Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

“Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”

With those simple words, filmmakers the world over, were given a new “cinematic” tool, as edited by Orson Welles in what everyone seems to think is the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane.

Now, strange as it may seem, I can’t recall this particular editing innovation being used very often in movies after Citizen Kane was released. Maybe it’s because I have a New Years Eve hangover from drinking a a few too many Gimlet’s with Glenn Anders and Todd Baesen at the Ha-Ra Club (by the way, I told Todd to stop his rant against the new messageboard. Although I don’t much like it, either, it’s better than having nothing!)

However, to return to “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” it seems to me it recalls the cut in Kubrick’s 2001 where we cover many years in the story in a single cut.

Welles had discovered a very effective cinematic device that nobody else ever seems to be using these days. Maybe it’s like the dissolve, and it has simply gone out of fashion, but it’s a technique that you would think some hot-shot young director would have picked-up on.

But, speaking of the dissolve, why would should that have gone so out of fashion in today’s movies? It’s one of the most poetic and beautiful things a director or a film editor has at their disposal. That is why Citizen Kane’s opening is so poetic. And just look at the beautiful dissolves in Terence Malick’s films.

Maybe it’s just because today’s young MTV trained directors don’t even know what a dissolve is. Could that be why they are so out of fashion?

If that is the case, it’s a pretty pathetic indictment of film schools. It reminds me of Welles own comments on what was “cinematic” made circa 1948. He and Jean Cocteau were at the Venice film Festival, and both wondered what the formula was for creating a “cinematic” experience, if only so they could put it into effect in one of their future films. At the time, both Welles and Cocteau had made films from plays they had already directed for the stage. Welles had just done Macbeth, while Cocteau had just started work on Les Parents Terribles.

The point being, “cinematic” was really just a fake description for what critics wanted movies to be. What is really cinematic, would be, as Welles said in 1958, giving the camera to someone who could use it as “an eye in the head of a poet.”

So let’s have more poets who want to make movies, and less bastards who are raised on MTV and want to become rich and famous!

In any event, here is wishing everyone at Wellesnet a very Happy New Year, and as promised, here is the second part of ORSON WELLES autobiography that was published in Paris Vogue.

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A BRIEF CAREER AS A MUSICAL PRODIGY

By Orson Welles - PARIS VOGUE, December, 1982
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Violinist, pianist…child conductor…

This last was pretty much of a fake. By the time I was seven I was reading through the scores and waving my little baton in the presence of such people as Heifetz, Casals, Schnabel, Wallenstein and Mischa Ellman, when they gathered informally in chamber groups in my mother’s house. Her own professional life was frustrated by long illness, but just about everybody was in love with her, so the celebrated musicians, when they came to visit and play, were kind enough to pretend that the midget Von Karajan in front of them was not (as I must truly have been) a damned nuisance.

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Given that most of Hollywood today leans distinctly Democratic, I found this 1944 article from Time Magazine to be quite interesting, in terms of getting an idea of where the Hollywood players of the time stood on the political spectrum.

The article also brought forth a letter of response from Orson Welles, which Time published a few weeks later. In his letter, Welles notes that while he and other Hollywood types were ripe targets for satire, the political content of the films Hollywood was making were a serious matter.

Of course, 25 years later, in his own magnum opus, The Other Side of the Wind, Welles combined both satire of Hollywood with the right-wing Hollywood types he had known, as represented by the members of “The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.”
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TIME Feb 14, 1944

Over the room-temperature burgundy and the chopped chicken liver, politics came to Hollywood. As the battle began, the right wing took up prepared positions at the swank Beverly-Wilshire Hotel. The left strung its forces along rows of white-clothed tables at the equally swank palm-studded Beverly Hills Hotel, three miles away. Then the giants fired deadly after-dinner speeches at each other.

The Leftists started it off by announcing a big Free World Association dinner, starring Vice President Henry Wallace. Rightists quickly formed a club of their own, rushed into dinner last week on the eve of Wallace’s appearance.

The Hollywood Rightists called themselves “The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.” Purpose: to correct “the growing impression that this industry is made up of and dominated by communists, radicals and crackpots.” The Generalissimo is urbane, graying Sam Wood, who diluted For Whom the Bell Tolls so that Spanish Fascists became “nationalists” and Spanish Republicans came out like the American G.O.P. His general staff includes Walt Disney, Rupert Hughes, one writer from Republic Studios, and ten Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives, faithful minions of Tycoon Louis B. Mayer. Gary Cooper, Hemingway’s Spanish Republican hero, ate dinner with them. Hearst papers gave the affair pages of pleased attention.

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As a special Christmas treat, Wellesnet is presenting the beginning of the autobiography that Orson Welles abandoned after writing only the first two chapters, remarking that he found it extremely difficult to write about himself and much preferred to write about all the fascinating people he had known, beginning, as you will see, with his father and mother.

The following appeared in English, as written by Welles, in the 1983 December/January issue of Paris Vogue. An editorial footnote identifies it as “the first unedited chapter of an autobiography that Orson Welles is currently writing.”

Part Two will provide us a nice entry into the Happy New Year of 2009 which will see something Welles would have loved: The first Afro-American President, from Welles adopted home town of Chicago, no less. Things certainly have changed for the better, in the sixty-odd years since Welles basically ruined his career on the radio in order to champion bringing justice to Issac Woodward!

So to all Wellesnet readers, have a very Merry Christmas…

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MY FATHER WORE BLACK SPATS

By ORSON WELLES

Vogue Magazine (Paris) 1983

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His shoes were made for him in London and his hats in Paris. When he traveled by train he carried his own bed linen and a small Persian prayer rug for his feet. His cigars, from a private selection in Havana, traveled first to England, where they were allowed to “breathe” in bond for two years before going on to join him wherever he might be. His cigarettes, of Virginia tobacco “straight cut,” were beautifully made with an untreated paper so that when he was not quite sober enough to remember to keep puffing, they went quietly out like one of his cigars. Thus he lived to a great age before setting himself on fire. This happened in a mid-Western village in a small hotel which he had purchased with a view to enjoying, for a month or so each autumn, the simple pleasures of rural America. For the rest of the year he mainly commuted between his houses in Jamaica and Peking — these being the last of the pleasant places on earth where dozens of skilled domestic servants were available and cheap.

What he liked best, I think, were the sea crossings: the long freedom from lands in which he felt himself increasingly diminished. There was no more welcoming spot for my father than the bar of a nice, old-fashioned ocean liner: the creaking of leather in the cradling seas, the cards he played so masterfully, and a captive audience for his stories.

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Greetings all, hope the holiday season finds you well. Here at Wellesnet Xanadu, I’ve just finished the installation of a stately pleasure palace of an upgraded message board, which you will need to correct your links to. The new URL is http://wellesnet.com/phpbb2/index.php, so change your bookmarks and ignore the old board, which while still accessible, will be deleted shortly. All passwords should work, and it looked like the avatars were working correctly as well, though the handful of folks with avatars not in the gallery will need to re-enter the URL to them (this is done in your control panel). E-mail me if you need assistance with this. Further site work is underway, and we’ll post about it as it happens.

Jeff

Ray Kelly, our Wellesnet man in Cambridge sends along this exclusive report on Stefan Drossler’s presentation of The Unknown Orson Welles on December 1, 2008 at the Harvard Film Archive

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By RAY KELLY

What was billed as a two hour look at the unfinished works of Orson Welles, stretched into a nearly four hour presentation. There were about 100 people present, similar to the size of the crowd there the night before for the look at Welles’ TV work (according to the gentleman seated behind me). Stefan Drossler of the Munich Film Museum bookended his presentation with a showing of a 1955 episode of Orson Welles Sketch Book and concluded with the 1983 videotaped pitch Welles’s made for his film version of King Lear.

Early in the evening, Drossler made it clear that some of Welles lost work may truly be lost. For instance, in processing some 1970’s cans of undeveloped footage of Moby Dick revealed only a blue print. The cans are being stored in hopes that a future technology may be able to salvage the footage. The Deep is also fading.

Highlights of the evening included:

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THE DEEP – For me this was the highlight of the night. A trailer (similar to the one shown in One Man Band, but much longer) was followed by a color reel of edited footage with sound and music. The footage totaled 18 minutes. Drossler believes it is The Deep, rather than, The Other Side of the Wind, that would have the best chance of being released closest to Welles’s vision. However, it is a low priority for Oja Kodar, who doesn’t want The Deep to compete with OSOTW in the battle to find completion funds. Further, an effort by German and French television to preserve and color correct the footage was nixed by Kodar a few years back over her request for more money. The Munich film Museum has only the work print. The negative of The Deep was apparently destroyed by French customs because of non-payment.

Additionally, dubbing most of the parts in The Deep would be necessary since Welles shot most of the footage with an un-blimped camera. Drossler also noted that Jeanne Moreau had originally acted in The Deep for only a percentage of the profits. However, her experience on the set was not entirely pleasant, since she and Ms. Kodar did not get along. When Welles later asked her to re-dub her lines, Moreau reportedly balked unless payment was forthcoming. Although now Moreau would be willing to help out, her voice is much deeper, so it might need to be dubbed by a younger actress. The other three main actors in the film (Welles, Laurence Harvey, Michael Bryant) are now deceased, so they would also have to be re-dubbed.

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