By RAY KELLY
Among Orson Welles’ most tantalizing later projects was his unproduced 1982 screenplay The Big Brass Ring, a political drama he co-wrote with Oja Kodar that dives into power, betrayal and buried secrets.
The script later underwent heavy rewriting by F. X. Feeney and George Hickenlooper for a 1999 Showtime film starring William Hurt and Nigel Hawthorne. Truth be told, I am not an admirer of the Showtime adaptation — nor apparently is noted Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote an illuminating afterword for a limited-edition hardcover of the Welles-Kodar screenplay published by James Pepper in 1986.
At its heart, The Big Brass Ring follows Blake Pellarin, a young senator with presidential ambitions, and his one-time mentor, Kim Menaker, a gay former advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Welles dreamed of attaching a bankable star to the project, but his wish list — Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds — all fell through.
A dozen years after Welles’ death, Hickenlooper shot five pages of the Welles-Kodar screenplay as a proof-of-concept to drum up financial support for a feature-length version. The resulting 1997 short film starred Malcolm McDowell as Menaker and Ivana Milicevic as journalist Cela Brandini — roles originally intended for Welles and Kodar themselves.
Though based on a scene from the Welles-Kodar screenplay, Hickenlooper and Matthew Greenberg added considerable new dialogue and shifted the setting from a Madrid hotel to the Santa Monica Pier, giving the short a different energy.
Clocking in at six minutes and filmed in a single day in October 1997, the The Big Brass Ring short appeared on the now out-of-print Warner Brothers DVD Short 2: Dreams (2000), alongside an interview with Hickenlooper. Today, it can be found on YouTube, a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.
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