Orson Welles

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.