Orson Welles

[Drucker]

Ms. Welles comes off, to me, as if to say "I am the only one who understands and appreciates my father's legacy, and the only one who can do it justice." I wonder what her relationship with the likes of Carringer, Rosenbaum, and others are/were.

A Criterion release of Othello would of course be splendid, but at least with Carlotta handling the French release, there's bound to be at least one good release of it.

[albucat]

Ms. Welles comes off, to me, as if to say "I am the only one who understands and appreciates my father's legacy, and the only one who can do it justice." I wonder what her relationship with the likes of Carringer, Rosenbaum, and others are/were.

Bad.

[JohnDale]

Mr. Rosenbaum has a business relationship with Oja Kodar, so I doubt he has a relationship with Ms. Welles.
It's fun to slag Beatrice over Othello, but at least it is watchable -- unlike One Man Band and Franco's Don Quixote.
I know there are complications, but it has been 30 years since Welles died and we are no closer to seeing Other Side of the Wind now then were in 1985.

[albucat]

It's fun to slag Beatrice over Othello, but at least it is watchable -- unlike One Man Band and Franco's Don Quixote.
I know there are complications, but it has been 30 years since Welles died and we are no closer to seeing Other Side of the Wind now then were in 1985.

Well, considering that she actively removed her father's versions of the film from release, that's an odd point of view to have on matters (whether or not she still owns the rights to any version is currently unclear). Along with this, she prevented the release of Filming Othello in any form whatsoever, and as a result it seems to be largely forgotten despite being the last completed film Orson directed.

Rosenbaum's relationship with Ms. Welles is a result of his frustration over her mishandling of not just Othello and Touch of Evil, but also pretty much any attempt at restoration besides her own throughout the years on anything her father touched. Essentially, she doesn't like cooperation, and for large projects that tends to not make friends. Oja Kodar's decisions may sometimes be detrimental, but they at least seem to be motivated by love and concern rather than sheer mercenary objectives. I don't really see what any of this has to do with The Other Side of the Wind, which like most of Welles' works (completed or otherwise) is its own tangled mess of problems that don't seem likely to be solved anytime soon.

My personal frustration with Beatrice is that for so many of these pictures, problems of distribution in the United States are likely to stay bad for a long time. But with Othello (and Filming Othello), for the longest time the wall was just a single obstinate person. I'd even be fine settling with her version of the film being released here, so long as at least one of her father's also made it out.

[Drucker]

Roger Ryan is that you getting name-dropped?

[Roger Ryan]

Roger Ryan is that you getting name-dropped?

I fell into that interview simply by choosing the same vegetarian restaurant that McBride and Rosenbaum did that evening! McBride (whom I consider a friend) kindly requested I join the discussion. I'm surprised any of my comments made the final edit of the article.

The Woodstock Welles conference, by the way, was quite charming with good presentations by all of the panelists in a lovely setting (this was my first opportunity to see this quaint little town that had so much impact on Welles as a youth and at the beginning of his stage career).

[Stefan Andersson]

Wellesnet advertises a good-looking online copy of The Fountain of Youth - go here: http://www.wellesnet.com/?page_id=1734" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; - scroll down for links

[Stefan Andersson]

From Wellesnet - a three-part interview re: Othello and Chimes at Midnight restos. - scroll down for links to parts 2 and 3.

It´s from 2013, but I didn´t find any links to it earlier in this thread.

[rockysds]

National Film Preservation Foundation has put the 66 min. work print of Too Much Johnson up for streaming or download: here.

Also, an attempted 30 min. edit: Too Much Johnson Reimagined.

[Drucker]

So I just read the opening, non-script passages of The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction, and I have to say it was disappointing. Carringer's Making Of Citizen Kane is exhaustively detailed and he continuously lays out his point about the final product being a benefit of collaboration. Even the chapter on Ambersons in that book is well-done.

The thesis of this book is similar: a wide variety of bad decisions by Welles and studio execs led to the destruction of the film, and Welles should have taken a more proactive role in caring about it. But Carringer's argument about why Welles distanced himself from the project in various ways, from not casting himself as George Minafer to running away to Brazil, is all lazy pseudo-psychology to me. Welles loved his mother so much that he couldn't re-enact his own life in this film? It seems absurd. While there are similarities between events in Welles' life and parts of Kane and Ambersons, there is scant if any evidence directly linking personal feelings and psychological trauma he may have supposedly encountered and his decisions made during the filmmaking process.

There is plenty of evidence to debunk many of Welles' tall-tales, such as his insistence that he never read the source novel for Touch Of Evil, but the book's matter-of-factual treatment of Welles' psychological decision-making process comes off more as correlation more than anything else. I'm glad I didn't spend $40 on a used copy for sure!

[hearthesilence]

That's the usual knock on that book, but it's a small part of it. Probably 90% of the book is research that's invaluable, especially the script, which clearly and expertly shows what was cut out, re-done or added in altogether, and the visual elements (particularly the stills of lost scenes) are incredible. Even if you have qualms about the analysis, this is still an essential book to have. There's so much documentation and detail, it makes it very easy to visualize what the film would've been like, at least for me, and there's very little doubt in my mind that it would've been Welles' best and a monumental work.

[Drucker]

Agreed with everything you said. One thing I hadn't encountered before reading McBride's What Ever Happened is the final scene of Jo Cotten driving towards the city, now a fully built industrial city, and the iris out on him doing so. To me, the criticism that the film wouldn't have been all that great is just absurd. Better than Citizen Kane? Debatable. But Welles was at the height of his creative power as far as I'm concerned, and based on what's still there in the theatrical release, it's not hard to imagine that was cut was absolutely brilliant.

[hearthesilence]

Absolutely. And it's frustrating how that lost ending seems just out of reach of being found. So many stills seem to exist from it. (I think one was used for the artwork of the current DVD.) Right off the bat, you can see the hard contrast between what was reshot and what was originally done, because you have that still of Cotten at his office, almost completely swallowed up in pitch black shadows, with the industrial sign outside his window. (He even has a dark hat which goes a step further in sinking him in black.) Compare that to the reshot ending, where it's this brightly lit, warm looking office, and he's with his daughter, on her way to making that ridiculously dramatic exit.

Even more fascinating is the part with Fanny. Pretty much the same exact dialogue, but it's been completely reimagined. Instead of them walking down the hall together in prosaic fashion, it's staged in the most eerie and chilling way. The blocking and setting alone would've done it, but the radio program serving as a counterpoint just takes it somewhere else entirely. (The whole program is scripted in a footnote.)

Absolutely brilliant, such a shame it hasn't been found intact. Bogdanovich said he and Scorsese talked about re-shooting and essentially restoring the ending in the early '70s since Moorehead and Cotten were now at the appropriate age in real life. Not sure how serious they were about that.

[Roger Ryan]

...Bogdanovich said he and Scorsese talked about re-shooting and essentially restoring the ending in the early '70s since Moorehead and Cotten were now at the appropriate age in real life. Not sure how serious they were about that.

I believe this was something Welles talked about wanting to do in the late 60s. It looks like he had a photocopy made of the 131 min. cutting continuity around this time (this was one of the items recently auctioned off by Beatrice), so maybe he was seriously considering it.

Scorsese talked about shooting new footage or, possibly, shooting a remake imitating Welles' style and the performances of the Mercury players as close as possible, but this was later (possibly in the 80s or 90s?).

The "Oedipus In Indianapolis" essay is ridiculous and makes far too much out of Welles' desire to toy around with the film in post-production. As "heartthesilence" says, the book is worth it for the reprint of the 131 min. cutting continuity and the frame enlargements of the lost footage. Incidentally, Carringer gets one thing wrong with his transcription of the cutting continuity: Welles' "comeuppance" narration was, indeed, part of the 131 min. edit, in addition to the narration that was cut from the sequence of George's last walk home (Carringer infers in the book that the "comeuppance" passage was added for the released version).

[hearthesilence]

I was confused by that, for a while I thought that was a rare case of a studio-ordered rewrite adding something memorable to this film. (Terence Davies memorably used that same sound recording for a scene in The Long Day Closes too.)

[zedz]

Absolutely. And it's frustrating how that lost ending seems just out of reach of being found. So many stills seem to exist from it.

Film stills and film film are completely different things. The stills would have been shot by a photographer wandering around the set who will almost certainly have had nothing to do with the making of the film and was just accumulating publicity material for the studio's marketing department. What he was shooting might have been scenes that were also being filmed by Welles, or they might not. They could also have been posed shots of the photographer's own invention that had nothing to do with anything that would have appeared in the film.

At any rate, that body of work was entirely separate from the film being shot, and would have gone straight from the marketing department into the studio archives (apart from whatever shots were selected for publicity purposes), so you can't draw any conclusions from its survival about the fate of shot footage.

[hearthesilence]

I thought we went over this a while back - there are actual still frames (not publicity photos from a still photographer) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I think it came up when this was mentioned in the Vanity Fair article.

[zedz]

I thought we went over this a while back - there are actual still frames (not publicity photos from a still photographer) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I think it came up when this was mentioned in the Vanity Fair article.

Well, if a print of the complete film was chopped up in this way then doesn't that answer the question of what happened to the film print? Would there have even been more than one copy of the full-length version, since it wasn't like it was pulled and replaced on the eve of release.

[Roger Ryan]

Welles had several dozen "frame enlargement" prints made during the post-production of AMBERSONS which come directly from the shot footage. Most of these prints reside at the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan; some of them are at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. All of them have a stamp on the back that indicates they were printed between February 8th and the 18th, 1942. Since Welles and Robert Wise put together a very rough assembly of the film in Miami from February 4th through the 6th (Welles left for Brazil on the 6th from Miami to begin his ill-fated IT'S ALL TRUE production), I suspect Wise had the frame enlargement prints made upon his return to California, then sent them to Welles in Rio so the director would have a visual reference for much of the footage as he attempted to make editing suggestions long distance.

At U-M, these prints are kept in a separate folder from the standard production stills and publicity photos. There is little doubt these prints are taken directly from the footage since the images of shots retained in the released version replicate the camera placement and composition exactly. Not only do the frame enlargement prints show material that was cut from the 131 minute edit completed in mid-March, 1942, but there are a number of prints showing material that Welles wanted cut prior to that edit.

In Carringer's book (as in THIS IS ORSON WELLES), there is a mixture of frame enlargements, production stills and behind-the-scenes photos. For example: the photo of Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and Delores Costello outside the early auto factory is a staged production still, the photo of Ray Collins and Tim Holt outside in the rain storm is a behind-the-scenes photo (obviously, since the actors are clearly between takes and the camera and cameraman are visible) whereas the photo of the party guests at the "Last Ball" is a frame enlargement taken from deleted footage.

Well, if a print of the complete film was chopped up in this way then doesn't that answer the question of what happened to the film print? Would there have even been more than one copy of the full-length version, since it wasn't like it was pulled and replaced on the eve of release.

So there wasn't a print that was chopped up to create the frame enlargements; these were made prior to Welles' initial long edit. You are correct that there were very few copies made of anything earlier than the released version. Likely, all of the prints made for the various previews were destroyed. After Wise completed the 131 minute edit, he shipped a 35mm copy (14 reels) to Welles in Rio along with an additional 10 reels of alternate editing choices Welles was considering. Reportedly, those reels were requested to be destroyed and supposedly were by December, 1944. One could hold on to a glimmer of hope that these reels actually survived and are in some kind of archive down in Brazil.

[zedz]

Thanks Roger. I didn't realize there was such detailed provenance. In that case, there's definitely no corollary between the survival of the frame enlargements and the possible survival of any film print, since those enlargements were made before the film ran into any of its fabled difficulties and before the prints were supposedly destroyed.

[Drucker]

Orson Welles films screening at Film Forum in January through early February. Mouth-watering, including Chimes at Midnight on my birthday.

[FrauBlucher]

Very cool! Chimes at Midnight is the one I will be most looking forward to seeing.

[Drucker]

Words honestly cannot describe how excited I am.

[Roger Ryan]

A great line-up for sure. I'm intrigued by the "new restoration" tag for THE TRIAL. As to CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, I'd like to think this film will become widely available again. If the restoration was done by the same team behind OTHELLO, then it's not necessarily "new" (I saw two reels of this restored version eight years ago - looked fine, by the way), just screened very infrequently. Perhaps it's a more recent, entirely different restoration; looking forward to learning more.

[Drucker]

A great line-up for sure. I'm intrigued by the "new restoration" tag for THE TRIAL. As to CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, I'd like to think this film will become widely available again. If the restoration was done by the same team behind OTHELLO, then it's not necessarily "new" (I saw two reels of this restored version eight years ago - looked fine, by the way), just screened very infrequently. Perhaps it's a more recent, entirely different restoration; looking forward to learning more.

I will be at these for sure. The Trial was released for blu-ray by Studio Canal and I'm hoping it's not the same version as that release, as it has its fair share of noise-reduction, "grain-management". But the only Chimes I've seen is the Mr. Bongo version. So certainly those two will be of most interest.

I'm a bit confused about the different Macbeths. Macbeth's "Scottish" version is the one Welles preferred, right? The one available on the Olive BD? He was forced to change the Scottish accents against his will, so the original release version on the 25th would be for completists only, right?