By MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR
One of the great archival discoveries of the decade is surely Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson. In 1938 Welles shot a series of film sequences intended to be screened during a Mercury Theatre adaptation of William Gillette’s farce. The sequences were never
completed but survive in the form of a partially edited 66-minute workprint. Long thought lost, the rediscovered workprint premiered to universal acclaim in 2014.
Scott Simmon is Professor of English at UC Davis. His books include The Films of D.W. Griffith (1993) and The Invention of the Western Film (2003). Simmon’s informative essays accompanied the National Film Preservation Foundation’s free online release of Too Much Johnson. He also created a 34-minute edit to suggest one possible form the material may have taken if it had been finished.
I conducted the following conversation by email.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR: Can you tell me a little about your background in film restoration and preservation, and how you became involved with the National Film Preservation Foundation?
SCOTT SIMMON: Well, at the risk of ancient history, I began with this in the 1980s when I was working at the Library of Congress and had the chance to start up its first public film exhibition space (called the Mary Pickford Theater, thanks to a large donation from “Buddy” Rogers). For five years, I got paid to prowl the world’s largest film and television collection, finding titles not entirely unsuitable to foist onto non‐paying audiences (and in the process watching Reel One of thousands of forgettable obscurities, for a unique kind of cinematic education).
I worked for the Library of Congress again but by long distance in putting together in the early 1990s what was the first U.S. video series to bring archival holdings to the public: six VHS tapes collectively called The Library of Congress Video Collection (and
rereleased on DVD under the unhelpfully deceptive title Origins of Film). For one tape — “African American Cinema, Part One ” — I supervised my first restoration, of Oscar Micheaux’s surprisingly savage Within Our Gates (1920), the earliest surviving feature by an African American, the single print of which surfaced in Spain’s national archive. The restoration challenge here was returning the Spanish intertitles back into English while staying as true as possible to Micheaux’s style (something helped by his having published novels in the 1910s).
My links with the National Film Preservation Foundation go back again to the 1990s, before its actual creation by the U.S. Congress in 1996. I co-wrote for Congress a survey of the state of film preservation, Film Preservation 1993, and then the 1994 follow-up, Redefining Film Preservation: A National Plan, which included among its proposals a federally chartered nonprofit foundation to help save and (not least!) make available the types of films that were mainly unprotected by commercial interests: silent films, avant-garde works, newsreels, home movies and all the types often known collectively as “orphan films.” My co-writer of these reports was Annette Melville, who became the director of National Film Preservation Foundation from its start in 1997 to 2014.
The most visible of the NFPF’s projects is its “Treasures” DVD sets, five of which I curated, from the first Treasures from American Film Archives in 2000 to Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive in 2013. Their basic idea couldn’t be simpler, which is to get preserved archival films out to the public — and with a little context, some of which I tried to provide with film notes. The only full restoration I supervised among the 200 or so titles on these DVDs is Lois Weber’s pro-birth control, anti-abortion feature Where Are My Children? (1916), which survived only in several incomplete prints, including one from the Netherlands which had been reedited at the time of its initial release to eliminate any birth-control advocacy. But for that restoration, we had a post-production script as a guide, and it included a tinting record for each shot, so that although the Library of Congress film restoration was in black-and-white, historically accurate tinting could be added to the video for the NFPF’s DVD Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934.
The National Film Preservation Foundation has also made many more films that it has helped preserve available on its website—see the “Screening Room” pages — where the full and edited versions of Too Much Johnson are also found.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR: The rediscovery of Orson Welles’ Too Much Johnson, a film originally intended to be integrated into the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 stage adaptation of William Gillette’s farce, is a major find. Several organizations in the United States and Italy were involved in the restoration of the rediscovered 66 minute workprint. Can you tell me how this international restoration effort came together, and where you came in?
SCOTT SIMMON: Well, I’m sure there must be a great, typically Wellesian story about how a nitrate workprint of Too Much Johnson came to be lost, only to turn up in a warehouse in, of all places, Pordenone, Italy — but I’m in the dark about that mysterious journey, having come in only at the end of it, in order to try again to provide bits of historical context for a NFPF project. As you may know, the 35mm print was salvaged by Cinemazero, the exhibition organization that partners with the Cineteca del Friuli to present Pordenone’s great annual silent film festival, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the 34th coming October 3-10, 2015. The two organizations invited George Eastman House and the NFPF to work with them to preserve the film. Eastman House directed the preservation, with funding through the NFPF. The reels from Too Much Johnson seem to be just a tiny part of the hundreds of reels of Welles material now stored at the Cineteca del Friuli’s conservation center. I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t more discoveries to be made among those holdings.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR: Your 34-minute version of Too Much Johnson modestly but very successfully presents the footage in a form as it may have appeared in the theatre. Can you tell me about the research process to prepare for this cut?
SCOTT SIMMON: Sure — and thanks for the generous words. I should say that my initial plan was just to try to write a not uninformed note about the complete Too Much Johnson stage-and-film project, for the NFPF to use alongside its online release of the workprint, but I suspect that anyone who watches that print as many times as I did will have the same reaction and impulse: There are astonishing and witty films just buried within it, yearning to breathe free! It’s hard to resist attempting to see what those might look like, something I started doing only for my own amusement. My 34-minute version is, as I hope is clear from its headnote, merely one possible cut among many, although I did try to base it on archival research. Of course, everyone’s initial hope would be that Welles or the Mercury company might have left some script or notes about the film segments of Too Much Johnson — but at least in the publicly available papers, no such thing seems to survive, if it ever existed.
That’s not all that surprising really, although the home movie of Welles directing the third film segment is an unexpected treat. Two film‐historian friends — Richard Abel at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Gregory Waller at Indiana University, Bloomington — generously undertook first surveys for me of Too Much Johnson material among the holdings of Welles’ papers at those two institutions, and I followed up with a few days at the Lilly Library in Bloomington where (with assistance from Craig Simpson and the ever-helpful David Frasier) I slowly made some sense of the many complete and incomplete drafts of the Mercury stage adaptation of Too Much Johnson. The chain of revisions is a bit of a nightmare, and one can see the chaos of the production reflected in it, but this was ultimately quite a satisfying little research project, as it let me pull together what I think is close to a final version of the stageplay as intended to be performed with the films. As much of a failure as the production without the films was apparently — where the actors may have hastily returned to a slightly longer version of the play — the way the film segments and the much‐revised stageplay work together feels like something quite new for the time. As I’ve tried to argue briefly in my two notes with the NFPF online releases of the two films, it feels to me as if Welles and the Mercury theater were working toward some reenactment of a history of American film up to that point: Silent film comedy interspersed with 1930s screwball stage dialogue. In any case, the revised play, in its tightest last revision, has a spirit far from the Gillette original — with rapid-fire exchanges in place of relatively longer speeches.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR: Can you illustrate the Mercury Theater’s screwball approach with a quotation or two from their rewrite?
SCOTT SIMMON: Absolutely. One can get a hint of the changes right from the start of the play (a passage quoted in my note about the workprint). The shift in sprit partly comes about simply by breaking apart Gillette’s speeches (and one has also to imagine the
Mercury actors interrupting one another, as is familiar to us from Welles’ radio work and films), but also there’s some toying with Gillette’s word choices. Two fairly quick examples:
By Act 3, in Cuba, Billings (played by Joseph Cotten) has intentionally confused everyone’s identities so fully that the planter Johnson has assumed that Mrs. Billings (Ruth Ford) is his mail-order bride. And, in his attempt to extricate himself from the situation, Billings feigns outrage over this, expressed this way in Gillette’s original:
BILLINGS. (sliding easily off chest or table and heading off JOHNSON as he starts from L. C. towards ladies up R. C.) Hold on, Johnson. Now wait — now wait — now wait — (JOHNSON stops) I think it’s just as well after what’s occurred for you to discontinue addressing remarks to these ladies. (after looking at JOHNSON an instant in silence, he turns toward MRS. BATTERSON and MRS. BILLINGS.) This man Johnson claims to be ignorant of the fact that he attempted to kiss my wife in this room yesterday afternoon. Will you kindly state, to the best of your knowledge and belief whether he did or did not.
MRS. BATTERSON. He certainly did!
MRS. BILLINGS. Well I should think so !
(JOHNSON goes back of chair R. of table for support.)
BILLINGS. (after pause for effect) Might be just as well, Johnson, for you to be a little more careful in the future. (a look at him) You’re not the only man on earth. (Pause) No, not the only one! There’s a few of us left yet. (after a slight withering and stony stare at JOHNSON turns to MRS. BATTERSON and MRS. BILLINGS) Come, my dear!
The Mercury converts this into a rapid ensemble piece, letting everyone get in their words:
BILLINGS. Hold on there, Johnson.
JOHNSON. Shut up! Wait!
BILLINGS. Hold on, Johnson. I think it’s just as well after what’s occurred for you to discontinue addressing remarks to these ladies. This man Johnson –
JOHNSON. I’ll be with you in a minute.
BILLINGS. This man Johnson –
ALL. Boo –
BILLINGS. Claims to be ignorant –
LEONORE. He is.
BILLINGS. – ignorant of the fact that he attempted to kiss my wife.
FADDISH. Shame!
BILLINGS. Will you kindly state to the best of your knowledge and belief whether he did or did not.
MRS. BATTERSON. He certainly did.
MRS. BILLINGS. Well I should think so.
BILLINGS. Might be just as well, Johnson, for you to be a little more careful in the future. You’re not the only man on earth.
MACKINTOSH. No.
BILLINGS. No.
FADDISH. No.
BILLINGS. No.
ALL. No, no, no, no.
BILLINGS. There’s a few of us left yet.
FREDERICK. We certainly are.
FADDISH. Thank God.
BILLINGS. Come, my dear.
This is the pattern of the revision, which either cuts Gillette’s longer passages or invigorates them along these lines — and Welles also adds the malaprops common in film screwball dialogue, as at the end of this next piece, from Act 1, on shipboard, when Billings is justifying why his haircut is so different. (He’s just chopped it with scissors to prevent his recognition by Dathis as his wife’s lover, from the evidence of that top-half portrait photograph familiar from the first film. Billings is claiming to his wife and mother-in-law that he got his head caught in the ship’s machinery.) Gillette gives him this little speech:
BILLINGS. Got absorbed. Didn’t notice where I was — standing near the piston-rod.
(MRS. BILLINGS shudders — BILLINGS has hat off until end of this speech) Suddenly I felt my hair seized in a grip of iron—caught by the suction pump—slowly wound up on the starboard windlass — struggle with might and main No use ! Drawn nearer and nearer every moment? Suddenly remember — pocket-knife! Snatched it out — cut myself loose — and fell exhausted into the ash-pan! (sits L. of table R.)
This becomes:
BILLINGS. Pretty close shave.
MRS. BILLINGS. Mercy!
BILLINGS. Got absorbed.
MRS. BATTERSON. Indeed.
BILLINGS. Didn’t notice where I was.
MRS. BATTERSON. As usual.
BILLINGS. Standing near the piston-rod.
MRS. BATTERSON. Piston?
MRS. BILLINGS. Rod?
BILLINGS. Suddenly felt my hair seized in a grip of iron – caught by the sucker pump – slowly wound up on the starboard windjammer – struggle. No use! Suddenly remember – pocket-scissors! Snatch ’em out. Cut myself loose – and fell exhausted into the ash-pan! Ash –
MRS. BILLINGS. Oh!
BILLINGS. Pan.
I also love those little word shifts in the Welles version: “sucker pump” and “starboard windjammer” nicely reinforce that among Billings’s many pretenses is that he’s an old hand at sea travel to Cuba.
As Simon Callow has pointed out, Welles was not an especially funny man but had a love of comedians and was susceptible to being amused. The stageplay of Too Much Johnson is, I think, funnier in the Mercury version.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR: You are not the first person to attempt a screening version of film material Orson Welles left unfinished. Other examples include Richard Wilson’s assembly of ‘Three Men on a Raft‘ from It’s All True; Jesus Franco’s version of Don Quixote; Vassili Silovic and Oja Kodar’s documentary One Man Band which presents scenes from many of Welles’ unfinished late projects; and Stefan Drössler’s more expansive screening versions of these late projects for the Munich Film Museum. And this is not to speak of posthumous re-edits of existing films such as Touch of Evil and Mr. Arkadin. To what extant did the successes and failures of these earlier projects guide your work on Too Much Johnson?
SCOTT SIMMON: Well, as you gently hint, Welles as been as much victim as beneficiary of attempts to “complete” his abandoned or unfinished projects. To my mind, the best of these are like the best film restorations generally: They make clear what’s been done to the original, they admit the provisional nature of the new creations, and they don’t alter the originals in ways that can’t be undone.
And yes, in light of the long history of less than ideal tampering with what Welles left, I’d stress again that my guess at the Too Much Johnson films is exactly that — just one guess among many possible ones. If my version has any special authority, that would come only by its starting from a fairly full investigation of what can be known about the Welles/Mercury stage adaptation of Too Much Johnson (and I’ve incorporated a few of the revised acts’ opening and closing lines into the new intertitles).
As I hope everyone who’s interested in this has discovered, the National Film Preservation Foundation made a point of providing not just a streaming version of the full workprint of Too Much Johnson but downloads as well (in MP4; see the link at the bottom of the page here), so that everyone has the source material needed to take a stab at an edit. One thing that anyone who tries this will soon discover is that the surviving footage is not quite sufficient to allow for the creation of entirely coherent films for the final two segments, those that come before the second and third acts of the play. As you know, Welles could tell wonderful stories about footage he never actually shot, but his description of footage of a small-scale model of Cuba (intended presumably for start of the film before Act II) sounds believable,and it may be that what we have now is not all the footage that was shot. I probably should confess too that this is the first project I’ve edited on my own—and I’ve no doubt that a more experienced editor can do a more professional job! So go at it,folks! I’d love to see alternate versions of the Too Much Johnson films!
View the Too Much Johnson workprint here
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Matthew Asprey Gear is an Australian writer and media studies academic at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work has appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books and Senses of Cinema. He is writing a scholarly book on Orson Welles which will be published by Wallflower Books/Columbia University Press. See www.matthewasprey.com
© 2015 Scott Simmon, Matthew Asprey Gear. All rights reserved.
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