By RAY KELLY
Wellesnet routinely fields questions from researchers, authors and producers, but a recent email exchange from Turkey was a bit out of the ordinary.
A national theater company there is interested in translating and staging Orson Welles’ Moby Dick Rehearsed. They asked us to put them in contact with the proper rights holders.
The 1955 stage adaptation of Herman Melville’s seafaring tale of obsession has been performed regularly by regional theater troupes with stagings in Oregon, Mississippi and Massachusetts earlier this year. Still, Moby Dick Rehearsed is not as well known to the general public as Citizen Kane, The War of the Worlds or even “Voodoo” Macbeth.
One reason is that few photos exist of the bare-bones London production, which starred Welles, Patrick McGoohan, Kenneth Williams and Joan Plowright – and then there is the legendary lost film.
Welles filmed between 40 and 75 minutes of the production with much of the original cast at the Hackney Empire and Scala theaters in London. (Christopher Lee was brought in to sub for Peter Sallis as Stage Manager/Flask.). Welles hoped to sell the finished product to CBS’ Omnibus, which had presented a live abridged version of King Lear directed by Peter Brooks and starring Welles in 1953. However, Welles was unhappy with the initial results and quickly abandoned the idea.
“We shot for three days and it was obvious it wasn’t going to be any good, so we stopped,” Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming. “There was no film made at all. We only did one and a half scenes. I said, ‘Let’s not go on and waste our money, because it’s not going to be any good.'”
In his autobiography, Williams said the dim atmospheric stage lighting rendered some of the footage shot by Welles unusable.
“It was to be a film of the play and from the outset Orson was at loggerheads with the lighting cameraman who vainly protested that theatrical arclamps were insufficient for filming. ‘You’re not Rembrandt painting with light,’ he was told. ‘Shoot the scene’. When the rushes revealed stygian gloom, it had to be filmed all over again.”
However, fellow co-star McGoohan in 1986 recalled watching 40 minutes of rushes three decades earlier and being impressed with what he saw.
There have been online reports that a badly decomposed copy exists at the Munich Film Museum by those who misunderstood remarks made by Jonathan Rosenbaum. The noted film scholar told Wellesnet in 2003 that some film cans marked Moby Dick Rehearsed were in the museum’s possession, but that the contents were not from the 1955 stage show.
But that did not curb hopes – or stop rumors– that the London footage may exist somewhere in the Munich archive. Sadly, museum director Stefan Drössler assured us that is not the case.
You can be assured that if we would have any of the footage of the 1950s version, I would have preserved it somehow and presented in Welles conferences or retrospectives. I had some conversations with Christopher Lee about it and followed unsuccessfully several tracks. At the Locarno festival (in 2005) and in some of the Welles centenary retrospectives, I presented a detailed lecture about Orson and Moby Dick. During the shooting in July 1955, Orson didn’t film his own scenes. He wanted to do it later. The filmed material was supposed to be shipped to Italy. Anyway, at a certain point it seems to have been chopped by the customs. There is no record or hint that Orson ever continued the shooting or worked on the editing. Only a few photos from the shooting in London survive.
A trunk of abandoned Welles footage found in Italy more than three years ago has yielded Too Much Johnson, reels from Merchant of Venice and outtakes from Portrait of Gina. It is too much to hope that Moby Dick Rehearsed will turn up one day.
The stage production of Moby Dick Rehearsed ran from June 16 to July 9, 1955, but it did not mark the end of Welles’ interest in the Melville classic.
He played Father Mapple in the John Huston big screen version of Moby Dick in 1956.
And 15 years later, Welles filmed 22 minutes of various scenes from the play, reading all of the parts himself. The surviving footage of that film was acquired and restored by the Munich Film Museum. (See below).
__________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.