What are you watching now? - (This is my brain on TV!)

[catbuglah]

Another link between Gilliam and Kurtzman is Terry's storyboards. They look very much like Kurtzman's pencil outlines for his comics, before someone like Bill Elder came along and inked and finished the artwork.

Hey cool - Kurtz 's layouts are great - Gilliam actually appears as the model for the cover of Help#24 (Down with topless bathing suits! Let us dress for the water.- As he's standing waist deep in a lake with in a four-piece suit and top hat)

[Tony]

Glenn:

This is fascinating: as the hustons, welles and aggie all had such fantastic voices! I've never heard this before- where did you get this piece of info?

As for the Salt Lake city Production, I'm afraid you are incorrect on that one: Jeanette nolan played Lady Macbeth, and apparently Aggie was never offered it.

[Terry]

Python wasn't on last night. It will be on tonight. Check your local listings if you were interested.

[Terry]

Aggie was a regular on OW Almanac in 1944. I think that was the end of her involvement with the Mercury. If she worked with Welles after that, it escapes me.

[Tony]

Thanks Store, I didn't know that! You probably also know that Welles wanted to get Aggie and Cotten together to refilm the ending of Ambersons, similar to the original, but not 5 years later, but rather 35 years later; he was going to film it in black and white, possibly with Cortez, and replace the botched studio ending. I've always thought that it probably wouldn't work, because 1945 was so different from 1975; at any rate, Moorehead died from cancer, I think in 1974, and Welles was taken by surprise: he hadn't even known she was sick.

Tony

[Terry]

I remember hearing about that plan. I didn't think it would work either. Even if Welles did reshoot the ending, there's so much other damage that RKO had done to that cut - a new ending wouldn't have saved it.

I'm watching the Python thing. The shots of ladies' breasts have been censored! What the fuck is that? It's 10:00 PM. I used to watch ladies' breasts on PBS when I was a little kid in the 1970s. That was before 10:00 PM, well before bedtime. Now we can't see breasts in the United States of America. They've been criminalized. Turn to the Forbidden Channel and you'll wind up on the Sex Offender Registry. What a country! What progress! Considering how often ladies' breasts appeared in Gilliam's animations, I shudder to think what the Nazi Victorian Censors will have done to his episode. America needs an enema. Sociopathic cannibalism is fine (how are you, Hannibal Lecter) but tits are obscene. FUUUUUUCK...........

[Terry]

Actually, the nude shots of Oja in F for Fake made it past the censors when TCM showed it last May. Yay, TCM! That's pretty inconsistent, though. My brain hurts.............

[Terry]

Oh, but Terry Jones' butt is okay to show! Yeah, tits are OUT, but bums are IN. Allright, um......... Maybe something else is going on. Schemes within schemes with schemes...

[Terry]

And since when is "blow job" one of the seven words you can't say on television? "Bleep job?" That violates Broadcasting Standards, but the Girls Gone Wild teenage lesbo french-kiss porn-show infomercial can be shown every morning at 5 AM?

I think I'm trying to apply sense and rationality to something random, absurd, arbitrary and insane. Boy, that's a losing battle.

[Glenn Anders]

Hadji: America is a deeply puritan nation. In the beginning, a significant group of us believed that children were born saved or damned, that the Devil literally lived in the forest, that native Americans were "red devils," and that women who did not marry and have children were cursed by God, etc. From time to time, censorship has been a big issue here, usually at times when our hypocrisy was showing. During the last occasion, in the 1920's, a black person was being lynched somewhere in the United States about once a week. There are similar but different parallels today, perhaps.

Tony, Hadji, my last post leaves me chagrined. (My son would use the f-word.)

I depended on what I laughingly call my memory for the notion that Agnes Moorehead played Lady Macbeth in Salt Lake City. [Could it have been Minsk?] I did find two supportive sources on the Internet, however:

"Also in '47 Miss Moorehead played in the production of Macbeth which Orson Welles staged Ior ANTA as part of Salt Lake City's centennial celebration. Welles offered her a part in the movie he made of this production but Other film commitments prevented her from accepting."

-- http://members.tripod.com/~samstephens/agnes.html

-----------------

And:

-- "At the same time that Moorehead was appearing in films she made occasional returns to the stage, including a performance as Lady Macbeth in a 1947 production directed by Welles."

http://www.glbtq.com/arts/moorehead_a.html

I suppose this is how these things get started.

----------------------

At the same time, Tony, along the that line, because as mentioned in another post, I sold off 600 of my books when making a move, and half of what's left are still in boxes, I can't give you the combination of sources which place Welles, Moorehead, and the Hustons together with Walter's sister. I can tell you that the sister was named Margaret Huston Carrington Jones. She married Carrington, a grain merchant, who sponsored her singing career. When an accident damaged her voice, she turned to coaching. Her first, and perhaps most famous pupil was John Barrymore, whom she prepared for his renowned production of Richard III in the early 1920's. She subsequently married Robert "Bobby" Jones, a scenic designer who worked on that show.

John Huston, though he did not care for certain of her personal qualities, credits her with straighening his life out on a couple of occasions before her death in late 1938.

The only source I have in my ready library is Lawrence Grobel's The Hustons (New York, Scribners, 1989). I find the following, on page Page 97:

"Over the years, [Margaret Huston Carrington Jones] trained the voices of John Barrymore, Alfred Lunt, Orson Welles, Lillian Gish, and her brother Walter . . . . Jones said of her theories, 'She had come to believe that it was possible to free the speaking voice to such an extent that she could hear, not the speaker's intention or his personality, but his inner essence . . . . '"

When I find the other sources I have, I'll post them.

------------------

BTW, in researching Agnes Moorehead's life, I came across a couple of things which surprised me:

For all the "sinful innuendo" I and others here might throw around, she was very religious. The daughter of a minister, she became a strong Fundamentalist in later years, and left much of her estate to Bob Jones University.

What's more, she considered her greatest political heroes to be Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne!

While Orson Welles appears to have had a profound spiritual streak, I doubt that she and Welles could have had agreeable discussions of politics, when they met each other later in their careers.

Glenn

[jaime marzol]

i got a bleep job last night

[Jeff Wilson]

Okay, enough already. Seriously.

[Tony]

Glenn:
Thanks for another great post; my sources for that info is Jonathan Rosenbaum: "This is OW"; Charles Higham: "The Rise and Fall of an American Genius"; Barbara Leaming: "Orson Welles"; Frank Brady: "Citizen Welles" and Berg and Erskine "Encyclopedia of OW"; don't believe anything you read on the internet!!:;):

[Tashman]

For all the "sinful innuendo" I and others might throw around, she was very religious.

True. But it probably goes without saying that even heterosexuals can find themselves at crossways with their religion. Particularly if they are fundamentalists. And then to be in the entertainment industry, too...

So I agree when you say her performances are the thing, Glenn. Personal biography, what little else it may good for, is hard-pressed to change the finished products--the movies and the characters--for good or bad. The rumors about her love life could speak to questions over her perceived ability to be a leading lady, though, so it seemed to warrant a comment.

Thanks to you and Tony for your interesting conversation.

Since Huston has come up again: I'm unfortunately down as saying that he was some kind of toss-off from Welles's sketchpad, and that really should be taken back. This seemed especially false catching a few scenes of KEY LARGO on TV recently. If anyone, that picture echoes Wyler. But maybe the safer point to make, in terms of the prior discussion, is that Edward G. Robinson is so much better off in THE STRANGER.

Now we can't see breasts

By the way, TCM is never in that way sanitized. It is surprising from PBS--that it would censor itself.

[jaime marzol]

the bonus disc for young mr lincoln is pretty good.

shadowing the third man i liked a lot

nicholas and alexandra was pretty fabulous. i liked it when i saw it, and now a month later i think it's better than i first thought