together, I raised the possibility of Blake flying to Cuba on the sly to meet with Kim. Mind you, the deal as George had landed it with financiers was closed with the assurance that our picture would be contemporary, and set (mostly, if not entirely) in the U.S. .... Even so, we lusted for a long moment over the prospect of any candidate for Governor ducking out of the country on a clandestine mission -- with two days to go before the election no less, and especially to Cuba of all places. However George, who thought like a producer and always had a firm grasp on what was practical and possible, and which battles to choose, nixed it. Wisely, if to our mutual chagrin. He asked, "Can we create the sense of a clandestine episode without the long trip?" I was game, and -- triggered by a line in Jonathan Rosenbaum's great essay on BIG BRASS RING as published -- wove a long aria of narration for Blake's solo boat-ride up the Mississipi, that spliced together a passage of Joseph Conrad with a line from Mark Twain. (It was sweet to discover how smoothly, even seamlessly the two fit together.)

This DID lend a wonderful bit of atmosphere to the journey upriver to Kim. Alas -- and this wrecks the sequence -- we're plunged into a song-and-dance drag show once we reach the riverboat. George has legions of talented friends, and the guys who put this together gave their all. Indeed, their efforts pay off beautifully LATER in the film, during the merry go round sequence. At the disco, however, the presentation stops the story dead and is tonally all wrong. I gnash my teeth just thinking back on it. As scripted, the club was intended to be state of the art seductive, full of deep shadows, men dancing with each other in silhouette. To further this I recommended that a haunting, mournful, heart-racing song ("Why?" sung by Jimmy Sommerville of the Bronski Beat) be the pulsing kickoff. George understandably saw a money-for-music-rights problem dogging this. We were struggling just to pay for the monkey! Nevertheless, given a more low-key but decidedly sensual and NON VERBAL environment, I believe we could have conjured more emotional power that would have served our story better AND honored the strengths of Welles's Congo sequence. If we show Blake entering this impolitic arena, crossing the room with his head high, calmly acknowledging the recognition of the various men but not engaging with anybody -- the wry obstacle course that his diabolical mentor has woven for him creates a stronger emotional ramp-up for their first first face to face confrontation.

The scene that follows (once the backgammon queens have been dismissed) may depart from Welles's original text in a number of small particulars -- owing to the new demands of the revamped plot -- but in atmosphere and tension, I'm proud that it has a satisfying fidelity to what Welles was aiming at. So does the later scene in the supper club. As to the ending, I'm with you in wishing that the feeling it communicates could be more subversive, and open-ended. I would have preferred that the final voice-over NOT be "Beautiful American Boy" (a line I wrote to be uttered only once, and at that off the cuff, very early in the story) but instead been Welles's own: "If you want a happy ending it all depends on where you stop your story." With a slightly different bit of cutting, and less music, those words might have provoked a very different feeling in the takeaway...

But! We can't have everything! I'm grateful for what we've got. Flexible realism was George's great gift, and the secret behind his exemplary productivity as a filmmaker. Again, Mr. Anders (or should I call you "Fella?"), thank you --

[ToddBaesen]

Right here at the Wellesnet message board, I found a post with F. X. Fenney's 1998 article about the writing THE BIG BRASS RING. Since the link to the WGA magazine is no longer available, I am taking the liberty of posting the article here, so Wellesnet members can read it:

REACHING FOR THE BIG BRASS RING

By F.X. Feeney - From the Dec./Jan. 1998 issue of the WGA magazine, WRITTEN BY

The writing of every screenplay is a journey. And what a long, mystical trip it's been for F.X. Feeney...from the time he first read The Big Brass Ring, an unproduced screenplay by Orson Welles, he was consumed with the need to see the work brought to life, despite the fact that the rights belonged to writer/director George Hickenlooper. Undaunted, Feeney wrote on, and ultimately saw his dream realized in a film co-written and directed by Hickenlooper, and starring William Hurt and Nigel Hawthorne, based on a script written by "the original indie filmmaker," Orson Welles. What follows is one writer's journey into the world of independent film and his attempt to grasp The Big Brass Ring...



Sometime in the early summer of 1982, Orson Welles ordered a case of Cristal champagne and threw a glittering party. The occasion was a christening. He'd just completed a new screenplay, The Big Brass Ring, and producer Arnon Milchan (then starting out, with Once Upon a Time in America and The King of Comedy in the pipeline) had guaranteed a budget of $8 million for Welles to direct it.

There was one condition: A major star had to be attached for the lead role of Blake Pellarin, a charismatic presidential hopeful who loves to live dangerously, a perpetual one step ahead of the posse from his past. Welles was more than agreeable; he was confident. He'd planned The Big Brass Ring as a thematic bookend to Citizen Kane--a suspenseful intrigue whose jeopardies hinge around the mystery of what makes a great man tick. This, he reasoned, would be catnip to Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Paul Newman or Burt Reynolds--the top men on Milchan's list--each of whom had expressed awe for Kane and, over the years, in different ways had told Welles: Anytime you need me Orson, I'm ready. Their refusals were thus painful six times over. One was soft in his no, saying honestly that he just didn't understand the character. Another was hard, responding through his agent: "Sorry, but [I'm] busy for the next four years doing real movies." Still another told Welles that the homosexual tensions shadowing the hero would be bad for his image. Eastwood's refusal was interesting: He told Welles he was planning a political career of his own, and for the moment couldn't afford to sow confusion by playing a politician with Blake's problems. Beatty's response was a bit of princely cruelty: He said yes, but demanded final cut--a condition he knew Welles would never agree to. Nicholson's response was the most depressing, given how loudly he later carried on about all that Welles meant to him: He said he'd do it but wanted twice the $2 million offered. With that, the deal fell apart.

"Orson always understood why the studios never wanted to finance his movies," Henry Jaglom observed to the L.A. Times, years later. "He knew his name didn't guarantee them a profit. But he never understood how people who had wanted to be his friend, who talked publicly about how great he was, wouldn't help him when they had the chance."

Jaglom had been the earliest champion of The Big Brass Ring, encouraging Welles to write it, putting him in touch with Milchan. A still deeper assist had come from Oja Kodar, the Croatian artist who was for 20 years Welles' companion and collaborator. She helped with the actual writing of the script, improvising into a tape recorder with Welles to create Cela Brandini--the relentless political journalist (closely based on Europe's real-life nonrelenter, Oriana Fallaci) whose quest for the truth threatens to bring the presidential hopeful crashing to earth. Kodar worked with Welles on Big Brass through 1981 and half of '82--a period when most of the world thought the director of Citizen Kane was washed up and unproductive, a cultural poltergeist forever reduced to appearing in wine commercials. What Kodar, Jaglom and other friends like Peter Bogdanovich knew was that Welles was, if anything, more productive than ever.

What money he made from all those wine commercials, he pipelined directly into his private armada of independent film productions. Twenty gorgeous minutes exist of The Dreamers, an adaptation of three interlocking stories by Isak Dinesen that Welles worked on throughout the '80s. When he died, four films--Don Quixote, The Merchant of Venice, The Deep and The Other Side of the Wind--sat unreleased on his shelves, more or less complete but blocked by a myriad of mishaps and legal battles that were the tragic fallout of his pioneering efforts to remake himself outside the Hollywood mainstream.

For Welles was the original indie filmmaker. Not the first--the margins of film history abound in cranks, entrepreneurs and inspired amateurs--but the "original" in that he was the first established director with the nerve and ingenuity to break away from the studio system, finance and shoot his films guerrilla style (often with his own money), only to seek distribution after the fact.

The myth that Welles never made a film to rival Citizen Kane has clouded his reputation for decades, though the smash success in 1998 of the recut Touch of Evil has lifted that fog a bit. In the next two or three years, we may see The Other Side of the Wind--a kaleidoscopic cyclone about the last day in the life of a great film director, starring John Huston, which Welles filmed in the 1970s. We may see Don Quixote and The Deep. And yet--strangely enough--it is as a writer that he will be making his surest mark in the immediate future.
One doesn't usually think "Written by Orson Welles." Much as he was a credited writer on nearly all his films, his best work was done with a partner (Herman Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane), a predecessor (Paul Monash, Touch of Evil) or was adapted from other sources (Magnificent Ambersons, the Shakespeare films, The Trial, Immortal Story). Nevertheless, in the last decade of his life, having discovered a steady partner in Kodar and finding himself with no choice professionally but to get his ideas on paper, Welles blossomed as a writer, and a number of those scripts are now finding their ways to the screen, in the hands of other directors: The Cradle Will Rock, an autobiographical piece about the New York theater scene in the '30s, is being made by Tim Robbins; The Dreamers has been optioned and is in the planning stages. Even The Big Brass Ring has found backing, not to mention a leading man--William Hurt--and has already been filmed, to premiere in 1999, under the direction of George Hickenlooper.

This is where the notion of "written by" becomes intensely personal, because as it happens, I collaborated with George in adapting the Welles script. The path to this partnership was circuitous. Before we got together, it was a dream we had pursued separately since 1987, when The Big Brass Ring was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Unaware of one another's existence, George bought one and so did I--and at separate times and in separate ways, we both fell in love with the story. A certain amount of Welles-worship was the motivator in both cases, but personal passions were involved, too.

George, grandnephew of late Iowa senator Bourke Hickenlooper, grew up in a world of privilege and political action that endowed Welles' little parable with a dreamy familiarity. As he later told me, "This enormous gap between a person's public persona and their private self was a phenomenon I'd been witnessing for most of my life. I didn't think of The Big Brass Ring as an opportunity to make a 'new' Welles film. There's no way any other director can ever substitute himself for Orson Welles, but I thought the story itself would be a great opportunity to pay tribute to Welles on the one hand, and on the other say something entirely personal and authentic."

With the success of Hearts of Darkness--the acclaimed documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now he directed in collaboration with Eleanor Coppola and Fax Bahr--Hickenlooper was in a position to pursue the rights to The Big Brass Ring, which he secured in 1991. From there, he spent seven years working the festivals, taking every meeting he could, working with a changing cast of producers and attaching actors of every stripe to one or more of the key roles.
Ian McKellen, Nigel Hawthorne and Malcolm McDowell were, at various times, committed to play Dr. Kim Mennaker, the role Welles had written for himself--that of a fallen political genius, a one-time presidential hopeful brought low by his homosexuality. Christopher Walken and Patrick Swayze were actively attracted, at different times, to the role of Blake Pellarin. Billy Bob Thornton (whom George directed in an early, 30-minute version of Sling Blade available on home video) briefly discussed taking a crack at the adaptation, and playing one of the smaller roles. Sissy Spacek and Julie Delpy had expressed interest in Blake's wife and Cela the reporter, respectively. People came and went: Other commitments led McKellen and Walken astray; an ill-calculated effort by one of the producers to get a firm but premature commitment out of Swayze caused the actor to retreat in suspicion. (Years later, when William Hurt was slow to commit, the pressure was again on George to force an agreement, but he resisted--no need to learn that lesson twice. "Let William say yes when he's ready to say yes," George told the producers--and in his own time, William did.) The wildly divergent differences in artistry and range that distinguish Hurt from his many predecessors may seem staggering, on the surface--but Welles had written characters of Shakespearean potential, archetypes that could be made flesh from any angle. As the months stretched into years, and those years added up to a near decade, George kept his hopes alive by becoming a rare and difficult thing: a flexible realist.

My own approach was the opposite: I'm a daydream believer. When I first read Big Brass in 1991, I fell in love with it for personal reasons, too. A dangerously balanced screenplay of which I was extremely proud had just been killed off by the producer who hired me to write it, after a year and a half of work. I was literally staggering around the house in search of solace when I finally sat down to read Big Brass: Its dark beauty, disobedient pace and long, wonderful stretches of meditative dialogue sang to my spirit like no movie that had ever been made.

I thought, why not make it myself? After all, Citizen Kane was the work of a first-time director. I yearned to see Blake Pellarin, Cela Brandini and Dr. Kim Mennaker drawing breath on the big screen. The characters were so alive in me it was as if I had closed a book and suddenly found myself pregnant. That crazy whimsy prompted me to write an impassioned letter to Oja Kodar, though I had no address for her. A series of mystical coincidences lit my way: I ran into Henry Jaglom at Book Soup--we had a friendly acquaintance; I was in the room once when he called my late friend Jerry Harvey with a message from Welles--and I asked him, "Hey Henry, do you happen to have Oja Kodar's address?" He did.

Then I went through a second crisis: I reread the script and thought, "This thing begins on a yacht, with a guy who wants to be President. When have I ever been on a yacht? What do I know about being President?" Now I was speaking to the open window: I said, "Hey, Orson. If you want me to do this, send me a sign." An hour later, the phone rang--it was my friend Irene Miracle, who had just taken a job with Jerry Brown. "Jerry's thinking of running for President and he's looking for a speechwriter. I told him all about you. Come see him tomorrow, there's a big party on a yacht." (I went, I worked briefly for Brown--who told me with a smile, as he accepted one draft, "I don't have speechwriters." The line, and the smile, are both in the film.)

Despite its American cast, despite its American theme, Welles had set his story in Spain. I was about to go to Spain that summer, for a wedding--so I took a sketchbook and spent a month touring every location Welles described, scribbling and dreaming. By the time I returned, there was a message on my machine from Oja Kodar: "Unfortunately, your letter reaches me too late. I have just sold an option to someone else--but I am not sure how that will work out. So, keep in touch." She didn't say who my competitors were--it would be a year before George's name came to my attention--but I didn't let the news defeat me. I was on fire with mystical purpose. I decided to persist, with the rather naive faith that somehow, some way, the characters I was now voluminously carrying inside me would somehow come forth into the world.

Three years later, while holding down several part-time gigs, working 12-hour days but rising at dawn to address Big Brass, I finished my adaptation--one careful in its faith to Welles' intentions but, I hoped, bold and heretical in its guts, with a clarity that would allow it to make sense in the absence of Welles as a director. (As Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum writes in his superb afterword to the published screenplay, "We are obliged to read the script as a libretto for the music that Welles's direction would have bought to the material.") For a brief moment, the rights came into the open. I sent my adaptation by DHL to Oja's address in the former Yugoslavia--then still cut up by civil war--only to learn too late that DHL doesn't deliver to civil wars. (Apparently, they went as far as the Austrian border and kicked a field goal with it in the approximate direction of Zagreb.) By the time Oja had my script, George and his producers had once again secured the rights.

At this point--in despair at last--I was thinking, "Okay Orson, send me another sign." And not much later I found George's home phone number staring at me one afternoon (it had been scribbled by chance, years before) while sorting a sheaf of notes to be thrown away. After a long walk and a conversation with my heart, I made a firm decision to jettison my own dreams of directing the picture.

This was a choice I knew to be smart when I was making it--and not only because George has proved to be exactly the right director. There is great creative power in renunciation, if you've really embraced the thing you're turning away, and if your mind and heart are still focused clearly on their original goals. My original goal was to see Blake, Cela and Kim on the big screen. If they could be kept true to Welles' original intentions, then any other step taken in their realization would be fair game, and, come what may, true to Welles' advice to all filmmakers: Be bold.

We met, we swapped scripts, we hit it off. George liked my adaptation so much that he trusted me to rewrite from page one, solo, saying the words every writer loves to hear from a director: "Go wild." Better still, he backed these words up when I finally turned in the script, six weeks later, encouraging me to go still wilder and further when there was a problem. It's telling--another sign from above?--that from the instant George and I got together, everything began to happen quickly. The rewrite was accomplished in six weeks. Those six previous years of inch-by-inch adaptation had served me well, in terms of penetrating the characters: It seemed as if now, they were telling the story.

Before I came aboard, William Hurt, who had read an old draft, said no to the part of Blake. Nigel Hawthorne--long a champion of the project, relishing the prospect of playing Dr. Kim--convinced him to take a second look, which coincided with my submission. The two men had never met face-to-face, but shared an agent and a wish to work together. (And therein may lie a valuable object lesson for anyone trying to cast his script--get a great actor passionate about one of the secondary roles, and great lead actors will follow.)

By the time I'd done three quick rewrites under George's direction, both men were so enthused that we were able to win them for fees well below their usual. (Take that, Jack Nicholson!) With two giants like Hurt and Hawthorne "ready to dance," as William laughed when he said his yes, it became easy to attract Miranda Richardson, Irene Jacob and Ewan Stewart to the supporting roles.

From the moment the project was announced, people have asked: How could you adapt Welles? (Sometimes they didn't ask--they'd exclaim: "How could you!") Did you have to make big changes? Weren't you intimidated?

We've remained true to Welles in every one of his eccentric essentials: The presidential hopeful still steals his wealthy wife's necklace, and heads upriver in a little launch to have a secretive encounter with his old mentor. (The river was the Congo in Welles, the Mississippi in ours, but the feeling of archetypal journey is preserved intact.) When we meet Kim, he's got a monkey on his shoulder and a pair of naked women playing backgammon close at hand. Characters spar with each other in quick jibes, peppery jokes, and ruminations about fate, and Blake is ultimately obliged to confront the central figure from his past. In Welles' script, this ghostly person was a mistress--in ours, a long-lost brother. This is the one radical liberty we have taken, and we've done it mindful that Oja Kodar, Henry Jaglom and Jonathan Rosenbaum will one day be sitting in judgement of the result. Our reasons were partly practical--a mistress is no longer the kind of secret that can destroy a presidential hopeful, in America post-Clinton--but a more profound consideration applies, too, which is that Blake's anquish, his capacities as a leader, a lover, an amateur thief and possible killer, all register more tellingly if his guilt and shame are directed at a betrayed blood-relative.

In writing free of the script, we sought inspiration from the life: Welles himself had a ghostly relationship with his schizophrenic older brother, Richard--a derelict to whom he provided lifelong income but whose path he crossed no more than once or twice after becoming famous. This is a topic Welles never touched on in any of his films, doubtless because the pain was too deep. We broached it in his honor, not to "improve" Welles or invade his privacy, but to enter those uncharted spaces his death left unexplored, where his deepest sorrows may break bread with all of ours.

Beyond that, only the film itself can answer. As of this writing, the film is being carefully fine-tuned. The festival route beckons--perhaps Cannes?--but such considerations are secondary. What matters is that a dream has been brought to life--one that, for mysterious reasons, doesn't belong to George, me or even Orson Welles. It seems to belong to the characters, in whatever heaven they originate. One can only hope we've done them justice, and pray that when the time comes, the audience will send us a sign.

[Le Chiffre]

Thank you F.X., for your fascinating and valuable insights into the many struggles, aesthetic decisions and compromises necessary to bring THE BIG BRASS RING to the screen. It reminds me a bit of Robert Altman’s statement that, “no one makes the films they WANT to make. You make the films you’re ABLE to make.” I suspect this was a reason why Orson Welles seldom watched his own movies. Most of them, great as they are to us, were probably far from the original vision that first inspired him to make them in the first place. That’s why his screenplays, both published and unpublished, are fascinating to me as they represent his imagination, completely unrestricted by practical concerns as it engages with the possibilities of adapting a story. Your adding of an "Iran/Contra" reference in your first, more faithful adaptation sounds like it would have added a nice provocative touch to the story, though. In reading Welles's original screenplay, my impression is that the CIA characters, including the one bent on killing Menaker, would have been played with a more-then-slight attitude of parody, like the Grandi thugs in TOUCH OF EVIL.

Now that you mention it, I totally agree with you about the too-jarring transition between the film's meditative and quietly ominous trip down the Mississippi, with the striking Conrad/Twain analogy, and the loud and garish drag show, which gets in your face unpleasantly, and undermines the sense of anticipation and seduction. Your version of the scene sounds like it would have been much more effective. As for the “reunion” ending, it has a certain sweetness to it, and one wonders if Welles and his brother could ever have had such a reunion, but seems somehow too anticlimactic after the buildup in the story, especially in comparison to the shocking climax, and ironic and ambiguous ending of Welles’s screenplay.

Francois Thomas posted here a few years ago about how his book ORSON WELLES AT WORK was drastically altered by the publisher, so I assumed that a similar thing had happened to you when you said your project had become a chapbook. We probably should have guessed that The Estate had a major hand in ruining your original plans. I remember thinking how strange it was that Taschen, with it’s great track record of books on film, would put out such an unremarkable one on perhaps film’s greatest artist. I look forward to seeing your revised complete version when it comes out, and hope you have much better luck getting that one past the powers that be.

BTW, your choice of Jimmy Sommerville's "Why?" would have worked very well. Good song; I'd never heard it before. Reminds me that it'd been at least a couple of decades since I'd heard his "Smalltown Boy", one of those classics from the glory days of MTV.

Smalltown Boy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuz94ZIP ... re=related

Why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcuuTxNG ... re=related

And thanks Todd, for reposting FX's excellent article. I thought I'd read everything on this board, but I guess that one slipped by me somehow. Patrick Swayze?! That actually might have worked, but I'm glad they got Hurt. He was perfect. In fact, the whole cast was well chosen.

[Glenn Anders]

And thank you, F.X., for your kind reply. There is nothing like getting inside information from the author's pen.

And nothing need be added by me to that already covered by my worthy colleagues. I share your regret over the loss of George Hickenlooper. I remember how interested I was, after seeing HEARTS OF DARKNESS (which I still have on laserdisc), to learn that he was going to make THE BIG BRASS RING.

You mention Stefan Droessler. Have you seen his edition of THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES? [I assume you have.] He brought me a copy as a treasured gift on one of his visits to San Francisco.

If you should be in Frisco, please look me up. We may get in a little target practice!

Glenn

[F.X. Feeney]

Hello Todd, mteal and Glenn!

What a pleasure to return to this page after a week away and find your warm-hearted posts. Todd, thank you for re-posting that article from 1998! Mteal, I'm delighted you not only like the music selection, but have linked us to something as good. And Glenn? You're on for that Tarrrrget Practice!

Big Brass was a wonderful adventure for both George and me, separately and together. We never doubted it was worth it, but we often did wonder how people would feel about it over time. You guys are offering the most moving confirmation that it's being enjoyed in the spirit with which it was made.

If I was in the dark, I'd be glowing!

Best --

F.X.

[Le Chiffre]

BTW, I recently saw the TCM docu 1939: THE GREATEST YEAR IN MOTION PICTURES and the 2-part Woody Allen American Masters program on PBS. I thought F.X. Feeney made excellent contributions to both programs.

Thanks to Larry French for the tip on F.X.'s fascinating and informative recent article on the experience of working with George Hickenlooper on THE BIG BRASS RING:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/1372684 ... he-georges