Harry's problem with Orson

[Tony]

I've been listening to the Bogdanovich/Welles tapes which Rosenbaum edited down from 20 to 4 hours; of course, they're marvelous, and I'd love to hear more; they really should go out on cd, but I suppose there's no market ...

Anyways, at one point Welles says that Harry Cohn said the problem with "Shanghai" was that the writer, the producer, the director and the star were all the same person, and he couldn't fire anybody; this left him in the position of "janitor". Welles agrees with this, and says it is "fair". I wonder if this was the problem with Orson's getting movies made, in that he just had too much power and was difficult to control since he held quadruple roles. No Hollywood producer (indeed, no independent producer) could expect to control him, and once he acquired a reputation as "difficult", then who would hire a difficult multiple threat? I don't want to be ruductionist, but is it possible that Welles' problems getting money for pictures weren't related to his profitability, or his alleged "Fear of Finishing", or even his reputation as tempermental, but rather because of his greatest strength: his incredible, multifaceted talent which, being on the level of genius, made producers feel that they simply couldn't control him and the project, once the contracts had been signed?

And thinking of Rosenbaum (Thank God for Jonathan Rosenbaum!) his latest book ("Movie Wars") has what is I think the single best thing ever written on OW: (not that this is hyperbole, but I may have said this about something else by Rosenbaum!): "Orson Welles as Ideological Challenge". It's a brilliant summing-up of the "problem" of OW, and it also fits in neatly with his general thesis about "How Hollywood and the media limit what movies we can see". It's beautifully written (as usual) and neatly articulates, and puts into deep focus, his ideas as to why Welles continues, even in death, to represent a muti-faceted ideological challenge to the "perceived wisdoms" and accepted beliefs of the film industry; honestly, I just don't think there is anyone doing better writing on the film industry in general, and Welles in particular, than Jonathan Rosenbaum. TGJR!

[mteal]

There's little doubt that a one-man-band like Welles was a threat on many levels to the assembly-line system of Hollywood, but I don't really think that's the main reason why he was unable to make more films in Hollywood. I think Welles himself put it best when he said, "The pictures I like to make are not the kind of pictures that Hollywood producers - and particularly modern Hollywood producers - want to make".

I agree that Rosenbaum's "Orson Welles as Ideological Challenge" is a great piece. Rosenbaum is one of the best writers among Welles scholars, frequently able to provide unusual insights and larger contexts that I had never thought of. I also enjoy reading his regular movie reviews, which can be found at

http://www.chireader.com/movies/

[jaime marzol]

that is so true mteal. in all the pieces that i have read, and 90% of the time i go for information written by first hand sources, welles was a bit of a loon. i think the case in the 50s was that he was such a cult figure that a lot of people, and television people wanted to work with him. as always, he was news. everywhere he went horns blew, newspaper people, magazine stories, interviews. that was how it went for him when he returned to america in the early 50s, and mid 50s. real projects were announced. meetings upon meetings were held. welles attended. nothing ever developed. i think once these money people, or executives, met with welles, heard his ideas, were exposed to him in a situation where it's 5 executives and welles in a meeting room, they maybe realized that he was nutty. they did not want to gamble their job, or dough on him. so nothing materialized.

his split with michael todd. if you can find the details of what went on between todd and welles, you will see a good example of how most of his business meetings went.

[jaime marzol]

and also remember that bogdanovich or rosenbaum in TIOW wrote that for his limitations, as well as the system's, he was not able to work within it.

something not many writers have alluded to is that through a good portion of his life welles, took diet pills. already a highly gifted, avanced individual, surrounded by lower intellegence, short tempered because of the pills.

welles didn't care about money. it was around to piss away. i've read, and seen documentaries where they lightly focused on this flaw.

i don't admire him any less. i just appreciate him more when i find out this stuff. like that kitty kelley book on sinatra. sinatra freaked out when it came out. i read it, made me a fan, i bought sinatra stuff.

[Tony]

mteal:
What do you think is meant by "the kind of pictures that Hollwood wants to make"? I remember somewhere that another director (Truffault?) felt that Welles made pictures for...damn, I can't remember, but it was some formulation as to audience; perhaps something like "intelligentsia"; speculating on Welles' problem in finding an audience is a hugely entetaining (for me) and endless parlour game; what was/is it that a) made producers shy away (ok- we know: one-man-band, bad reputation, money-loser, budget over-runs, etc.) and b) made audiences shy away? I just thought of that word: "aristocratic"- Welles was an aristocratic director (albeit a liberal, modern one) in an age of ...again I can't remember- anti-aristocracy? I think it was "populist": a populist age which caters to the lowest common denominator, or something like that. I actually don't believe that Welles understood his own problem- he believed he was a populist, and perhaps he was, but in a period of very low culture. What was it he said to Bogdanovich: "I don't even think our age is very silver" or something like that. I believe that even in the last 25 years I've seen a deterioration in Western culture, in many ways. But still, sometimes, I wonder as to whether there was/is some problem with OW's art, something fundamentally amiss... and the only thing I can come up with is "pacing"; perhaps his pictures are too... labyrinthine for movie-goers... I just don't know. But as Jaime Marzol has pointed out, try showing (most of) your friends Arkadin, The Trial, or even Kane... and the response is pretty bad. I once showed my step-mother Arkadin; she's from Austria, a well-read, intelligent, sophisticated woman who knows poetry, music, film, etc.; a real intellectual, and she said it was the worst, most ridiculous movie she had ever seen... she was actually angry! so.....

...what was Welles' problem?

[mteal]

Jaime,
It wasn't just in the 50s that many people would make concessions (financial or otherwise) in order to work with Welles. As the TV docu FAME IN THE 20TH CENTURY points out, "the fame (Welles) had earned as a boy genius lasted him a lifetime", and Welles was undoubtedly very adept at exploiting that fame and those that were in awe of it. In his autobiography, John Gielgud says that when Welles offered him the role of King Henry IV in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, friends advised him not to accept the part since Welles had a bad reputation for not paying his actors. He took the part anyway, and doesn't mention whether he was paid or not. Welles always had many admirers all over the globe. What he didn't have tho, was a sizeable-enough audience for his films.

Tony,
As Michael Anderegg says in his book, Welles - although an unabashed highbrow - was willing to meet the public halfway by mixing his highbrow subject matters with a directorial approach that was baroque, stylish and pulpy enough for mass consumption. But the public was never interested. John Landis, who was going to produce the CRADLE WILL ROCK film, said Welles told him he would give anything for a box office hit, which he said was "proof of communication". I think Welles felt that he had essentially failed to communicate with the public on his own terms.

So why couldn't Welles make the kind of pictures that Hollywood wanted to make and that the public wanted to see? I don't know, but I'm reminded of a great line in Altman's THE PLAYER, when a Hollywood executive, in explaining why someone's script was rejected, says that it lacked certain elements that were needed to market a film successfully, including "suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex, and happy endings. Mainly happy endings".

[Tony]

mteal:
I think Welles' films had all of those, except happy endings; is there a happy ending in a Welles film? The Ambersons was a happy ending forced on him, though Carrington has detailed how Welles was willing to put a really soppy ending on it himself; and I guess you could say that Shanghai has a sort of happy ending: the guy does survive...in TOE the couple are ok, but Quinlan dies a horrible death...but that's about it. Hmmmm... Welles had a happy ending deficit! Could it be true?

[jaime marzol]

.......

i didn't mean to say that welles only in the 50s had a following of people that wanted to work with him, he had that all his life. andrew yule in bogdanovich book, says there was interest in welles in the 70s, and i don't know if in the 80s, but nothing in the director's chair materialized for him. many were willing to put him in front of the camera. i think he acted like in 50, or 70 movies?

he was able to exploit his fame, but not enough to get in the director's chair. the conservative suits must have been frightened off by him.

[mteal]

Or they may have been simply uninterested in the increasingly esoteric projects that Welles pitched thier way, like THE DREAMERS. And they also most likely didn't know what to do with him as an actor once he got so old and fat - beyond cameos, that is. "They call me in when they have a really terrible movie and they need a cameo or two that'll give it a little class", he said. Of course, Oja Kodar says his voice was always in demand for commercial voiceovers and narration. That must have been his bread and butter.

Tony, it's true that Welles films did have most of those elements needed for successful marketing, and that happy endings may have been the main sticking point. Most of Welles endings are amibiguous and/or ambivalent rather then happy. I think he sums up his attitude towards happy endings at the end of THE BIG BRASS RING screenplay when he writes on the last page, "whether or not you have a happy ending depends on where you stop your story". That ending apparently wasn't liked by the conservative suits either.

[LA]

Tony, I think the quote you were thinking of may have been Cocteau's comment that Welles was an aristocratic director working in a middle-class industry, can't remember the exact quote myself though.

The problem was, I think, that Welles' endings tended to be natural : he made films with serious themes, so the endings tend not to be lighthearted. There were other directors of almost equal calibre who made serious films too, but they were willing for one reason or another, to go easy on the audience at the ending, a good example (in my opinion, although it's perhaps not quite so serious a film) being Hawks' Red River : there are many even better examples. They felt they'd "put the audience through enough", and so pulled the last punch, or in some (thankfully not to common) cases, pulled a happy ending out of a hat (best case of this is the almost surrealist, studio-enforced ending to Ophuls' Caught : I've seen that movie quite a few times but I still don't understand the logic). It depends ultimately, of course, on the director's attitude to film, and his (or her) power over his material. If his (or the studio's) main concern is to leave 'em smiling, then...

mteal said:- "I think he sums up his attitude towards happy endings at the end of THE BIG BRASS RING screenplay when he writes on the last page, "whether or not you have a happy ending depends on where you stop your story"."

That reminds me of that old emigre Tsarist Russian filmmakers' trick of, when adapting a classic Russian story for a Western audience (as they often did), simply leaving off the end of the story.