TV Ontario Welles Documentary

[Store Hadji]

Saturday Night at the Movies, among those interviewed is our friend PB

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UEAys-Fh6nU&feature=user

[mido505]

Thank you, Store, I just watched the doc, and was entranced. Why is it that David Thomson is so on point here, yet produced such a shitty book on Welles? And it is nice to see Richard Benjamin's recollections of Welles during the Catch 22 shoot, compared to the Austin Pendleton's poisonous bilge. Who is the interviewer? At times it sounds like someone dubbed Welles' voice into the interviews.

[Tony]

Gotta disagree with you on Thompson, Mido; really, he makes me ill. I just fast forward past him. Everyone else interviewed worked with Welles, or knew him, or met him: they have an opinion, even if it's negative, I want to hear it. But what the hell does Thompson know? Where does he get his opinions? How does he formulate his views about Welles the person?

From other people's stories.

Thanks, but I'd rather listen to/read them: the people who actually experienced Welles.

[Store Hadji]

The credits list Thom Ernst as being the interviewer. I thought it sounded like Elwy Yost, and maybe that's him conducting the older interview clips, since he was the long-running former host of Saturday Night at the Movies, and the clips themselves are of various vintage.

[mido505]

Tony:

Your post reminds me of a story related by Gore Vidal about Anthony Burgess. Using a pseudonym, Burgess once wrote and published in a major London daily a review of one of his own books. When confronted with the subterfuge, Burgess replied that he just wanted to make sure that the book had been reviewed by someone who had read it.

I must say that I burst out laughing during one Thomson segment when the inevitable "who is this guy" caption read "author of Nicole Kidman"!

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Hadji. It's a beautifully put together little piece.

The research is a bit faulty. For instance, a picture of Welles with his first wife, Virginia, identifies the baby she's holding as their "son," Christopher. We know here that the fact checker slipped up on that one.

As for David Thomson's participation, at least they get a number of his books right, necessarily excluding some of his 25 publications: not listing all his works of reference, his novels, his works on cultural geography, his other biographies, and his books of essays, etc. And after all, Nicole Kidman is the title of his last published work.

That book, rightly, was not very well received for its inaccuracies and adulation. But I suppose that brings me to a hobby horse I've driven into the ground too often here already. People think that David Thomson hates Orson Welles. That could not be further from the truth. As with his infatuation over Nicole Kidman, Thomson is an artistic lover, and in that sense, his first love was Orson Welles. I'm certain that no one here today wishes any more than Thomson that Welles had gone on in an unbroken series of artistic and personal triumphs all his life, in the end to find Napenthe with Rita Hayward at the end of the rainbow on that dirt road in Big Sur.

It was not to be, and he has enraged or disgusted people here by saying so in Rosebud, embellishing certain truths with fanciful interjections of himself and I take it his wife, or one of his children, but I was happy to see him on camera in the documentary Hadji has brought us defending Welles verve and love of life on the day of his death.

Almost all the participants except for the ever loyal Peter Bogdanovich are more critical of Welles than he in this film.

Glenn