Wellesnet Message Board

by **Store Hadji** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 4:36 pm

Here's a high quality copy of the rare second half of the CBC interview.

Part 1 http://youtube.com/watch?v=T7e1H1oqu74
Part 2 http://youtube.com/watch?v=WWPFi9PxNhQ
Part 3 http://youtube.com/watch?v=CT13u2PkFhM
Part 4 http://youtube.com/watch?v=iscnfime600
Part 5 http://youtube.com/watch?v=OYOR_RvC3-M

I guess now the first half is rare!

by **Store Hadji** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 5:44 pm

by **Store Hadji** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 6:45 pm

More.

Who's Out There:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aGRy-N35xb0

Star Trek trailer:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DeF9O0OCVd0

La Ricotta clip:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kfFvzGOvZFo&feature=related

Follow the Boys segment:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DgqOUFcy1Zs

Black Magic clip:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ReVFdw61gAw

Touch of Evil suppressed fullscreen opening with Mancini music:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zt7-aTOPFCA

Beggars Would Ride (Gary Graver short):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Bfz1HW9Gx4E

by **ToddBaesen** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 1:35 am

The Clip of Welles on Herb Shriner reading Carl Sanburg's PRAIRIE is quite interesting, since the complete Sanburg poem is of a rather epic length, and would take about 15 minutes to read.

Welles, as always, takes the liberty of editing it down to fit into this shorter version that would be needed for a TV show, and like the magician he is, makes it appear as if he's reading the poem verbatim from a book!

Likewise, he dosen't just abridge the poem by removing passages in order, but re-orders them into a completely new and concise version of the poem.

It would also appear that Welles must have really enjoyed this poem, as it was written only three years after he was born and also makes reference to Wisconsin, which Welles, of course, includes in the excerpts he reads.

Interesting also is the harmonica opening (of Red River Valley), which evokes images of the landscapes of John Ford's westerns, just as Sandburg's words recall the nostalgia for another age that is so present in Welles own work, especially "The Magnificent Ambersons."

Here is the Welles edited text:

Part 2 http://youtube.com/watch?v=-xWVVim9qfk

_______________

PRAIRIE (1918)

By Carl Sandburg
_______________

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of Indian wigwam smoke—Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with a stub teeth.

I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.

The Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.
A headlight searches a snowstorm.

The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled.
The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses.
The farmer’s daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.

The threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.

The crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the byeroads and kissing bridges.

The horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.

The old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.

I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:

To-morrow is a day.

Website · by **Glenn Anders** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 1:35 am

Thank you for the Christmas present, Hadji.

I shall have to take some time with these. The quality in a number of cases is excellent.

I just looked at the beginning of TOUCH OF EVIL again, and was struck by Welles doing a little homage to Hitchcock, in addition to establishing a "rosebud" by having Quinlan at the scene of the crime before it takes place.

Glenn

by **Store Hadji** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 9:07 am

I'm glad the second half of the Braden interview surfaced, since it's rather more revealing than the first: http://www.box.net/shared/2cl2pez72f

I found very interesting the exchange in which Welles said he would cast friends in a film to the film's detriment, since he valued friendship more than films or art, and further that he didn't consider himself a serious artist at all but rather an adventurer. That's a key to understanding Welles' work, for all those who wonder why his films didn't seem as good as they should have been. When the friends he was casting were the members of the original Mercury Theatre, he could do little wrong (unless there was a rotating stage involved, or a theater which couldn't screen the filmed portions of Too Much Johnson.) When those friends were Robert Arden (aka Mark Sharpe aka Bob Harden) or Paola or Oja, the critics cried foul.

All in all, a damnably impressive ouvre for a man who wasn't even trying to create art.

Also, Welles dodged Braden's question about the numerous charges of Welles being incommunicado, negligent, and otherwise suffering from phone phobia when studio heads and producers were trying to contact him about his film they had in production or postproduction (and I've never seen Welles stroking the sides of his mouth in such a way after Braden posed the question - some interesting body language Braden effected there.) Welles' history of unprofessionalism in this department still has an unanswered question mark hanging over it. Welles wanted specifics, well, how about refusing to answer George Schafer's phone calls or telegrams when you were in Brazil, or refusing to return Richard Wilson's calls when he was finishing Macbeth, or why Universal had to ask Chuck Heston where you were when they were finishing Touch of Evil? We can provide reasons, excuses and rationalizations for Welles' behaviour, but the straight dope from the horse's mouth on these would have been more illuminating (were something straight to be forthcoming, rather than something spun.)

by **Alan Brody** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 10:55 am

I found very interesting the exchange in which Welles said he would cast friends in a film to the film's detriment, since he valued friendship more than films or art, and further that he didn't consider himself a serious artist at all but rather an adventurer. That's a key to understanding Welles' work, for all those who wonder why his films didn't seem as good as they should have been.

I'm thinking of a Welles line in one of the Paul Masson commercials, "I like to cast a party the way I would a film: with very special people." Sounds like Welles also liked to cast a film the way he would a party. Maybe that's why his films often have a festive quality to them.

by **Store Hadji** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 11:30 am

Ouch! You may be right.

So that's why Louis Dolivet was complaining about drinking on the set (or was that just how Welles lent verisimiltude to Bob Harden's performance during the amnesia scene?)

by **Tony** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 7:31 pm

Store:

I agree that Welles's behaviour was often inexcusable and inexplicable, and that he was often his own worst enemy. However, unless we want to become armchair psychiatrists (dollar-book Freud, anyone?) it seems to me that the only position to take at this stage is the one held by writers like Rosenbaum: look at the work, and forget the artist's foibles. We don't know much about Shakespeare, but what does it matter to the work?

For example, I can't imagine how Welles's not returning phone calls has anything to do with understanding his work. It seems to me that one is entering David Thomson territory when one starts assigning blame to Welles.

I suppose one could posit that Welles's wild, undisciplined personality explains his work being outside the usual bounds- but where does that get us, and where can we profitably go from there?

by **Store Hadji** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 9:13 pm

It's valid in the context of the interview because Welles dodged the question concerning a facet of his reputation that even if he hadn't earned it was still one that dogged his career and hirability, which ultimately meant far fewer Welles productions than either you or I would have preferred.

Where would any student, archivist, fan, critic, fanboy, detractor, sycophant, or assassin of Welles and his work be without asking any question they deemed pertinent?

I'd much rather ask questions that some deem to be stupid than subscribe to the dollar-book sycophant fanboy fanzine which offers nothing but praise, worship, spin, rationalizations, and a glossing-over of any degree of hard questioning anyone might have.

And were I somehow practising psychoanalysis on a client from beyond the grave and without the one-on-one counseling sessions which analysis requires, I guess I'd begin with the cigar and why Welles always positioned it in the center of his mouth. And since I hadn't ventured anything of the kind, perhaps there wasn't any dollar-book psychoanalysis to begin with.

Also, I find it impossible to separate an artist from his work. To not assess Welles the man from his interviews is something I cannot do.

But I wasn't trying to tread on toes, ankles, shinbones, and cochlear implants with my ruthless line of hypothetical questioning. Sorry that I did.

by **ToddBaesen** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 6:42 am

While I give Store many thanks for all the fantastic material he has brought to the attention of Wellesnet, I must say that I am squarely in Tony's corner re: the questions you bring up above.

First of all, I think one of the main problems about Welles is who do you believe is telling the truth. Is it Welles, or his biographers, or his numerous enemies. Also, to a lesser extent, how much of the actual evidence of what we are discussing have you or I actually seen? In this regard the story Welles tells in CITIZEN KANE becomes an important touchstone. No one story or biographer can possibly hope to tell or even imagine the truth about such a complex character as Orson Welles. And no one man, not even Simon Callow (our Thompson - but certainly not David Thomson), can possibly be trusted to tell it like it actually was.

Was Welles a genuis? A liar? A fool? A spendthrift? A madman? A charlatan? Or as Welles says about the artisans who created Chartres, in the end, does it really matter?

Well, in my own opinion, only a Welles biographer who has read or at least been to glance at the Welles documents at the Lilly Library in Indiana, could possibly know, or be considered to know what he or she was talking about. Which rules out quite a few of the Welles biographies that have already been published, and which is why Dick Wilson chided Charles Higham's horrible tome on Welles. But unfortunately, when Higham's disgraceful book was published, nobody but Welles (through Bogdanovich) seemed to question it's truthfulness. At the time it got several rave reviews in Newsweek and the N Y Times.

Now, in the interim, many other biographers have examined the files at Lilly, so we know that Higham's book and Higham himself are examples of biographical writing at it's worse. In his book, Higham mis-quotes and outright lies about facts that are quite clear to anyone who has had access to the Richard Wilson files now at the Lilly library that he had.

On the other hand, I think there is no doubt that Welles also lied many times in his interviews, and was certainly responsible for many of his own career problems. There is no doubt Welles seems to have had a certain lack of discipline. His leaving before completing the editing and re-dubbing of MACBETH would seem to be one of the prime areas where he really could be faulted. But in my view, there's quite a big difference between leaving a flawed experiment like MACBETH, and a possible masterpiece in the making, such as IT'S ALL TRUE. MACBETH was a film Welles made on a very low budget that couldn't have possibly cost more than $300,000, and it was shot in only three weeks. When Welles saw the results, he may have simply felt he had failed and thought it couldn't be turned into anything worth saving. Or at least without a great deal of additional funds, that certainly wouldn't be forthcoming from Herbert W. Yates. So, perhaps Welles simply decided, (as he was fond of pointing out about DON QUIXOTE), that since the film had cost almost nothing, he wouldn't even expend the effort to try to re-edit it. Result: He leaves for Europe, without giving MACBETH a second thought.

Now, how can anyone who has seen MACBETH believe that this film made in 1947 could have cost the $800,000 figure that Higham and others have reported is beyond me! That's about what CITIZEN KANE cost to make, only six years earlier. So if Welles was given that same kind of budget, (or even half of it), how could Welles possibly come up with the final results we see in MACBETH, which love it or hate it, must easily rank as his cheapest looking picture in terms of production values. Even if I saw the final cost sheets from Republic Studios that said it had cost over $800,000, I wouldn't believe it for a second.

Now, we also have access to all the telegrams, frantic letters, faxes (just kidding), etc. that Welles had sent to Schafer in the files at the Lilly Library. And we know IT'S ALL TRUE reached nearly a budget of $500,000. before the plug was pulled. So to say "Welles was ducking Schafer's phone calls" while making the picture really dosen't ring true.

Isn't it rather far-fetched to believe that while in the middle of shooting a complicated movie in Rio, on location, in 1942 when there was a World War going on, that it just might not have been possible for Welles to come to the phone when Schafer was calling him? Of course, maybe Welles was, as Lynn Shores may have imagined, shacked-up with some girl in the middle of the afternoon when he was supposed to be shooting. After all, there's the famous story of Welles pointing to a chorus line of Rio girls and supposedly saying "I screwed that one, and that one, and that one." But even if that story were proven to be true, I would still tend to doubt it's veracity.

After all, in reading anything written these days, you have to consider the source. I mean, who is Lynn Shores? A man who hated Welles. So he says Welles was "ducking Schafer's calls." Every telegram and letter Shores sent back to RKO indicates his hatred of Welles, and his own negative opinion of everything Welles was trying to accomplish in Rio. So anyone who believes anything that Shores says in his memos (as Higham's book does, for instance), would seem to me to be a bigger Fool than Lear or his Fool ever was.

Now, that dosen't mean Welles was innocent of all blame, but he certainly didn't abandon IT'S ALL TRUE. If anything he wrecked his future career by trying to finish it. Why would Welles try so hard for years after he had been fired from RKO to obtain the footage of IT'S ALL TRUE and attempt to find the money to finish it? Because he wanted to abandon it? It simply dosen't make sense.

And even if Welles subconsciously wanted not to finish IT'S ALL TRUE, in the memos he wrote to RKO we can see that Welles felt he had the makings of a real documentary masterpiece on his hands, and Welles own actions when he returned to America after being in Rio indicate he would have truly have loved to have been able to finish IT'S ALL TRUE,on his own terms. And as Richard Wilson noted in his Sight and Sound article, all this factual information is plainly available in the files at the Lilly Library.

by **Tony** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 8:14 am

Store: Don't worry about tredding! I'm always interested in others's views if they are interesting, and wouldn't reply if I didn't find yours interesting.

Todd: what can I say, except I'm squarely in your corner, and I think you've written a beautiful post.

I would add though that I think these fantastic interviews (especially the Canadian one!) show Welles to be fully a human being, i.e. full of rationalizations about and ignorances (is that a word?) of his own personality. I know I'm ignorant of many of my own follies, since I regularly disocover them, only then realizing they've always been around! How many more exist? Who knows? But Welles was also aware of many, and I see a vulnerability in the 16 part Magahey 1982 inteview that is not there in 1960. I still stick with my position as stated above, and Todd has expressed it much more fully than I did.

I do have another thought: to me, it's completely unimportant whether Falstaff as Welles depicted him is Welles's vision of himself or not, simply because we can never know. I would say though that in the 1982 L.M. interview, Welles expresses his ideas about his Falstaff film and his conception about Shakespeare more beautifully than ever before, and it is these ideas that I beleive we can profit from versus completley unreliable psychoanalyses of his personality. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is all we need, and the 20th century trend to write psycho-biographies is a dead-end.

And thanks for posting all of these vids!!

by **Store Hadji** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 10:22 am

Now I'm wondering if "i'm not a serious artist, i'm an adventurer" holds no more water than "i'm a charlatan."

Maybe he was a serious artist after all! Sure seemed like one to me.

And maybe he instead cast ENEMIES is his films, like Jack Moss who was actively destroying Welles' job at RKO.

Welles said everyone has personally known several Iagos, but then Welles gave them parts in his films.

by **Tony** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 4:34 pm

I'm just reading Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote, given at Harvard in 52, and he makes my point but regarding Cervantes and DQ:

"I can devote only a slanting minute to [Cervantes] life...we are interested in books, not people."

Which, of course, I would paraphrase as "We are interested in films, not people."

Personally, I don't care if Welles was a sacred monster or a saint, or both: but I do care passionately about his work, and we can find out much about his work from what he says about it, but not, in my opinion, from trying to psychoanalyze him. I believe this trend is a result of Freud's effect on our modern culture, and has resulted in, among many changes, the analyzing of an artist's subconscious mind to find out what they are all about. But even if we could reliably do this, where would it get us? To a final view of the work? But I believe Welles was strongly against this as it would kill interpretation of the work by individual minds.

But Store: you are in the mainstream on this position, as evidenced in Welles's case by all the psychobiographies written about him (you know which ones they are) and on this site by thoughtful Wellesians such as Glenn who strongly holds your position, as I understand it.

I am definitely in the minority on this one.

by **Store Hadji** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 5:23 pm

I'm sure psychoanalysis is the wrong word, since no one I've read (well, perhaps except for Naremore) made suppositions about psychosexual stages, anal or oral fixations be they repressive or overindulgent, Oedipal complexes (well, there's been some of that too,) or whether certain behaviours were symptomatic of neuroses, psychoses, or neither (I should double-check, but I don't think the DSM IV contains Phone Phobia.) Nor have I read any surmises as to Freudian symbology in the films. Psychoanalysis is an outdated school of thought that no psychologist I ever met uses any more.

I know what you mean, I just can't think of the right word for it. Personality Dissection, maybe? Or perhaps even Biography?

Ha, but I'll disprove you by having you notice that since the name of this website is NOT citizenkanenet or falstaffchimesatmidnightnet then perhaps people just might be interested in directors after all. I don't think artists are Gods or Monsters, just people who with or without talent had the balls to produce artifices, package them in a frame, call them art or entertainment, and offer them up for public perusal. And unless they do so anonymously, they themselves fall under the baleful eye of public scrutiny, even posthumously (as do we for being silly and arrogant enough to post our opinions online.)

But I think a thread that starts off disussing an interview is rather likely to focus on the person being interviewed, yes?

And now back to the essential topic of George Orson's potty training...

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