By RAY KELLY
Prominent bookseller James Pepper has donated his impressive collection of Orson Welles-related scripts, correspondence and movie mementos to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Pepper is an internationally noted rare books dealer and former governor of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. He is also a creator, editor, and publisher of many film-related books. In 1987, Pepper edited, introduced, and published the Welles screenplay book The Big Brass Ring, and followed that eight years later with The Cradle Will Rock.
The result of more than 50 years of collecting and curating, the James Pepper Collection on Orson Welles has been hailed as an extraordinary donation to the Academy.
The Academy library is located at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study on 333 South La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills and open four days a week. The collection can be accessed online at academycollection.org/web/arena/search#/entity/academy/collections%3A3385/james-pepper-collection-on-orson-welles. Requests for scans of items can be made online at academycollection.org.
Pepper told Wellesnet he chose the Academy library as a repository for his collection because he wanted the materials to be available to fellow Wellesians and cinephiles.
“I am 73 and started gathering Welles-related material when I discovered Welles and his world when I was 18,” the Santa Barbara, California, resident said. “Along the way I got to encounter or know Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Gary Graver, Norman Foster, Richard Wilson, Albert Zugsmith, and other Wellesian figures.”
Pepper shared a typed 15-page inventory prepared by the Academy of the hundreds of scripts, correspondence, photographs, press clippings, books and mementos he amassed. The inventory reveals Welles material not found in other scholarly archives in North America and Europe.
Among the many fascinating items in his collection is a powerful 11-page letter sent to investor and l’Astrophore Films president Mehdi Boushehri in 1977. In the letter, Welles laments the lengthy delay in completing The Other Side of the Wind; strains on his friendships with Bogdanovich and Graver over them being left unpaid; the loss of $2 million in potential income; the open hostility exhibited toward Welles by various individuals involved with Mehdi’s companies; disappointment in the outcome of the American Film Institute tribute; the “miserable stalemate” the project had become; and finding his reputation “as a director blackened beyond reparation” and the subsequent “catastrophic… cost to my credibility in the film world.”
Other notable items donated by Pepper to the Academy library include:
• An invitation to the Citizen Kane wrap party given to Mercury Theatre stalwart Paul Stewart in November 1940;
• A 1956 pitch by Kirk Douglas for a film adaptation of The Shadow radio program with Welles responding, “I would enjoy directing it if we can manage a good enough script and get together on the time;”
• A letter sent to lawyer Arnold Weissberger concerning Welles’ work in 1964 on a script for an unrealized stage version of Gone With the Wind;
• The Book of the American West with a “Dynamite Gus” caricature drawn inside the book by Welles and a handwritten message to Bogdanovich;
• Correspondence from daughter Rebecca Welles and numerous friends and associates including Geraldine Fitzgerald, Vivien Leigh, Bernard Herrmann, Roger Hill, Maurice Bernstein, Hilton Edwards, Maurice Bessy, and Akim Tamiroff. Amid the correspondence is a May 2, 1956 letter from Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn: “To reiterate what I told you at lunch today. I can think of nothing better to revive my interest in the future than being associated with you. I have a few additional projects I would like to discuss with you;”
• Contracts, correspondence and financial statements related to the January 1956 New York stage production of King Lear;
• Leather bound copy of the Long Hot Summer script with the film title and “Orson Welles” embossed in gold on front cover;
• Two drafts of Welles’ script for Touch of Evil, each with numerous handwritten notes;
• Additional Welles-written scripts, including Citizen Kane, It’s All True, Mr. Arkadin, The Other Side of the Wind, The Big Brass Ring, The Dreamers and Dumas;
• Second draft and release scripts, as well as a cutting continuity, for director Carol Reed’s The Third Man;
• Text of a speech given by Welles at the Free World Congress on October 28, 1943;
• And numerous correspondence and telegrams related to the production of several Welles-directed films, such as The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil and The Other Side of the Wind.
The James Pepper Collection on Orson Welles joins the nearly century-old Academy collection of 52 million items. The Margaret Herrick Library also houses periodicals, costume sketches, sheet music and advertising materials, as well as tens of thousands of books.
Among those books now is Welles’ copy of Charles Higham’s unflattering 1970 volume The Films of Orson Welles that Pepper has donated. Years after its publication, Welles gave a copy of the book he detested to filmmaker and friend Henry Jaglom, who wanted to read it.
On the front endpaper of the Higham book, Welles wrote a message, “For Henry, There’s hardly a word in this book that’s true – But here it is anyway – for a good friend from his, Orson.”
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(Editor’s note: In addition to the James Pepper Collection on Orson Welles, the Academy library also houses the previously donated James Pepper Collection of Rare Cinema Material and many other fine selections.)
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