Orson Welles

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.

Other Side of the Wind to be released by Netflix:

http://www.wellesnet.com/other-side-of-the-wind-footage-netflix-to-release-orson-welles-film/

wowowowow

sounds horrifying tbh

even if it sucks it'll be fascinating

(fwiw F for Fake is probably my second favorite Welles after CK)

Finding all the detailing of archiving/preservation of most interest -- this turned out to be a smart move over the last eighteen months:

Unknown to many, Rymsza had a team quietly at work at LTC during the lengthy negotiations. Each film can was opened and the footage checked for signs of deterioration. Metadata and handwritten information from each reel or film can was collected and entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The footage was then transferred onto modern cores and prepped for its 4K scan at Technicolor. The sound elements, contained on quarter-inch analog audio tapes, were packaged for their eventual conversion into digital files. The materials were placed in moisture-proof bags with absorbent paper, securely boxed and then packed onto eight pallets for shipment.

"We definitely made good use of that time," Rymsza said. "We have a very good sense from an inventory of what's what. It's extremely well-organized."

i've seen the first 40 minutes on a bootleg dvd and i love it. as long as they keep jesus franco out of it (shouldn't be too difficult what with him being dead and all) it should be a great watch.

The agreement calls for producers to deliver to Netflix, among other elements, a 35mm print of the completed film, which leaves the door open to some type of theatrical release.

You better bet yer fuckin' ass.

Someone said that all of Welles' films, despite some stylistic/thematic resemblance, were all sui generis. I doubt this cut of OSOTW will be "horrifying," but based of the clips and accounts it should be an ungainly, arresting thing, whether it's good or not.

(might be received more like recent Malick then like Chimes at Midnight)

xxp

the thing i'm most worried about is that it's the sort of film that _ought_ to be seen on a bootleg dvd. it is, by design, an unfinished mess.

ya sure? i'm sure OW wanted it to feel "70s" and improvisational but i think he wanted to finish it, and for it not to be a mess. None of his finished (signed) films are messes, exactly, not even the multiple Mr Arkadins.

well, the conceit is that a washed-up, aging director had a party on what turned out to be the last day of his life and invited everybody with a camera there. at that party, he showed the unfinished rushes of his film in progress. so what i saw, at least, cuts between those unfinished rushes and "guerilla" footage filmed on about every kind of camera imaginable at the party. my feeling is that "chaotic mess" is kind of baked into that structure.

The summaries I've read of his working method -- Welles writing scraps of dialogue on 5x7 cards which we would give to an amused John Huston -- don't augur well for what we'll see.

I'm more disappointed that he never got to film The Big Brass Ring