By RAY KELLY
When news surfaced in 2013 that the staff of Pordenone’s Cinemazero had discovered Orson Welles’ Too Much Johnson in an Italian warehouse, a tipster told Wellesnet that more than just the long lost 1938 silent footage of the Mercury Theatre stage show had been found.
Skip forward two years and we are delighted to learn that Cinemazero will present 30 minutes of Welles’ 1969 television film The Merchant of Venice next month.
Welles had told interviewers in his later years that Too Much Johnson had been lost in a Madrid house fire and The Merchant of Venice stolen.
It seems more likely the ever traveling Welles misplaced or left behind these two cinematic treasures, just as he left the only known copy of Viva Italia (Portrait of Gina) at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris in 1958. Those unmarked cans turned up in a hotel storage facility in 1986.
Lost and found Welles is nothing new.
We have Joseph McBride to thank for uncovering the 1934 short The Hearts of Age at the Greenwich, Connecticut Public Library collection in the late 1960s. Ray Langstone, who hunts for missing British television shows, found the missing Vienna episode of Around The World With Orson Welles at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives in 2011.
More recently, Wellesnet was contacted by an archivist at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in May after footage from The Deep was found there. We put him in touch with the Munich Film Museum. It appears the footage may be a high quality copy of the trailer seen in the documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band.
Wellesians would like to believe the missing reels from The Magnificent Ambersons are somewhere in Brazil waiting to be discovered. While that would be wonderful, there may be other treasures still out there. Among them:
- Film of the Welles-written play Time Runs, and an abridged The Importance of Being Earnest (1950)
- Footage of the Moby Dick Rehearsed play with Welles and Patrick McGoohan (1955)
- The single day shoot of Isak Dinesen’s The Heroine (1967)
While we eagerly await the completion of Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, who knows what other treasures will turn up in Italy, Brazil or a U.S. library.
Thirty years after Welles’ death, there is still be much more to see.
________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.