Freedom River - Welles -- prescient as ever

[NoFake]

Has anyone caught this on YouTube? It was new to me:
Freedom River

[Harvey Chartrand]

Back then, Orson would toss off cartoon voiceovers between wine and beer commercials.
Meanwhile, his "disciple" of 30 years before, Robert Wise, was directing late-career classics like The Andromeda Strain, Two People, The Hindenburg (a masterpiece!) and Audrey Rose.
Around that time, John Lennon observed on The Mike Douglas Show that it saddened him to see Orson doing his dancing bear act on TV talk shows. Lennon said something to the effect that "Orson can act, he can direct, he can do anything, but no one wants to hire him."

[Terry]

Yeah, Welles was a fucking waste, wasn't he? Why does anyone even bother?

Freedom River is a great short. Thanks for the link.

[NoFake]

Thanks, Store, I agree. What strikes me is how prescient Welles was -- another Nostradamus, dare I say. :;): (Is he directing Al Gore from the great beyond...?)

[Terry]

Um, I doubt Welles wrote the copy, and the only thing Al Gore ever said that I cared about was his praise for Frank Zappa at the PMRC hearings.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5b8FxF-bXw

[Harvey Chartrand]

Orson was not being prescient. He had no input on the script to River of Freedom. The producer fed Orson his lines, he recited them with great import and used the cheque to buy dinner at Ma Maison or finance a few pick-up shots in The Other Side of the Wind.
Welles had as much input on River of Freedom as he did on The Begatting of the President LP, written by the now forgotten troika of Myron Roberts, Lincoln Haynes and Sasha Gilien. Welles carried the can for their anti-Richard Nixon stance, though. Nixon didn't view Orson as a journeyman narrator, but added him to his burgeoning enemies list... and sicced the IRS on him.

[NoFake]

Well, yes, but that's what you continually find with Orson: his willingness to put himself on the line -- or perhaps, fail to realize, or better yet to care, he's putting himself on the line -- and speak truth to power. I think Nixon (or his henchmen) knew from Welles' history, including a burgeoning FBI file whose growth Nixon no doubt facilitated, that Orson wasn't just reciting other people's prose.

[Anton]

Good point, No Fake. It's hard to imagine Welles lending his voice to political or social views he didn't concur with.

[Harvey Chartrand]

You mean like the propaganda piece for the Shah of Iran in 1972? Or his narration of a documentary – Persepolis Ceremonies (1971), sponsored by the Iranian Government's Ministry of Culture?

[NoFake]

Good point. Not much has been written about these, at least in the references I'm familiar with, and although I now recall hearing or reading brief allusions to what you mention, I was disturbed by what I found when I googled Welles and Iran. I'd welcome anyone's input...

[Glenn Anders]

Reading these remarks, I think it would be wise to consider the possibility of a kind of "reverse McCarthyism" here.


We might remember that, in 1971, the Shah was regarded by the United States and others as a democratizing influence in Iran. He had industrialized the country, introduced women's suffrage, and would soon recognize Israel. [These last two accomplishments marked him for deposal by the fundamentalist mullahs.] His extravgance, plus the ruthlessness and the cost of of his war on Communism, helped bring him down.

[The CIA-led coup in the 1950's was either not known by Americans, or floated by people who could be easily dismissed as Communists, or the kind of nuts who later wanted to go to investigate the assassinations of the 1960's, or Iran-Contra, or those who see the pattern of Obstruction of Justice in war profiteering cases behind Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez's dismissal of the eight Federal Prosecutors, today.]

But in 1971, the idea that the Shah represented thousands of years of imperial rule (even if his father had been originally only a non-commissioned officer in the White Russian Army) might well have been deemed the subject of a movie (as it had, in his father's case in 1934). Welles' cooperation no doubt won him brownie points with the U.S. State Department, maybe some forgiveness on his tax problems, and it led to the financial arrangement which financed his last two films.

No movie about the accomplishments and embodiment of the Shah, probably no F FOR FAKE; no THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND for us to palaver about.

Remember that after the fact, it is always easy to see the beast Hitler was (as Welles did, contemporaneously); that Stalin sold out the ideals of the Revolution by the early 1930's; or that the majority of the Iranian people had come to look on the Shah as a tyrant. Rememember that the FDR Welles campaigned for in 1940 and 1944 is the same guy who at a pen stroke put tens of thousands of loyal Japanese in detention [concentration] camps, and gave a blind eye to "ethnic cleansing" and the expropriation of their businesses and properties.

You might say, it happens every Spring or so, but we don't have Orson to kick around anymore!

Glenn

[chipm]

Good point Glenn!

[Wellesnet]

In the wake of the new political turmoil, this is making the rounds of social media once again:
http://www.wellesnet.com/freedom-river- ... bia-greed/

[Terry]

https://archive.org/details/freedom_river_orson_welles

[Le Chiffre]

Good to see it on Archive in a decent print. Part of a tryptich of shorts, along with IS IT ALWAYS RIGHT TO BE RIGHT, and THE CAVE, both of which are very good too.