BBC´s Christmas Season - Orson Welles

[the scotsman]

The following programmes were transmitted over the Christmas Season
Orson Welles Scketchbook parts 1.2.3.4.5 each 15m excellent copies
Orson Welles BBC Arena 1982 165m complete excellent copy
Welles over Europe - A documentary written and presented by Simon Callow 59m
Citizen Kane - decent copy
Ambersons - not good resolution (old tape) used in 2006
Journey into Fear - decent copy
The Stranger - miserable copy
Macbeth - decent copy
Lady from Shanghai - decent copy
The Third Man - decent copy
All movies transmitted are to be found in much better condition and quality on the open market.
However the documentaries and the scketchbooks are invaluable.
If anyone is interested I can provide dvd-r´s of the docs - no charge just postage and such.
It is a pity that the BBC did not continue the series. They could have shown all the movies which they still have in their library.

[tonyw]

Dear scotsman,

I'd like to take your kind offer up concerning the Sketchbook episodes and documentaries so if you pm me re. your address and estimated cost I'll gradually reimburse you.

[Glenn Anders]

And welcome to you, scotsman, from me! I don't need to tell you, we have been an embattled breed.

I would love to take you up on your offer, too.

Please send me a private message.

I was once Macresarf1 here, before technical circumstances forced me to adopt the acursed avatar of . . .

Glenn Anders

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Mathew: Let me think that offer over. Now that I've gotten my Private Messages straightened out, I've been planning to write you, anyway.

Right now, I don't want other matters to detract from the arrival of "the scotsman"!

Glenn

[the scotsman]

The 1982 Interview on it´s first complete re-broadcast on 26/28th December 2009 is exactly as I first saw it all those years ago, I taped it on VHS at the time and have compared the old with the new. The picture is of course much better; much more resolution. The big improvement is the sound quality.
Sad to say the BBC did not try and redo any of the clips from the Movies - they just dusted it off from the Archives and let it run.
I, in fact recorded the complete season on BBC2 in 1982 on VHS- when they showed everything up to and including F for Fake. That was the last time to my knowledge that they showed CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. This series just gone,while worth it for reshowing the documentaries/Sketchbooks and the new Simon Callow doc.,did not do justice to the Movies.
They are basically still using the same old material tranferred from tapes to modern digital carriers - but the quality of the original material was not good.The worst was THE STRANGER. I have never seen such a shoddy badly transferred or transmitted movie on the BBC. Considering that the movie exists in more than one good issue,it disappointed me greatly.
It smacked of filling the schedules without spending any more money than was neccessary.The Only new item was the Callow programme(very good) , everything else was already in the archive.
They missed the boat by not reshowing their own best work "The Complete Citizen Kane" from 1991 - for me the best documentary on Kane that exists. It could have a great retrospective.
However, we did get the documentaries.
One small anomily - Last year the BBC showed the 10 minute interview with Huw Wheldon as part of an evening devoted to the old Monitor series. They listed the interview as being from Monitor programme number 47 - 13th march 1960. However
Wellesnet list this as 1962. anyone care to clarify ?

[ToddBaesen]

Scotsman:

In THIS IS ORSON WELLES Jonathan Rosenbaum lists the running time of THE ORSON WELLES STORY at 210 minutes. If the original running time was actually only 165 minutes, maybe Rosenbaum thought THE COMPLETE CITIZEN KANE documentary was at some point added to THE ORSON WELLES STORY. But if you have the original 1982 show, it would appear it never ran more than 165 minutes.

As for THE STRANGER, the MGM U.S. DVD release is a beautiful print. You would think the BBC FOUR would have used that if they couldn't find a decent print somewhere in England.

And regarding the ten-minute Huw Wheldon clip, what did Welles talk about?

It may be from a Wheldon show in 1960, but the Wellesnet 1962 show refers to Wheldon's long interview with Orson Welles on THE TRIAL, which certainly could not have taken place in 1960, because it's clear in the interview that Welles had already finished THE TRIAL when he was talking to Wheldon in the 1962 interview. Wheldon and Welles were apparently good friends, as he also produced THE ORSON WELLES SKETCHBOOK, and if you look at the comments section at THE MUSEUM OF ORSON WELLES, you'll notice that Huw Wheldon's son wrote to say that he has the original sketches Welles made for the "Sketchbook" show in his private collection. So Welles must have given them to Huw Wheldon as a gift!

What is also curious is why did BBC Four only show 5 of the 6 Sketchbook episodes? The one that was presumed missing was included, but they left off the last show in the series!

[the scotsman]

A possible explanation for the discrepancy over the running times between the BBC and the USA - PAL and NTSC run at different speeds - The OW Story was made on Film not tape.Film transmits at 25 frames per second(PAL) and 24 FPS (NTSC) this makes a difference of about 4% (about 4 minutes shorter over 90m).
The other reason is that the OW story was shown in the States in 3 parts(on the BBC only ever in two parts: part 1 -115m and part 2 50m - so - an extra set of start and finish credits plus any commercial breaks makes the possible difference (The BBC has always run commercial free). I really did tape it live in 1982 and still have the original VHS tapes in the cellar somewhere. The DVD transfer I made from those tapes in 2001 remained the same in terms of running time.
The other possibility is that when it was originally transmitted in the states it may well have been re-edited to allow for any copyright hassles over the rights to whichever of Welles´s movies were at the time in difficulties.So maybe they added longer or different clips from movies than the BBC did.I can only re-state that the original BBC transmission of 1982 and the BBC4 transmissions of 26/28 december 2009 are the same.
Try this one - the original BBC transmission of the COMPLETE CITIZEN KANE - shown first in 1991 (and recorded at the time by me) is 91m 30s.
The Huw Wheldon interview concertrates solely on Citizen Kane. and the problems of it´s release. It´s only 10 minutes and it seemed to have been taken from a longer interview - but I can´t as yet find out for sure - It may also be that the 10m is all that survived from the programme. The BBC carried out ruthless wiping and dumping of their archives in the 60´s and again in the 70´s - a great many important things were lost forever.I imagine they kept the 10m because of the historical importance of having the Author (Welles)talking about the "greatest movie of all time"(Kane)( as it is often considered) .There has always been a special relationship between Welles and the BBC.This interview was shown during a retrospective evening of the BBC monitor series from the late 50´s to the mid 60´s,along with a similar one with Hitchcock and features about Ken Russell and Henry Moore.
Hope this helps explain the points

[Roger Ryan]

The differences between PAL and NTSC are related to video or electronic broadcast, not actual film speed. The worldwide standard for projecting sound film is 24 frames a second (silent films varied somewhere between 15 and 20 frames). Programming originating on video (or transferred from film to video) using the PAL system reproduces the image at 25 frames per second; video using the NTSC system reproduces the image at 30 frames per second. This is what creates the roughly 4% difference in speed when transferring from PAL to NTSC or NTSC to PAL.

As I understand it, the version of the Arena documentary shown in the U.S. actually did eliminate some footage shown in the BBC version, namely portions devoted to Welles as an actor in films where he was not the director.

[the scotsman]

Thanks Roger - I did mangle the technical explanation but did not rewrite it. I should have known better.
As for the changing of the documentary when shown in the States or other countries - it would seem that even with documentaries concerning Orson Welles, nothing is ever simple or sraight forward - whatever is shown in one country is changed slightly or greatly in other countries. I can understand this when it is a question of language, or with copyright problems necessitating changes, that is acceptable: but for editorial reasons, that is something else. The producers of the works should expect that other TV companies uphold their rights. The other companies who decide to cut or insert material from original works should then at least be forced to publish the fact that programmes have been changed from the original creator´s concepts, but i suppose that is some sort of utopian dream,but it looks like documentary films have even less protection than movies do once they have been sent out into the world.

[Roger Ryan]

I agree with you, Scotsman. In fact, often on commercial television in the U.S., we are treated to a whole page of disclaimers prior to the showing of a theatrical film: "This film has been edited for content, edited for time, reformatted to fit your screen [how do they know the shape of my screen?] and time compressed". Time compression is the worst offender; a bit like PAL 4% speedup, it is the deliberate speeding up of the film to fill a shorter period of time - characters start sounding like Mickey Mouse! And I won't even get into the insane use of promos for alternate programming that constantly takeover the lower half of the screen, obscuring the program one is trying to watch.

Fortunately, non-commercial cable channels (Thank you, TCM) tend to show films unedited and in the proper aspect ratio (although I'm troubled by HBO and SHOWTIME habitually showing certain 2.35:1 ratio films in 1.85:1, cutting off the edges of the composition in the same way 4:3 television used to do). The most ludicrous experience I had with commercial television happened over 25 years ago when a local network affiliate broadcast CITIZEN KANE in a two-hour prime-time block. Not only was over thirty minutes of the film removed to accomodate commercials (which made it difficult to recognize the lead character as a newspaper publisher for the first hour), but the station cut away to other network programming before the sled could be revealed in the furnace at the film's end!

As to the changes to the Arena documentary in the U.S., it was broadcast by the TNT cable network as ORSON WELLES: A LIFE IN FILM in what I believe was a three-hour block. To fit in the requisite number of commercials, a sizable chunk of the BBC footage needed to be removed.