Orson Welles

Brad Pitt

Mickey Rourke

Of course it's a toss-up as to who does the worst Irish accent in that film - Rourke or Bob Hoskins?

B.Pitt's accent in Snatch is supposed to rilly good. Since I intend nevah to see this film can anyone confirm or deny?

Mark S - yup, it's pretty good, shame about the film in general, which howls.

kind of reminds me of the difference between Indiana Jones I and II

'the magnificent ambersons' has lots of good in despite whatever.

'the lady from shaghai' is great. all around.

'the third man', yeah, is brilliant. mainly because of welles. erm. and anton karas. & shit.

'touch of evil' is too. how about charlton as a mexican? his accent?

Orson Welles' late-in-life follies inspired one of the funniest bits shown on the most unfunny "Critic". (Something about frozen peas? It was funny.) His films are pretty good, too (even though _Touch of Evil_ seemed a bit ... disheveled. Or was that _Shanghai_? The one where he has a really fake beard? I saw one of those flicks in a film class after getting no sleep the night before.)

(_Shanghai_ had the funhouse mirror sequence, right?)

Welles is classic all the way. His Macbeth is underrated and bizarre as well.

Did anyone read Simon Callow's biography? Seemed pretty snide in tone.

Too bad Othello is kind of patchwork, that would have been another great one had he gotten backed fully & up front to film it. I can appreciate Kane historically and for its technical finesse, but I don't really relate to it.

Did he really put dye in his swimming pool to catch guests who peed while swimming?

Has anyone read the Callow bk on OW(and did they ever publish his vol. 2)? The Thomson, of course, is superb - I love the way that DT swings between being incredibly tough-minded and adoringly effusive.

It is only 'good' when compared with Heather Graham's. It sounds kind of Australian, which who knows is maybe how eastenders sounded back then, seeing as how that's where the Australian accents derives from (so I'm told and it certainly sounds that way when you think about it). Apparently, the real life Depp character was from Dorset or somewhere but the studios vetoed this bit of obsessive detail-following on the grounds that it would be TOO WEIRD (for Depp or audiences, I'm not sure).

(uh, x-post by about a year and a half)

Not that I know of, but Turner Classic Movies is showing the film THIS WEDNESDAY (May 18th) at 11:30pm Eastern.

Either get your VCR ready or find someone who has TCM.

! I must get this.

(Does his "sellout" material need any defense anymore? It's all priceless.)

I wish someone would get on Falstaff/Chimes At Midnight quick. That's a great, great Welles film.

Does anyone remember when Orson Welles was on Moonlighting?

Last I saw on Wellesnet, Rosenbaum was expressing disappointment that this wasn't the case. (Of course, that was months ago.)

i was reading recently about how as soon as those really bombastic deep-focus shots became identified as "wellesian," he stopped using them.

As I understand it, Orson was on some kind of medication that reacted badly with alcohol, so after a few takes - I imagine he had to imbibe the wine at the end of each take - he was incoherent. Then again, the director's voice seems to indicate they were only on takes one, two and three, so maybe he did show up to the set absolutely trousered. I guess we'll never know. Still, awful to see such a great man laid so low.

Some of my favorite Welles performances were on The Dean Martin Show, of all places. The sketch/dance routine with Dean, Orson and Jimmy Stewart at the hairdressers makes me weep with laughter every single time I watch it.

I saw F for Fake for the first time last week, and I'm still thinking about it. The way it's edited is so goddamn brilliant. I keep remebering the sequence when the painter is denying that he ever signed a painting, and instead of just cutting to the biographer saying that he did, he lets the camera sit for a long moment on the biographers expression, purse-lipped, not even wanting to comment on a fact so obvious. "Of course they were signed."

And the other best bit is that he's absolutely right. Sure he's being a jerk, but ask a bonafide genius to do the dumbest commercial in television history, and that's what you get. I laugh when I hear that not because Orson is an arrogant prick, but because he so outclasses everyone around him, and says so.

F for Fake: This is the Welles movie that people seem to discover on their own, perhaps by accident, and after the discovery, they cannot contain their enthusiasm. A friend of mine recently saw it for the first time, and declared it: “Cinema, Cinema, Cinema!”

It is. It really, really is.

... up until this April, mehaps.

That Thomson book is awful!

Uh, not really--especially from a factual basis. I mean maybe it's the last word on him from the Pauline Kael-revisionist/ain't Hollywood great! strand of Welles writing.

That's incorrect. He has nothing but praise for The Immortal Story and F is for Fake.

"I mean maybe it's the last word on him from the Pauline Kael-revisionist/ain't Hollywood great! strand of Welles writing."

Another reductive judgment. Kael's essay made Thomson very uneasy, and he admits it. As far as Kael's argument goes, there's some merit to it, as the auteurist wing of filmcrit had championed Welles to such a degree that Mankiewicz's contributions were overlooked or ignored. Some of her criticism re Kane is on the money too; she's right on about how beautiful Welles' performance is and the scene in which Kane intones that awful line, "If I hadn't been very rich I'd be a great man.

This book will have some of the same problems with repitition and reiteration that plagued Movie Wars.

Is Simon Callow anywhere close to finishing his bio vol 2?

What troubles Kael, Thomson, and myself (even tho' I haven't seen the film in about 8 yrs) is welles' performrance, or rather, his conception of Falstaff. We don't buy him in this lead anymore; his Falstaff is a buffoon, not the supreme prankster and wit whom Harold Bloom considered the greatest character in Western Lit. Welles couldn't play him anymore; that "great, booming, con man's voice" as Gore Vidal once described it gave the game away.

"immortal story" is a minor work at best. and yes, he likes "f for fake" - that's no excuse for all but ignoring and/or downplaying the importance of everything else welles did in the last two decades of his life.

kael was a great critic but an awful researcher. her kane essay is fun to read but extremely sloppy as an account of the actual making of the film (see peter bogdanovich's "the kane mutiny" and andrew sarris's "raising kael" for a pretty comprehensive rebuttal to virtually every point she makes), and her observations about the film are generally less-than-acute.

i don't think "if i hadn't been very rich i'd be a great man" is an awful line at all; it's exactly the kind of deluded thing kane would say about himself - which is exactly the kind of nuance kael missed in the film. as far as she's concerned it's just a "shallow masterpiece," and anyone who finds resonance in it is an idiot. by contrast, thomson's observations on kane are generous, fascinating and original - the best stuff in his book, probably.

harold bloom's thinly disguised self-worship aside, jack falstaff is a con man AND a buffoon! i personally find the performance very moving, much moreso than almost any other welles ever gave - the long close-up of his face after hal banishes him is just a beautiful piece of acting.

To me, that's the most generous kind of praise: you dismiss a film's flaws, but love its pluses. Do you want more two-dimensional appraisals?

As for "If I wasn't very rich..." the scene in which it's found is just pompous and lacking nuance. Kane sits there, intones, and allows the line to sink in; there's no irony intended. It's clear Welles (or Mankiewicz) was crafting a moment of pseudo-profundity, and, to their credit, one of the few in a movie that's far from the shallow masterpiece Kael declared it to be (how's that for nuanced praise?)

haha what kind of asshole?

Kramer: Oh! yeah.

Elaine: Huh . So What's it about?

Kramer: Well it's a story about love, deception, greed, lust and...unbridled enthusiasm.

Elaine: unbridled enthusiasm...?

Kramer: Well , that's what led to Billy Mumphrey's downfall.

Elaine: Oh! boy.

Kramer: You see Elaine, Billy was a simple country boy. You might say a cockeyed optimist,

who got himself mixed up in the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue.

Elaine: Oh! my God.

October 18

F is For Fake vs. Dial M for Murder
Orson and Alfred by alphabet.

Audio will alternate with each seating
4:00pm Dial M for Murder audio
6:00pm F is For Fake audio
8:00pm Dial M for Murder audio
10:00pm F is For Fake audio

We're not sure if there are any synergies besides their alphabetic titles, but seeing Orson's last great masterpiece next to Alfred's waltz with Grace Kelly should reveal something, right?

Orson Welles' F is For Fake (1974) deserves the same level of praise as Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil. This past year, Criterion Collection released it on DVD. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) is a murder-melodrama wrapped in Hitchcock's formalist, baroque aesthetic.

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/showing/spanish05.htm

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0549,morales,70712,20.html

I saw it and found it really frustrating. I'm not sure how many of those "postmodernist quirks" were Welles' and how many were invented by Franco using the In the Land of Don Quixote footage.

The dubbed voices were really terrible--especially in light of Welles' hyper-attention to the way actors sounded. I couldn't tell how many of the jokes were just flat and how many suffered due to the hammy dubbing.

I'm not sure why the footage looked so awful--if Welles used bad stock, or if it wasn't preserved well or if Franco did that to normalize the look of the film, but I felt like I was watching a movie on an Apple II.

I mean, I'm still glad I saw it and these are just my first impressions, but it certainly wasn't a particularly enjoyable film going experience.

Either the footage had deteriorated, or OW was delusional that hewas making something releasable.

"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millenium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."

It never made an impression. Reportedly Welles wanted to cast Agnes Moorehead in the role that eventually went to Edward G. Robinson, but the studio nixed the idea. Fascinating.

i thought this movie was wonderful!

yeah, the trailer is awesome.

i love this movie.

ringwald gets her comeuppance.

the stuff on the second disc is rad.

Amoeba is good for that. There's a whole section of nothing but Critierion discs (they know their crowd) and many discs turn up used.

Yeah, all the bonus features look a treat. :-)

well, no, it doesn't suck, but it hasn't dated well

i am teaching "f for fake" on monday!

F is for Fake -- great mindfuck, partly because it appears that he's hellbent on deconstructing his own cinematic authority when in fact he's doing the OPPOSITE (viz. his locating himself in the editing room) - his capricious excursions and tangents from whatever loose plot there is only underline his ultimate control. especially vis-a-vis the half-naked girls who show up from time to time.

-- Tracer Hand (tracerhan...), February 10th, 2002.

So there you go. ;-)

its one of my favourite movies of all time, formally and it moves me emotionally too

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:xnmm9TyWYm49dM:images.amazon.com/images/G/01/books/ripping-yarns/palin-intro-tomkinsons-roje.jpg

Wait, isn't that a photo from the back cover of Music From Big Pink?

(and the movie itself is marvelous needneedneed that 3xdvd set...)

(jos, the one time I saw it seemed an amusing footnote)

On some days, Othello is my favorite film of his. Kane or Lady from Shanghai on others.

http://www.deanesmay.com/files/deanesmay-250px-TV_cookie_monster_monsterpiece_theatre-small.jpg

Er, wait.

"Callow appreciates Welles’s post-Kane film work without neglecting its flaws or denying Welles’s own share of responsibility for the shambles in which studios tended to release what he had shot. The culprit was not inevitably crass commercialism but often an absent Welles, who had already sped off towards his next project, leaving editing and sound, for which radio had sharpened his ear, to underinstructed colleagues."

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25352-2277138,00.html

His Dylan biography is worthless as criticism but extremely entertaining.

Also great outtake of Welles directing Arkadin's daughter (OW's future wife) while acting in a two-shot with her: "Again, warmer, chin a little higher, don't pause..."

I watched half of it, one day

Got the Arkadin box after Christmas and have so far just watched the Corinth cut. Good lord what a loopy (and loopily wonderful) movie. I did like the appearance of Goldfinger as the "Christmas Merry" guy.

Hope the third volume comes out before I'm 65.

I have it on a couple of DVD-R's someone in the UK burned for me. Wish I could share it but, unfortunately, I don't own a DVD burner. They're also Region 2. I'll let you know if I can get them copied somehow. It's a wonderful, often hilarious and also very touching interview. One of my fave parts is when he's asked about his being a child prodigy and he denies it by saying something like " I wasn't one of those precocious little monsters you hear about." And his fascination with the LED clapboard they were using between commercials: "Amazing. Technology has finally caught up with the movies. I need to get one of those."

Imagine if he had lived even a decade or so more.

"An Avid, you say? Hmmm..."

obviously i understand if this is too much trouble however...

I'm so swamped at the moment that my getting them copied would take awhile. However, the person I got them from - can't remember her real or ILX name - posted/posts a bunch on I Love Film and I Love Comics and is a Welles fan. I got them over 2 years ago so I can't remember her details. I'll keep digging around for you, though, and see what comes up!

http://brightlightsfilm.com/55/windiv.htm

Gregg Toland on shooting KANE:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=178

It's a hundred degrees out right now... Currently watching F For Fake and drinking beer.

I can't wait to have this baby arrive in the mail this week.

I picked up on the cheap a French box set of Welles films and a TV series he made. So far I've watched a couple, The Stranger and Confidential Report.

The Stranger is a watchable thriller about a Nazi on the run in small town America. There's a bravura, Hitchcock-esque finale in a clocktower, but on the whole it's a very run-of-the-mill Hollywood thriller. I find it amazing he turned out something so very conventional just a few years after Kane and Ambersons.

Confidential Report = British release of Mr Arkadin, supposedly a superior cut to the U.S. release. An enjoyable caper, the first half hour in particular very good, but then it loses steam and focus in a whirlwind of different locations (The Riviera, Spain, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, Mexico... it's all too much), and a neverending series of campy cameos. The whole thing is too rich, the underlying plot not really up to the job. He's recycled themes from Kane I guess (investigation into past life of larger-than-life tycoon, flashback structure) but played it for laughs. Enjoyable, but no masterpiece.

Last film is Malpertuis, which I've yet to see and know nothing about. The TV series looks like it might be interesting.

Just like everyone else it seems, I've wandered onto this thread to say I've just watched F for Fake and OMG it's fun. Best bit is the fit girl wandering around and being ogled - I'm being fucked with, but I know I'm being fucked with, and OW knows I know I'm being fucked with, or so it seemed to me. Oh yeh, and the quick cuts between the two dudes when the old guy said he'd never signed any of his paintings, O RLY? YA RLY.

I really have to get round to watching Citizen Kane.

uh ya

shenanigans:

http://www.tribecafilm.com/news-features/features/Orson_Welles.html

I thought it was gonna be about Lady From Shanghai.

Shanghai-igans

The 1982 Arena special on Welles gets an airing on BBC4 tomorrow night, essential viewing.

I hope I'm in to watch Magnificent Ambersons on Sunday. I've decided this year to give in and watch it, bastardized though it may be.

The special's in 2 parts with the second on the 27th, also on Sunday 'Orson Welles over Europe' a new documentary looking at his exile in Europe presented by Simon Callow.

Alright, watching the Arena special now and being reminded of how depressing the changes to Ambersons are I've gone right off watching it on Sunday. Convince me otherwise?

also lols at Bogdanovich totally dicking Kael. and RIP Robert Wise.

Raising a glass to the man right now: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm queer for the Caribbean. ."

I hope I'm in to watch Magnificent Ambersons on Sunday. I've decided this year to give in and watch it, bastardized though it may be.

― moron oil (Gukbe), Thursday, December 24, 2009 2:28 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

obviously it would be better to have his cut, but dude... most films are bastardized. even some classics like 'rules of the game' are very dodgy (iirc the version we have is a 1958 edit).

the first 20-30 minutes are still perfect, and there's good stuff throughout (except the very last scene).

“My doctor told me not to have intimate dinners for four,” he once famously quipped, “unless there are three other people there.”

hero

there's batardized and then there's lopping out 45 minutes and changing the ending. echoes of the cut version of Brazil come to mind. I'll probably watch it.

however, there's a new problem. the second part of Arena airs right afterwards, but I'm meant to be going out. since part 1 isn't available on iplayer, i can't imagine the second part will be. /distressed

was glad to have seen 'journey into fear', whatever welles's involvement. i would definitely steal the opening shot if i were a maker of hitman movies. (probably been done.)

i watched his "macbeth" the other week. shit is weird. dude was weird.

granted, macbeth is a weird play. but this was new kinds of weird.

also, has anyone ever heard an orson welles story that wasn't fairly entertaining? was reading about his shenanigans on the set of "the long, hot summer"--pretty much standard-issue welles shenanigans, really--and was duly amused.

yeah.

any opinions on the best welles biography? i've only read david thomson's, many years ago, which a) i can't remember, and b) well, i can remember it was afraid of being a boring old "biography".

Thomson's has some of the best critical insights into Welles' work even when I disagree often.

i forget which one i read, it was a super-defensive post-"raising kane" one clearly out to make a point but otherwise pretty good

isn't there a definitive three-volume set, the guy currently writing the third? sorry that this isn't tremendously helpful but i maybe gathered this from an old welles thread.

that'd be simon callow's, i guess. not read anything by him (he's best known as a very actory-y actor).

but shd look up reviews.

I have the first 2 Callow vols and have only skimmed. Look good.

i read volume 1 of callow's book back when i was an obsessive wellesian. it's great stuff, very insightful and informative, espec on all the theatre stuff. i'll get around to reading the second one one of these days; i remember being relieved he had decided to continue doing it. they're coming out at the rate of once every 12 years or so.

barbara leaming's book is worthwhile if only because she was the only biographer welles spoke to, so there's a lot of wonderfully entertaining stories and quotes even if you assume he's making a third of it up.

I loooved the first volume of Callow's biography, birth thru Citizen Kane, teh second volume not so much. looking forward to the third covering Welles' long weird decline.

anybody else remember the TV commercials he did in the late 70s for Perrier and Gallo (IIRC) wines? or John Candy's priceless Welles impression on SCTV?

Sure. And there is a Paul Masson wine ad over at Morbius's shenanigans link.

I guess This Is Orson Welles is not a bio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ehxdlAlHQ

is journey into fear worth watching? its on el iplayer

it's only 75 minutes long. press play and see what you think!

no-one would claim it's a classic.

did The Immortal Story ever come out on disc?

There's an hour long Orson Welles documentary by Simon Callow (wrote Cowell first) tonight on BBC4.
Orson Welles Over Europe:
Simon Callow looks at the career of actor-director Orson Welles after he went into self-exile in Europe and immersed himself in challenging films, TV, theatre and bullfighting.

The ending of Ambersons is absolutely appalling.

don't think it has, morbs (i watched it on VHS i think)

anyone ever read jonathan rosenbaum's reconstruction of the original ending of ambersons?

anyone ever listen to OW's mercury theater radio adaptation of it?

Haha, googled Orson's F for Fake girlfriend the other day and came across an album by some Ilx0rs.

is "girlfriend" some sassy new slang for "movie" like "joint"

No, that is a nice theory but sorry. Isn't there a woman featured prominently in F For Fake who lived with him for many years and later made a documentary about him, as is mentioned up thread?

yes, OJA

(I have seen her sex scene in a car from The Other Side of the Wind)

is "OJA" some sassy new slang for "oh yeah"

I thought you were watching GWTW!

Not every one of your contributions is going to get reposted on the zing thread, s1ocki.

i wasn't trying to zing u sir

Actually, I just looked it up, her real name was Olga but Orson changed it to Oja to make it more exotic.

Will watch Compulsion tonight.

Good movie, Fleischer and Dean Stockwell in great form too.

Well, then

Not even death can keep Orson Welles down. The gargantuan film legend, wine pitchman and Transformers: The Movie voice-over artist will roar out of his coffin to narrate an upcoming adaptation of Christmas Tails, an obscure, self-published Christmas novel about Santa's dog by a friend. Welles narrated the novel on reel-to-reel tape as a favor to pal Robert X. Leed.
Leed has now hooked up with Drac Studios, a special effects and make-up company looking to get into film production. The film, a live-action/animation hybrid, hopes to begin shooting this Summer with an eye towards a December 2011 release.

spellbinding, all things considered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V421bF698sA

Dinah is so gentle and polite, in an uncondescending way.

Have you guys seen this? Enjoying it:

http://www.ubu.com/film/welles_oneman.html

NIKKA whisky
ORSON WELLES,
he is really a man

so I was in Venice CA last Friday night, and was alerted that I'd find the blocks near the beach familiar:

http://www.justabovesunset.com/id1421.html

Henry Jaglom has a book coming out on his lunch chats with OW, and oh my, the dish....

H.J.: Were things really better in the old days?

O.W.: It’s terrible for older people to say that, because they always say things were better, but they really were. What was so good about it was just the quantity of movies that were made. If you were Darryl Zanuck, and you were producing 80 moving pictures under your direct supervision, how much attention could you pay to any one picture? Somebody was gonna slip something in that’s good.

I got along well with even the worst of the old moguls. They were all easier to deal with than these college-­educated, market-conscious people. I never really suffered from the “bad old boys.” I’ve only suffered from lawyers and agents. Wasn’t it Norman Mailer who said that the great new art form in ­Hollywood is the deal? Everybody’s energy goes into the deal. Forty-five years I have been doing business with agents, as a performer and a director. As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I’ve never heard one say, “No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.” They will always say, “You don’t like him? I’ve got somebody else.” They’re totally spineless.

H.J.: In the old days, all those big deals were made on a handshake. With no contract. And they were all honored.

O.W.: In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, ’cause it was lawless. A man’s word had to mean something. My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn’t be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You’re a lawbreaker. It’s just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society. You see?

Richard Burton comes to the table.

Richard Burton: Orson, how good to see you. It’s been too long. You’re looking fine. Elizabeth is with me. She so much wants to meet you. Can I bring her over to your table?

O.W.: No. As you can see, I’m in the middle of my lunch. I’ll stop by on my way out.

Burton exits.

H.J.: Orson, you’re behaving like an asshole. That was so rude.

O.W.: Do not kick me under the table. I hate that. I don’t need you as my ­conscience, my Jewish Jiminy Cricket. Especially do not kick my boots. You know they protect my ankles. Richard Burton had great talent. He’s ruined his great gifts. He’s become a joke with a celebrity wife. Now he just works for money, does the worst shit. And I wasn’t rude. To quote Carl Laemmle, “I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”

http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/orson-welles-lunch-with-henry-jaglom.html

thats great

H.J.: They keep writing in the papers that, ever since Wolfgang Puck left, this place has gone downhill.

O.W.: I don’t like Wolfgang. He’s a little shit. I think he’s a terrible little man.

really hoping i get to that kinda awesome fascinating asshole phase in my life

not fond of Chaplin, Spencer Tracy, or Woody Allen either!

really wanna read that jaglom book now

note of pathos at the start of that excerpt on smelling roast pork.

can understand why Tracy was an asshole.

What would Dick & Liz be doing dining out in '83, seven years after the end of their second marriage?

also K Hepburn did A Bill of Divorcement in '32, long before Orson was in Hollywood... but Maureen O'Hara did a remake in '40, maybe Welles is conflating them and MO'H was the salty talker? Maybe he just hated anyone who was close to Mia Farrow?

someone posted this piece earlier, and I noticed the discrepancy re ABOD.

Weren't Liz & Dick doing a stage show together at the time?

oh yeah! I remember they had done (a badly reviewed) Private Lives on Broadway, but had no idea they toured with it...

love the talk about goldwyn/thalberg:

H.J.: F. Scott Fitzgerald must have been impressed by [Thalberg], to make him the model for The Last Tycoon.

O.W.: Writers always fell for his shtick. Writers are so insecure that when he said, “I don’t write, but I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this,” they just lapped it up. By the way, there were better scripts written, on the whole—this is a generalization, but it’s my opinion—even when writers considered that they were slumming by coming out here. Faulkner and everybody. “We’re going out there to get some money.” Still, they did an honest job for that money, because instead of going back to their little place up in the Hollywood Hills to write their scripts, they had to eat with each other every day in the studio commissary, which made for a competitive situation.

H.J.: But Thalberg was also creative. At least from Fitzgerald’s point of view.

O.W.: Well, that’s my definition of ­“villain.”

i think it's thalberg that my favorite story in the bogdanovich book is about. it's like a long joke with a tricky punchline and nobody i've told it to has laughed as hard as i've thought they should and obviously that's my fault. hold on a sec.

oh no it was goldwyn which now that i think about it for two seconds makes more sense:

OW: This was when Sam had a beautiful ballerina called Vera Zorina under contract ... He was preparing The Goldwyn Follies and there was going to be a ballet in it for Zorina, so he's brought out George Balanchine to do the choreography, a word Goldwyn couldn't even pronounce. This is at a story conference, a big table clotted with Hollywood gag men and associated producers. George is asked to explain just what he has in mind, and George, you must understand, speaks a version of our English language even more opaque than Sam's. He brings out matchsticks to demonstrate the movements and employs the whole specialized vocabulary of the dance. This takes a good hour, and when he's finished there follows one of those numb, executive silences. Not one of all those blank-faced writers and department heads can think of anything to say. Then Goldwyn speaks. "I like it," he says, "and I understand it."

which PB book, Who the Devil Made It?

this is orson welles, best book ever

in which ORSON turns out to be a superb book critic.

looking forward to this new sack of gossip tho because welles in the PB book is cautious with invective:

PB: What American director do you like the least?

Here follows a full reel of tape in which Orson attacks a number of filmmakers whose work he detests. This material was very colorful indeed, but the following letter from Orson, which I received soon after he was sent the typed transcript of this day's work, leaves me no choice in the matter:

Dear Peter,
How do you like having another director lay into you? It hurts, doesn't it? You tell yourself that you are angry, but the truth is that you are hurt. I know I am. A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves. There's quite enough poison floating in the Hollywood air as it is, why add to the pollution?

Of course, I hate those movies we were talking about the other day, but I don't hate the men who made them. Or want to distress them even a little bit. You told me on the phone it was very funny when I said that [name deleted] ought to be put in jail. Well, let's commute the sentence. The book doesn't need it.

Always remember that your heart is God's little garden.

Yours ever,
Louisa Mae [sic] Alcott

the bit about Mizoguchi

ah! j'admire beaucoup mizoguchi.

that's a beautiful letter, thanks dlh

Oh boy! Treasure!! Can't wait for this Jaglom tome either.

also wow/lol/wtf:

O.W.: I adored [Carole Lombard]. She was a very close friend of mine. And I don’t mean to imply that we were ever lovers. Do you know why her plane went down?

H.J.: Why?

O.W.: It was full of big-time American physicists, shot down by the Nazis. She was one of the only civilians on the plane. The plane was filled with bullet holes.

H.J.: It was shot down by who?

O.W.: Nazi agents in America. It’s a real thriller story.

H.J.: That’s preposterous.

O.W.: The people who know it, know it. It was greatly hushed up. The official story was that it ran into the mountain.

H.J.: The agents had antiaircraft guns?

O.W.: No. In those days, the planes couldn’t get up that high. They’d just clear the mountains. The bad guys knew the exact route that the plane had to take. They were standing on a ridge, which was the toughest thing for the plane to get over. One person can shoot a plane down, and if they had five or six people there, they couldn’t miss. Now, I cannot swear it’s true. I’ve been told this by people who swear it’s true, who I happen to believe. But that’s the closest you can get, without having some kind of security clearance.

No one wanted to admit that we had people in the middle of America who could shoot down a plane for the Nazis. Because then everybody would start denouncing anybody with a German grandmother. Which Roosevelt was very worried about. The First World War had only happened some twenty-odd years before. He’d seen the riots against ­Germans. And he was very anxious for nothing like that to be repeated. He was really scared about what would happen to the Japanese if all the rednecks got started.

H.J.: So his idea was to protect them? That’s why he rounded them up and put them in camps?

O.W.: Yes.

O.W.: The people who know it, know it. It was greatly hushed up. The official story was that I was the mountain mountain.

H.J.J: That's preposterous.

you have to wonder when/if he knew he was bullshitting.

some great stories (one all-timer about churchill) in his long dick cavett interview (on youtube!) but you can't believe more than a few words of them.

he's "great chums" with a lot of people (Thornton Wilder, FDR, Winston, Zanuck).

this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpqwY7QL7r8

"i found myself paddling in the water just next to churchill." envision that: like done DUMPLINGS!.

what on earth. i just typed DUMPLINGS!.

lol

pottery

more entertaining pranks than F for Fake at least

I found a half prive copy at The Strand in NYC today and three interviews in this is a thing of hilarious beauty.

*price

He was sort of pals with Ernest Bornemann, who is very Welles-like himself, a polymath and outrageous raconteur. There's some Welles stuff in the long interview in the back of The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, and I can't remember if Bornemann also wrote a book about when he was living with and then renting from Welles, in a house Welles was squatting in, and the movie project they worked on that eventually became Ulysses with Kirk Douglas.

I believe that the movies—I’ll say a terrible thing—have never gone beyond “Kane.” That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been good movies, or great movies. But everything has been done now in movies, to the point of fatigue. You can do it better, but it’s always gonna be the same grammar, you know? Every artistic form—the blank-verse drama, the Greek plays, the novel—has only so many possibilities and only so long a life. And I have a feeling that in movies, until we break completely, we are only increasing the library of good works. I know that as a director of movie actors in front of the camera, I have nowhere to move forward. I can only make another good work.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/my-lunches-with-orson.html

(why being a film critic in the 21st century has essentially been a waste of time for me)

Orson Welles died before Vulgar Auteurism

things that are "a waste of time" I view as absolutely necessary

yeah, better wastes back then

also, motherfuckers got paid

"only" increasing

Glenn Kenny pleasantly surprised by (most of) the Jaglom book:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/07/my-lunches-with-orson.html

Rosenbaum in the comments worth reading.

I had not read any allegations that Jaglom had taped OW secretly, dunno what to think. That sucks if true, but it was a lot harder to hide recorders 30 years ago, especially on your person.

It wasn't in secret, the intro mentions that Welles didn't mind.

It also says that some parts have been edited together, some dialogue filled in when the audio was unintelligible, and some content inserted. So I take some parts with a grain of salt.

Irritatingly, that extract that was online a few weeks ago seems to have been composed of a half dozen bits from the book, so you'll occasionally run into something you already read every dozen pages.

well apparently Oja Kodar and Barbara Leaming say Welles claimed he was unaware, just before his death.

yeah, I read that in the comments just now :(

jaglom more like jagoff amirite

here's something to lead off two years of centennial screenings (we can hope)

For generations, Welles scholars have been intrigued by “Too Much Johnson,” which would seem to represent Welles’s first real experience composing a film to be seen by a paying public, with the support of a professional cast and a professional crew. But for over 50 years, no print had been known to exist....

“Too Much Johnson” has reappeared — discovered not in Spain but in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/movies/early-film-by-orson-welles-is-rediscovered.html

http://www.avclub.com/articles/longlost-early-orson-welles-film-discovered-has-un,101353/

new book on his stay in Italy (1947-52):

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/a-conspicuous-gap-on-orson-welles-in-italy

The Lady From Shanghai comes to BluRay.

http://shop.tcm.com/the-lady-from-shanghai-blu-ray-dvd-combo/detail.php?p=505914&v=tcm_vault-collection_coming-soon

audio Shakespeare

https://archive.org/details/Orson_Welles_Shakespeare_Collection

newly digitized Othello opens in NY today

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-orson-welless-othello

pumped to see too much johnson someday

Bogdo open his card file (all Welles work, not just dir'd)

love the supermarket photo

http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/the-orson-welles-file-part-1

too many damn adjectives

http://d1oi7t5trwfj5d.cloudfront.net/32/18/39d1d6d9452db64065538d47986b/welles-and-bogdanovich.jpg

Huh, unexpected new addition to ws via time machine.

i guess that's why Cybill Shephered transitioned from Elvis

Right, Orson was slimmer than Elvis by that point.

oh!ja kodar!

Bogdo giving the camera the stare that would attract blonde models the world over.

orson giving it the hooded and beseeching look of a man desperate for a blonde model to distract the lickspittle

Welles' head looks about 3 sizes too small for that body.

Wonder if he bought some of that frozen fish with the crumb crisp coating.

Wonder if he bought any donuts or sweet rolls.

I just see Campbell's, and Madame Tana's Instant Chili

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ixt_t46k4Q

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aqPPS8_KswY/Ty6mVQMPh0I/AAAAAAAALaE/IYNAreC-bBA/s400/Mr_burns_state_of_mind+ketchup+or+catsup+grocery+store+broke+the+simpsons.jpg

I like how Orson is smoking a cigar IN THE FUCKING GROCERY STORE

it was 1970 maaan, a much more libertarian America. My childhood doctor smoked in his examining room.

(he had a hacking cough, too)

a much more libertarian America

I think in this one instance, you can admit it was a dumber America.

tbh i think my ideal america would let orson welles do whatever the fuck he wants

I am not a libertarian

otoh, there was no house music

also TV comedy was actually funny

Thanks for playing.

next week we dissect Othello, right

they look like they've just been caught in that photo. did they go for the discount ground beef or something?

tbh i think my ideal america would let orson welles do whatever the fuck he wants

the tragedy of america is he was allowed to smoke in the supermarket but not to make a movie

The tragedy is he was allowed in the supermarket.

Superegomarket

Fun thing I didn't know was available -- all his Harry Lime radio shows:

https://archive.org/details/TheLivesOfHarryLime

I think those are also included on one of the Criterion discs for his films. Arkadin, maybe?

http://www.spaziocineforum.it/quinlan.jpg

Too Much Johnson work print viewable here

http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/too-much-johnson-work-print

some thoughts:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2014/08/a-few-notes-on-too-much-johnson.html

http://brightlightsfilm.com/too-much-johnson-orson-welles-film-recovering-orson-welless-dream-of-early-cinema/#.U_tuA_mwJrO

centennial symposium next spring at Indiana U:

http://www.cinema.indiana.edu/?post_type=series&p=7603

Arena - The Orson Welles Story (BBC, 1982)

http://vimeo.com/71534857

So...finally?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/movies/hollywood-ending-near-for-orson-welles-last-film.html

I'll believe it when I (literally) see it. Actually I have seen a 5-minute excerpt, with Oja Kodar blowing some guy in a car.

Unless OW left awfully detailed notes, seeing "his" version of the whole thing is very unlikely, as Bogdanovich indicates above.

I gotta say, I'm not intrigued, based on the descriptions in the Bogdanovich interview book.

Well I watched the workprint of Too Much Johnson (that is, of the silent "prologues" to the stage production) at MoMA the other day, which is "chiefly of historical interest," so I'd watch this.

TMJ is probably much easier to watch as I did with a guy from Eastman House on mic and supplying production and historical notes, and seeing vanished Manhattan buildings on the big screen as Joseph Cotten scramble over their rooftops in 1938, than to watch in one sit at the link posted above.

was the footage actually used in a theatrical production or was that abandoned?

According to the Bogdo book and David Thomson, there's bits of a bemused John Huston, told to improvise lines about the rigors of filmmaking. Sounds like two old drunk men on a bored Saturday afternoon.

There's the scene Morbz mentioned and another one that has Huston's character facing the press which surfaced in a documentary that's contained with the Criterion F for Fake, along with a variety of other clips of scrapped projects. (I hadn't realized Welles was doing the original film version of what eventually became Dead Calm two decades later.)

Well the Johnson footage was not fully edited by the time the play ran and closed in Connecticut, so no one ever saw it. (Apparently the theater there essentially wasn't equipped to show it, either.)

I recognized George Coulouris w/out it being pointed out, and John Houseman still looks like Professor Kingsfield in '38.

man i really hope there's an opportunity to see whatever constitutes welles' workprint of this. really can't imagine it needs/benefits from speculatively chosen musical picks.

Well if you're going to project it as "a real movie" to rep house audiences, I can see why they'd want to do it. Beatrice W and Kodar no doubt realize the Orson Centennial is going to be the optimum time in their remaining years to monetize this.

If only Jess Franco were still alive

beatrice welles is so awful

btw you can buy her hideous handbags here: http://www.beatricewelles.com/beatrice_welles_collection.htm

i wish someone could assemble the various pieces of welles's 'don quixote' and do it right this time.

fwiw: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/aug/29/2

her MO is basically to sue, claiming she has some kind of rights to a film when she doesn't. but it prevents people from taking much action to restore let alone release many of welles's films. "chimes at midnight," which might be my favorite of all (although it's hampered by a cheap sound mix), is almost unseen these days thanks to her.

she seems to make a living forcing various companies to settle with her even though her claims are specious. certainly she isn't making a living with her handbags.

part of me thinks that this is all her way of getting back at a father who was less than attentive in her childhood--and who left her mother.

yeah, I read Christopher's book a while back and it just made me feel bad for all the Welles daughters

yeah, he was a total heel. also, he probably didn't leave her with any money. he didn't exactly managed his money well, and what he did make he usually poured either into a glass or into a variety of unfinished projects. so i doubt she was left with much when he died.

some history on "other side of the wide," courtesy a 2002 article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/1404733/Daughter-and-lover-fight-over-unreleased-Orson-Welles-film.html

accounts differ on how "finished" this film was. some think it just needed a sound mix, others say the shooting wasn't even really complete.

i'd forgotten Franco was the one who had done an edit of Don Quixote.

Film Forum in NYC is doing their centennial retro ASAP: Jan 1-Feb 3. (Not really all that many films to deal with, so a lot of acting-only.) Then Paley Center does a TV retro in Feb.

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=10676

I wasn't aware that Filmoteca Española had done a DCP 'resto' of Chimes. Wonder if the sound is any clearer...

probably not; i think the shitty sound is just how welles recorded/mixed it.

and it has that recorded-in-a-bathtub quality that the post-synched soundtracks to even some of welles's hollywood films have. he did amazing, highly inventive, original things with sound, in part because he seemed indifferent to the idea of sonic verisimilitude, but by the same token the recording quality of some of his soundtracks is just awful.

you know i take that back, just a few pre-1960 acting jobs plus his 2 minutes in The Muppet Movie at FF.

anyone seen this TV King Lear? Talk about a part he grew into and should've done in 1980...

yeah, in Kael's pro-OW piece in the '60s she talked about how much lesser she found his movies after he lost his radio artist's attention to sound.

Furthermore, Welles feared a repetition of the experience of having the film re-edited by someone else (as had happened to him on The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil), so he divided up all the reels of film for Don Quixote and deliberately mislabelled many of them, telling Mauro Bonanni, "If someone finds them, they mustn't understand the sequence, because only I know that."

he underestimated jesus franco

i saw his 'king lear' and don't remember it being terribly good.

did OW have any really standout performances in films directed by other people? (other than 'the third man.') the list of projects at the back of 'this is orson welles' is dizzying. i wonder if anyone in the world's managed to see everything he was in.

yeah, he's great in jane eyre, pasolini's segment of RoGaPag....

also good in Compulsion... not to mention lots of iconic voice-over work...

I thought he looked strained in Jane Eyre, but that booming histrionic falsity works for Rochester.

He was well cast as Unicron.

I like his hokey Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, also Compulsion and The Long Hot Summer. Some say his sermon in Huston's Moby Dick is the highlight, but I still haven't seen it. The Catch-22 cameo is funny. yes, Pasolini!

Oh yeah! That sermon is his best actor-ly moment.

Stop the movie when it ends though.

I enjoyed his Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, and I'm sure he did too.

welles and melville were kinda made for each other. apparently he made a moby dick film of his own that met a typically wellesian fate:

Orson Welles filmed approximately 75 minutes of the original 1955 production, with the original cast, at the Hackney Empire and Scala Theatres in London. He hoped to sell the film to Omnibus, the United States television series which had presented his live performance of King Lear in 1953; but Welles stopped shooting when he was disappointed in the results. The film is lost, with the only copy believed to have been destroyed when a fire broke out at Welles's Madrid home in 1970, while he rented it to the actor Robert Shaw, who was drunkenly smoking in bed.

His cameo in A Man For All Seasons is amusing; he looks like a dangerous strawberry.

He did a piece he called Moby-Dick Rehearsed onstage, and I've seen footage of him (in the '70s, probably) reciting Melville's prose against a seafront twilight in an attempt to get another low-budget film of it (or about it) going... He said in one of those recent "conversation" books (maybe?) that if F for Fake had done well enough he'd have tried to do an essay film every couple years.

Chimes at Midnight available as a Region 2 DVD, sound/picture are dece:

http://www.mrbongo.com/products/falstaff-chimes-at-midnight

the long hot summer is a horrible film, i guess welles is amusing in typical scenery-chewing mode

Awful. But young Newman was never more guapo.

Interview with Welles scholar (and Rock 'n' Roll High School screenwriter) Joseph McBride, by Danny Peary... apparently the search for a complete Ambersons goes on, at least for him.

http://sagharboronline.com/sagharborexpress/danny-peary-on-film/joseph-mcbride-to-appear-at-the-fabulous-orson-welles-tribute-at-the-film-forum-35347

thanks for the link -- that's a wonderfully insightful interview.

i love 'ambersons' but find it hard to revisit because the last half-hour is so heartbreaking, the way the obviously non-welles stuff gradually consumes the real film.

don't get the dismissal of Thomson's Rosebud, which to me has the most original insights of any of the longer c ritical biographies although the form is as ungainly as Edmund Morris' Dutch.

i think mcbride is mainly peeved by thomson's airy argument that most of welles's unseen films should stay unseen to preserve the 'mystery' of them, or whatever.

I went to see Journey into Fear tonight, which I've always liked; it's very funny, so much so that it plays almost like a parody of cloak-and-dagger. (Welles handed off the direction to Norman Foster at some point; I think it was released months before Ambersons.) Cotten and OW share the writing credit, and there are a couple of fab monologues from supporting characters that sound like pure Welles mischief to me.

I haven't seen it in years but at the time it did play like a private joke b/w Cotten and OW. I love how it's, what, 70 minutes? Fit to be played as part of a double feature.

Apparently Ben Hecht did some work on it too...

It was hacked up by RKO, surprise!

What Wellesnet says is: Previewed at 91 minutes, in August 1942. Final version released in America on February 12, 1943 at 69 minutes. A version sent for European distribution was 71 minutes. So, same ol' shit.

http://www.wellesnet.com/journey-into-fear-stefan-drosslers-new-version-shown-in-san-francisco/

It's based on a novel by the very popular and well-regarded Eric Ambler, and Cotten's haplessness very much anticipates The Third Man.

going to McBride's 'Wellesiana' program tom'w

rosebud is one of thomson's best things imho, but he is tough on welles, it's quite a 'negative' reading

I went to the McBride thing, it went close to 2.5 hours... saw an OSotW scene I never had, with Bogdanovich and a couple cinephiles (McBride one) riding in a car with Huston... and the Oja Kodar sex scene, which i'd misremembered; she humps the guy, doesn't blow him, in the car (it's in the protagonist's film w/in the film).

also had a cute Welles magic act bit in Follow the Boys, with Dietrich, about 15 years before ToE. And Welles doing Falstaff's monologue about the benefits of sack (sherry)... on The Dean Martin Show! It is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ6v7GHYDbM

they showed the Moby Dick sermon too, which OW allegedly did in one take after downing a bottle Huston gave him for stage fright.

that falstaff's good got chimes at midnight dvd a while ago been meaning to watch looking forward to it saw for the first time henry iv 2 last night and 1 last week

Resaw The Immortal Story, made for French TV circa '68... adap of Isak Dinesen, sort of his hourlong Eyes Wide Shut w/ OW as Dying Wealth, Jeanne Moreau as Middle Age (discreetly palming her nipples in nude scenes), some blond Brit hunkstiff as Youth. Stilted and solemn, but I like it.

Shot in amber glow by Willy Kurant, he of the amazing filmography from Masculin-Feminin to Pootie Tang.

http://images.moviepostershop.com/the-immortal-story-movie-poster-1968-1020488190.jpg

Hadn't seen It's All True in 20 years. The reconstruction of "Four Men on a Raft" really is a helluva silent film, and the whole story of OW's sojourn down there is incredible.

complete 1993 version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hy-4cI3EVc

I definitely sensed a queer sub(barely)text in The Trial this time... OW admitted as much from Perkins casting, also the BDSM flogging scene in what appears to be a broom closet.

David Thomson is quite high on The Immortal Story; I keep forgetting to check YouTube availability.

it aint there. wait to see it properly, it's got to make the rounds at some point.

Chimes print!

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/how-a-near-pristine-35mm-print-of-orson-welles-chimes-at-midnight-was-found-20150227

!

new book on The Other Side of the Wind, and an excerpt:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/orson-welless-last-movie-book-786518

Still in its infancy, Century City was nothing more than a few mirrored buildings and lots of construction dirt when Welles arrived. He transformed it into a neo-futuristic landscape by putting large mirrors on rolling platforms, then positioning them in ways that turned the reflections of the existing buildings into a strange world that existed nowhere but in his own mind and then on celluloid.

Securing a permit for Gary Graver Productions, Welles skirted additional fees by having Graver erase the date each time it expired and enter a new one. By Christmas, they’d rubbed a hole right through the permit.

Since Hannaford's film was supposed to be beautifully composed, faux-symbolic nonsense, Welles ran wild in Century City, conceiving visuals and then taking them to extremes. With no sound and Orson directing him on the fly, actor Bob Random (who played the lead in Hannaford’s film-within-the-film) recalled, the experience was like “a silent movie, except you never knew what you were going to do.”

During this period, Welles also fell in love with the idea of creating his own wind and had the crew load a Ritter fan (an airplane propeller on a giant motor) onto a truck and haul it around to various locations, where Random would drive his motorcycle into a blistering dust storm they’d manufactured or spend half a day walking into a blizzard of garbage that crew members were tossing into the fan.

Graver was able to rent the MGM back lot for $200 a day by having the crew pose as U.C.L.A. film students and making Orson duck whenever they drove past the security gate. Once inside, Welles filmed on half-demolished Western sets where tumbleweeds blew across the street, and shot as much footage as humanly possible, culminating in a final, 72-hour filming spree that took place over a three-day weekend.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/04/orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-making-of

Some great anecdotes throughout... "Idiot, I haven't the foggiest idea what to do!"

looks great, thanks!
wonder what they were spiking their frescas with
http://photos.vanityfair.com/2015/04/10/552823982447462e4e0113f5_orson-welles-citizen-kane-the-other-side-of-the-wind.jpg

Huston made the same life decision per drinking vs driving i did (choosing the first).

finally saw chimes @ midnight, and it lives up to the hype! welles's editing (esp. his sound editing) is so eccentric, you wouldn't mistake it for anyone else's.

haven't watched that in forever, but it's definitely stuck with me. far and away the best shakespeare film i've ever seen.

otm, by a very long ways

this is where i say 'not even OW's best shakespeare film'

curious, but I can't imagine it's better than Macbeth

it is! just not Othello.

haven't seen othello in a long time but i remember thinking that welles's own performance in it wasn't quite as good as it should have been.

othello is great, possible i just prefer the chimes at midnight plays more than that one.

ranked in descending order:

Chimes at Midnight
Macbeth
Othello

as i said last time i saw it, some of the Chimes dialogue is unintelligible. That's kind of important (and I've seen most of the Falstaff plays! Some more than once).

Oh, there isn't one of these films marred by budget constraints. CAM is the most realized though. I like David Thomson's line about Welles' capturing the "sea spray" of Shakespeare in Othello.

i do think Othello is in toto helped by the fly-by-night makin' it up vibe! which also is the most hopeful element of Other Side to me, reading that VF excerpt (hint hint).

last time i saw chimes i got a bit distracted by some of the dialogue being out of sync. i assume that nobody's tried a serious restoration just because no one's been able to sort out who actually owns the film.

the "lost" welles film i'd really love to see somehow salvaged is don quixote, but i have a feeling it's never gonna happen.

who knows? i think they said that about other side of the wind, too, but it seems like that'll happen sooner rather than later.

There was a Chimes restoration a few years back that made it on to DVD before Beatrice W squashed it. They did a great job sync'ing the audio and - well - it's an overall excellent restoration! It's floating around on the 'nets. Also my fave Welles Shakespeare film by a long margin.

as i said last time i saw it, some of the Chimes dialogue is unintelligible. That's kind of important (and I've seen most of the Falstaff plays! Some more than once).

the restoration i saw cleared a lot of that up. there were still some lines (unfortunately a few of gielgud's) that were quasi-intelligible, but most was fine. and yeah, you don't really want to miss the dialogue. among other things, C.A.M. served as a great reminder that Shakespeare is funny as hell. the guy playing Prince Hal was fantastic, as was Margaret rutherford. Gielgud goes w/o saying.

i think that there are some challenges to comprehension aside from the murky sound quality, mostly the manic sound editing such that there's often little pause between lines of dialogue. my senses is that both C.A.M. and othello were shot completely "wild" and everything you hear was added in a studio, which allowed him to manipulate the dialogue for rhythmic effect. I wonder when Welle's first fully "post" film was... "Lady from Shanghai" probably has some synch dialogue but not much.

the dialogue is just out of synch a lot of the time, sometimes you hear a line and the character just doesn't open their mouth at all. or they are moving their mouth but no dialogue! i think welles just didn't give a fuck. but frankly it's only occasionally distracting. some actors seem to have been looped better than others, and i think that contributed to my impression of the quality of their performances.

anyway, among the seemingly indelible images in this film, the one that sticks in my head the most is of portly falstaff in his adorable-grotesque suit of armor hiding behind some trees, avodiing the battle raging around him.

i meant to write, the dialogue is NOT just out of synch....

btw i think the rights issues with Chimes have mostly cleared up and there will be a few legit video releases soon.

but then again, this stuff is pretty strictly believe-it-when-I-see-it, since it seems like every year or even month comes with a new announcement that various parties are "very close" to working out the rights issues/restoration problems/etc. on this or that unfinished or obscure Orson Welles film, and then nothing has happened. people (including Peter Bogdanovich) have been trying to get Other Side of the Wind assembled and released for... 25 years? 35?

On the post-synch tip: it's always fun in later Welles films ( or at least from "Othello" on ) to play "Which One's Welles?" since he'd provide often large chunks of the male voices himself.

Centennial Week

"You’d better be good in this scene or else I’ll have to use a close up.”

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/rosenbaum-on-welles-at-100

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPDgGxLb2OM

Happy 100 Great Man!

I believe the only OW feature screening in NYC today is F for Fake. Fuckin' hipsters.

Who Run The World

(the Maysles Cinema, actually)

from the new FX Feeney bio:

"This was the America in which Welles was functioning. If we interpret his life strictly in terms of his frustrated relations with the film industry, we lose touch with what he actually cared about, and what he meant to his contemporaries. If we free our eyes from the gunk of Hollywood-Golden-Age nostalgia, we can view Welles more fairly and fully in the greater context of American history. In such a context, his years in Europe after 1947 cease to be an abdication, as many have posited, and constitute a stance. If we take the mythic Hollywood line that Welles was a dangerous and ungrateful houseguest who misbehaved and was sent packing, we buy into a narrative that affirms the conformity of the 1940s and '50s that brought us the blacklist, and implies: That's just too bad; that's how things are. If instead we accept the challenge of thinking in a larger political context—as Welles always did—we're faced with a tale of independence and a man who was always devoted to building a better world, long before he got to Hollywood, and who stayed on that course long after he left town: building worlds for himself, if no one else, come what may."

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/a-citizen-of-the-world-orson-welles-at-100/

roundups:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/the-best-writing-on-orson-welles-100th-birthday-20150506

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-welles-100

i think it's possible for both of things feeney talks about to be true. studios weren't knocking at his door, but of many available options he chose to go to europe and make art films (sort of). he could have wound up hosting a regular TV show (which he actually did, but never for very long), writing novels, whatever.

it's impossible not to be entertained by stories about welles's appetite for good food and good conversation.

btw i think the rights issues with Chimes have mostly cleared up and there will be a few legit video releases soon.

Americans seem constitutionally averse to buying all-region DVD players, but this Region 2 DVD of Chimes is fine, and has been available legit for two or three years:

http://www.mrbongo.com/products/falstaff-chimes-at-midnight

outside the Callow bio that Lumenick piece is the only one I've read about Welles' Post columns

xpost

i've heard bad things about that DVD? anyway, mr. bongo in the UK is putting out a putatively "restored" version on Blu-Ray, and Criterion will do the same in the US. so just wait a few months and you'll have yr fill of Welles's Falstaff.

Criterion confirmed?

hints

http://www.wellesnet.com/will-criterion-be-releasing-chimes-at-midnight-on-blu-ray-and-dvd/

the Janus imprimatur seems like a guarantee

woo!

they're releasing Othello too. they should add MacBeath and the Peter Book King Lear and make it a Welles Does Shakespeare set, but I think those two are licensed to other companies.

Chimes at Midnight, Othello, and Macbeth are all on the TCM schedule for the evening of May 15.

Welles had a whole bunch of other abortive Shakespeare projects, including some films that were only half-completed IIRC.

probably more like 15% completed, I guess.

the Isaac Woodard radio broadcast. I teared up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P11sW1sXNbs

yeah, i listened to that a few months ago and had the same reaction. powerful stuff.

the officer that blinded woodward was acquitted and lived to the age of 97.

feted by the community, according to Callow.

Oh, I'm sure the Criterion will be the best home viewing issue of Chimes, I'm just quibbling with the idea that it's been difficult to see at all (it has also been screened at least once on UK TV).

It's on YouTube in a good print.

one more Other Side tease

On May 7, the colleagues — each of whom fought for years to obtain the rights, before joining forces in 2012 — will launch an Indiegogo campaign in an attempt to raise $2 million, the amount they say is needed to finish the picture. The campaign will run through June 14 and, among other things, will offer investors a limited number of 35 mm prints, tickets to the premiere, and canisters from the original film....

Now an editor, Affonso Goncalves (Beasts of the Southern Wild), is at work piecing the film together, based on Welles’ extensive notes, along with input from Bogdanovich.

“We have Orson’s work print that he had smuggled out of France, which is a [roughly] 42-minute cut of the film,” says Rymsza. “We’re using that as a blueprint for the remainder, some of which is in an assembly state.”

He and his team have also consulted the many copies of the script with Welles’ notes, which together create a pile five feet high. “You look at the scripts; you have his annotations and his memos to his editors,” says Rymsza. “We have a huge amount of information.”

If the Indiegogo campaign is successful, the producers hope to finish the film by the end of the year.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/orson-welles-last-unfinished-film-793975

i worry that contributing to that kickstarter would be like sending good money after bad, given the history of attempts to finish that film.

do not watch the Battle of Shrewsbury on your computer.

on The Lady from Shanghai, sometimes my favorite.

The strange thing about (Harry Cohn's) depredations, though, is how little they actually impede the movie, even in the naive sense of blocking access to Welles’s intentions. Welles told a story about a cocksure idealist encountering the nihilism of greed, a story that must have already had personal resonance. Cohn’s hijacking had the effect of enacting this drama on the film itself. Welles wanted to use the noir form to alienate the audience from genre expectations. Cohn’s cuts produced a plot that was even more oblique and arbitrary than the original, with music that seemed piped in from a different theater. Welles was half trying to save and half trying to escape his relationship with Hayworth. Cohn’s insistence on splicing pinup-girl glamour shots into her cool, sad performance created a movie that didn’t know whether it was in love with her or terrified of her.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/through-a-glass-darkly-the-lady-from-shanghai-and-the-legend-of-orson-welles/

I watched Shrewbury on my TV screen. You can do that now.

That's an excellent read. Now that I'm rewatching his key films I need to give TLFS a third chance. Something about that very obliqueness has kept me from connecting with it.

Frank Marshall can prob fork over those necessary $2 mill. C'mon, Hollywood peoples...

ya'll see this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlpAE2Sf3QU

it's obviously terrible in a lot of respects, but i found it very watchable. there's almost no sense of the spontaneity that one seeks in a talk show, but there are some compensations. even before i read that welles ghost directed it, it was fairly obvious via the oddly percussive editing. feels very much like "f for fake" at times. the magic routine at the end is bizarre, mostly because given all the elaborate editing and lighting effects there's no transparency whatsoever which you'd think is key to "magic" on TV. the result is grotesque in a very compelling way. the same might be said of some of welles's elaborate spoken tributes to burt reynolds, jim henson, et al. it's interesting how welles's incredible talent as a bullshitter dovetails with the need for chatty hyperbole in this sort of celebrity-culture exercise.

for "the (erstwhile) greatest director of all time" orson welles sure was a weird director, wasn't he!

p.s.

http://www.edconroybooks.com/images/140263x.jpg

It's not like he wrote an intro to The Films of Jan-Michael Vincent.

btw the film rights to Karp's book about Other Side have been purchased. So we may see a movie about the making of TOSOTW before the thing itself...

Bogdanovich weighs in on the Indiegogo campaign

http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/orson-welles-last-picture-show-peter-bogdonavich-on-the-other-side-of-the-wind-20150511

It's not like he wrote an intro to The Films of Jan-Michael Vincent.

hey, I love Burt Reynolds!

I think he comes off rather well in that "talk show," too.

i'll be pretty amused if they finish "the other side of the wind" and it turns out to be a huge turd, but you know almost everything welles had a hand in is, at the very least, interesting. as with that talk show above.

so for The Making of The Other Side, DD Lewis and de Niro as Huston and Welles? with Shia leBouef as Bogdanovich?

the sex scene in the 'Antonioni film' w/ in Other Side does go on too long for a parody unless there's a payoff that can't be judged out of context. I could see it being a film maudit.

jason schwartzmann as bogdanovich, no?

xpost

like 75% of orson's films are films maudits, no?

have you seen "the immortal story"? i should catch up with that one. it's his last /completed/ (semi-)feature, i believe. made for european TV IIRC.

that argument could be made. maybe it'll be like The Immortal Story, only twice as long. xp! I saw it again earlier this year. It's good.

Schwartzman, that could be

The guy who played OW in the Linklater movie, maybe he could play him at 57.

Gleaning what pleasure I can from watching The Lady from Shanghai a third time. This one's for you, Morbs.

it's a broight guilty wurld.

for my own part i have Macbeth and Mr Arkadin out of the liberry (which i think i've seen once each -- counting all 3 versions of the latter?)

i'll be pretty amused if they finish "the other side of the wind" and it turns out to be a huge turd, but you know almost everything welles had a hand in is, at the very least, interesting. as with that talk show above.

― he quipped with heat (amateurist), Monday, May 11, 2015 7:57 PM (1 hour ago)

i've seen everything welles released (except filming othello which i've never been able to find) and i think everything he directed is worth watching, even the stuff that isn't exactly good. and it's hard to know who to blame for the not-good stuff because so many of his films were so profoundly damaged. i love lady from shanghai but the film we have was so radically altered (an hour chopped out, random closeups of rita hayworth added to what feels like every scene) that it's almost not welles's film anymore. all of the films that welles seems to have had total control over (kane, the trial, chimes, f for fake -- um, that's it?) are exceptional, so i tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I saw Chimes this weekend in the best print I've ever seen; the syncing and Welles' habit of murmuring his lines into his beard or gut keep it from being a masterpiece. My favorite film Shakespeare.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/arts-feature/9520712/dont-believe-orson-welles-says-his-biographer-simon-callow-especially-when-he-calls-himself-a-failure/

yet more about the future of Wind -- there is no fucking way we are seeing it in a year.

http://moviemorlocks.com/2015/05/26/finishing-the-other-side-of-the-wind-an-interview-with-peter-bogdanovich-and-filip-jan-rymsza/

http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/nsfw-watch-orson-welless-porno-movie.html

that URL should be a very strong warning

Reading that other side of the wind book now -- a total blast.

there is no fucking way we are seeing it in a year.
almost feel like i'm ok with not seeing it -- there's almost no way the movie could be as good as the story of the movie. (i still want to see it of course)

Saw Chuck Workman's Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles this afternoon. Lots of interview clips, the expected film clips, nothing especially surprising but worth seeing. Actually, I knew Chimes at Midnight was highly regarded, but it was a surprise seeing two or three people, one of them one of his biographers, saying it was his greatest film. I've never seen it--there was a note about it being in legal limbo right now. I watched a budget VHS of The Trial years ago; the clips here make me really want to see that again.

Love The Trial, which actually *is* available on DVD (in case anyone was unaware).

clemenza behind the curve about 20 years

"nothing especially surprising" was basically what every review of it said

Chimes available on YouTube in a good print.

OW films need to be seen in a theater if at all possible (certainly that one).

AND The Trial.

I set my metronome to the beat of your replies.

It hasn't occurred to you that for some people this is the only way to watch'em, right? ("If at all possible" is your escape hatch). So not only are you criticizing people for not watching the movies you're criticizing the medium they choose.

thats why i said "if possible," doink.

No possibility exists for me to watch The Trial on screen, but after my experience w/Netflix streaming last month I doubt I would've loved it any more than I already did.

and eventually it should be possible, since you have your lil cinematheque (pats head) xp

I's a false choice; it shouldn't have even come up. Most people who love film aren't going to prefer watching it on screen.

at home rather

I've just seen that third volume of Callow's bio comes out in November

entitled One Man Band

just watched F for Fake the other night, absolutely loved it. so much fun, and so unlike his other films.

Reading the Rosenbaum collection. This script for the intro to heart of darkness is bonkers in the best way.

Been on a real welles binge lately - lady from shanghai, magnificent ambersons, third man

Rosenbaum book's piqued my interest about a bunch of Welles projects but it's a little frustrating too - lots of repetition of various points (perhaps unavoidable given the nature of the book as an assemblage of essays rather than a single cohesive work) and the overwhelming focus on things that are incomplete or unavailable. Does make me want to read one of the bios.

i need to read that.
i really enjoyed the simon callow bios ... if anything they showed off how films were just one part of his life. wonder if callow is going to keep going with them? second volume only made it through the 40s.

oh hey! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Orson-Welles-Volume-One-Man-Band/dp/0224079352

I would recommend the David Thomson biog Rosebud, too - one of his best books, I think. He is pretty tough on Welles, and apparently the book is not 100% reliable factually, but there's something about Thomson's waywardness that feels very well-suited to the subject.

am I wrong in my impression that Rosenbaum hates Thomson? Particularly re: the latter's less than enthusiastic view of some of Welles' work?

Thomson is not loved by Welles scholar. I have affection for his book.

*scholars

xpost
I wouldn't be surprised - I think Thomson annoys quite a few 'serious' film scholars. Personally, I like the fact that he wasn't one of Orson's groupies back in the day.

Bogdanovich seemed fairly hostile to Rosenbaum when he was speaking about Other Side of the Wind recently

i think rosenbaum is particularly irked by thomson's airy suggestions that it would be better if welles's unfinished/lost works were never seen because the "myth" of all those lost films is more entrancing than the reality could ever be. that's probably not precisely what thomson wrote but i read that book more than a decade ago, iirc it's more of a meditation on welles's life and works than it is a "biography" in the strictest sense.