Despite the System reviewed in Sunday Times - Orson Welles Versus Hollywood Studios

[jaime marzol]

"his book is handicapped by a lack of understanding of what the system he despises actually is. Company towns are, by their very nature, indifferent to the ambitions of its inhabitants and place “resources” where utility and management whim dictate."

that is exactly what clinton's book said, which is why there was no place for welles.

clinton's book, just like bordwell's essay is not for welles-beginers. it's for advanced users. i get the impression that most of the reviwers that review welles books could not sit through welles' macbeth, f-for-fake, and chimes at midnight. i relish watching those films, and appreciate the not-for-beginers approach clinton took. i could not have read another barbara leaming type book.

[jaime marzol]

this is from tony williams. he pressed the wrong button and it came to my messenger instead.

Heylin is a well known rock music critic having written such stimulating books such as the unofficial guide to bootlegs. He obviously sympathizes with Welles as a rock n' roller done in by the system.

But concerning the reviews printed so far, all of them exhibit a tendency to excuse Hollywood and blame Welles. Even the Michael Parkinson BBC interview ends on a sour note when "Parky" labels Welles "self-destructiive after conducting such a good interview and seeing for himself the man vs. the myth.
Welles expected better treatment. He really could have changed Hollywood but the system did not want any change and remains the corporate town it is today - even worse than before.
We must remember that many reviewers are employed by venues which really need advertizing often linked to multi-national corporations now owning Hollywood.
I think Jeanne Moreau summed it up well at the end of the BBC2 Arena Program. "Orson never found a kingdom big enough for him." If Hank Quinlan was "a great detective but a lousy cop" then Orson was a great director but a lousy studio hack.

[Oscar Christie]

Just wondering what you relish watching in Welles's Macbeth

[Wilson]

Newsweek's review of Heylin's book:

Downer of a System; Refighting the battle of filmmakers vs. Hollywood. David Gates.

*****

CORRECTION: In "Downer Of A System" (Feb. 7) we incorrectly stated that Orson Welles acted in "Wuthering Heights." He did not.

*****


It's gratifyingly romantic to see the history of Hollywood as a saga of visionary filmmakers against philistine studios. That's the subtext of both New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman's "Rebels on the Backlot," about '90s maverick directors including Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, and biographer Clinton Heylin's "Despite the System," a blow-by-blow account of the travails of the arch martyr Orson Welles. "This is a story that goes all the way back to the beginning of cinema in this country," Soderbergh tells Waxman, "with the struggle for auteur filmmaking within the American cine-culture." Of course, you side with the good guys. To a point.

Granted, nobody likes what Waxman calls "the Hollywood system of cookie- cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery" (except millions of paying customers), but heroically innovative film directors are crucially different from heroically innovative writers or painters. It cost James Joyce a few francs of his own money for the ink and paper to produce "Ulysses"; it cost David Fincher some $400,000 of Twentieth Century Fox's money to film the few seconds of "Fight Club" in which Ed Norton's character blows his brains out. One unintended effect of these books is to give you a little sympathy for the bean counters. It's their beans.

Filmmaking has always been an outrageously expensive art to practice--and therefore a devil's bargain for a principled director. It may have cost only $800,000 to make all of "Citizen Kane," but that was back when Coke was a nickel. "Kane" tanked at the box office, and Welles's next, "The Magnificent Ambersons," had gone $160,000 over budget when RKO Pictures took it away from him and began the desperate, incompetent edit that ruined a second masterpiece. It can break your heart to read Welles's memos: thoroughly reasonable, largely unheeded pleas for the integrity of his versions of "Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil." It can also break your heart to read that it took Fox a month and a half to get Fincher to cut less than two minutes of ultraviolence from "Fight Club," and that Paul Thomas Anderson finally admitted New Line had been right when it had told him "Magnolia" was too long--after it failed to get people into the theaters.

The notion that shortsighted moneymen resent genius directors (and the countermyth that producers are sensible folk reining in the crazies) has some basis in fact. Only vindictiveness could have led studios to destroy Welles's footage that didn't survive their cuts; only mad genius could have led to Spike Jonze's film about a portal into the brain of a real-life actor--an idea, one executive noted, that "doesn't pitch well." "Being John Malkovich," luckily, slipped through the cracks during a period of studio mergers. But audiences and critics wondered who opened a crack for David O. Russell's "I (Heart) Huckabees."

Despite their thorough research, neither Waxman nor Heylin can write a lick: both use journalistic cliches, and Heylin's jauntily aggressive tone is downright grating. But it's not their fault that their stories end as unhappily as your average auteur film. After "Kane," Welles saw his pictures mutilated, took acting gigs ("Wuthering Heights," "The Third Man") to fund them on his own, and--though Heylin denies it--surely conspired in his own undoing. Waxman concludes that the system "beat down" her rebels, who either joined the mainstream (Soderbergh) or lost their mojo (the Wachowski brothers, who made the "Matrix" films). What did they think was going to happen? The script had already been written.

[Wilson]

From Library Journal:

HEYLIN, CLINTON. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios. Chicago Review. Feb. 2005. c.400p. photogs. filmog. bibliog. index. ISBN 1-55652-547-8. pap. $24.95. FILM

Undeniably the creator of a great oeuvre (e.g., Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil), director Orson Welles is invariably regarded as a genius manque because of the films he never got to finish. In fact, he is almost as well known for the films he did not complete. Heylin, the author of several books about the music industry (e.g., Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited), argues that Welles was the victim of interference and downright hostility from the Hollywood studios dating back to 1941's Kane. Drawing on archival records, including studio memos and interviews, Heylin analyzes Welles's major films and details what he considers the ongoing betrayal of the director's work by supposed friends and foes alike. In his view, all the major films would have been near masterpieces in their original form but were sabotaged by heavy-handed editing and the quest for economy at the expense of quality. The author is so passionate about what he considers the injustices done to Welles that he allows himself numerous asides in which to vent his spleen. The result is just another in a long string of books on the great director--no doubt there will be more. Recommended for cinema collections.--Roy Liebman, formerly with California State Univ., Los Angeles

[Wilson]

From Publisher's Weekly:

DESPITE THE SYSTEM: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios CLINTON HEREIN. Chicago Review, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 1-55652-547-8

Using shooting scripts, shooting schedules, internal studio memos, private correspondence to and from Welles, and the director's interviews and public lectures, Heylin re-evaluates the circumstances under which Welles produced the six movies he made for Hollywood studios, from 1941's Citizen Kane through 1958's Touch of Evil. The depth of Heylin's research on Welles's consistent workaholic approach to his art, especially his examination of a 58-page memo Welles wrote to Universal after it dismantled Touch of Evil, aids Heylin in arguing against the claim put forth in other Welles bios that his work declined after Citizen Kane due to his own egotism and excess. Heylin's is the most well-researched and evenhanded refutation of this line of thought published to date, and shows in detail how Welles "was undone by real people, with real motives"--most notably Columbia studio head Harry Cohn, who cut The Lady from Shanghai from 155 to 86 minutes. Heylin (Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry; Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited; etc.) persuasively argues that Welles did indeed make masterpieces after Citizen Kane, but that audiences never got to see them because of continual intervention from Hollywood studio bosses who "had no idea what [Welles] was doing, and why he was taking so long to do it." 12 b&w photos.

[jaime marzol]

MACBETH: i love all of welles' movies, i love the scraps of unfinished films that turn up here and there. any time welles had a movie camera in his hands he created magic. his craft as a director, in my opinion, is unsurpased. i should also add that i don't need a complete narrative to enjoy a film, if the visuals are dynamic. welles has this down ten fold.

THE BOOK: wow! i haven't been looking for reviews on the book, but the ones posted here sure hate it. have any writers that have written on welles in the past reviewed it? i consider myself an advanced welles user, and i found none of the woes these articles posted here found. oh well, one man's treasure is another man's trash.

[Tony]

Thought to Jaime:

I can't recall who it was ( might it have been William Blake?) who said that the further from the artist's character, the better the work of art. And I was thinking about something you wrote on this thread:

"...there are 3 people from this site in the special thanks column, and the book doesn't make Welles look like a *hithead. you'd think that would make the people around here happy."

So, taking "Blake's" POV, who care if Welles was a "*hithead"?
I don't see how his character has anything to do with his works; his intellectual life is , of course, crucial, but his "character", if we define that as the nature of his personality and how he is perceived by, and relates to other people, doesn't seem important at all. I believe all these "psycho-babble" biographies which are all the trend now are nonsense, and I also think Welles would agree: he might call them "dollar-book Freud".

It's the WORK that's important, and how we understand, interpret, and think about it. Welles' Fifi is just not important. We all know the myriad stories about how Welles sometimes treated people like you know what; there are so many that some must be true. And Chuck Heston was bang on, IMO, when he said (paraprased):"Orson never figured out you have to be nice to the execs; if they don't give you money, you don't make pictures." And Rita said, years after their divorce: " Orson never understood the value of money".

William Burroughs wrote "It's never either/or; it's "either" plus "or" plus much information we don't even know about."

So: Welles was partly the author of his own misfortune (aren't we all?); plus he was advanced for his times, so the system usually didn't understand him; plus lots of stuff we don't know about.

I also just remembered something Welles said himself, c.1970 (from "This is Orson Welles", Harper Collins 1st ed., p. 204):

"Hollywood died on me as soon as I got there. I wish to God I'd gone there sooner. It was the rise of the independents that was my ruin as a director. The old studio bosses- Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Harry Cohn- were all friends, or friendly enemies I knew how to deal with. They offerred me work. Louis B. Mayer even wanted me to be the production chief of his studio- the job Dory Schary took. I was in great shape with those boys. The minute the independents got in, I never directed another American picture except by accident...I've had much more trouble with the independents than I ever had with the big studios. I was a maverick, but the studios understood what that meant, and if there was a fight, we both enjoyed it. With an annual output of 40 pictures per studio, there would probably be room for one Orson Welles picture. But an independent is a fellow whose work is centered around his own particular gifts. In that setup, there's no place for me."

This quote would seem to, all by itself, refute the main thesis of Heylin's book. How would, or could, Heylin possibly deal with this quote?

Heck, it was an American television studio that funded Don Quixote in the 50's. I even remember in the late 60's Welles being offered some work by Paramount, but he turned it down, telling a journalist that he didn't want to have to get up early every morning.

I just don't think Heylin's basic thesis holds water, and I don't care if Welles was a jerk, or a nice guy, or both. Let's instead think and talk about the work. That would seem to be a lot more valuable in the long run.

IMO, anyway!

[Wilson]

Two different reviews from the Telegraph (UK), and the third is from Empire Magazine (UK):

by Christopher Tayler:

As everyone knows, Orson Welles directed and starred in The Greatest Movie Ever Made. He did it in 1940, by which time he'd already stormed Broadway with a voodoo Macbeth, voiced Lamont Cranston - aka "The Shadow" - on a popular mystery series, and caused a national panic by reporting a Martian invasion of New Jersey in his legendary radio version of The War of the Worlds. Citizen Kane was his first motion picture. He was 25.

By the time of his death - in Beverly Hills, 45 years later - Welles was best known by a younger generation as a television pitchman for Paul Masson wines. An even younger generation had appreciated his resonant voice-over work in Transformers: The Movie and the trailer for Revenge of the Nerds. Hollywood had long since washed its hands of him and he hadn't directed a movie for years. He'd become a professional chat-show guest. What went wrong?

Solving that question brings the critic and biographer, and, over the years, battalions of writers have marched over the territory playing variations on the fatally flawed genius theme. It helps that Kane - a critical hit but a box-office failure in its day - deals with much the same material: an artfully stymied attempt to investigate the irresolvable mystery of a great man brought low.

Then there are the set questions. How much of the credit for Kane should go to Welles and how much to Herman Mankiewicz, his acknowledged co-writer, who staged a resentful campaign to portray Welles as a credit-stealer? And what was Welles thinking when he went off to Brazil in 1942, leaving The Magnificent Ambersons, his follow-up to Kane, to be butchered by the studio - a debacle from which his Hollywood career never recovered?

Ben Walters's Orson Welles [Haus Publishing, £9.99, 178 pp] doesn't pretend to come up with any new revelations. The latest instalment in a series of short biographies issued by Haus Publishing, it's a workmanlike synthesis of published Wellesiana. Walters works briskly through the Welles life: the Shakespeare-loving mother and alcoholic father; the early triumphs clouded by struggles with moneymen; Harry Lime; Othello; Touch of Evil - and on to the miserable final decade. We're also filled in on girlfriends and marriages – to Rita Hayworth, most famously – and his sometimes fractious relationship with his children.

Walters is duly sympathetic to his subject and tries not to present him as someone who developed a neurotic inability to bring his projects to completion. The book works well as an introduction to Welles's work, although the copy-editing is poor and the decision to put all quotations from Welles in italics is annoying on the page.

Clinton Heylin's Despite the System takes a much more combative approach. Drawing on extensive research, Heylin aims to obliterate any notion that Welles's wayward genius led him to sabotage his own career. Meticulously reconstructing the conception, writing, shooting, editing and reception of each film, he sets out to show that Welles was undone "by real people, with real motives", and by the Hollywood studio system in general.

The Magnificent Ambersons fiasco, for instance, is laid at the door of one Charles Koerner, an RKO executive who throttled the project as part of a power-struggle with the existing production regime. Welles wasn't a fool to go to South America while the editors sharpened their scissors: "he simply failed to conceive of a situation akin to the one that transpired". As for Mankiewicz, he's written off - not entirely unfairly - as a bitter drunk, although his genuine contribution to Welles's picture is acknowledged.

Some of Heylin's scholarship will only be of interest to very serious fans: if you want accounts of every single edit of Touch of Evil - all six of them - then this is definitely a book to buy. For everyone else, however, Heylin's scorn for the "lackadaisical mischief-making" of previous writers on Welles might turn out to be a more entertaining feature. The likes of Peter Conrad ("self-important"), David Thomson ("ostentatiously ignorant"), Simon Callow ("credulous") and Pauline Kael (don't get him started) come under constant attack.

His victims could draw some comfort from the fact that he's a master of mixed metaphor and - appropriately enough - doesn't know what the word "disinterested" means. Still, his passionate championing of Welles's professionalism is only partly undermined by the vituperative way he hammers his thesis home. He ends with Welles's observation on John Barrymore, another actor often spoken of as wasting his talent: "what he hated was the responsibility of his own genius".


The other is by David Isaacson:

Orson Welles had a talent for making, and humiliating, powerful enemies. It was not enough to antagonise William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon, by purloining his life story for Citizen Kane. According to Barbara Leaming, his official biographer, Welles discovered that "Rosebud" was the pet name Hearst gave to the genitalia of his mistress, Marion Davies.

The director turned this innocuous little intimacy into one of the most famous and enigmatic last words in the movies. Though Hearst's minions could not suppress the film, Welles was roundly smeared in the press. On one occasion he was allegedly tipped off that an under-age girl had been planted in his hotel room. Had the sexual sting succeeded, it would have ruined his career.

Welles had, at the age of 24, stoked Hollywood's resentment by wangling a contract that gave him complete, unprecedented artistic control over his debut feature. When Citizen Kane was awarded Best Screenplay – its sole Oscar – at the Academy Awards in 1941, his name was jeered.

Even his circle of collaborators conspired against him. Herman Mankiewicz, the co-writer of Kane, put about the lie that he was the film's sole author. The accusation that the boy wonder was a credit stealer was later taken up, for their own reasons, by the film's producer, John Houseman, and the influential critic Pauline Kael.

In this book, Clinton Heylin tries to focus on Welles's battles with his most important adversaries: the moguls responsible for limiting his Hollywood canon to eight movies, and the producers and editors who ruined most of them behind his back. Heylin wants to absolve Welles of any responsibility for this failure to fulfil his immense talent. To this end, he draws on recently released correspondence between Welles and the studio heads and analyses the ways in which the studios edited his films.

Heylin's valorous attempts to save his hero from himself tend to the naive. Although Welles berated his own foolishness in allowing the studio to butcher The Magnificent Ambersons, Heylin gamely argues that "He did not act like a fool. He simply failed to conceive of a situation akin to the one that transpired." What transpired was the pressure of Hollywood's bottom line: the desire to put bums on seats. After the disappointing box-office returns of Citizen Kane, studio heads were not prepared to indulge "the would-be genius".

It was only on the insistence of Charlton Heston, and with a parsimonious financial deal, that Universal hired Welles to direct Touch of Evil. During one of Welles's characteristic absences from the set, Ed Muhl, the studio's bullying production head, assigned a new editor and demanded extra scenes that he would not let Welles shoot. (Out of loyalty to Welles, Heston and his co-star Janet Leigh initially refused to comply.) For his part Welles would, according to Heston, "deliberately insult" the bosses. By this time Welles had realised that Tinseltown would never grant him the freedom he craved. He did not direct another film in America.

Heylin tends to interpret criticisms of Welles as malicious, but Heston's remarks about him are marked with pathos: he ascribes Welles's downfall to a "perverse, suicidal refusal to deal with the people… who are going to give him the money to make the movies". Yet still Heylin attempts to "deconstruct" the "myth" of Welles's intransigence, preferring to believe that "the system" victimised him. Unable to prove his thesis, he becomes sidetracked by a mission to answer the perceived anti-Welles slurs of two generations of critics. With some justification, he lays the charge of "lackadaisical mischief-making" at the door of Kael and Charles Higham. But to extend this accusation to the more recent, disparately magnificent, biographies by Simon Callow and Peter Conrad, as he does, is preposterous.

The cheapest of Heylin's shots is also the most self-deceptive: "Welles was a 'bad' writer, as Callow seems to suggest (and he should know)." Of the many admirable qualities of Callow's Orson Welles: the Road to Xanadu (1995) – the first of three planned volumes - the most remarkable is the sustained brilliance of his prose. Heylin by contrast throws in "Uh-oh" as a portent of trouble, refers to Macbeth as "the briefest of Bill's tragedies", and compares Citizen Kane - favourably - with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

From Empire:

Anyone who writes about Orson Welles has to deal with the inconvenient fact that Citizen Kane, his artistically uncompromised debut, was also guaranteed to annoy
one of the few men in America powerful enough to crush its maker: its inspiration, William Randolph Hearst.

Every American film Welles directed thereafter, not to mention a few European ones, was taken away from him and released in versions he did not approve, sometimes with chunks directed by other hands that still stand out like sore thumbs. He left several projects unfinished — Don Quixote, The Deep (later made as Dead Calm) and the tied-up-in-litigation The Other Side Of The Wind.

Most commentators, taking a cue from Pauline Kael’s essay ‘Raising Kane’, feel that Welles harboured a self-destructive streak which led him to walk away when he needed to stay and fight, or to alienate collaborators he ought to have cajoled.

Clinton Heylin, taking particular issue with recent books by Simon Callow (The Road To Xanadu) and David Thomson (Rosebud), has a different take, which now seems as radical as Kael’s did in 1971. He maintains that Welles was almost entirely blameless of anything but ambition and that his films were picked apart by malicious people within the Hollywood system — and comes up with a great deal of evidence to back his conclusions.

It’s a necessary redress, and Heylin’s take on the tragic, spiteful botching of The Magnificent Ambersons is convincing. However, his savaging of other authors and their research sits uneasily with a tendency to get shaky on facts whenever
he strays from his subject. He glaringly misremembers the ending of a non-Welles film (The Story Of Vernon And Irene Castle), and like glitches recur throughout. In putting Welles’ case so strongly, he also paints a picture of a naive genius that doesn’t really square with much we know about the man.

Where’s the Welles who used his unprecedented carte blanche to deliver a masterpiece that maligned Hearst, then wryly let RKO take the heat? Some major incidents — like the scuppering of The Deep — are omitted altogether, and other anecdotes construed in a manner that provokes an unavoidable ‘yes, but’ reaction.

We’ll probably never glimpse the ‘Rosebud’ that will ‘explain’ Welles, but with its naming and shaming of specific editors, producers, studio heads and time-servers, Despite The System is still a necessary addition to the groaning shelf.

Rating 3 of 5 stars

[jaime marzol]

this is too much reading. i read one of tony's questions, "who cares if welles was a shithead."

i have read all the books on welles, and was glad that this latest one i did not have to wade through a lot of higham type slander to get to the nuggets. simple as that.

[jaime marzol]

read the rest of tony's post:

i enjoy the books, and i love analysis. i see the books as extensions of enjoyment to watching the films. like i said, one man's treasure is another man's trash.

welles was very chummy with a lot of the moguls, but they wanted him as an actor, not a director. his problems came when he was in charge of a production, not so bad when he was just a hired actor.

[Tony]

Jaime:
You're now in the interesting postion of agreeing with Clinton's thesis and disagreeing with Welles' own analysis of his Hollywood experience; isn't that a little absurd?

[jaime marzol]

i'm just a guy that is reading a book and enjoying it. why do i have to pick sides?

[jaime marzol]

tony, it's just a book. no one has to take stands and carry banners. the nazis carried banners, i am a bohemian, too lazy for any of that.

[Tony]

Jaime:

I've e-mailed you- hope you get it;
Tony