The Orson Welles of India

[Phil Rosenthal]

This is in today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/movie ... l?ref=arts

[NoFake]

Fascinating, and with a quasi-Wellesian countenance too (although his fate -- if not necessarily the fate of his film work -- un-Wellesian, and tragically so).

I hate to change the subject, but I'm not sure where else to put this.

Has anyone seen this yet? http://waltandelgrupo.com/

There are several Wellesian echoes here, from the “de facto diplomatic mission” (Disney and his team of animators, who became known as “El Grupo,” were asked by Roosevelt in 1941 to be cultual ambassadors to several South American nations under OIIA auspices) to the studio headaches and heartaches Walt was plagued by (his, apparently a tug-of-war with the studio bosses, his animators and the unions).

Would love to know others’ impressions.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, NoFake, I feel almost embarrassed to say that Mr. French (or was it Toddy Baesen?) and I saw WALT AND EL GRUPO two years ago at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WALT AND EL GRUPO is a carefully tailored documentary produced and financed by The Walt Disney Family Foundation as a tribute to "Uncle Walt," but for even someone like myself who knows far less about Hollywood History than Mr. French, the film would have been of more interest had it given the real story behind the trip and its results, rather than the cartoonish hagiography presented to us. Too bad!

A film about how and why Walt Disney "sold out" has yet to be made. Also too bad.

Disney, who in just a few years produced at least two American masterpieces of animation, had set up a company of artists which might have been in form a model for the Mercury Players in Hollywood. But beset by financial, political, and labor problems there, Disney found it convenient to take some of his top production people not yet infected by unionism upon a State Department supported "Good Neighbor Policy" junket to South America, It was not unlike in projected purpose the mission which Orson Welles and his troupe would undertake a few months later, after America had entered the War, at the urgent behest of Under-Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller.

Despite PR to the contrary, other than his protean Mickey Mouse, Disney had created few of his famous cartoon characters himself, but he was a beacon for artisans, and a founding member of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers, of which Welles was also a founder.

Forgive me if I once more cite a brief history of this important, now forgotten organization:

http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/do ... ls1947.htm

The tragedy of Disney, never expressed in WALT AND EL GRUPO, is that, handsome and in his prime, as we can see from the cryptic trailer, he somehow ceased to be a creative force in American Film during the time he was gone. Upon his return, he converted his studio into a meretricious business operation, which produced little of real merit from there on out, becoming instead another corporate film empire; and by the time of his death in 1966, an entertainment and real estate conglomerate.

Anyone who ponders the two State Department projects, one by Disney and the other by Welles, may note that the former was politely hailed while the latter was derided and condemned. One marked the rise of a corporate media giant, the other a crucial failure for one of the most original artists of the 20th Century. Disney brought out the financially highly successful SALUDOS AMIGOS, based on his travels, just the sentimental propaganda our State Department was looking for. Welles' gritty study of the joys and degradations of what would later be called the Third World, IT'S ALL TRUE, was abandoned, seen only in fragments or bowdlerized versions during the next fifty years.

That fact points up a tragedy of American culture for us all. By the 1980's when Welles died, we were deeply into the Age of Trivialization, which has brought us to the catastrophe we face today.

Glenn Anders

[NoFake]

Thanks, Glenn! That's just what I was hoping for.

The tragedy of Disney, never expressed in WALT AND EL GRUPO, is that, handsome and in his prime, as we can see from the cryptic trailer, he somehow ceased to be a creative force in American Film during the time he was gone.

Although the differences you pointed out between the two men and their situations are signal, Welles and Disney were, in the above respect, strikingly similar. Add to that the fact that for each of them it happened at almost the same time and place, when each was on a similar mission, made a chill creep up my spine as I watched the film.

[Glenn Anders]

You indeed have it, NoFake.

I might add that Disney's four part SALUDOS AMIGOS (1942) is ambitious in scope (if only 40 minutes or so in length), a mixture of live and cartoon footage dealing with not only Brazil but Argentina and Chile as well. It is the kind of film which Welles envisioned once he was on the ground in South America, but IT'S ALL TRUE would have been in much more serious detail and of greater length. Welles' film never came together and was never seen while SALUDOS AMIGOS, the first Hollywood picture really devoted to contemporary South America in a hands-on sense, did good business in the emerging wartime Latin market.

The lesson of this competition, I suppose, was not lost on independent motion picture producers, especially when McCarthyism (the counterpart of today's BigHollywood fascism) cast suspicion upon them all.

That thread will bring us back to Glenn Beck's obsession with ACORN as a symbol for community organizations and service employee unions. Hollywood's "liberal" independent film community is one of the next targets on the agenda.

Glenn Anders

[NoFake]

That thread will bring us back to Glenn Beck's obsession with ACORN as a symbol for community organizations and service employee unions. Hollywood's "liberal" independent film community is one of the next targets on the agenda.

And we will have more Orson Welleses flying / fleeing across the ocean to practice their craft in the freedom both constitutionally and implicitly guaranteed them in their homeland...?

[Glenn Anders]

Exactly . . . .