(Editor’s note:Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s once overlooked archive of Orson Welles scripts and personal correspondence in Turin has received a great deal of attention in recent months thanks to Massimiliano Studer, co-founder of Forma Cinema, and Alessandro Aniballi, co-founder of Quinlan.it. The Italian film scholars first publicized the contents of the collection earlier this year. Matthew Asprey Gear, author of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City, has delved in to the archive.)
By MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR
A few weeks ago I visited Italy’s Museo Nazionale Del Cinema in Turin on a research project under the sponsorship of the Ernest Hemingway Society. While there I not only made significant discoveries to aid my project, but also had the chance to survey the highlights of a largely unexplored archive that should excite all Wellesians.
I’m something of a veteran of Orson Welles archives. While researching my book At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City, I closely examined thousands of pages of Welles documents at the Lilly Library at Indiana University and at the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan. (For the record, I have yet to study Michigan’s most recent acquisitions from the private collection of Beatrice Welles, and no detailed inventory of these documents has yet been published.)
The Turin Orson Welles archive, stored at the Bibliomediateca “Mario Gromo” on the outskirts of the city, was catalogued in 1998 but its existence has only recently been widely publicized via Wellesnet. It contains 167 folders divided between five series. Evidently the final depository of files from one or more of Welles’s European offices, these documents cover the period from the 1950s to the mid 1970s, so there is some overlap with the Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers I examined in Michigan. Nevertheless, I’m happy to report that Turin holds numerous unique items including unproduced screenplays and treatments (with many working pages in Welles’s own handwriting) and correspondence to and from Welles and his secretaries. In short, this archive is another essential stop on the itinerary for serious Welles researchers. I want to thank the kind and tirelessly helpful staff at the Bibliomediateca for their assistance during my visit.
Wellesnet recently reported on my discovery of V. I. P., the long-lost English language version of the 1953 novel Une Grosse Legume, not a film treatment as catalogued. Here are my preliminary notes on some other exciting items at the archive, including several almost unknown Orson Welles projects.
BRITTLE GLORY
A play, circa late 1950s.
One of the few known references by Welles to this unproduced play is in a letter written in Zagreb, possibly in 1960 during the filming of The Tartars, to his friend the columnist Leonard Lyons. The letter was published at Wellesnet in 2008 [https://www.wellesnet.com/letters-from-orson-welles/].
Like V. I. P., Brittle Glory is a Cold War fantasy about a tiny fictional European dictatorship, this time a Balkan country located “Eastward, God help us, in that complicated scribble of frontiers […] there where the balalaikas used to play and soldiers dressed like lion-tamers: above Islam and beneath Europe; on the borders of Ruritanian light fiction; in the latitudes of operetta…”
Turin has a complete 95-page typed carbon copy of the play, although a few pages bear the place-holding note “NOT YET WRITTEN.” Welles’s original envelope also contains some hand-annotated draft pages.
[N.B. An as-yet-unidentified version of this play was acquired by the University of Michigan from Beatrice Welles’s collection of her father’s papers.]
JACOB
A screenplay, 1963.
This screenplay was commissioned by producer Dino De Laurentiis for the project that would become The Bible: In the Beginning (1966). Welles was hired to write and direct the story of Jacob and Esau; other sections were assigned to Robert Bresson and Luchino Visconti. Simon Callow notes that Keith Baxter was invited to play the part of Jacob and underwent makeup tests but Welles (and the other filmmakers) ultimately departed the project.
The film was directed by John Huston and its script credited solely to Christopher Fry. The story of Jacob was not included.
Turin has pages 54-142 of a professionally-typed screenplay with a title page denoting ‘Jacob’. It appears to be the complete segment; the pagination probably means it was originally slotted in after an earlier episode (‘Abraham’?). The script is dated “11.6.63”. Since this was a European production, the date is probably June 11, which would also seem to fit the known chronology.
TREASURE ISLAND
Two screenplay drafts, 1964 and 1972.
Welles’s screen adaptation of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel, which he had once performed on CBS radio in 1938 during the series First Person Singular.
The bound 1964 screenplay is professionally typed, although differences in typefaces on some pages indicate that the script was revised over a period of time. The page numbers reach 184 but, as a result of revisions, successive pages had been occasionally collapsed into a single page. According to legend, Welles used this script as a bargaining ploy when obtaining financing for Chimes at Midnight (1965). The two films were to have been shot simultaneously in Spain using common sets and actors. As it turned out, only some preliminary footage for Treasure Island was filmed by second unit director Jesús Franco. Several shot descriptions late in this script are indeed noted ‘(Franco)
The 1972 screenplay, completely re-typed in a different screenplay format, was the actual basis for that year’s film directed by John Hough and starring Welles as Long John Silver. It is dated 4 February 1972. A penciled note remarks ‘London’ and ‘OW rewritten script’. The pagination reaches 116, but again some successive pages have been collapsed due to revisions.
A quick comparison of the screenplays shows that for the 1972 version Welles simply took the red pen to his 1964 draft rather than begin a new adaptation from scratch. The dialogue closely matches in each script, although it is substantially abbreviated in the 1972 version, with some minor changes to the descriptions of action.
I haven’t yet determined to what extent the 1972 screenplay was reworked by Wolf Mankowitz by the time it reached the screen, but Welles was sufficiently unhappy with the resulting movie to assign his co-writing credit to the pseudonym ‘O. W. Jeeves’.
[N. B. Copies of Welles’s Treasure Island screenplay were also acquired by the University of Michigan from Beatrice Welles’s collection of her father’s papers.]
IVANKA
A screenplay, 1968-1969.
The archive has both typed story notes and a 135-page screenplay, evidently by Welles with the collaboration of Oja Kodar. The title page of the screenplay is dated ‘Original script: May 1968, amendment May 1969.’ This exciting drama contains a plot element that would eventually wind up in Welles’s 1982 screenplay The Big Brass Ring — the attempted theft of a rich woman’s jewelry on a yacht and the surprising complicity of the owner’s husband with the thief.
The setting of Ivanka is the Dalmatian Coast of what was then Yugoslavia. The script begins in media res: Onboard a yacht in Dubrovnik, a young woman named Ivanka has attempted to steal jewels from a rich American woman. The woman’s husband, Benjamin Carter (a “candidate for governor”), has caught her in the act. Surprisingly, Ben decides to help Ivanka by smuggling the jewels onto shore at ‘Borchina’. Meeting later in a market, they discuss the predicament of Ivanka’s eighteen year old sister Tena, married to a possessive man. Ivanka is planning to help Tena kidnap her own child and flee across the border. Ben and a young Dutchman named Hein help out. The adventure takes them to an island with a nudist colony. Meanwhile, Ben’s grown son David, a newly divorced medical student, has accompanied his parents on their sailing voyage and meets Ben for several heart-to-heart conversations. The story winds up in Paris, but there is no real conclusion to the drama.
The screenplay is clearly inspired by a real life incident in Yugoslavia in the mid-1960s involving Welles, Oja Kodar, and her sister Nina. Kodar discussed the situation in a long interview with Stefan Drössler (published in The Unknown Orson Welles, 2004):
“[Nina] was splitting from her husband at the time and I kidnapped her son Sasha from him. It was an incredible adventure through ex-Yugoslavia. We looked liked Bosnian refugees, tired, disheveled, wrapped in blankets. And when we crossed the border I lost one of my shoes. Orson was waiting for us in a taxi across the border. That’s how we and the little boy came to Italy. Nina didn’t want to return to Yugoslavia because there would have been a prolonged divorce in court and she didn’t know how custody for the boy would have been decided. So we stayed in Italy and she started working for Orson.”
(Sasha appears at the beginning of F for Fake as the amused child with Welles the Magician.)
In any case, Ivanka may have evolved further beyond this 1968-1969 version. Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his afterword to the posthumously published script of The Big Brass Ring, interviewed Kodar about that script’s origin. In that account, ‘Ivanka’ was “an autobiographical story written in English by Kodar” in the mid-1970s (Welles himself named the story). But instead of the jewelry theft scenario, Kodar remembers it providing different story elements: Senator Blake Pellarin’s love affair with a long-lost Asian woman and the Oriana Fallaci-esque character ‘Cela Brandini’. Kodar said, “There is something of Orson and myself in the story of the Asian girl, something that we lived. It’s not exactly that, but something like that happened.”
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MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR is the author of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2016). He is a 2018 recipient of a research grant from the Ernest Hemingway Society’s Lewis-Reynolds-Smith Founders Fellowship.
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