By RAY KELLY
Novelist Charles Williams’ shipboard thriller Dead Calm set two motion pictures off on different courses – Orson Welles’ The Deep sank in murky waters, while Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm launched the Hollywood career of future Oscar winner Nicole Kidman.
Welles acquired the film rights to Williams’ book shortly after it was published in 1963, and retained it for the next 22 years. Three months after his death in October 1985, his companion Oja Kodar sold those rights for $180,000 in a deal which nearly went sour.
During the 1967-1969 shoot, Welles utilized Bavaria Film Studios in Geiselgasteig. Cinematographer Willy Kurant (The Immortal Story), along with Ivica Rajkovic, worked on the shoot.
For The Deep, also known as Dead Reckoning and, according to one 1967 news account, Course of Death, Welles cast himself, Kodar, Laurence Harvey, Jeanne Moreau and Michael Bryant in the lead roles found in Williams’ book. Filming took place sporadically off Yugoslavia’s Dalmatian coast.
“My hope is that it won’t turn out to be an art house movie,” Welles said during the production. “I hope it’s the kind of movie I enjoy seeing myself. I felt it was high time to show that we could make some money.”
Professional and personal relationships complicated filming of The Deep from the start.
Kurant told Cinémathèque in 2003 that shooting was halted for a day when the award-winning Moreau, who had been romantically involved with Welles years earlier, unhappily discovered that Kodar, the 52-year-old director’s current girlfriend and a novice actress, had been given the larger role. Surely, it was a slap in the face to the 39-year-old beauty who Welles had once lauded as “the greatest actress in the world” and whose presence added star power to his three previous efforts. To her credit, Moreau continued to speak highly of Welles telling columnist Marilyn Beck in 1972 that she had agreed to co-star in his next movie.
The 26-year-old Kodar was cast as Rae Ingram, wife of John Ingram, played by Bryant, 39. The younger Kodar wore bikinis for her starring role, while the attractive Moreau, relegated to more drab apparel, settled in to her supporting part.
Weather, finances, cast commitments, and Harvey’s death in November 1973 at the age of 45 were initially cited as reasons for the film’s delays and eventual abandonment. However, Chimes at Midnight actor Keith Baxter claimed in a 2003 interview with Peter Tonguette that a finished version of the film had existed and Moreau told an interviewer Welles completed the film, but decided not to release it.
Kodar has blamed Moreau for the scuttling of The Deep. She told an audience in Woodstock, Illinois, and the Brazilian website AdoroCinema in May 2015 that the legendary French actress refused to dub her lines because she was jealous of Kodar.
“We pretended at the time that the film could not be completed because of the death of Laurence Harvey, but that’s not true. We could not finish because Jeanne Moreau refused to participate in the dubbing. I say this without fear of repercussion, without fear of being sued, because I have letters from Orson and Orson lawyers, proving that the culprit is Moreau,” Kodar told AdoroCinema. “I was a very pretty girl, and at the time she was hired for the film, she was a middle-aged woman. When she saw me, she hated me, and could not forgive Orson for loving me rather than love her. That’s why The Deep has not been completed. It was jealousy.”
In the 2004 book The Unknown Orson Welles, Kodar recalled a circa 1972 editing session where Welles created guide tracks for Moreau to dub her lines, but she made no mention of problems with the French actress.
Prior Harvey’s death, Moreau told a newspaper that Welles’ hectic schedule was the reason the pair “never got together to do the dubbing.” “Orson is an incredible person. He’s always traveling, so it’s hard to get together in Paris at the same time,” she told the Montreal Gazette on April 21, 1973. “But we’ll do it sometime.” (Gossip columnist Joyce Haber had reported 11 months earlier that Moreau had just completed dubbing her part).
A far different explanation for The Deep’s downfall was offered by editor Mauro Bonanni. In a June 2015 interview with the Italian website Quinlan, Bonanni claimed that Welles scrapped the movie after realizing his young lover was ill-suited for the lead role.
“I told him one day at lunch – it was just me and him – ‘Can you imagine, Welles, the day when the movie comes out, there will be a few reviews, and they’ll all speak only of the leading actress, Oja?’ Because of this, there was deathly silence on his part … and that was why we did not do any more work on it,” Bonanni said.
The real reason may never be known for certain, but it is worth noting Kodar was given relatively few lines of dialogue in her next Welles film, F For Fake, and none in the unfinished The Other Side of the Wind.
In the years that followed, the negative for The Deep was lost.
“We don’t know where the copy is,” Moreau told Film Comment in 1990. “We know it exists. I’m sure it’s in a lab somewhere, and I’m sure the woman he left behind (Kodar) knows where it is. The decision is in her hands. I’d like her to do something about it.”
Kodar has placed the black and white and color workprints under the care and preservation of the Munich Film Museum.
Just as Welles was drawn to Williams’ novel in 1963, the thriller also found an admirer in Tony Bill, producer of The Sting. Bill shared the book with his friend Phillip Noyce in 1978 and later tried to buy the movie rights from Welles.
Following Welles’ death in October 1985, Bill sought to acquire the film rights from Kodar, who had been given them by Welles.
“What Tony had found was that Oja was reluctant to release the rights to a person that she felt was part of the Hollywood establishment, having felt that that establishment had persecuted Orson,” Noyce recalled in a 2014 interview with The A.V. Club. “She was right to feel that one of the great film artists did not have a smooth ride in Hollywood.”
With Bill’s efforts stymied, Noyce pitched the movie to Australian producer George Miller (Mad Max).
“Tony was kind enough to let George approach Oja Kodar… because Tony had not been able to convince Oja to sell the rights to him, for him to direct,” Noyce told Venice magazine in 1999. “George, who is a doctor, has a marvelous bedside manner, approached Oja and convinced her that we didn’t want to make a Hollywood version of the story, and that the adaptation would be done in the spirit of what we imagined would please Orson. She agreed, then Tony very generously allowed us to make the film without his participation.”
Kennedy Miller Productions paid $20,000 to Kodar to option the rights in January 1986 with $160,000 to be paid once production commenced on Dead Calm, according to correspondence found in the eight boxes of Welles-related items Kodar recently sold to the University of Michigan Special Collections Library for an undisclosed sum.
In selling the film rights to Kennedy Miller Productions on January 10, 1986, Kodar represented that she was the sole, exclusive owner of those rights with no litigation or claims related to the property. As part of the contract, Kodar was free to complete and release The Deep or use Welles’ footage in a documentary, provided it did not conflict with the release of Dead Calm.
Welles had given The Deep and other unfinished works to Kodar in a two-page Confirmation of Ownership Rights signed on June 19, 1985. In the weeks before his death, Welles also gave half of his pension to Kodar in a single sentence agreement and pledged to repay a $130,000 loan to her with possible interest in an only slightly longer worded promissory note. None of these agreements appear to have been reviewed or drafted by Welles’ lawyer, but they were notarized and became part of the estate settlement, which concluded on November 7, 1986. (Welles had prepared a formal will on January 15, 1982 that left the Los Angeles house and its contents to Kodar with the bulk of the estate going to his wife, Paola Mori, and three daughters).
On February 28, 1986, lawyers for Kennedy Miller Productions responded strongly to an “indirect message from Oja Kodar to the effect that there is some problem with the rights.” Seven weeks after signing the deal with Kodar, producers had expended considerable money on Dead Calm and entered into a distribution deal with Warner Bros. – only to learn from her lawyer about issues having “something to do with ‘the estate’.”
Noting the documentation previously furnished by Kodar and guarantees she made to Kennedy Miller Productions a month earlier, the lawyers “put Kodar on notice that they will hold her accountable for their damages in the event of any breach of that agreement.” Unless hearing otherwise, they said, Kennedy Miller Productions would proceed with Dead Calm and assume whatever problems existed were resolved by Kodar.
If Kodar’s lawyer did respond, it is not contained in the correspondences at the University of Michigan. Production of Dead Calm went on as scheduled.
Perhaps a desire to avoid further headaches prompted Miller to publicly distance Dead Calm from Welles’ unfinished The Deep.
Miller diplomatically stated in the production notes that his team never viewed footage from The Deep nor did screenwriter Terry Hayes (Road Warrior) bother to read Welles’ script. In fact, Hayes’ screenplay pared the thriller’s cast from five to just three players – Kidman, Billy Zane and Sam Neill.
“We were extremely careful not to follow in the footsteps of the master and look at any part of what remained of his film,” Miller stated. “We never even read the screenplay Welles shot.”
Noyce filmed Dead Calm over a 14-week span near the Whitsunday Islands between Queensland, Australia, and the Great Barrier Reef during the winter of 1987.
Unlike The Deep, production went smoothly on Dead Calm until a test audience balked at the original ending, in which Rae Ingram (Kidman) knocked the psychotic Hughie (Zane) over the head with a speargun and left him adrift on an inflatable raft. At the urging of Warner Bros., Noyce filmed a new ending that had Rae’s husband (Neill) shoot Hughie in the face with a flare.
Upon its release in April 1989, Dead Calm was a modest success and drew mostly favorable reviews including those from Variety, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. The New York Times, however, described the film as a mix of escapist suspense and pure trash. The studio-suggested ending was seen as heavy handed by some critics.
Dead Calm is best known for launching Kidman’s career in the U.S., although her co-stars, Neill (Jurassic Park) and Zane (Titanic), eventually went on to appear in blockbusters. Noyce has directed more than 50 film and television projects including Patriot Games and most recently The Giver. Miller moved beyond the Mad Max franchise and delivered Babe and the Oscar-winning animated film Happy Feet.
As for The Deep, Stefan Dröessler of the Munich Film Museum has labored for years to preserve and restore the workprints. Screened in July at the Cinémathèque Française, the composite that was shown was missing some scenes and partly black and white. The faded, aging color scenes were desperately in need of correction. Drössler will be screen The Deep at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Nov. 22.
“Unfortunately, only a few rushes of the original camera negative survive, so that today we have only various incomplete, faded and worn workprints of The Deep.” Dröessler told Wellesnet. “Since it is impossible to ‘finish’ an unfinished Welles film, you can only put together an interpretation of the work that’s as faithful as possible to Welles’ original vision. This requires a very intensive study of all existing film material, documents, screenplays, dialogue lists and talks with the people involved in the production. I think in the case of The Deep we have done it and are ready to take the next step. It will be a very expensive enterprise due to the bad shape of the material and we have to develop a very specific reconstruction concept.”
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