I just found this in "Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson":
Over the summer [of 1976], a young Hollywood cameraman reached Thompson at the Hillcrest apartment about a movie he wished to co-write with Orson Welles. "I stumbled across 'The Killer Inside Me', looking for a good story," Gary Graver relates, "but when I contacted the publisher, I found out that the picture had already been made. I got Thompson's address - he was living in a building a friend of mine owned back of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, an old Raymond Chandler kind of place."
Graver phoned Alberta [Thompson's wife] and she invited him over. "Jim was very weak from his stroke, but they gave me a whole bunch of books, which I xeroxed," says Graver. He conveyed the photocopies back to Welles.
"Orson and I split up the books - he read half, and I read half, then we switched. First, I wanted to do 'Pop. 1280', but Orson figured it would be way too expensive, with the black shanty-town burning. So we both agreed that 'A Hell of a Woman' would be the one.
I optioned it for $2000 a year, and Orson and I set out to write the screenplay. Orson had me go down to the butcher shop and get a roll of paper. I was at his house, and we rolled it out and hung it up on all four walls. From there we wrote down what happened in each chapter - some things we were going to leave out, some things we were going to keep in, and some things we mixed around. Then we wrote the screenplay together.
I changed the title to THE DEAD GIVEAWAY, which I thought was more commercial and simpler, and because it was about a guy going door to door giving gifts away, and there were so many murders. I announced in Variety that I was going to direct the picture with my friend Bud Cort as Dolly Dillon. Orson was going to play Staples, the manager of the store. And I talked to Jocelyn Brando, Marlon's sister, about playing the aunt."
THE DEAD GIVEAWAY joined the scrapheap of lost Welles, and lost Thompson films.
Has anyone ever actually seen this screenplay?