Iago=Houseman, Othello=Welles

[DexyMan]

Yeah exactly, being in alot of controversies isn't neccessarily bad.

Cradle Will Rock - very controversial and did help sink the WPA for theatre but that first performance is legendary.

War of the Worlds - very controversial but actually helped his career.

Citizen Kane - massive controversy, but the end result was a masterpiece.

Being cutting edge often can be controversial and unfortunately usually ends up bringing you down because at some point you will do something that isn't a masterpiece and then you find no one defending you.

[rizibo]

Tony: I don't agree that Houseman splitting up with Welles was the cause of the Welles' stock going down in Hollywood. I agree with Store that Citizen Kane with it's attack on Hearst caused the film to be a financial loss. In my opinion Citizen Kane was more devastating to his career because Hollywood's initial impression of Welles was that he was not a commercial director and he was a troublemaker. Houseman was there when Citizen Kane was selected to be Welles first movie and Houseman even helped to write Citizen Kane according to Welles. If Houseman had such great insights about what was beneficial to Welles' career how could he think that Citizen Kane is a great choice for a first film? Wasn't Houseman supposedly the guy who knew how to get along with other people and help Welles in making friends with powerful people but instead helped to make the most powerful media mogul at that time, Hearst, become Welles' ultimate enemy.

I am even shocked that the RKO agreed to make this film considering the possibility of being sued by Hearst for slander. I think Welles, Houseman and RKO made a quick decision to make Citizen Kane after the bad publicity of Welles being in Hollywood for one year and having no film made during this time. Welles said that RKO knew that Citizen Kane was a controversial film and that RKO should have been agressive in distributing the film. Even thought the film was controversial it had plenty of people come to the few theaters where it was shown. It just wasn't shown in many theaters because of a threat of retribution by Hearst. There was very poor judgement on the part of Welles, Houseman and RKO in deciding Welles' first project.

Once you are branded by Hollywood as a director who is not commercial then you have less freedom as a director to make your movie. In the book Despite the System there is a very good documentation about how Welles films were made worse by the studios by real people with real motives.

The other thing that hurt Welles was that the movies he made could have been more commercially appealing. He never made a feature film which was a comedy. He had a very good sense of humor when listening to the interviews with Bogdanovich. In the One Man Band there a sequence where Orson Welles trys to get cloths from a British tailor and it is one of the funniest films I have ever seen. If Welles had made more films like this then he could had a hit at the box office.

I don't think that Welles was self destructive. For all the mistakes he may have made at a personal or profession level, I will state that he still made Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai hall of mirror sequence, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, The Trial, and Touch of Evil. All these films show a director who truly loved what he was doing.

[Tony]

Rizibo:

I'm just repeating what people who were there said: this was the opinion of people who worked with these two guys for years, including Richard Wilson.

Have you read Houseman's 'Runthrough'? And also have you heard the TOTI cassette "The Mercury Remembers"? If you haven't, you might want to check them out. There is simply no doubt in anyone's mind who worked with Welles and Houseman that together they revolutionized theater, radio and stage in 5 years flat, and that after their break-up, Welles had nothing but problems, from the day they parted- or rather, from the day Welles through a flaming can of fuel at Houseman. And Houseman was the world's biggest Welles fan- see Runthrough! When Houseman speaks of Welles, it's like a long love song to an artistic genius.

But he also knew Welles's limations: a terrible temper, unable to deal with people who had power over him, extreme disorganization, leaving everything to the last minute, and a lack of talent in the writing area- at least in original screenplays.

There's no question in the minds of the Mercury players and others who worked with them at that time that their breakup was the turning point in Welles's career.

Houseman was his McCartney, and Oja was his Yoko.

:;):

[Store Hadji]

Um, Lennon continued having commercial and critical success after McCartney announced the Beatles were defunct, and Oja wasn't exactly demonstrating primal scream therapy in her film appearances and script co-writes. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to trash your similes!

The Susan Alexander parallel is a valid one, I think, for both Paola and Oja, but I rather enjoy the performances Welles got from both of them. Would Mr. Carringer call them both examples of "risky casting?"

[Tony]

I've been practising! Glad you noticed!


But I do think that in this case, we should give serious attention to the opinions of people who were there and saw this amazing and revolutionary working relationship up close.

[rizibo]

I'm just repeating what people who were there said: this was the opinion of people who worked with these two guys for years, including Richard Wilson.

But he also knew Welles's limations: a terrible temper, unable to deal with people who had power over him, extreme disorganization, leaving everything to the last minute, and a lack of talent in the writing area- at least in original screenplays.

There's no question in the minds of the Mercury players and others who worked with them at that time that their breakup was the turning point in Welles's career.

Houseman was his McCartney, and Oja was his Yoko.

:;):

Tony: I think I have heard the TOTI tape. I haven't read Run Through. I don't doubt that the Mercury actors were critical of Welles. I will even give you some support that Houseman was helpful to Welles. However I don't think that the presence of Houseman could have saved Welles career. Houseman didn't have the foresight that Citizen Kane was a bad choice for a first time director. Being a first time director is like being someone on a first date. How the first date goes will determine whether there will be another date. Welles first date was Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane shocked Hollywood with the threats by Hearst and eventually was only seen in a few theaters. There would be no second date. Welles would never get another studio film where he would have the final cut and have the full resources of a major Hollywood studio. I doubt Houseman could have changed that.

I don't agree with you that Welles was a poor writer. He was a cowinner of an Oscar for original screenplay for Citizen Kane. I just bought the Other Side of the Wind screenplay and I have read the first few pages and I think it is beautifully written. I seen many interviews with Welles and he is by far the most articulate and intellegent director I have ever seen.

The belief that he had a bad temper, unable to deal with people who had power over him, extreme disorganization and leaving everything to the last minute may be true. The exception was that he had a good relationship with Shaeffer. If Welles' first film was a huge commercial success (I think Heart of Darkness could have been it) this good relationship with Shaeffer could have continued. Welles could have had more than just a second date. He could have gone all the way. If Welles could make one film per year then he could have made 44 more films in his lifetime. The tragedy is that we could have had 44 films better than Citizen Kane if Welles had a better first date.

[chipm]

It's fairly obvious to me that Welles started believing his own hype post-Houseman....this is evident in all the pro and con bios out there. And then, after a while he realized that he had screwed it up...and tried to act humble. Especially in the Bogdanovich interviews...but by that time it was too late. And he never realized that he was not the businessman he should have been....and he never found that "other" like Houseman that filled his voids in the same way.

[rizibo]

Chipm: What could this "otherlike Houseman" have done to help Welles. I think read that Welles at one point was represented by CAA. You can't get better representation than CAA and it didn't help his career. Welles' problems were more complicated than requiring Houseman.

[Tony]

chipm:

I think Welles thought he had found his other Houseman when he found Oja; unfortunately, she couldn't act, and the history of their 25-odd collaborations is "F For fake" and the never-finished Wind. After Welles partnered with Oja, he never finished another dramatic film. If I were Beatrice, I would surely think that Oja had inadvertently help to destroy my father's career.
This could never be said of Houseman.

rizibo:
I encourage you to read Runthrough. And to listen to the TOTI tape: they weren't criticzing Welles- they idolized him- but they all felt that the breakup was a disaster for Welles.

[chipm]

Riz - I know tons of super talented people who have been repped by CAA who's career never went anywhere. CAA is a great agency, but it isn't a golden ticket.....just so you know. But I get what you are saying. What I am trying to convey and maybe not succuessfully is that I see Welles as almost a pure "creative" who when he had the balance and groundedness of someone like Houseman produced in a limited amount of time some of greatest stage and film work during the 20th century. For whatever reason, he never found that Yin to his Yang ever again. I agree Welles was complicated. And all artists all fight with their own demons. I don't mean that in a Higham/Thomson sort of way. I mean when at the end of the day you sit and edit something you have worked years on and you are all alone - it is incredibly hard. If it was easy, we would have tons of films of Welles caliber. I think we are lucky that we got the output that we did from Welles given his own artistic battles within himself - on top of the outer pressures on him. I mean what an incredible output.

I mentioned the above in somewhat different form in the TSOTW forum and I got a couple of posts about what a hard worker Welles was. Which I never even touched upon and thought was an interesting knee jerk response. That said, as a creative person myself, someone who has produced several things (albeit small), and been involved with film, I know MANY people who are work super hard, harder than most people, and find ways to sabotage themselves in different ways. I am also familiar with very successful people in the business who could be even more so, but for the limits of their character.

Bottom line for me, why I am into this forum, why I am into Welles is that I am keenly interested in that intersection between talent, character, and business that fuel the peculiar film industry. Other than just purely enjoying his films and studying and learning from them....

[chipm]

Tony - I think the more interesting thing with Oja would be to figure out why Welles was attracted to the woman he was attracted to...and how that inflienced his life. I think creatively Oja was a great pairing. TOSOTW stretched Welles in knew ways, the Brass Rings script I found interesting, F for Fake is awesome for it's time and spawned it's own genre....but on the business side of things...That era was not so good. The choices ultimately lay with Welles for the business and creative decisions he entered into etc. that went bad.

My thing is that he could have finished the Deep...easily. And didn't. Regardless of Harvey dying, an artists as good as Welles could have found a creative solution out of that like he had done so many other times in his career. Working directors with bad films out will always get more work,, because their are so few working directors. But a director with a movie mostly shot and not out.....leads to Iran....leads to more time between production....and more and more hurdles to getting his work out in the world.


I wonder if Welles had finished the Deep - and maybe it would have been great, but most account describe it as a middling effort - the last decade of his life would have been easier.

I don't think there is any coincidence in the prominence of CK becoming vogue as the greatest film of all time while at the same time Welles never finishes another dramatic feature. As an artist, that kind of pressure would have been incredibly hard to deal with.....

[Tony]

:cool:
hmmmm...

[Tony]

chipm:
Kane was voted greatest film in the Sight and Sound survey in 1962, but Welles completed the Trial, Chimes, Immortal and Merchant after that, so I'm not sure it was Kane. But I do think all the books being written possibly had a paralyzing effect, a process of becoming very self-conscious. By 1972, we had maybe 6 books on Welles, including the French ones (Fowler, Noble, Cowie, MacLiammoir, Bessy and Bazin). But very quickly in the 70s the whole middle-class film awareness/film school develpment/university film courses/ books on film/ film magazines scene exploded, and I do believe that had an effect on Welles: very soon there were more books on him than films. and we do know he became very upset and distressed by three books published in quick succession at the beginning of the 70s: Higham's first in 1970, with the "fear of completion" theory, Kael's in 1971, which claimed that Welles did not write Kane, and Houseman's in 1972, which was highly critical of aspects of Welles's character. Perhaps on some subconscious level he also didn't want to screw up an almost perfect ouvre, increasingly solidified (calcified?) by the dozens of books and hundreds of articles, etc. I recall McBride writing that the seashell dropped by Charles in Immortal Story's final scene was the bookend to Charles dropping the snow-globe in Kane, and I remember thinking that was so beautiful. And Welles never finished another dramatic film after Immortal, unless you count the finished Merchant which had a reel stolen.

Glenn Gould was fond of referring to interview questions that dug too deeply into his method as "centipedal" questions: he recounted the story of the centipede who, happily walking along one day was asked by another insect "In which order do you move your legs?". When the centipede tried to figure out the answer to this question, he promptly became confused, fell over and could no longer walk.

Maybe Welles became like that centipede in the 70s and 80s, on a very subtle level, though this does put one in the uncomfortable camp of dime-store psychology and the "fear of completion" theory of Charles Higham.

[rizibo]

Chip and Tony: The loss of Houseman, Oja, demons or just plain self consciousness as you both have described may have been the cause of Welles' decline. In my opinion there are two more likely reasons.

The first is that one can see that Welles films suffered when he gave the final cut to the studios. As soon as RKO started changing Welles final cut of Magnificent Amberson, this film started to deteriorate. The new scenes shot by RKO had flat lighting and cutting out the ending made the film lose the moral of the story. This has happened to many directors in Hollywood and appears more likely the reason why Welles' studio films after Citizen Kane didn't have the same quality.

The second reason is related to the difficulties in making independant film. These difficulties include raising money to finish a film, getting the cast and crew together at the same time, the lack of profession equipment, costumes and sets. These problems are are common to independant film. Welles clearly had these problems. Many independant films appear to have poor picture, sound, acting or set design (if there is any). Welles amazing made extremely well made independant films like Othello, Falstaff, and The Trial despite all these problems. These problems are present today. I heard Quinten Tarantino say that independant film making is more difficult than making a film funded by a studio for the above reasons. Almost all independant film makers have these problems and make poor films. Many of them never finish their film because of these difficulties. All of them can't be undisciplined, mad men, fearful or lazy. I once heard that John Cassavete's film A Woman Under the Influence was the greatest independant film but I think Welles Othello, Falstaff and The Trial are all better.

Because of the two reasons above, Welles had less ability to repeat the artistic success of Kane but he still did great work.

[chipm]

Well I think we are all in Violent Agreement...as a friend of mine once called it. Seriously, no one scenario is going to explain a man - as Welles made clear through his films.

Tony - Speaking of Gould have you seen 22 Short Films on Glenn Gould? One of my all time favorites...

C.