Welles on Jake Hannaford

[Le Chiffre]

Like Charles Foster Kane and Gregory Arkadin, Jake Hannaford is an original Welles creation based on several different people. Most people seem to take the character as a fusion of John Ford, Ernest Hemingway and Welles himself, but here's what Welles said to Barbra Leaming:

At the suggestion that he might have modeled the character of Jake Hannaford on himself, Orson insists otherwise: "He's based really more than anybody on Rex Ingram," he says. "He was considered a great filmmaker at one time - and he wasn't. He made terrible movies. They're awful! He was a great fascinator like John (Huston), in the high style of a great adventurer, a super-Satanic intelligence, and so on. He was a great director as a figure, in the way that John is. That's why John is so perfect for it."

What Welles doesn't mention here is that Ingram also helped discover both Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, who both became big stars in Hollywood during the silent era, and who were both rumored to be gay, as was Ingram himself. In fact, in 1968, just before Welles began formulating the basic story of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, Novarro was murdered by two young men (brothers)he had invited to his home:
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/24 ... bk-rechy24

Whether coerced by the older brother or to indicate that he was still a power in Hollywood, Novarro called a film publicist and told him -- sounding agitated -- that he wanted to introduce a young man who had star quality.

Here's Welles to Peter Bogdanovich about 1970 or so, from the audio edition of THIS IS ORSON WELLES, talking about the Hannaford character as originally envisioned for the earlier incarnation of the story, THE SACRED BEASTS:

It’s terrible because he’s half queer. He’s discovered male actors all his life, and made five or six great male stars. His thing is that he has to go to bed with every girl that the male star goes to bed with, and then he has to finally destroy that male star. Oh, it’s the sickest story I’ve ever thought up in my life.

At the end, because the boy is a kind of Jimmy Dean character, it begins with this wrecked car, where they both die. At the end, the boy who he’s destroyed is put into a corrida (bullfight) and let the bulls toss him and everything, the boy that he’s lost, he’s covered up like a mummy, and he’s in the car, and he says “C’mon, fatso. Wanna get in the car?”, because that’s what Jimmy Dean used to call George Stevens, because he hated him. “Are you chicken?” And you know that Dean is going off to kill himself in that car, but he gets in the car, because he has to show he’s a man. It’s a terrifying story, and complex, you don’t know where you are, it’s so complex.

You never see a bullfight in the story. You only see them in the bullring looking at the bull, and you never see a bull, and you never see a bullfighter except in his hotel room. It’s about the whole macho thing that I’m so fed up with, although I love it. I love Ford, and I think it’s a lot of shit that he punched Fonda, and I love Hemingway, and all that…and I love this man, and I hate him, and that’s what I think is so great about this story. It’s my best story.

It has to be adlibbed. I have to take the cast away for six or eight weeks, tell them the story – it’s a cast of only about six people – and then we go into the temporada, with three or four cameras, many of which show, because they’re making a movie about this man. You don’t know what’s the movie or not. They’re doing one of those Reichenbach portrait things, and there’s someone like you, and a girl, like Candy Bergen, and all that’s going.

And then right at the end, while they’re trying to bite off a piece of him, like they were with Hemingway at the end, when he was just a symbol and nothing else, and he knows it. Then there’s a terrible scene with the boy, whose already been fired, and he has to be destroyed, and he has a dummy of the boy, to be destroyed in some awful way, and it doesn’t work at the beginning, and this truck is getting empty. There’ll be one shot of this truck with all the dummies of the boy that’s travelling around, and you keep seeing these dummies being set up and destroyed, and he doesn’t like it.

It’s a story that's right for now, but I don’t have a title yet.

This is a transcription from THIS IS ORSON WELLES (audio tape edition - 1:37:40), which can be listened to at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LnuQZ6VD_Y

From another Wellesnet thread:

I do know, after 40 years in the business, that many artists' sexual lives are complicated; and I do know that what might be called, "sexual mentoring" over age gaps is not unheard of.

[nickleschichoney]

I think that Welles's views on human male sexuality, especially the "macho" kind many men have to this day, is pretty incisive. It can be destructive, especially in the hands of a well-known person with a certain amount of control over entertainment. Actually, I found a rushed (albeit 34-page!) letter from Welles at the UofM Welles-Kodar collection describing the film-within-a-film. It has these things to say about Jake:

"Historical Footnote:

"In Hollywood’s Golden Age (when he did a lot of his best work) Hannaford was rated well below such names as Capra, Cukor, Lubitsch, McCarey and Ford… For most of his long working life he was regarded by the Industry as not much more than a gifted, difficult and uncomfortably intelligent maverick. His true importance has been acknowledged by critics and film historians only recently. The change began on the other side of the Atlantic. The sort of European sensibility which, two generations earlier, had called America’s attention to the genius of its own jazz music, began in the late fifties, to proclaim the high significance of J.J. Hannaford to the culture of this century. This took a while to spread, but today he’s counted, more or less officially, among the six greatest living directors.

"Some people would make that twelve. Quite a few would give him first position.

"Be sure the Media is on to this…

"The press — newspapers, magazines, TV and radio — the whole wolf-pack, and all the culture-vultures, too — this summer they’re all running after Hannaford, and tripping over their own light and sound cables in the process.

"The Media tries to keep hooked on to the Youth Market…The kids dig Hannaford? That makes him an important product. Fang and claw, the entire jungle population has the old man surrounded.

"This is a film within a film…

"A film about a film…

"A film about a film-maker…

"The film-maker: J.J. Hannaford III

"The kids are digging film today as film was never dug before. Godard is God. There are a few select arch-angels. And then there is Hannaford (“Jake” to hundreds of his friends and thousands of his enemies).

"He’s an old man; why do the kids like him? I guess what they recognize in the old freebooter is a wayward streak of anti-establishment-fuck-you-all nihilism…

"Does he enjoy it? Well, that’s hard to say. The ego trips of J. J. Hannaford the Third are not as other men’s. He remains, as he has always been, a hard nut to crack. Tough, self-seeking, highly complex; a seducer, a destroyer — in sum, a very queer customer, indeed.

"Jake Hannaford is making a picture.

"We actually see a great part of this film — (an erotic fable about two young people) — and as the story about Jake proceeds, the story by him unfolds at the same time…

"We never actually see him shooting it. (We do, however, sometimes hear his directing the action.)

"We see his film as it exists in his own mind."

A little later, interrupting a description of the film-within-a-film, Welles writes:

"A final word here by way of clearing up a harsh question of sexual fact.

"Is Hannaford a queer?

"…Jake Hannaford? — Man’s man, macho of machos, grand captain of all the hairy chest brigades — a queer?

"If he caught you hinting such a thing, Jake — being, even in his sixties, the owner of a quite convincing Sunday punch — would have a good try at flattening you for the suggestion.

"Alone in front of the mirror, that battered face, meeting his own eye, could testify that not once in a sexual career both lengthy and athletic did he ever make or (consciously) wish to make a single pass at anyone of his own sex. He is, in fact, aggressively anti-queer, and stoutly bars all poufs and goddam faggots from his cot.

"And yet…

"There has always been (as we will learn) a curious pattern in every relationship between Jake and his leading men…

"First he discovers them…Nothing wrong in that, of course. No director, as it happens, has given to the screen so many of its male stars. Jake has been, quite literally, a star maker — a molder of male images. With this has gone a not unusual sense of proprietorship….Once having made his movie hero, he tends to think of him as his own personal property.

"The odd thing has been his method of staking out his claim…

"Several writers have been very busy just lately getting various books together on the Hannaford life story. Their researches have uncovered a recurring theme: almost invariably, Jake lays title to his male creations by laying the important female in their lives. Girl or wife, he manages (even now) to get to bed with them.

"Thus does the star-maker make his male stars and finally possess them.

"Another aspect of this pattern:

"What Jake creates, he must destroy…

"The actor who plays Michael is another such discovery,
another creation,
another victim…"

It's another Wellesian example of how power can corrupt, albeit now the target is sexuality. However, I would add to all this that Hannaford is perpetuating his own destructive, highly-closeted masculinity through the culture he holds influence over. He is a god not only over his cast and crew and friends, but over pop-culture, even the "artistic" end where real social progress could be made. Rosenbaum is right when he says this might be Welles's only "feminist" film.

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks nickles, very interesting. Sounds almost like Welles was unsure of how gay he wanted Hannaford to be. Suddenly, I'm not sure I envy Marshall and Bogdanovich in their attempt to assemble all this into something coherent. If this is, as Rosenbaum has said, Welles's feminist statement, then that is undoubtedly from Oja Kodar's influence. That's why it might be a mistake to shut her out of the creative process altogether, although I'm not sure if she has expressed any interest in being part of it.

The first part, concerning Hannaford's rediscovery by European critics, seems quite a bit like Welles talking about himself.

[nickleschichoney]

Thanks nickles, very interesting. Sounds almost like Welles was unsure of how gay he wanted Hannaford to be. Suddenly, I'm not sure I envy Marshall and Bogdanovich in their attempt to assemble all this into something coherent.

I never got that impression. Welles's point, I think, is that Hannaford has enough gayness in him to make him self-loathing and drive him to compensate for it.

[Le Chiffre]

Probably. I remember Charles Higham, in his RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN GENIUS suggested Welles may have been a repressed homosexual, and Welles certainly was interested in the subject of male bonding and relationships throughout his career. CHIMES seems to have a hint of the repressed homoerotic about it, as does THE TRIAL. Welles mentions Hannaford bedding all the girlfriends and wives of his male discoveries, but John Dale doesn't have a girl that we're made aware of in the film, only Oja in the film-within-the-film. Brooks Otterlake does, though, and Hannaford makes a play for her. The actress playing her bears a strong resemblance to Cybil Shepard, Peter Bogdanovich's girlfriend at the time, which is interesting. The whole thing smacks of Welles trying to work out his own tangled and tortured web of frustrations and desires.

Excerpt from "Sexual Repression: The Malady That Considers Itself the Remedy":
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/se ... the-remedy

Nothing inspires murderous mayhem in human beings more reliably than sexual repression. Denied food, water, or freedom of movement, people will get desperate and some may lash out at what they perceive as the source of their problems, albeit in a weakened state. But if expression of sexuality is thwarted, the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire. Unfortunately, the distorted rage resulting from sexual repression rarely takes the form of rebellion against the people and institutions behind the repression. (If it did, perhaps we'd be reading of abused priests rather than priests as abusers.) Instead, the rage is generally directed at helpless victims who are sacrificed to the sick gods of guilt, shame, and ignorant pride.

Interesting in light of Welles describing John Huston as being like a "defrocked cardinal."

[nickleschichoney]

Welles mentions Hannaford bedding all the girlfriends and wives of his male discoveries, but John Dale doesn't have a girl that we're made aware of in the film, only Oja in the film-within-the-film. Brooks Otterlake does, though, and Hannaford makes a play for her. The actress playing her bears a strong resemblance to Cybil Shepard, Peter Bogdanovich's girlfriend at the time, which is interesting.

And the note from Welles comes to the rescue again (italics mine):

"Through all of this — and above and below it — super-imposed upon it and under-pinning it —

"JAKE…
HIS FRIENDS . . .
MEMORIES (the tape recorders for the “oral histories” . . .
INTERVIEWS (opinions and confrontations)

"above all — his emotional involvement with the actor who plays Michael (and — incidentally — with the actor’s girl: the actress who plays Carla)…

"NO WAY OF EVEN INDICATING HOW THIS WORKS WITHIN THE FILM . . . [at least, not in this letter, anyway… — nickles chichoney]

"So let’s get on, at least, with Jake’s own movie .. … …"

In the film, it seems she's implied to be John Dale's girlfriend, but no one explicitly says so.

The whole thing smacks of Welles trying to work out his own tangled and tortured web of frustrations and desires.

That's possible, but I don't know how good of a possibility it is. There are boundaries to psychoanalyzing people, even Welles.

[Le Chiffre]

"above all — his emotional involvement with the actor who plays Michael (and — incidentally — with the actor’s girl: the actress who plays Carla)…

Wow, I don't remember this being conveyed in the script I read. Of course, there were quite a few drafts of the script, and it is logical.

There are boundaries to psychoanalyzing people, even Welles

No question. Since we now have a very good chance of finally seeing this movie in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future, it would probably be best to refrain from too much amateur psychoanalysis until the finished product has actually been seen by all of us. I'm reminded though, of a funny line one critic came up with for his negative review of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA by Sam Peckinpah (another Hannaford type): "The only analysis it invites is psychoanalysis."

Thanks again for the excerpts.

[Le Chiffre]

Albert Maysles 1966 documentary on Welles discussing his plans for The Sacred Beasts is always worth revisiting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gcp9-_bfI

Our story is about a pseudo-Hemingway, a movie director. So the central figure … you can barely see through the hair on his chest; who was frightened by Hemingway at birth. He's a tough movie director who has killed three or four extras on every picture … [but is] full of charm. Everybody thinks he's great. In our story he's riding around following a bullfighter, and living through him … but he's become obsessed by this young man who has become … his own dream of himself. He's been rejected by all his old friends. He's finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur … a fellow who lives off other people's danger and death.

One more word on Rex Ingram: he was a big influence on Michael Powell of Powell and Pressburger fame. In Jaglom's LUNCHES WITH ORSON, Welles trashes Powell and Pressburger, saying they never made a good film. That makes sense when you consider he didn't like Ingram either. Here's Powell making a cameo in Ingram's THE MAGICIAN (1926), in which Powell also served as assistant director:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS20veyGB9w
Good Senses of Cinema article on Ingram:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/great-di ... ex-ingram/

Rex Ingram may be the best-known enigma in film history. We are aware of him, these days, less as a director than as a fantasy of what a director might be. We may know him as the key Hollywood filmmaker of the 1920s. As a sexually ambivalent Svengali who discovered Valentino and other stars...If we look closely, whole sequences by Ingram shine through in films by Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, Luchino Visconti, James Whale and Stanley Kubrick. The patron saint of sheer visual obsession, Ingram made images so primal they are a world in themselves.

[nickleschichoney]

At the risk of saying something others have talked about: It seems that one of the people Jake was modeled on was Roger Hill. Hill's appearance went to Bradley Pease Burroughs, but not the character. The adventurous, mentoring aspects of Hill went to Jake, as did the nickname "Skipper", and like Brooks Otterlake and Hannaford, Welles and Hill used to trade lines of Shakespeare with each other, and did so even in the late 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii7mHFJhuA0&app=desktop.

Moreover, I'd say that there's a bit of Welles in Otterlake, in addition to Bogdanovich. Like Bogdanovich, Otterlake does celebrity impressions, but he has Welles's flair for showmanship, entertaining guests with Hannaford anecdotes. From the screenplay, Otterlake apparently likes to talk quite a bit!

What do you think?

[Le Chiffre]

Bogdanovich does impressions frequently in interviews, but I’ve never seen him do a good one; he’s no Rich Little in that regard. It’s still kind of a mystery why Welles wanted Rich Little, who had little acting experience, to play the role of Otterlake in the first place, and then another mystery why he decided to switch to Peter Bogdanovich after Little had filmed almost all of his part. Maybe we’ll find out in the documentary.

Welles is definitely part of Hannaford, but yes, he could be part of Otterlake too. Welles certainly knew what it was like to have Otterlake’s success and clout back in the early 40s, and the idea of Hannaford being a mentor with the nickname “Skipper” is interesting. One could argue that Welles splits himself in two, into the mentor and the mentored, in both CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and THE BIG BRASS RING as well. I can’t think of any earlier Welles film where that happens, except maybe MR. ARKADIN.

[nickleschichoney]

And the note from Welles comes to the rescue again (italics mine):

"above all — his emotional involvement with the actor who plays Michael (and — incidentally — with the actor’s girl: the actress who plays Carla)…

"NO WAY OF EVEN INDICATING HOW THIS WORKS WITHIN THE FILM . . . [at least, not in this letter, anyway… — nickles chichoney]

"So let’s get on, at least, with Jake’s own movie .. … …"

In the film, it seems she's implied to be John Dale's girlfriend, but no one explicitly says so.

If there's one thing I've learned since writing this, it's that nothing Welles wrote -- screenplays, treatments, etc. -- was set in stone. Everything he came up with was prone to being revised by him. He was a true perfectionist regarding the content of the movies he made.

And the relationship between Hannaford and "Carla" (eventually just called "the Actress") is just one of the things he changed his mind about as time went on. In the Locarno edition of the screenplay, there's a quick scene where Juliette Rich says that Dale wasn't interested in the actress, and neither was Hannaford (pp. 182-84). People ignore her, but she goes on anyway: "Things would have been different, wouldn't they, if Dale had been her lover? You [Jake] couldn't manage that. It rather spoils the pattern, doesn't it?" (p. 184).

It went by so quickly that I missed it. Knowing that the Locarno edition of the screenplay is pieced together from different drafts, I compared it to a bound draft dated Mid-September 1974 in the UofM Welles-Kodar collection. The exchange is still there, except Julie Rich further clarifies her point to someone only identified as A STOOGE: "Hannaford could have made him make her … So with Dale and this Indian girl - nothing happened. Hannaford knows they weren’t lovers- He couldn’t arrange that — Well? Doesn’t that sort of spoil the pattern?"

Hannaford's relationship with the Actress is the exception that proves the rule. Dale is not attracted to her, and Jake feels no need to make his "move" on said Actress because of this. If there's anything to take away from Dale's lack of attraction toward the Actress and the conversation with Denny and Burroughs ("From the time he could walk he used to put on shows with his auntie's gowns and dresses..."), it's that Dale is not only an aspiring actor who lied about not wanting to go into films, but also a young man who's in the closet. Dale is a destructive manipulator who is playing off Hannaford's insecurities. The Actress is just a pawn in this perverse game gone awry between a toxic, closeted, gay old man and the equally-closeted, manipulative kid who's making Hannaford chase him.

This shouldn't be a surprise, as Dale belongs to the generation that Hannaford and others like him helped mold through popular culture. Remember what Henry Jaglom says in that bit of improvised dialogue with Paul Mazursky: "This is the first generation that's violent out of their pain and frustration and you identify with that violence, right? 'Cause you dig the violence. It excites you. ... Who are the human beings in his films, huh? The men, right? Only the men. The women are practically non-existent except as fragments of a man's imagination. Kids are violent because of people like you [Jake], that's why the kids are violent."

Apologies if all this has been plowed over before. I just want to correct that comment of mine.

[Colmena]

Concerning Welles' personal fascination with the Other Side plot (which is made very clear by that transcript from _This is OW_) isn't
the plot line to Big Brass Ring relevant? Since it is so similar: the story of ostensibly straight powerful celebrity politician, who is
brought down my his closeted desire for a handsome young man. I have not read or seen BBR, but my memory has it that the same pattern is the crux of it.

[jbrooks]

Since it is so similar: the story of ostensibly straight powerful celebrity politician, who is
brought down my his closeted desire for a handsome young man

There are similar themes in both stories. But the actual plots of the two films/scripts are very different from each other.