Higham's THE FILMS OF ORSON WELLES

[mteal]

I was going to drop the subject of Higham, since it's an unpopular issue here, but I wanted to thank whoever it was (Larry French, I assume) that posted that very interesting interview with Higham. I never put two and two together that Higham and Bogdanovich were, in a sense, competitors- or would have been if Bogdanovich's book hadn't been delayed for so long. In fact, I've read that one of the main things that soured the Welles/Bogdanovich friendship was Welles's refusal to authorize the publication of THIS IS ORSON WELLES.

[Glenn Anders]

That review IS interesting.

Granting that Mr. Higham has an extremely sympathetic interviewer, he does not come off as the lying fool he is often presented here. A bit pompous and cocksure, true, but not entirely unbelievable.

When he speaks of Welles covering his eyes as a clip from one of his projects was shown professionally on TV, Higham makes a considerable point. Welles, like anyone who so loved perfection, anyone who had had the resources of major Hollywood studios to work with, anyone who had produced CITIZEN KANE, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, and parts of other Studio films, must have been chagrined by the rough quality of much of the later photography and its concision. That may have been why he became obsessed with editing and re-editing again and again -- in order to somehow bring together a film as perfect as CITIZEN KANE. Only the best copy of a CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT or a MR. ARKADIN could have stood his test.

Glenn

[Tony]

Why, Mr. Higham, did you write the book?

MR. HIGHAM: To restore Mr. Welles’ dwindling reputation as a director, and a great artist. Need I say more?

Uh-huh.



Actually, Glenn, I think Higham comes across as an arragant, self-righteous, cold, pompous, ruthless bastard.

But that's just my take. :;):

[ToddBaesen]

Charles Higham's book is so full of errors I can't imagine anyone taking it seriously, or that anyone could ever imagine at this date, 36 years after it has been so throughly discredited, that anyone could take his answers in that idiotic N.Y.Times interview very seriously.

Of course, I've no doubt that Mr. Higham did actually speak to several of Orson Welles collaborators, including Norman Foster. Higham says he spoke to 68 people, which I somehow doubt is the true number.

I've also no doubt that Mr. Higham's interviews were twisted to fit into his own bizarre conclusions about Orson Welles career.

So there is really no point in going over what an idiot Mr. higham has shown himself to be in that N. Y. Times interview.

Just reading his response to the shark and octopus battle in Rio harbor that he so so incorrectly reported, indicates he doesn't have any crediblity as a scholarly reporter that he claims to be in the Times interview.

Just check out the original Time magazine report of June 8, 1942, which Higham himself sites as his source material for his incorrect reportage of the incident in his hopelessly mangled book on Welles.

None of the facts as reported in Time magazine
are quite the same as in Mr. Higham's much more fantastical version:


TIME MAGAZINE: June 8, 1942:

Last fortnight, the luck ran out. During the filming of a shark-octopus battle, Jacare was spilled from the tricky jangada. Though he managed to swim away, he was caught in a treacherous current and, like his fisher-father before him, swallowed by the sea.

But last week, when a 440-lb. shark caught off Barra da Tijuca was opened, there rolled out a human head, two human arms. Jacare's own comrades, examining the teeth, were doubtful it was Jacare, though expert criminologists, judging from the skull formation and skin color, were sure it was from Jacare's region. In any case, it was another poor jangadeiro.

Deeply moved, Orson Welles revised his script, now dedicated throughout to "An American Hero." Inspired by Jacare's feat, four messenger boys of the Telegrafo Nacional planned to walk the same distance from Fortaleza to Rio to ask President Vargas for a better wage. But what would have pleased Jacare most was that the first pension won for the jangadeiros by his efforts goes to his wife and nine children.


**************


Now compare the above objective report with what Mr. Higham did to it in his book on Orson Welles. It is clear in the Time Magazine piece, that the shark found did not contain the body parts of Jacare. But that is not what we get in Higham's report. It is also clear in Richard Wilson's article in Sight and Sound, that most of what Mr. Higham wrote about "It's All True" in his book on Welles was highly imaginary.


#############


Here's how Higham transformed the facts of what ACTUALLY happened in Rio harbor to his fantasy version as recorded in his silly book, "The Films of Orson Welles":


Shooting of the Jangadeiros episode proceeded smoothly—then an extraordinary disaster took place. On May 19 a second unit was filming Jacare and his companions off the coast when an octopus and a shark suddenly burst out of the water, locked in a death struggle. The crew eagerly shot this astonishing sight, and the Jangdeiros stood up to look, thereby tilting over the raft. They fell into the sea. Tata, Mane, and Jeronymo where powerful swimmers. They reached safety, hauled aboard a film crew boat. But Jacare was a poor swimmer. As the great creatures sank in a bloody foam, reports ran, he was sucked into the vortex and vanished. Six days later, the shark was caught. Inside it, half digested, were portions of octopus and the head and arms of Jacare.

Welles was stunned when he heard the news. He immediately scrawled across the script of It's All True the words: "Dedicated to the memory of Jacare, an American hero."

____

Now, can you imagine the kind depression Higham's book must have caused Orson Welles in 1970?

Here is the first major book on your career, and when you look at it you realize that the man who wrote it is squarely in the mold of the kind of Hearst/Hedda Hopper/National Inquirer type of journalist you so despise.

[Store Hadji]

I would have thought the octopus and fish story would have been discredited before 1970. It was just another fish story. That tells me not to believe what newspapers print, especially the erroneous crap they keep in a file and drag out from time to time to requote as 'archived truth,' nor to trust the authors who use them as their only source of information about an event.

Higham is one of those real-life Iagos that Welles spoke of.

[Kevin Loy]

Personally, this was the one that I liked:

"Due to Mr. Bogdanovich’s share-of-the-profit agreement with Mr. Welles, which invalidates his own book as a work of objective scholarship since the object of that scholarship is a partner in that endeavor, all other interviews were forbidden."

So, since Bogdanovich apparently had a share-of-the-profit agreement with Welles (and in all fairness, why not? As far as I can tell [unless I'm mistaken], Bogdanovich's research and interviews were conducted strictly on his own time without a publisher's advance...I wonder if Higham wrote his book without a publisher's advance), his book was automatically invalid. Sounds like petty jealousy to me.

[Tony]

Higham was/is a typical author/academic: 'publish or die'. And if you write a book like "The Films of Orson Welles" and it's published by the University of California Press, then it has the patina of credibility, and adds to your list for achieving tenure. Can you imagine making up that crap about the octopus and shark? Only a person with no moral conscience would do that, and of course he doesn't footnote properly, because he can't. At least Higham's first book has nice big pictures: the second one is just purely exploitative. I guess he'd given up on trying to "help" Welles's career by 1985, as the book was titled "The Rise and Fall...". And of course Kael had an axe to grind, not with Welles, but with the auteur theory. Therefore, attack the greatest American picture by claiming that it's famous director had no significant hand in writing the screenplay, and you've "proved" that the system works, and it's foundation is the writer, and the writer is the author of the picture. Welles just got caught in the crossfire on that one, but Kael obviously didn't care.

As for Thompson, at least he is marginally more honest, in that no one with any brains could take seriously his "creative" excesses as fact, as they are 90% his imaginative flights of fancy, or we could say "literary onanism".

NONE of these 'authors' have had any moral compunction whatsoever about any negative effect their 'writings' might have on Welle's ability to make pictures, or (after his death) on the understanding and further releasing of his work; in fact, Higham seems to have believed (from the above NYT interview) that he was helping Welles, and Thompson has declared his hope that no further Welles pictures ever be released.

After the hat trick of 1970/71/72: Higham/Kael/Housman (the latter who not only wrote his own book, but was Kael's source for the "facts" about how Welles didn't write Kane) Welles never released another feature. Of course, there were many reasons for this, but as Welles put it so eloquently himself in the letter to Richard Wilson quoted above (and excerpted below), one of the central factors was his reputation, particularly as affected by the Brazil debacle, and later by books like Higham's:

Dear Peter:

...I haven’t bought the Higham book but managed to sneak a few pages of free reading in Brentano’s the other day. That’s as far as I’m going: no use eating up what’s left of my liver… He thinks I hate to finish my movies because I equate completion with death. I should think he’d realize that not finishing a job is not really to do it at all—which isn’t suicide but murder. If he had his facts straight he’d see who’s been guilty of that. I guess that’s why he refused to take me up on my offer to check his material for purely factual inaccuracies; it would have robbed him of the source of some pretty ripe theorizing. On the other hand, it might have helped to get me off a hook which—after 25 years or so—is really starting to hurt.

The South America episode is the one key disaster in my story, so of course, you’ll want to get it straight. For my part, I need to get it straight—as a simple matter of survival. This is newly urgent for me, because, once again, the legend that grew up out of that affair has lost me the chance to make a picture.

As I’ve mentioned, that lovely money out in the middle-west suddenly dried up. Mr. Higham seems to have spooked them. A quote from it in tagging the review in Newsweek sent them scampering. Once again I am the man who “irresponsibly” dropped everything to whoop it up in the carnival in Rio, and, having started a picture down there, capriciously refused to finish it. No use trying to explain that I didn’t flit down to South American for the fun of it…

I don’t know of any more fun than making a movie, and the most fun of all comes in the cutting room when the shooting is over. How can it be thought that I’d deny myself so much of that joy with AMBERSONS? I felt than as I do now that it could have been a far better film than KANE. How can anyone seriously believe that I would jeopardize something I loved so much for the dubious project of shooting a documentary on the carnival in Rio? Jesus, I didn’t like carnivals anyway—I associated them with fancy dress, which bores me silly, and the touristic banalities of the New Orleans Mardi Gras. You know why I went? I went because it was put to me in the very strongest terms by Jock (John Hay Whitney) and Nelson (Rockefeller) that this would represent a sorely needed contribution to inter-American affairs. This sounds today quite unbelievably silly, but in the first year of our entering the war the defense of this hemisphere seemed crucially important. I was told that the value of this project would lie not in the film itself but in the fact of making it. It was put to me that my contribution as a kind of Ambassador extraordinary would be truly meaningful. Normally, I had doubts about this, but (President) Roosevelt himself helped to persuade me that I really had no choice.

Why else would I have agreed to make a film for no salary at all? Any appetite I may have felt for high-life could have been satisfied with a few flying weekends to New York. By preference I would have heard the chimes at midnight in Billingsley’s Club Room and in Dickie Wells up in Harlem. But I was getting all the kicks I needed at the moviola. Dick’s file will show you that I only agreed to the Brazilian junket on the firm guarantee that the moviolas and all the film (of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS) would immediately follow me. What happened instead? The film never came. A takeover in RKO brought in new bosses committed, by the simple logic of their position, to enmity. I quickly lost the last vestiges of control over AMBERSONS, and friends at home collapsed in panic. Who can blame them? Even if I’d stayed I would have had to make compromises on the editing, but these would have been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the picture in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.

The point is that the tragedy of South America didn’t end with the mangling of AMBERSONS by RKO. No, it cost me a hell of a lot more that the two years I spent making the picture. It cost me many, many other pictures which I never made; and many years in which I couldn’t work at all.

For the new men who came to power in RKO it was all too easy to make this giant, this script less documentary in South American look like a crazy waste of money. And to justify their positions, it was very much in their interest to do so. A truly merciless campaign was launched, and by the time I came back to America my image as a capricious and unstable wastrel was permanently fixed in the industry’s mind. You know all this, of course, but the documentation may surprise you. The extent of that campaign and its virulence is hard to exaggerate.

When I’d left, the worst that can be said for me was that I was some kind of artist. When I came back I was some kind of lunatic. No story was too wild—the silliest inventions were believed. The friendliest opinion was this: “Sure, he’s talented, but you can’t trust him. He throws money around like a madman; when he gets bored he walks away. He’s irresponsible.”

The legend was established, founded on the firm rock of popular conviction. Soon it was so large and life-like people couldn’t see the reality which it obscured. Nobody cared about the facts; the fiction was so vastly more amusing.

I have carried that legend on my shoulders for more than a quarter of a century. Just lately, for the first time—and for no very obvious reason—it did seem to have expired finally of old age. Not quite old myself, I have been looking forward to as much use as the years will leave me to rather eagerly function as a movie-maker.

Then came that book (Charles Higham’s THE FILMS OF ORSON WELLES)… The very well-intentioned review of it in Newsweek would seem to be what’s cost me the financing for this new picture, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. When the money people read that in the world’s first news magazine, they can scarcely be reproached for second thoughts in the matter of gambling on a Welles movie.

So now the legend walks again, Peter, and I’ve no choice but to go back to hustling those cameo jobs in other people’s films…

You have on-the-spot witnesses to consult and Dick has the documents. When you get to this chapter I’m hoping that you’ll find the hard facts in this matter and will make it honestly possible to do a little job of disinfecting…

This time, it’s not just that I’d like to have the record straight—I’d like to go to work again…


All the best,
Orson


If this letter doesn't break your heart, and cure you once and for all of any admiration of authors like Higham, Kael and Thompson, then nothing will. (Can you imagine if Welles were still alive? He wouldn't be after reading one page of Thompson's character assassination.)

Just compare Higham's and Thompson's accounts of Brazil with Welles's and Wilson's, and then contemplate the fact that neither of the former footnote, while both of the latter were actually there.



???

[Glenn Anders]

After giving careful, prosaic details of how Jacare died from the official "Welles Activities" diary, sent back to the RKO head office, Simon Callow, who surprisingly has become my Boswell for post mortem Welles, cites a NY Times, 20 May 1942 article -- "Leading Brazil Raftsman Dies": "[Jacare] was tipped from his raft today during the filming of a battle between a shark and an octopus. The fisherman swam away from the fighting monsters into a whirlpool, where he was drowned" [p 121]. Then, noting the mythologizing quality of this report, Callow paraphrases or quotes several (of "innumerable," he says) conflicting alternate accounts.

Our colleague, mteal, should be commended for bringing Higham's interview to us, hogwarts and all. It really does no good, at this point, to demonize Higham, Thompson [sic], Houseman or Kael. Higham, whatever his pretentions, was always a journalist and muckraker; Thomson was lover of the Wellsian (like ourselves), who as a result, became a professor of film studies and a popular critic (and realized that he could no longer substantiate all of the Welles' myth he loved as a teenager); Houseman was a careful Falstaff to Welles' Prince Hal, rejected and embittered; Kael, an art house theater manager, who parlayed her style (her original championing of Welles' films) into a career as a best selling author and critic.

All of them make mistakes, as do Callow, our McBride, as do we, but each of them may have larger or smaller morsels of the truth. We need to stay with the facts, but also consider the half-truths and where they might have come from, for it is in the half-truths that we condemn certain of these writers and may miss the actual truth.

For instance, only to be provocative, I can see this scenario:

Someone decided to set up a "cinematic" bit to hype the re-staged entrance of the Jangdeiros into the Harbor of Rio. Perhaps, one of the film boats or other tenders were encouraged to make a sharp turn to port with the cameras rolling, creating a swell (easily done in shallow coastal waters), for the background of a possible "shark-octopus struggle" of a kind so beloved by cameramen and special effects experts in the 1930's. After the fact, after the tragic accident, though PR pre-hype, or a crewman's blabbing -- the story must have come from somewhere -- and it found its way into the NY Times, everyone involved with the picture would have been at pains, for obvious reasons, to suppress even the hint of such a motive.

I'm not saying that a muckraker like Higham's hook, line and sinker swallow is correct, but that there is enough bad journalism in this story, and in our arguments, to go around. [Have we discussed fully the implications of references to sharks in Michael's famous speech in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI? More to the point the sea monsters swirling behind Michael and Elsa in the San Francisco aquarium? Those are metphors which can be interpreted in several ways.]

Let's agree that all the commentators present flaws, but let's not demonize this one and canonize that one from our particular standpoints. It eventually exhausts our resources and wastes our time.

What was the truth? I say. And the half-truths? What were their sources, and why did some become so troublesome?

Perhaps, Catherine Begamou's book will give us some answers.

[ToddBaesen]

Here is the very brief New York Times report sited by Higham (and Callow). Note that the Times version makes it appear as if the octopus and shark battle was being staged for the cameras. In any case, it seems likely that this sketchy early cable report was probably just as innacurate as Higham's later embellishment of it.

May 20, 1942:

LEADING BRAZIL RAFTMAN DIES STARRING FOR MOVIE

special cable to The New York Times

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, May 19- Mandel Olimipa Meira, Brazil's most noted fisherman, was drowned today off Rio de Janeiro while starring for Orson Welles's film of Brazilian Life.

Mr. Meira, who sailed 2,000 miles on his raft last year to Rio de Janeiro to get President Getulio Vargas's persmission to form a fishermen's union, was tipped from his raft today during the filming of a battle between a shark and an octopus.

The fisherman swam away from the fighting monsters into a whirlpool, where he was drowned. Two companions were rescued.

[mteal]

I don't think we'll ever know whether there was a shark or an octopus or not, but if there were, I'm sure Welles would have wanted to take advantage of it, since he was such a firm believer in what he called 'happy accidents'.

Thank you Glenn, but I believe it was L. French who provided the Higham interview- I just provided a link to it. I agree that it does no good to demonize Higham, Kael, and Thompson- or, we can demonize all we want, but their accounts are part of the historical record so we can't dismiss them unless we have conclusive proof that they are wrong. Carringer did a pretty good job refuting Kael's thesis, but according to THE ENCYCLEPEDIA OF ORSON WELLES, her RAISING KANE probably did more to raise interest in Kane then anything had in years. So it's always a double-edged sword.

Just compare Higham's and Thompson's accounts of Brazil with Welles's and Wilson's, and then contemplate the fact that neither of the former footnote, while both of the latter were actually there.

Yes, but then, Wilson and Welles both say the Voodoo Doctor's needle through the IT'S ALL TRUE script happened to them personally, so their own accounts are not entirely to be trusted either. One of them had to be lying. I think the whole IAT debacle is likely to remain in the twilight zone between myth and fact. There's always Benamou's upcoming book, as Glenn says, but after reading Callow's quote of her in the forward of his new HELLO AMERICANS, I'm not sure we'll get much new from her besides dry, academic wordspinning.

[Store Hadji]

I prefer to apply Occum's Razor to the accounts of the death of Jacare. Elizabeth Wilson said the fisherman were riding their raft as it was being towed into the harbor and a wave came along and capsized it. She did not mention sharks or octopi. Her's is the most straightforward account of the tragedy and the only one I find believable. Or perhaps scientific credulity should be leant to a New York Times account concerning phantom whirlpools. Come on, it's the Times, which should be consumed for entertainment purposes only and not confused with reality.

[Tony]

"It really does no good, at this point, to demonize Higham, Thompson [sic], Houseman or Kael."

Sorry, Glenn and Mteal, but I'm not demonizing these 'writers', I'm critisizing their work, which I consider slipshod and sensationalistic. I thought I had made my point clear: these writers demonized Welles, and helped destroy his career. And they did it with hack writing and research. Higham frightened off some investors and really planted in peoples' minds the "fear of completion" nonsense, while Kael partly robbed Welles of his greatest achievement. And as regards Thompson, he is a good writer who bends his talent to the least noble of tasks: sensationalist biography. And he's doing his best to stop all further releases of unfinished Welles. We can also add Carringer to this list, as he propounded the thoroughly silly "Oedipus in Indianapolis" theory. And Callow (Glenn's current 'Boswell') really wrote a character assassination in his first volume (let's not forget that twisted and corrupted work) but seems to be slowly understanding Welles in his new volume; perhaps in the third, Callow will sound like Joseph McBride.

These people are the enemy, and should be paid no respect whatsoever as regards Welles. Writers such as McBride, Rosenbaum and Bogdanovich have always had the goal of understanding Welles's art, and not attacking the man for his alleged 'moral shortcomings'. It's the self-righteous moral tone which I find most objectionable in Callow, Higham, Thomson, Kael, et. al.

How dare they? How many masterpieces did they create?

:angry:


mteal: you wrote:

"I agree that it does no good to demonize Higham, Kael, and Thompson- or, we can demonize all we want, but their accounts are part of the historical record so we can't dismiss them unless we have conclusive proof that they are wrong. Carringer did a pretty good job refuting Kael's thesis, but according to THE ENCYCLEPEDIA OF ORSON WELLES, her RAISING KANE probably did more to raise interest in Kane then anything had in years. So it's always a double-edged sword."

I find your reasoning curious: How could one ever conclusively prove that Callow's attacks, Thomson's psycho-babble, Carringer's Oedipal nonsense, and Higham's "fear of completion" are ever "wrong"? Other than, of course, using our common sense to realize that they're talking through their hats (to put it politely).

And as you've stated, when it's a factual claim, for example who wrote Kane, sometimes the facts can be shown. But then you quote the "Encyclopedia of OW" (of all books!) to excuse what Kael did, in that it helped promote Kane.

BUT AT WELLES'S EXPENSE!

And to quote that awful "encylopedia", which has already been shown here to be not worth the paper it's printed on, as it has missed so much and has so many inaccuracies- this really surprises me. Believe me, Benamou's book will be properly researched and footnoted, and neither she nor McBride nor Rosenbaum will ever descend into the cheap and damaging silliness of Thomson, Higham, Kael and their kind; these people are hacks- possibly talented, but true hacks nonetheless. Personally, I have a far greater problem with their morals than I do with Welles's (which are not germane to his art).

And in Welles's lifetime, as celebrity culture really took hold, these hacks were terribly damaging to his career as they revived the old "Crazy Welles" image, and damaged his abilty to get further financing. Before any of their "work" was published, Welles had troubles, but he could always manage to get a picture out every few years. After all those books came, he never finished another feature.

You ever wonder why? Look to Higham, Housman, Kael et. al., as part of the reason. And who would want to finance the completion of The Other Side of the Wind or Don Quixote today after having read Thomson, who advises against it?

These authors are the enemies of Welles; they did him no favours, damaged him terribly (both professionally and emotionally, it seems) and justified their actions as 'telling the truth'. In fact, they couldn't have cared less about Welles, as long as they sold books and made or added to their reputations. Their books are finally more about celebrity culture than they are about Welles, concentrating as they do on the artist instead of the work, and arriving at 'moral judgments' about the person.

It's all rather tawdry, don't you think?



???

[Skylark]

I must confess that my objections to the tendency to pass negative judgments on Welles' personal life and professional career and the derogatory opinions on various aspects of his work are mainly selfish. I want Welles to have a more positive public acceptance because I want to have easier access to quality Welles products on the consumer marketplace. (DVD's, Books, CD's, etc...) Although there have been some remarkably successful quality Welles releases since his death (TOE pulled +/-6 million initially at the box office) I do fear that maintaining all these ideas of Welles as the tragically flawed train wreck (and sure I believe a lot of writers do this because they know that they can gain notoriety by doing so) contributes to the 'bad juju' surrounding his name and thus deters initiative to take advantage of the new technology that would allow a lot of his work to be revived and refreshed...

So yeah, maybe no one will notice if the name of Orson Welles is forgotten, but I ask you, maybe just maybe, wouldn't then the cultural landscape that we live will be that much poorer? and that 's not the America I want to wake up to in the morning - that's why Orson Welles is one of 'Skylark's People'...

(The last paragraph is tongue in cheek, by the way...)

http://skylark-.blogspot.com

[Glenn Anders]

Skylark: I enjoy your beautiful line drawings.

Tony: You have now extended your theory to a realm that I had not considered, that a series of books, only one of which many people read, even in "the business," was the reason "[Welles] never finished another feature." I seriously doubt that statement is true on any level.

"These people are the enemy"? :p

Greed, "progress," boundless ambition, jealousy, racism, fascism . . . are the enemy, qualities Welles sometimes found within himself.

I would rather go back to Skylark.

Let's get the "masterpieces" out there, let's experience them, examine them. If they are as we think many of them to be, no series of books can destroy them or their creator's genius.

We shall have Skylarks to carry their beauty, their fame, their reputation.

[Tony]

Glenn: this is what I wrote:

"Look to Higham, Housman, Kael et. al., as part of the reason."

Do you doubt it? Here's Welles (again); please read it carefully, and decide whether you would rather believe Welles or Higham:

"...I haven’t bought the Higham book but managed to sneak a few pages of free reading in Brentano’s the other day. That’s as far as I’m going: no use eating up what’s left of my liver… He thinks I hate to finish my movies because I equate completion with death. I should think he’d realize that not finishing a job is not really to do it at all—which isn’t suicide but murder. If he had his facts straight he’d see who’s been guilty of that. I guess that’s why he refused to take me up on my offer to check his material for purely factual inaccuracies; it would have robbed him of the source of some pretty ripe theorizing. On the other hand, it might have helped to get me off a hook which—after 25 years or so—is really starting to hurt.

The South America episode is the one key disaster in my story, so of course, you’ll want to get it straight. For my part, I need to get it straight—as a simple matter of survival. This is newly urgent for me, because, once again, the legend that grew up out of that affair has lost me the chance to make a picture.

As I’ve mentioned, that lovely money out in the middle-west suddenly dried up. Mr. Higham seems to have spooked them. A quote from it in tagging the review in Newsweek sent them scampering. Once again I am the man who “irresponsibly” dropped everything to whoop it up in the carnival in Rio, and, having started a picture down there, capriciously refused to finish it. No use trying to explain that I didn’t flit down to South American for the fun of it…
The legend was established, founded on the firm rock of popular conviction. Soon it was so large and life-like people couldn’t see the reality which it obscured. Nobody cared about the facts; the fiction was so vastly more amusing.

I have carried that legend on my shoulders for more than a quarter of a century. Just lately, for the first time—and for no very obvious reason—it did seem to have expired finally of old age. Not quite old myself, I have been looking forward to as much use as the years will leave me to rather eagerly function as a movie-maker.

Then came that book (Charles Higham’s THE FILMS OF ORSON WELLES)… The very well-intentioned review of it in Newsweek would seem to be what’s cost me the financing for this new picture, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. When the money people read that in the world’s first news magazine, they can scarcely be reproached for second thoughts in the matter of gambling on a Welles movie."

And here's an excerpt (taken from Larry French's fascinating News post of today) from that Newsweek article:

"In a way, though, it is hard to blame the studio entirely for the oblivion to which “It’s All True” was consigned. With typical impetuosity, Welles abandoned two films already in progress and flew down to Rio to start shooting the carnival.. The rushes he sent back to the States were supposedly a producer’s nightmare; so were reports that Welles had thrown his furniture out of a hotel window to protest a bill...Welles had enjoyed the unalloyed confidence of a major studio for the last time. For nearly 30 years since, he has continued to carom from one precariously financed project to another, still managing to produce exciting if flawed work with surprising regularity...But nothing has ever seemed to click completely for Orson. Higham’s theory of why is more plausible than most: “Above all I sensed a feeling… that Welles hated to see a film finished, that all his blame of others for wrecking his work is an unconscious alibi for his own genuine fear of completion."

Glenn: do you seriously doubt that this infamous reputation, added to and revived by Charles Higham, Pauline Kael and John Houseman (and Newsweek!) between 1970 and 1972, cost Welles some financing? And I did write that the books were "part of the reason".

Please check out Bogdanovich's reply to the Newsweek column, as posted today on the News page by Larry French:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=127#more-127

???