Joseph McBride, noted film historian and author of three books on Orson Welles, fired off a letter to The New Yorker today criticizing its article Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece.
McBride took exception with writer Michael Schulman’s account of Welles’ firing by RKO Radio Pictures following the filming of The Magnificent Ambersons and the ill-fated South American documentary It’s All True.
In his letter to the editor, McBride states:
Michael Schulman’s article about Orson Welles’s mutilated film, The Magnificent Ambersons (“Deepfaking Orson Welles,” February 9), contains unfortunate distortions about why he was fired by R.K.O. in 1942.
Most importantly, the studio lied to Welles and claimed he was fired for going overbudget on his Brazilian documentary, It’s All True. As my research in R.K.O. and U.S. government documents demonstrated in my 2006/2022 book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (University Press of Kentucky), Welles was actually under budget by $447,452 at the time of his firing. Studio executives deliberately concealed from Welles that the actual budget was $1.2 million, of which $752,548 was spent by the time Welles was doing the last filming in the fishing village of Fortaleza.
Furthermore, Schulman repeats the old racist, neocolonialist stories about Welles having sex with Brazilian women while claiming that was why he had problems finishing It’s All True. In fact, R.K.O. sabotaged the goodwill project, which was causing consternation both in Hollywood and Brazil for showing poverty and mixing races of performers.
The Pomona preview of Ambersons was indeed disastrous, as Schulman writes, but he leaves out some highly positive responses from attendees, including “I think it was the best picture I have ever seen” and “The direction, acting, photography, and special effects are the best the cinema has yet offered. It is unfortunate that the American public, as represented at this theater, are unable to appreciate fine art.”
Welles was not “mostly ignoring the studio’s panic” over Ambersons, as Schuman writes, but could not leave Brazil due to his obligations to the U.S. government and tried vainly to save the film in phone calls and telegrams to the studio. Schulman contradicts himself and further blames Welles by writing that he “wired back reams of cumbersome changes, which R.K.O. disregarded.” Welles’s later career, which Schulman dismisses in clichéd terms as trivial, was largely and intentionally independent and included such major films as The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, and The Other Side of the Wind.
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