"Me and Orson Welles"

[Glenn Anders]

I'm most certainly losing my sight, and I seem to hear a false echo.

ALL the photos are captioned: "Zac Efron and Christian McKay: Mercury Men." Similar links are provided (in blue). But Chris is NOT identified in the captions, nor is her new book identified.

Fortunately, for those who might not notice that fact, I have added a note at the site to clear the matter up.

As Akim Tamiroff, the great character actor favored by Orson Welles, said as Pablo in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS: "I-I-I do not provoke."

Silly as it is, for a third time: Happy Thanksgiving to all here.

Glenn

[mido505]

"As I am sure you will understand, it is difficult for me to be objective about a portrayal of my father in a fictional movie, especially when the Orson Welles character is presented as a sacré monstre (holy monster). Director Richard Linklater was equal to the task of telling a coming-of-age story but not, I feel, of delving into the Orson Welles character and helping us better understand what makes him tick. As a result, we end up with a caricature. Instead of taking the novel on which the movie is based at face value, as well as buying into the prevailing myths surrounding Orson Welles, Linklater might have gone deeper into his subject and given us a more complex and substantive portrait of a theatrical genius.

Christian McKay is a charming man, in person as well as on the screen, and a fine actor. He does a splendid job with the character he was given to play, but it is only an echo of the real Orson Welles. As charming as McKay is, the real Orson was infinitely more charming, charismatic, even spellbinding. The real Orson exuded at age 22 a boyish enthusiasm, a boundless energy, a sense of childlike wonder and curiosity that captivated almost everyone who came into contact with him. He had a zest for life that was irresistible. His actors were willing to work themselves to the bone not only because they believed in his genius but because he was good to them, supportive, generous, even as he made superhuman demands on them. For instance, we do not see the fictional Orson bringing food to the theater for his actors or setting up cots in the aisles and backstage during all-night rehearsals. The real Orson was incapable of the put-downs, petty humiliations and acts of cruelty we see portrayed in Me And Orson Welles. Ask yourself: Would practically every member of the Mercury Theater company have followed Orson Welles to Hollywood and remained with him for years had they been treated like the Zac Efron character in the movie?"

Thank God, and three cheers, for Christopher Welles Feder!

[Glenn Anders]

For the few here who do not often frequent it, there is a certain invaluable source of information, often current firsthand information, about Orson Welles, his works, and various recognitions of his continuing impact upon America. Chris Welles Feder has written on that site an invaluable, delightfully graceful, eye-witness account of ME AND ORSON WELLES' New York City premiere, a personal reaction to the movie itself, a keen description of the party afterward and the Mercury Theater plaque dedication ceremony the next morning. It pretty much makes superfluous the speculations we have been nattering about here, and may be found at:

http://www.wellesnet.com/

As for "on the other hand," what in the name of Orson Welles do random observations have to do with the important work we have been attempting to accomplish here?

". . . certainly capable of put-downs, petty humiliations and acts of cruelty . . . sock puppets . . . ."

Are we ever to come to an end of these fantasies?

I may be physically "twisted," but, "I AM NOT A CROOK!"

Let me second mido505's just oath: "Thank God, and three cheers, for Christopher Welles Feder!"

"I do not provoke."

. . . Unless someone suggests that "Chris Welles Feder" is also in someone's imagination a "sock puppet" of his Secret Cabal.

Happy Thanksgiving to all here!

Glenn

[Glenn Anders]

Unfortunately, a particular someone is going beyond the harmlessly silly but often quite accurate references of mine to The Ha-Ra Club, Larry French's Gin [always Gin, stirred not shaken] Gimlets, "Todd" or Toddy" Baesen. [Ask Larry French if these references, no matter how irrelevant in the midst of more substantive information, point to real places, things, events, and persons out here in Frisco -- "Todd Baesen" is listed among his "friends" on the Wellesnet Facebook Page.] Indeed, in the good old days, when the legal system protected individuals from public slander, Quentin Reynolds would have sued the ears off Richard Nixon's Enemies List boys, Team B, the Project for a New American Century Gang, The Men Who Stare at Goats, the ESP Squad, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the person who asks his name never be uttered.

We all contribute according to our abilities, I suppose, no matter how limited our abilities may be.

I know I try my best, too, but within a hopefully socially acceptable democratic, legal, and constitutional context.

" . . . the Nixon comparison is apt: you are a crook."

Sounds like a prima facie case of slander to me. Where is Quentin Reynolds when we need him?!!

Still . . .

"I do not provoke."

May we return to ME AND ORSON WELLES or Chris Welles Feder now?

Happy After-Thanksgiving!

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

Man, this thread is really getting ugly. I feel a lockdown coming on...
A touch of evil permeates this thread, and it's quite a trial reading through these increasingly nasty missives – a journey into fear, almost.
In the words of the King, can't we all just get along?
I much prefer David Thomson to Barbara Leaming (who wrote one of the worst Welles bios, even though – or perhaps because – it was officially sanctioned by Welles). Does my preference for Thomson over Leaming make me a monster, Mr. Keats? Or even worse... a liar?
And Glenn, take solace in the knowledge that "a person's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners." At least that's what the fellah said... the fellah being Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773).
Glenn... if I weren't a tired old man with a game leg, I'd leave my turkey ranch and come down to San Fran and hoist a glass with you at the Ha-Ra Club. Maybe more than one.
I myself find your references to yon club vastly amusing. And I'm not just talkin' through the back of my neck.
To sum up, perhaps Orson Welles said it best, way back in 1970, when he asked: "Is It Always Right to Be Right?" Not having seen the Oscar-winning animated short subject, I assume Welles meant is it right to be right at any cost... hurt feelings, incivility, intolerance, etc. Catch my drift?

[mido505]

While I understand her discomfort the rest of us need to remember that the film is a work of fiction. It should not and cannot be taken as portrait of Welles. I've not seen the film yet but I did find the book to be entertaining, even unique. I look forward to the film as an evocation of an era that hold a great fascination for me.

Keats, as a rigorous scholar, could you please explain to me how one evokes an era when one distorts, alters, falsifies, or radically changes the personalities of the individuals who made up that era, or is the era somehow separate from the individuals who produced it? Most writers of historical fiction worth their salt may weave fictional characters in with the real characters and events that they are depicting, but they do attempt to get the facts, and the personalities, right.

Also, as a dedicated truth-teller, can you please point me to the biography (title, author, and page number) where it is stated that Richard Nixon, during Watergate, had to be reminded which leg to limp with? I've read several biographies of Nixon, and several accounts of Watergate, and never ran across that little nugget. For that matter, I never ran across that little nugget in the books of Hunter S. Thompson, or in Oliver Stone's Nixon, and you'd think that they would jump on something like that.

Speaking of phlebitis, did you know that Welles suffered from it at the end of his life? It was the chronic phlebitis, and not Orson's weight, that necessitated the infamous wheel chair.

For those of you interested in such mundane factuality, Welles's death certificate can be (morbidly) accessed here: http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/w/orson/dc.jpg

[Christopher]

Keats or whoever you are,

What is the matter with you? There is simply no excuse for your rudeness, inappropriateness and attacks on another Wellesnet member. Where is your sense of humor?

[Alan Brody]

Glenn Anders wrote:
"Hey, fella, whatever your name is: I don't mind a leetle Tar-r-r-get Practice, but you're getting it all on me, doncha know? Barman, what are you going to do about that?" "Nay-x-x-t!!"

Aw, isn’t he cute. And he even has fans:

Quote:
LOL Glenn, but I really wish you would stop using "Keats" as one of your so-called sock puppets. You have enough of them already, including Mido and me.

Keats, I don't mind your being such a lofty person at all - I find it ever so interesting - but Glenn is a great man. And although he may seem like just a mild-mannered gimlet guzzler, I can tell you firsthand that he has an extensive network of sock puppets all over the world, maybe even in China. He's like Arkadin that way.

Better start running, Keats.

[Alfred Willmore]

I want to remind our veteran members what happened to The Other Board.

We must not let this get out of control.

Wellesnet is too valuable a resource, and Glenn is an important part of that value.

There is NO justification for these personal attacks on a valued colleague.

By the way, the gimlets at the Ha-Ra are terrible.

Wilfred

[Christopher]

Well said, Alfred!

[Alfred Willmore]

Sinvergüenza ...

Until these postings, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.

It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear Glenn shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.
You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
Have you no shame?

[RayKelly]

Simon Callow in The Times today on Me and Orson Welles -- "...they've got it all right"

When you know a lot about someone, as I do about Orson Welles (having written two fat volumes of a biographical trilogy over the past 20 years), you rather dread fictional treatments of that person. So I approached the new film Me and Orson Welles very gingerly, especially since it is set in the Mercury Theatre in the 1930s.

I was at drama school when the Welles virus first infected me: I read about the Mercury in Run-through, a book by John Houseman, a good portion of which is devoted to describing his relationship with Welles in the 1930s, culminating in a magnificent description of their work together, first for the Federal Theatre Project, then the Mercury Theatre. That’s the life for me, I thought: working 20 hours a day, under the charismatic leadership of a young genius — stretching oneself and the theatre to the very limits, defying convention, electrifying the audience, changing lives.

Houseman was describing a golden period in the theatre, and these are rare. Welles in his early twenties set off a series of brilliant theatrical fireworks that were unlike anything that had come before — were, indeed, unlike each other; each production had its own particular style, although iconoclasm was the rule. Of course, Welles went on to other glories. Made internationally famous — notorious, perhaps — by his radio version of The War of the Worlds, which panicked people thought was a report of an actual Martian invasion, he directed Citizen Kane, his first film, when he was 25, but then he fell out with the studio, and somehow nothing was ever the same again. His films were often taken away from him and re-edited, his radio career petered out, his theatre work imploded spectacularly with a musical version of Around the World in 80 Days that all but bankrupted him. In Europe he made extraordinary films such as Othello and Chimes at Midnight (known in some countries as Falstaff); none of them made any money. He acted in other people’s films to raise money for his own; he did commercials and chat shows in the hope that they would remind the industry that he was around. He did a huge amount of work, but few people saw it, especially not in America. What had started in such glory ended in a rather muted melancholy. Why this should be has been the subject of my books.

The glory, while it lasted, was glorious indeed. Welles’s impact on the theatre of his time is impossible to exaggerate. Bliss was it to be alive at that moment in the American theatre, but to be young was very heaven. And he was the youngest of them all. Macbeth, his first professional production, at the age of 21, made him that unusual thing, a superstar director, overnight. His new best friend, John Houseman, very English, very white, 13 years older, had been appointed head of the Negro Theatre Unit, a branch of that extraordinary venture the Federal Theatre Project, itself an offshoot of Roosevelt’s great initiative to put America back to work, the Works Progress Administration. It seems almost too good to be true that theatres and performers were included in such an initiative, but they were — right across the board. And thus it was that down in Harlem a huge company of actors who had very little experience of anything and none whatever of 17th-century verse plays, as well as some very distinguished actors who had, were put under the leadership of this astonishing great hulk of a middle-class boy from the Midwest with floppy black hair, electrifying energy and the voice (even then) of God Almighty.

It worked, not perhaps in quite the way Shakespeare might have intended, but as an event it was astounding, unprecedented, a sort of barbaric cabaret, underpinned from beginning to end by the drums of Asadata Dafora. Harlem went wild for it. Houseman was so thrilled by his protégé’s work that he determined to quit the Negro Unit and set up a unit of their own within the FTP. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was the first show, cut by, designed by, with conjuring tricks by, the human tornado Welles, who of course played the title role. It was an out-and-out triumph, followed by something much more risky, The Italian Straw Hat, a wild farce by Eugène Labiche, followed by something very politically daring, a musical written by a card-carrying communist, Marc Blitzstein, advocating root-and-branch reform of capitalism.

The FTP instructed Welles to delay the opening, but he would not hold back. When he found himself locked out of his theatre he simply found another, and he and the entire company and the entire audience marched up Broadway and did the show right there. It was the most enormous hit, and it transferred, but Houseman and Welles were finished with the FTP.

It was then that they decided to form a company of their own, and they named it the Mercury Theatre. In November 1937 they opened to mighty fanfares with a greatly trimmed-down version of Julius Caesar — even the title was trimmed to Caesar — set in a modern fascist state; they had a stupendous triumph with it, eclipsing all their previous successes. Although it was only 90 minutes long, it was huge, technically, and demanding for the actors, and Welles was unrelenting, working everyone through the night, as he lolled, bawling out his instructions, in the stalls while trays were brought in from Chasen’s at regular intervals laden with steaks and beer that Welles avidly scoffed. The first-night audience erupted, the reviews were almost universally ecstatic, and news quickly spread across the theatrical world; the British impresario C. B. Cochran invited the Mercury to come to England and do the play in the Albert Hall.

All this was wonderfully described some decades ago by the Welles scholar Richard France, whose work was the starting point for Robert Kaplow’s charming romantic fiction, Me and Orson Welles. The book has now been made into a movie, and — astounding to report — they’ve got it all right. The story itself is a fiction, a tale about a boy (a very winning and skilful Zac Efron) who joins the Mercury just before the opening of Caesar, briefly plunges into the life of the theatre, and then leaves, swatted away by Welles. They have changed a few things to accommodate that story, a few others for practical reasons, but the essential facts are there, the characters are on the whole like their originals (though they don’t often look like them), there is a credible sense of what work in the theatre is like.

Miraculously, they’ve got Welles right, slap down the middle. The English actor Christian McKay, who bears a striking facial resemblance, and reproduces Welles’s cadences with accuracy (though pardonably he lacks some of the range and richness of what was, after all, one of the greatest voices of the 20th, or probably any other, century), succeeds where none of the many actors who have attempted to play Welles have, in that he suggests the astonishing alternation of masculine and feminine on which everyone commented. Now seductive, now abrasive, now skittish and now savage, McKay sweeps all before him, not counting the cost to himself or others, which is exactly what Welles did.

I found the whole thing inexpressibly moving, because I knew so many of the people depicted in the film — not Welles, thank God — otherwise I might have fallen under his spell and lost all objectivity (though I did once listen in on a telephone conversation between him and Rupert Everett, in which Welles roared with glorious laughter from beginning to end). I didn’t meet his best friend, Joseph Cotten, who was in Caesar, too, but I did get to know the other actors who feature in the film: George Coulouris and Norman Lloyd and William Alland and Stefan Schnabel, all of whom spoke to me at length about those days; Arthur Anderson, the boy actor to whom what happens to Zac Efron in the film happened in real life. Arthur was a real 13-year-old, whereas Richard, the boy in the movie, is 17. And Arthur never left the theatre; is still in it, as far as I know. I talked to the peppery designer Sam Leve, the lighting designer Abe Feder.

Above all, I knew John Houseman, well; indeed, at his own request, he talked to me about Welles, on his deathbed. He and Welles had fallen out terribly, but he said to me: “Meeting Orson Welles was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.” For all of them, that Caesar, and the Orson Welles of those days, were what the theatre was all about, which is what I sensed all those years ago.

[Magentarose67]

Ray, you beat me to it...I was about to post that article up . Thanks for the posting.

It is an elegant article - although I doubt that this movie got Orson "right" (Chris Feder Welles confirmed this). Callow should have also mentioned that Arthur Anderson did not get fired like the character in the book, and while John Houseman's quote on his deathbed seems moving, he trashed Orson in his memoir, creating the monster that many believe Orson was...ironic, isn't it?

[Alan Brody]

I generally agree with Keats, in the sense that, having read the book, I'm looking forward to this film, not to see a whitewashed portrait of Welles, but mainly to see a good story, and a faithful recreation of the period and what the production of Ceasar was like. Zac Efron mentioned that they actually filmed a lot more of the play that didn't make it into the final cut. I can't think of a more perfect extra for the DVD release then to include those deleted scenes. Maybe we can even get some kind of alternate cut of the film down the line.

As Orson Welles's daughter, Chris Welles Feder is right to pick a few bones with this depiction if she feels it's inaccurate, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is entirely inaccurate. Kaplow's book was based in large part on recollections from former Mercury players, and there are many other instances elsewhere, beside the Callow and Houseman books, of his co-workers recollecting his volcanic temper, and wild mood swings, including Beatrice's 1991 docu, Orson Welles: What Went Wrong, where the late Ruth Ford described him, semi-affectionately, as a "slavedriver". Even Ms. Feder's new book quotes Chubby Sherman as saying he quit the Mercury partly because of the insane work schedule and because he thought Welles was getting too much credit for everything. The two video excerpts with William Alland just posted also make a very interesting assertion I'd never heard before: that Houseman was expert at seducing old rich ladies into supporting the Mercury. Is it possible that that was as significant a source of financing as Welles's radio work? We'll probably never know. Obviously most of his people stayed with Orson Welles because the excitement of the work (largely generated by him) outweighed all the negatives. But like it or not, the good, the bad, and the ugly have all become part of the Welles legend, and as John Ford said, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

[mido505]

Let us not forget that, for all his talent(s), Callow is a Houseman partisan. The first volume of his Welles biography was written entirely under Houseman's spell; it is not about Welles, it is about Dr. Frankenhouseman's enduring creation, monster-Welles, and, to my mind, demonstrates about as much insight into Welles's character as David Thomson's fiasco. In volume two, with Houseman pretty much out of the picture, as it were, a more rounded and sympathetic Welles emerges from the burnt-out windmill, and Callow, to his credit, relaxes many of his preconceptions and begins to paint a more accurate portrait. But for Callow, the monster still lurks in the shadows, as his article demonstrates, and while I look forward to volume three, I suspect Callow's delays in publishing show that he is having difficulty completing the transition.

We've been talking about ludicrous apocryphal Welles anecdotes lately here at Wellesnet; now we have Houseman on his deathbead reaching out to Callow to state that meeting Welles was the best thing that ever happened to him. Did his thin, pallid hand tremor as he spoke? Jesus, Dickens couldn't make this stuff up. I must say that I can imagine Houseman looking for one last chance to stick the knife in. Suffice it to say that meetiing Orson Welles was the only thing that ever happened to Houseman, in any historical sense, as he would be largely forgotten now were it not for his association with "the monstrous boy". Or did I miss PaperChase.net in my google search?

Like many of you, I am looking forward to viewing ME AND ORSON WELLES. I suspect it gets a lot right, and I suspect it gets a lot of Welles right, too. But after reading Ms. Feder's book, I am ready for a little more of the man and a little less of the legend. As far as Welles biography is concerned, there is now BF (before Feder) and AF (after Feder). ME AND ORSON WELLES IS patently BF; it may, in fact, be its apotheosis. But that's it; no more. Time to go down a new path...