By MIKE TEAL
and RAY KELLY
Two years after the hoopla of the Orson Welles centennial, exciting projects and releases just keep coming.
Among the highpoints: The editing of The Other Side of the Wind is underway, the expansion of the two largest repositories of Welles’ papers took place, and the home video release of Othello alongside the seldom seen Filming Othello.
Here a quick look back at the past 12 months.
There is still a “pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming” feel to the exciting news that The Other Side of the Wind is finally being completed. More than 40 years after Welles finished principal photography, producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall are completing the film, which will air on Netflix in 2018. Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos has said he favors a debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
The 1,083 reels of negative footage, dailies, rushes and other materials ― once housed by LTC Laboratories outside Paris — were flown to Los Angeles on March 13. The negatives were reassembled by legendary cutter Mo Henry and 4K scans were conducted by Technicolor.
Working with Rymsza, Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich, editor Bob Murawski (The Hurt Locker) is currently editing the footage. Oscar winner Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom) is filming a companion documentary.
In other Wellesian news, two universities housing the largest Welles collections in the U.S. both came through in a big way in 2017.
The University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library acquired an archive of Welles material from his youngest daughter, Beatrice Welles. It is a huge selection of vital and unseen written work by Welles, including unpublished and unfilmed scripts, letters, diary excerpts, behind the scenes memos and routine, but fascinating, correspondence. We played a part in the introductions, but bravo to Beatrice Welles for putting these items in the right hands, and bravo to the University of Michigan for expanding its already impressive holdings.
Some scripts are in a more advanced stage than others, but all of them are fascinating reading and come across as Welles movies that happen to exist on paper instead of film. As Peter Conrad, author of Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life put it: “(Welles’s) essays, journalistic articles, works of fiction, and unproduced screenplays are an invaluable guide to his motives, too seldom consulted by critics.” With the help of UM, this relatively unexplored Wellesian frontier is starting to open up!
Meanwhile, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana completed their two-year project to digitize its huge collection of Welles radio programs on transcription disc. The results have, for the most part exceeded our already high expectations. As one longtime Wellesnetter put it, “Lilly’s website is wonderful. These live master recordings are such a substantial sonic upgrade over the hissy and muddy Nth-generation bootlegs which previously were all that was available.”
Here’s an excerpt from an IU website article from two weeks ago, praising the Lilly for this project: “The incomparable Lilly Library collaborated with our ambitious Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative to launch Orson Welles on the Air. The website features more than 300 rare master recordings from Welles’ personal collection, which is held in the Lilly’s archives and digitized through the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. These recordings were previously available only to those who visited the Lilly in person, and many went unheard for decades due to the delicate nature of the media on which they were preserved. Now, they are easily accessible to scholars and Welles fans worldwide, a truly profound contribution from one of our campus’s most cherished resources.”
We can’t say it any better than that.
On October 10, The Criterion Collection released its Othello set, which is now the standard by which future home video releases will be judged. Criterion expertly restored the 1952 and 1955 versions of the movie and delivered a mother lode of exceptional extras, including Welles’ last completed project, Filming Othello. For the restoration of the 1952 release, Criterion scanned a 35mm fine-grain master positive with a running time of 93 minutes and 31 seconds. A 35mm original camera negative was the source of the restoration of the 1955 release, which runs 90 minutes and 59 seconds. In both cases, dirt, debris, scratches and splices were manually removed. The monaural soundtracks for both were remastered from composite fine-grain prints. Illuminations writer-producer John Wyver said that “Criterion continues to be the DVD and Blu-ray gold standard, with glorious prints and exceptional extras,” adding that the two-disc Othello is “up there with the label’s best.”
In other home video news, Olive Films, which previously did a stellar job with its release of Macbeth, tackled The Stranger on August 29. A public domain title, it had previously been released on Blu-ray by MGM Home Video (2011) and Kino Lorber (2013) to mixed reviews. Many fans feel the new Olive release is the best overall, though it appears to have slightly less clarity of detail than the Kino release. Olive worked off of a MGM master, which is a generation down from the Library of Congress print used for the Kino transfer.
Also worthy of mention is a wonderful CD of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino’s scores for Welles films from the German-based Alhambra Records. Limited to 300 copies, The Orson Welles / A.F. Lavagnino Collaboration is devoted to Lavagnino’s collaboration with Welles on Othello, Chimes at Midnight and the unfinished TV production The Merchant of Venice. Lavagnino wrote and recorded the 15-minute score for The Merchant of Venice in two to three days. The composer did not want any fee from Welles, but in the end received 12 paintings of various Shakespearean characters which Welles had drawn on the back of his cigar boxes – a few of them can now be seen on the cover and within the booklet of the CD.
Several Welles-related books arrived in 2017.
Film historian Joseph McBride’s 19th book, Two Cheers for Hollywood, drew from some of his finest work of the past 50 years. The 695-page tome includes interviews with directors; profiles of screenwriters; features on stars and craftspeople; accounts of visiting sets; and essays on some of his favorite movies. McBride has written three books on Welles and appears in the upcoming The Other Side of the Wind, so it’s not surprising that Two Cheers for Hollywood has two impressive selections dealing with Welles: “Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema” (updated from its original April 2014 publication in Bright Lights) and a discussion of the controversy over the script of Citizen Kane as part of his essay “The Screenplay as Genre” (from the Harvard University Press book A New Literary History of America, 2009).
A new book by Michigan professor Robert Kroll looked at the other lives of the nefarious Harry Lime – first depicted by Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir classic The Third Man. After the huge success of that film, Welles resurrected Lime for a prequel radio series, which aired on BBC between August 1951 and July 1952 as The Adventures of Harry Lime.
Kroll’s Study Guide to The Lives of Harry Lime, examines this often overlooked chapter in Welles career. The 84-page book is available in softcover from CreateSpace and Amazon for $9.99. It is also available as a Kindle eBook for $4.99.
Each of the 52 episodes are summarized and reviewed. Kroll provides broadcast dates and, when possible, writing credits and interesting bits of information or a notable quote. As the author says, “Many episodes I believe are among Welles’ finest radio dramas…Welles’ voice was always his best instrument, and episodes of The Lives of Harry Lime exhibit some of Welles’ most versatile vocal performances.”
Finally, English writer-musician-filmmaker Chris Wade, who runs the arts magazine Hound Dawg, provides an overview of Welles’ cinematic career in his essay The Rise and Supposed Fall of a Maverick, which is part of his new book Orson Welles: The Final Cut.
Wade also offers a detailed log of Welles’ many movie appearances beginning with his amateur short The Hearts of Age in 1934 and concluding with the posthumous release of Henry Jaglom’s Someone To Love in 1987.
Wade told Wellesnet, “I did the book primarily for myself, as I couldn’t find a full Orson Welles film guide, so I thought I’d give it a go.”
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