Was Orson Welles "Experienced?"

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This question was asked while "Mr. Arkadin" played on cable last night. Given the atention paid to high contrast patterns and uncanny situations and the overall sense than an elaborate "in-joke" was being played, had Mr. Welles indeed done LSD?

― The Sensational Sulk (sexyDancer), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:01 (twenty-one years ago)

well, he lived a while in Madison, Wisconsin as a teenager

and F Is for Fake would lead one to speculate

― p.s. mueller, Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Er, when Orson was a teenager LSD hadn't been discovered yet.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:08 (twenty-one years ago)

Ergot, however...

― Aimless (Aimless), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:17 (twenty-one years ago)

i meant someone who'd spent formative time in Madison is drug prone. what a great town

― p.s. mueller, Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:24 (twenty-one years ago)

What year was this film made? I recently read something about Los Angeles psychoanalyst who in the 1950s and 1960s who used LSD as part of his practice.

― j.lu (j.lu), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:35 (twenty-one years ago)

Alls I know is, the movie looks great. And that fake beard get-up is pure comedy.

― slightly more subdued (kenan), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:37 (twenty-one years ago)

plus the way he shoots himself, he looks ten feet tall

― The Sensational Sulk (sexyDancer), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:37 (twenty-one years ago)

You sure about that Madison thing? I thought that after his family moved from Kenosha when he was still a baby, he stayed the hell away from Wisconsin and was embarrassed about being born there. I thought he grew up in Chicago, actually.

― Chris F. (servoret), Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:38 (twenty-one years ago)

If he wasn't he almost certainly hung out with people who did in the late 50s -60s, young film people and the like. Acid evangelists were pushing the stuff at likely intellectuals during the period, and I can't imagine Welles being shy about it.

― Soukesian, Thursday, 19 May 2005 18:43 (twenty-one years ago)

'Cary Grant on Acid', a great cover story on L.A. Weekly about 5 years ago detailed that L.A. therapist's work, J.Lu. I seem to recall Orson Welles being mentioned in passing but I could be wrong.

― tremendoid (tremendoid), Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:05 (twenty-one years ago)

found it:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/98/32/news-whalen.php

"find" yielded no Orson but a fascinating read nonetheless.

part of same article with excerpt of Grant's autobiography where he bigups acid one last time:
http://www.liveland.com/stars/cgrantlsd.htm

― tremendoid (tremendoid), Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:11 (twenty-one years ago)

The rough kids in "Touch of Evil" are all wacked out on some wild dust, man.

― andy --, Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:17 (twenty-one years ago)

i really wouldn't put it past orson welles to have done anything

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:54 (twenty-one years ago)

when i saw this thread title i thought someone was asking if orson welles had any sexual experience and suddenly an image of rita hayworth popped into my head, so thanks, whoever started this thread.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:55 (twenty-one years ago)

You think he killed a man? MANY men?

― slightly more subdued (kenan), Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:55 (twenty-one years ago)

http://img5.allocine.fr/acmedia/medias/00/08/23/000823_ph1.jpg

― slightly more subdued (kenan), Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:56 (twenty-one years ago)

i think orson mentions doing LSD in "this is orson welles" (interview book w/ peter bogdanovich), but i'd have to go back and check. might have been marijuana, which would be a lot less interesting.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:00 (twenty-one years ago)

I want that "Lady from Shanghai" still for framing!

― Soukesian, Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:02 (twenty-one years ago)

"framing"

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:03 (twenty-one years ago)

he had his own apartment downtown on state street at some point before he became joe wunderkind out in new york. probably before chicago. i hear willem defoe (appleton) has the same wisconsin denial.

― p.s. mueller, Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:05 (twenty-one years ago)

the lost project from the early 70's "Other side of the wind" sounds like classic 'Head Movie' stuff: ". . this will give me the effect I need with the midgets that will be milling around your feet."

― Soukesian, Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:10 (twenty-one years ago)

Found it:

Peter Bogdanovich: [Touch of Evil] was probably the first film to show a bunch of hopheads and to drop marijuana loosely. What do you actually think of people who take drugs?
Orson Welles: Suicides. All real addicts are some form of suicide in my opinion.
PB: And marijuana?
OW: No, that's the beer of drugs. If there were no law against marijuana and no fuzz connected with it, its popularity would diminish enormously. Because its effect is rather less potent than that of beer, and all it does is give you extremely bad breath. It's a socially very unpleasant thing unless everybody's on it. But there's nothing really against it. It was a terrible mistake to make it illegal, because it's quite an innocent thing in itself. All over the world, children of eight and ten smoke it with less harmful effects than from the few glasses of wine the French kids have. Because taking it is given an illicit feeling, and because it's now sort of connected with protests and is generally antiestablishment, anti-fuzz, and so on, the sort of neurotic who has the marijuana habit can be led into real drug-taking. But it's a terribly overrated drug; and it's very hard to get quantities of good enough quality to give anybody enough of a bang to be worth all the carrying on that they do about it.
PB: What do you think of the hallucinatory drugs in general?
OW: I'm against the principle of it, but not the adventure and experiment of it. I've never taken LSD, but years ago I took the hallucinatory mushrooms and all that kind of thing and, having done it, I've no desire ever to do it again.
PB: Did it help you in any way?
OW: Of course not.

― Eric von H. (Eric H.), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:32 (twenty-one years ago)

Wait, so I was watching Homicide: Life on the Street this week and Richard Belzer's character was talking about the conspiracy theory that William Randolph Hearst was responsible for marijuana being illegal, and Welles hated Hearst, right, so his pro-pot bias kind of makes sense, that is if any or all of that is even true.

― n/a (Nick A.), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:38 (twenty-one years ago)

I can hear his voice in my head as I read that. The same voice that gets very angry about the syntax of a frozen pea commercial.

― slightly more subdued (kenan), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:39 (twenty-one years ago)

R.D. Laing.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:42 (twenty-one years ago)

http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html

― slightly more subdued (kenan), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:43 (twenty-one years ago)

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH California Redbush ... known the world over as the finest in sensemilla

― The Sensational Sulk (sexyDancer), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:46 (twenty-one years ago)

The punchline being that he keeps forgetting the lines and giggling.

― slightly more subdued (kenan), Thursday, 19 May 2005 20:49 (twenty-one years ago)

One needs to bear in mind that Orson also spoke to Kenneth Tynan of living in Spain as a bullfighter and pulp thriller writer when he was 14 or something. Did one sincere word ever escape his lips (of course that's exactly why we love him)? I expect he probably tucked in with a mug of cocoa at ten o'clock sharp every night.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 20 May 2005 05:29 (twenty-one years ago)

i think it's been possible to (mostly) sort out fact from fiction, but his biographers have their work cut out for them.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Friday, 20 May 2005 06:09 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm still waiting for the second volume of that biog Simon Callow was doing.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 20 May 2005 06:36 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah, i second that. i read a bunch of welles biographies back in my teens when i was obsessed and they're a mixed lot. callow's is the best-written and probably the most objective overall, but it only goes up to 1941. the other bios mostly skimp on the later years (barbara leaming's book covers the trial in ONE PARAGRAPH!), and they're either fawningly sycophantic or too vindictive. jonathan rosenbaum normally annoys me, but he's written some nice stuff on welles and the kneejerk reactions a lot of people had to his personality, which led them to dismiss much of the work.

the david thomson book is as brilliant as anything else he's written, but it's not so much a biography as a meditation on welles, and it's flawed a bit by some crazy opinions (the bit where he suggests that none of welles's unreleased films should EVER be seen cos they could never live up to the myth - fuck that, i'll take a real movie over a fucking "legend" any day!).

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Friday, 20 May 2005 06:53 (twenty-one years ago)

i'm sure it's just afterrush from that marathon tcm had the other night but right now i'm thinking orson welles is my favorite human being of all time.

― j blount (papa la bas), Friday, 20 May 2005 06:59 (twenty-one years ago)

(xpost)
I sort of understand what Thomson was getting at with that, though - there was the same debate with Brian Wilson coming out 37 years later and finishing SMiLE - the memory of how great these films might have been could be tarnished by seeing them and realising they might not be all that good. Nevertheless I would still dearly love to see Ambersons as it was intended (I think the "RKO dumped the film in the Pacific" was a tall story, probably invented by Welles himself; someone just needs to go through their archives and piece the thing together diligently) and indeed whatever he did of Don Quixote or The Other Side Of The Wind.

Also I think Thomson's not going through Welles' last years in detail was a bit of a cop-out; it's the equivalent of Reynolds losing interest once New Pop started.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 20 May 2005 07:08 (twenty-one years ago)

here's a question as troubling as the continued obscurity of chimes at midnight: why the hell is the magnificent ambersons not out on dvd?

the other side of the wind and don quixote, as i recall, were all but finished at welles's death, except for the final edits. in quixote's case, welles left all the surviving footage with different ppl around the world, and they apparently don't get along well enough to decide what to do with it.

rosenbaum had an interesting comment about this, that welles didn't bother to finish either film because toward the end he didn't seem to care about the final product so much as the joy of making films - understandable, when you look at how ignored his last few releases were.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Friday, 20 May 2005 07:32 (twenty-one years ago)

Isn't a lot of this to do with his daughter (Beatrice Welles) legally hassling everyone over copyright and royalties, refusing to lease out any of her dad's stuff?

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 20 May 2005 09:18 (twenty-one years ago)

'ambersons' is on dvd in france.

― N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 09:21 (twenty-one years ago)

Ambersons was on the telly last Saturday.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 20 May 2005 09:22 (twenty-one years ago)

it's a weird one, rights, i don't understand them, but as far as i can tell it's easier to show something on tv than put it on dvd or show it publically, rights-wise. i have a vhs of 'ambersons' from about 199, so i don't think that has a rights issue, but 'chimes' does to the extent that it was left out of the NFT's welles aseason.

― N_Rq, Friday, 20 May 2005 09:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Amberson's is around. But it is a version butchered by RKO, Welles longer intended cut has never seen the light of day and .

― Chewshabadoo (Chewshabadoo), Friday, 20 May 2005 11:19 (twenty-one years ago)

i agree thatthe ending of ambersons is fucked but welles was too busy fucking around in south america to fix it, 'butchering' is just sstandard studio bidness.

― N_Rq, Friday, 20 May 2005 12:11 (twenty-one years ago)

The Ambersons ending was fucked up because of the preview audience reactions, the general gist of which was THERE'S A WAR ON, thus was Welles condemned for the sin of not being "relevant" in the stupider sense of its 1942 meaning.

But yes, faffing about shooting random stuff for It's All True didn't exactly help OW's case.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 20 May 2005 12:14 (twenty-one years ago)

supposedly a print of the director's cut of ambersons exists in a brazilian rainforest, but a local indigenous tribe has placed a curse on it

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Friday, 20 May 2005 17:13 (twenty-one years ago)

i meant someone who'd spent formative time in Madison is drug prone. what a great town
That's hysterical considering that my city's trying to aspire to be a Southern version of Madison. We're already drug prone (there's not much else to do here aside from drugs) and we've got the unofficial-VD-capital-of-North-America designation in our favour.

― Ian Riese-Moraine is on toffuti break! (Eastern Mantra), Friday, 20 May 2005 17:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I saw maybe 10 minutes of "Other side of the wind" footage at a Welles fest last year, and it looked more like a mix of Russ Meyer and Henry Jaglom than Welles! Key scene was some lovely young hippie stud having sex in a car with Oja Kodar (OW's companion).

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Friday, 20 May 2005 18:33 (twenty-one years ago)

That clip of speedingcarhippysex is in the One Man Band doc. Russ Meyer+Henry Jaglom OTM.

― Jay Vee (Manon_70), Friday, 20 May 2005 23:36 (twenty-one years ago)

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