Orson Welles’ long-believed lost footage shot for the 1938 stage comedy Too Much Johnson was preserved by the George Eastman Museum and first shown to the delight of cineastes at an Italian film festival in 2013.
Now, the black and white footage can be viewed online at eastman.org/too-much-johnson or Vimeo. The digitized version includes new recorded voice-over commentary by Anthony L’Abbate, preservation manager, and Caroline Yeager, associate curator, of the George Eastman Museum. The hour-long online film also includes a musical score provided by Philip C. Carli and inspired by Paul Bowles’s score for the original Mercury Theatre stage production.
“For the first time, people from all over the world will have access to this unique material with the voice-over commentary and musical accompaniment, previously only available for in-person screenings,” said Peter Bagrov, curator in charge of the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman Museum. “The original commentary was written by the museum and has been performed all over the world. It is essential for the understanding of this unfinished work by one of the great masters of cinema; the context it provides enhances the viewing experience for everyone.”
Lenore Faddish (Virginia Nicolson Welles, left) and Mrs. Billings (Ruth Ford) in a scene from “Too Much Johnson.”
The voice-over commentary chronicles the print’s discovery and the preservation process, as well as the history of the film’s creation — its casting, New York filming locations and why it never made it to Broadway.
Too Much Johnson was originally intended by Welles to be used in conjunction with his stage adaptation of an 1894 play by William Gillette. His Mercury Theatre planned to show three short cinematic segments as prologues to each act of the play. The slapstick comedy was meant to be shown with the accompaniment of music and live sound effects, but was never finished.
Joseph Cotten was cast in the lead role, with supporting roles going to Mercury Theatre actors, including Arlene Francis (later of What’s My Line fame), Eustace Wyatt, Edgar Barrier, Ruth Ford, Mary Wickes, Virginia Nicolson, and John Houseman. The play opened, without the film prologues, for an out-of-town tryout at the Stony Creek Theatre in Branford, Connecticut, on August 16, 1938, and flopped.
In October 2013, the George Eastman Museum, together with the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), the Cineteca del Friuli, and Cinemazero announced the recovery of Too Much Johnson. The nitrate work print of the film was rumored to have been lost in a fire at Welles’ home outside Madrid in 1970.
Instead, it turned out to be in trunks owned by Welles and recovered in an Italian warehouse some 30 years later.
The Eastman Museum — with financial support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia, and with technical expertise from Cinema Arts, a Pennsylvania film laboratory specializing in restoration of archival material, and Haghefilm Digitaal, a leading preservation lab in the Netherlands — completed the film’s preservation.
The world premiere of Too Much Johnson took place at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy, on October 9, 2013. One week later, the Eastman Museum presented the U.S. premiere at its Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York.
Stream the footage at https://www.eastman.org/too-much-johnson or at https://vimeo.com/513446254
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