Orson Welles

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