Orson Welles

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.