Orson Welles

assorted treats at NYC MoMA next month: work print of The Deep, longer Euro cut of Journey into Fear, incomplete Shakespeare projects/clips, and Oja Kodar!!! introducing "the Munich Filmmuseum’s reconstruction of two legendary—and legendarily unseen—Welles projects": The Other Side of the Wind and The Dreamers. ("scenes")

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1623

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/25396

jealous

will heckle Oja to get this shit edited

Pretty sure they presented all these unfinished pieces/Munich Filmmuseum reconstructions like 10 years ago at Film Forum. Wonder how different this showing will be - other than the fact Kodar will be there?

yes, i had the same thought but will investigate

Tanx, Morbs.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/022_03/14944

That opening anecdote is devastating, def one for Orson Welles: the biopic. I think this paragraph is reaching a bit:

But now when we look back on Welles’s work in Hollywood in the early 1940s, his real problems become clear: His dark vision of American capitalism was out of tune with the gung-ho years of World War II. That Welles pursued his original vision, even as he worked in a state of hand-to-mouth auteur financing, into the ’80s looks from our vantage point like a sign of strength and integrity. The director of Citizen Kane and the director of The Maltese Falcon sitting in a Denny’s in Arizona with Rich Little in 1974? That is a picture of dignity in the face of adversity, not a picture of failure.

I mean, you cld equally say that Welles' 'career' throws the whole question of what constitutes success and failure up into the air - because there can be few more multifaceted lives lived than Welles', and so his is a prismatic life story that's open to many different interpretations/viewpoints - and it's this ambiguity, sometimes verging on indifference (to capital, to an orthodox career, or to a well-ordered life) that troubles 'American capitalism', whatever that is (and if it exists, Welles is culturally and temperamentally deep within it.)

By skipping [...] his years in the ’50s and ’60s as a nomadic filmmaker in Europe

So not a 'failure' post-Kane *goes on to review bks talking about Orson's triumphs and life pre-Kane* why skip that period?!

sick burn:

In the mid-1980s, Steven Spielberg bought a Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane at auction for $60,500. At the same time, Spielberg denied Welles the opportunity to direct an episode of his NBC television series Amazing Stories, instead opting to hire directorial talent such as Burt Reynolds and Timothy Hutton. According to Joseph McBride, who has written several books on Welles and also Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Spielberg, after buying the prop, said he saw it as “a symbolic medallion of quality in movies. When you look at Rosebud, you don’t think of fast dollars, fast sequels, and remakes. This to me says that movies of my generation had better be good.”

Maybe that’s why there has never been a Goonies sequel.

Doesn't exactly explain why there was a Goonies original tho.

haha yes that was my thought too

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BlBroL1IgAA8Moq.jpg:large

Josh Brolin was never that hot again

He's hotter only than ever IMO.

Now than ever

Saw the reconstructed half-hour made-for-TV Merchant of Venice last night -- really, The Story of Shylock as one script had it. Aesthetics and rhythm very much in Immortal Story key.

also OW playing Lear on Ed Sullivan, just after a disastrous NY staging.

wikipedia has a lengthy description of circulating footage from "the other side of the wind", but whenever welles stuff gets posted to video sites it gets taken down quicker than dylan stuff. even private trackers seem to have only a handful of what's floating around. does this stuff exist anywhere besides a couple of welles fanatics' hard drives?

Just saw about 110 minutes worth of workprint footage of The Deep, which might've been cut into a decent thriller if he'd finished it. Looks like a good Laurence Harvey quotable psycho performance, an amusing Thurston Howell-as-Hank Quinlan one from OW, and Jeanne Moreau doing her ambiguous woman thing. Oja Kodar is nude (but hardly ever frontally shot) fairly often.

Wild scene near the end with a boat being splashed with kerosene and other fluids a la "action painting," as the head of the Munich Filmmuseum put it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMNr1jWKi4A

(it's based on the same novel as Dead Calm from 1989)

on the reconstructions / footage hunting:

http://www.craveonline.com/culture/924149-interview-unknown-orson-welles-moma

(Kane)'s innovations — the abandonment of continuity editing in favor of long takes, wide-angle shots, and deep focus — served a particular thematic agenda: to deny easy access to the inner lives of its subjects. But the impulse to discover that point of easy access is the narrative motor of the film, with the reporter Jerry Thompson dispatched to discover the meaning of Kane’s final word, “Rosebud.” The search ends in Kane’s mansion, the reporters surrounded by the endless detritus of his life, and Thompson declaring: “I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.” The denouement, however, takes us to the furnace where Kane’s belongings are thrust, and we see the sled “Rosebud” begin to burn. Should we accept this apparent offer of a skeleton key?

The cinematic interventions of Haynes and Van Sant respond to this very moment, a moment where the audience (and the larger social body they represent) can either accept the intimacies of another as unknowable or fashion an overriding narrative that explains away their difficulty. The queer commitments of these filmmakers roundly rejected social demands for universal legibility, especially regarding the experience of intimacy. Their films insist that intimacies and the inner lives they sustain need not be widely legible to deserve recognition. They respond to Hollywood’s legacy of exclusion not by carving out space for themselves or their characters in a dialectic of progress, but instead by demonstrating sources of communion that fall outside its universalizing conventions.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/i-know-thee-not-old-man-orson-welles-and-the-new-queer-cinema

Simon Callow on how his bio turned into 4 volumes

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/28/orson-welles-simon-callow

Alex Ross surveys the life:

Callow’s latest book, “Orson Welles: One-Man Band” (Jonathan Cape/Viking), covers the gypsy years. The biographer summons his subject with easy authority, his descriptions poised between sympathy and skepticism: “One senses something archaic about him. He behaves like some great tribal chieftain, a warlord of art, riding roughshod over the niceties of conventional behavior, sometimes sulking in his tent, sometimes rousing his people to great heights, now making huge strategic decisions off the cuff, now mysteriously absenting himself.” As before, Callow is especially good at evoking Welles’s theatre work. There are lively pages on the 1955 production “Moby-Dick Rehearsed,” which depicted a nineteenth-century theatre troupe preparing a stage version of Melville’s novel, and on a 1950 Faust revue that featured Eartha Kitt as Helen of Troy, and music by Duke Ellington. Such projects veered between triumph and catastrophe, sometimes on the same night. Callow notes that at one performance of “King Lear,” in New York, Welles’s bellowing on the heath included the words “John! John!! John!!! Switch sixteen is not on!”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/the-shadow

I loved the second Callow volume.

I read Charlton Heston's interview with George Stevens, Jr. collected in that new-ish book. He called Welles the most talented director he ever worked for but not the greatest (he had a lot of fun explaining the difference).

OK, this i wanna hear...

Keith Baxter on playing Hal in Chimes

We left the intensity at the end of November, when it was certainly cold. But (Orson) had a gramophone, a wind-up gramophone with bakelite discs. When we were setting up the death of John Gielgud as the king, the gramophone was playing Lena Horne singing ‘Stormy Weather.’ Sir John said, ‘Oh I’m so cold Orson, my thighs are icy,’ Orson got a hot water bottle for him. I can’t explain to you how much laughter there was. Directors take things so seriously now. The work was serious, the performances were serious, but the atmosphere around the actors was fun.

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/orson-welles-keith-baxter-and-chimes-at-midnight

Gielgud is superb in Chimes

when i last saw it it Dec 2014, friend said he saw him breathe after he died

but yes

Gielgud is superb in Chimes

― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 2:27 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he really is, but gielgud is seldom less than superb. one of the finest screen performances i've ever seen is gielgud in a television version of The Browning Version directed by John Frankenheimer. he's stunning as man increasingly unable to hide his inner anguish.

when i last saw it it Dec 2014, friend said he saw him breathe after he died

cf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w4p4GkvrJ8

Jesus, this quote from J.Ro's piece on The Trial:

To anchor these feelings in one part of Welles’ life, he was 15 when his alcoholic father died of heart and kidney failure, and Welles admitted to his friend and biographer Barbara Leaming that he always felt responsible for that death. He’d followed the advice of his surrogate parents, Roger and Hortense Hill, in refusing to see Richard Welles until he sobered up, and ‘that was the last I ever saw of him….I’ve always thought I killed him….I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it.’

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/06/nightmare-as-funhouse-ride-orson-welless-the-trial-2/

Hard to believe he wasn't Irish Catholic.

if only the catholics had a monopoly on self-hating guilt! they're very professional about it, though

practice makes perfect

it's an instinct i share

“Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968) were the last two fiction features that Orson Welles completed,” begins R. Emmet Sweeney at Movie Morlocks. “Still to come would be the self-reflective essays of F For Fake (1973) and Filming Othello (’78), as well as the perpetually promised to-be-finished projects like The Other Side of the Wind (1970-’76), but Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story mark an endpoint. Both deal with aging, obsolete men living outside of their times, belonging to previous epochs. In Chimes, Welles’ Falstaff is a ruddy-cheeked representative of the Merrie England torn asunder by the War of the Roses, while his ‘Mr. Clay’ in The Immortal Story is a wealthy Macao merchant who lives inside his account books, completely cut off from the world outside. Chimes at Midnight is the capstone to Welles’s extraordinary career, while The Immortal Story is a dream-like coda. Today both have been released in essential DVD and Blu-ray editions from Criterion.”

http://moviemorlocks.com/2016/08/30/end-of-an-era-chimes-at-midnight-and-the-immortal-story/

The Immortal Story gets thick when Moreau and the gay bait lie in the bed for a seeming eternity, but my gad, sir, what an oddity.

V excited to finally get to see Chimes at Midnight

OK, got The Immortal Story out from the library. Should I be watching the English or the French version?

The only difference is the soundtrack? English i'm p sure

ENGLISH.

Replacing now broken link because J-Ro slightly reshuffled web page:
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/09/nightmare-as-funhouse-ride-orson-welless-the-trial/

Thanks guys.

I suppose it makes sense that the English version would be preferable; guess I was still haunted by how my first viewing of Herzog's Nosferatu was ruined by clicking the "English" option.

While I didn't love it, The Immortal Story is Welles' most homoerotic film.

Nice use of Satie, and the sailor was yummy, but The Immortal Story is a mildly interesting curio at best.

ie better than F for Fake

Bogdanovich teasing on That Movie again

https://thefilmstage.com/news/editing-on-orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-aiming-for-spring-start/

I finished Simon Callow's third volume two weeks ago. Rather good on sorting out who was responsible for the TOE screening debacle, explaining the complicated Welles- Mac Liammóir-Edwards axis during the filming of Othello, and the disastrous production of Rhinoceros, during which Welles realizes he hates Larry Olivier after all.

I hope to move this June so i can find out which box(es) the first 2 volumes are in.

If you can't find them, every public library in America has'em.

I wish.