Orson Welles

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.