By NICOLE V. GAGNÉ
In the early 1980s, just a few years before his death, Orson Welles spoke with Gore Vidal about the French connaisseurs du cinéma who would come to him bearing what he called “the gift of the unexpected letdown. The ultimate zinger. ‘There are only three great directors in the history of the film,’ they will announce. I smile shyly. ‘There is D.W. Griffith.’ I roll my eyes toward Heaven in an ecstasy of agreement. ‘There is Orson Welles.’ I lower my lids, all modesty – little me? Then, ‘There is – Nicholas Ray!’”
Vidal recalled Welles laughing when he told this story, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make him angry. His point – that there’s no joy in praise from someone who can’t tell champagne from Mountain Dew – also has a stinger to it, because the unexpected letdown also paints Welles into the same martyr’s corner with Griffith and Ray. The Three Great Directors all had their American careers ended prematurely by an industry that could not be moved to re-employ them.
Yet the question remains: Why did Orson Welles feel such antipathy for Nicholas Ray that he made a film parodying Ray? Granted, Welles always had an appetite for satire. His very first film, made in 1934 when he was nineteen years old, was the 16-mm short The Hearts of Age, a spoof of German expressionism. There’s also the “News on the March” newsreel in Citizen Kane, and his 1950 stage play The Unthinking Lobster, which lampooned Hollywood’s religious-themed films and included footage Welles shot for Le Miracle de Sainte Anne, glimpsed as rushes at the start of the play. Even such films as The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil cannot resist mocking the radio’s commercials and pop music. And of course The Other Side of the Wind is a brutal attack on early 1970s Hollywood from just about every perspective, blistering an array of players from mean and jaded veterans like producer Robert Evans and John Ford’s Irish Mafia to the fatuous glimpses offered of such real-life then-young guns as Dennis Hopper and Paul Mazursky. There are insightful self-parodies from Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston as well. The latter stars in The Other Side of the Wind as legendary director Jake Hannaford, and certain scenes from Hannaford’s new film emulate Michelangelo Antonioni’s icy compositions and alienating architecture – in fact Hannaford’s house is the actual next-door neighbor to the exploding house in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. Welles also used The Other Side of the Wind to swat the swarms of film buffs, students, and historians who had come armed with their obtrusive tape recorders and cameras – the people referred to as “spooks” by Hannaford’s leathery entourage, played by a once-in-a-lifetime ensemble of great character actors: Mercedes McCambridge, Edmond O’Brien, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Tonio Selwart, and Norman Foster.
This team is still standing by their man, even though we see Hannaford when more than his career is at its end – it’s actually the last day of his life, and the man is broke, about to lose his house, and unable to find backing for a film he’s been making up as he goes along, which he calls The Other Side of the Wind. He’s celebrating his birthday at a party on which a horde of spooks have descended, and they document their hero as he gets increasingly drunk and screens footage from his doomed comeback project. That film and how it’s shown and who Hannaford is ¬ all point directly to Nicholas Ray and his final film We Can’t Go Home Again.
* * *
Nicholas Ray probably got on Welles’ Shit List right at the start of his Hollywood career in 1947, because Ray’s first film, They Live by Night, was produced by John Houseman. (On Dangerous Ground, which Ray made four years later, was also a Houseman production.) Welles had banished Houseman from the Mercury Theater in a rage back in 1939; almost thirty years later, he grumbled to Peter Bogdanovich, “Let’s not talk about Houseman; I want to enjoy the afternoon, and he’s one of the few subjects that depresses me so deeply that it really spoils my day to think of him.” The producer and writer of Ray’s second film, A Woman’s Secret, was Houseman’s friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-authored the screenplay of Citizen Kane – and who subsequently called Welles a “juvenile delinquent credit stealer.” Ray’s emergence with these two men would only have sealed Welles’ estimate of him as a lightweight reliant upon patrons who badmouth Orson Welles.
Ray’s reputation as a director, however, ignited in France over the 1950s with such films as In a Lonely Place, The Lusty Men, Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause. Jean-Luc Godard, then just beginning to make films, summed up the esteem when he declared in a 1957 review, “the cinema is Nicholas Ray.” The following year three French film critics interviewed Welles and told him that Ray and Robert Aldrich were “seen as your disciples.” Welles claimed ignorance of Aldrich and dismissed Ray: “I have seen some things by Nicholas Ray but I didn’t find them interesting. I left the cinema after four reels of Rebel Without a Cause. I get angry just thinking about that film.”
By then Welles was already developing The Other Side of the Wind. Calling it The Sacred Beasts, he was employing a bullfighting angle and using Ernest Hemingway as the principal model for the aging macho director. Another component of Hannaford’s profile, however, presented itself to Welles in 1961, when he recorded Ray Bradbury’s narration for King of Kings. Nicholas Ray was that film’s director but had been taken off the production after completing principal photography in the autumn of 1960, before Welles was brought in; neither he nor Bradbury took credit for their work on the film. But beyond whatever stories about Ray, which Welles would have heard from people still attached to King of Kings, he had now participated in the making of something the French critics would call a Nicholas Ray film, and there had been no Nicholas Ray at all.
Over the 1960s this empty-suit quality came to define Hannaford for Welles, even as he fleshed out a backstory and career profile for the character, working on the script with Oja Kodar, who would also act in The Other Side of the Wind. Production was underway by the summer of 1970, but Welles consistently shot around Hannaford, even filming the other halves of his dialogue scenes – knowing that continuity would be a non-issue because the man would be seen only in footage from the different cameras wielded by the spooks haunting his party. Welles could therefore take his time deciding whether John Huston or he himself would play Hannaford. Huston was of course a natural for the role, and as early as 1969 Welles raised the idea of his playing the part. Although Huston agreed at once, Welles still wasn’t ready to have him act in the film – not until 1974, some months after Nicholas Ray had his last hurrah at Cannes.
That event took place on the penultimate day of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, when Ray premiered his first film in ten years. Presented out of competition and as a work in progress, We Can’t Go Home Again was a startling trip even for Ray’s admirers – nothing in his career had prepared them for an avant-garde work made not by industry technicians but by the film’s own cast of non-professional college students. Ray employed different film stocks, sometimes projected simultaneously onto shifting areas of the larger frame; his narrative situations were fragmentary and scattered, and occasionally treated with distorting video effects. But those fragments included young lovers and college radicals and Ray dressed as Santa Claus, along with moments of the riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention and some frames of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Jane Fonda. For his audience at Cannes, Ray clearly had his heart in the right place, and he was received as a beloved master – although not so beloved as to attract any serious financing to complete his film.
At the time of the May 1973 Cannes Film Festival, Welles was in France editing F for Fake; in June he was joined by cameraman Gary Graver and they resumed shooting The Other Side of the Wind there. By early in 1974 the two were back in the States, filming Huston as Hannaford – who, as Welles was first to admit, was perfect casting. Beyond his own Hemingwayesque legend in Hollywood, Huston had become a sought-after character actor – he had given his iconic performance in Chinatown only a few months before – and he had the charisma and technique needed to hold the center of Welles’ film. Welles also benefited from Huston’s physicality with its casual threats of violence and sexual predation, two important aspects of Hannaford’s character. That physicality even included an unsettling leonine resemblance between Huston and Nicholas Ray (put an eye patch on Hannaford, you’ll see it…).
Throughout Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, Hannaford attempts to screen scenes from Hannaford’s The Other Side of the Wind, but his film suffers continuous interruptions. The screening-room projectionist announces that the projector has stopped working; he’s asked, “Which projector?” and answers, “Both of them.” It’s because the house’s generator has broken down. That unit is replaced but soon the spare gives out. Finally the partygoers have to go party at a nearby drive-in to see the rest of the film. There the projectionist is chided for getting the reels out of order, yet when he asks the film’s nominal writer, “Does it matter?” he receives the only honest reply: “It doesn’t matter at all.”
“In the course of the screening itself, there was hardly a three- or four-minute interval in which one of the projectors – four 16 millimeters and one Super 8 – did not break down, each time prompting Nicholas Ray to call ‘Cut. Cut,’ and to ask for a rewind.” So reported Vincent Canby in September of 1972, when The New York Times sent him to Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, where Ray was completing his two-year visiting professorship, making We Can’t Go Home Again with his students. “The showing was also meant to make use of a 35mm projector,” Canby added, “but one of the young technicians said that it certainly would blow a fuse.”
These mechanical furies continued to pursue Ray and his film. Helene Kaplan White worked on We Can’t Go Home Again, and she recounts in Susan Ray’s 2011 documentary Don’t Expect Too Much, “In order to raise money, we showed the film for, you know, somebody in New York. I mean, everything went wrong, you know? The projector wasn’t working, and things weren’t syncing.” Bill Krohn reported likewise for Cahiers du cinéma, describing an important New York screening of the film in autumn of 1974, with such Ray supporters as Houseman and Elia Kazan in attendance, as well as potential backers for the film’s completion. But after only a few minutes the projector broke down.
Canby’s article also described one scene he was able to see: “a fight in a swimming pool, between a boy and a girl in love and at loose ends, that is one of the toughest, most dolorous things he’s ever shot.” No such scene, however, occurs in the film shown in Cannes eight months later – which is the only version available today (although the film’s 2011 restoration/reconstruction utilizes Ray’s 1976 narration). About 35 minutes into the film, a boy and a girl are in a pool, seen in the frame’s center; but video treatments turn the people into visual abstractions, while electronic music on the soundtrack overwhelms any dialogue. If the original scene was one of Ray’s toughest and most dolorous, you’d never know it.
For Ray to take the one scene that found critical praise and render it unintelligible as drama or narrative points to an inner conflict: A self-destructive impulse is being externalized in his film. The same can be said of Jake Hannaford, shooting a love scene and so goading his leading man that the actor walks off the film stark naked. Films made under such an impulse tend to absorb their makers – literally. Or as Canby said of Ray, “It seems at times that he has disappeared into the chaotic world of the film itself.” But Ray kept working on We Can’t Go Home Again even as spooks pursued him to his dying days – vide Wim Wenders’ Lightning Over Water, with Ray’s final moment onscreen: ravaged by lung cancer, yelling “Cut” at Wenders’ relentless camera and microphone. Released in 1980, a year after Ray’s death, Lightning Over Water makes The Other Side of the Wind seem prophetic: “Cut” is Hannaford’s last word at the end of Welles and Kodar’s script – a line dropped in the released version of the film. Instead, the director is first seen when he calls “Cut” and leaves the studio, after which he too will disappear into the chaotic world of his film: fragmented and isolated by all the spooks’ cameras, driving off to his death as his voice bloviates from a spooky tape recorder over the final images from his footage: the collapse of an enormous inflated phallus, taken down by a woman armed with scissors.
She’s Oja Kodar, who is nameless and wordless in both Hannaford and Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind and credited only as “The Actress.” Hannaford shows her repeatedly with scissors in hand as she deals with the attractive young man who follows her: actor John Dale, played by Bob Random. He had been sent to Welles by Peter Bogdanovich, who found Random too sensitive-looking to be in The Last Picture Show, but thought him right for The Other Side of the Wind. He clearly was – “He looks like a girl,” gripes the studio exec when the film is pitched to him. Dale’s androgynous quality is brought out by Hannaford, who shows him always behaving passively with “The Actress” whom he doggedly follows. He does not even move when she starts to undress him and make love to him while they’re being driven in a car. We see Kodar with her scissors as she alternately tempts and eludes him; she is even on top of him – still wielding her shears – for the nasty scene that ends his participation in Hannaford’s film.
The director’s sexual fears are explicit in his imagery; so is his fixation on his male lead, whom he cannot bring himself to touch. Hannaford can however slap the female critic who dares call him on his own attraction to the leading men in his films – an attraction that he has lived out vicariously by seducing their women. Yet when he discovers that Dale first encountered him not by accident but in a deliberate effort to approach him, and that the young man has a past that opens him to being every bit as available as might be desired, all Hannaford can do is burst into brutal and desperate laughter. The closest he comes to acting on his feelings is when he grabs one of his rifles and shoots all the prop dummies made to look like his departed star.
Dale however has not yet broken with him. At sunrise, after almost everyone else at the party has either left or passed out, he shows up just as Hannaford is about to drive away for the last time. He offers his former leading man a lift but Dale refuses to get in the car, remaining as silent as he is in all of Hannaford’s footage, even as his director taunts him: “Chicken?” But Dale stays where he is because this is one pretty boy who isn’t chicken for Hannaford, at least not anymore. His eerie arrival at the end of a spook-filled party makes him the spectral guest, like Banquo’s ghost – or maybe Dale’s own, lost in an accident riding his motorcycle and now present to prepare Hannaford for the imminence of death.
Despite their similar names, John Dale is not James Dean; and in Welles’ reversal of the facts for the imagery of his film, it’s the director who gets racked up in a car crash, not the star. This situation of the sexually ambivalent young actor being directed by a repressed homosexual, however, is another factor connecting Hannaford with Ray. In 1977 on the television series “Camera Three,” Ray spoke of Rebel Without a Cause and “the bisexuality of Jim” and “the bisexuality of myself” while also insisting, “I am not bisexual.” That same year Ray told his film students at NYU, ”Homosexual was not in my vocabulary. Did I love and revere men more than women? I think I did.” Ray’s biographers Bernard Eisenschitz and Patrick McGilligan discuss how, when a student of architecture in 1934, he was ejected from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin school over what is believed to have been a homosexual incident; Wright later spoke scathingly of Ray as being homosexual. Houseman claimed the same cause for Ray’s dismissal from the Office of War Information in 1943: “In fact the ostensible reason was homosexuality.” Gore Vidal wrote that he saw Ray “rather openly having an affair with the adolescent Sal Mineo” at the Chateau Marmont when Ray was preparing Rebel. Gavin Lambert has written about his own affair with Ray.
Cahiers du cinéma writer Serge Daney described in his book Postcards from the Cinema what happened when he and Louis Skorecki praised Nicholas Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades in a conversation with director George Cukor: “Cukor started howling, the laugh of a mean and sour old lady, crying to the others, ‘Come here, come here! You know which film they like? Wind Across the Everglades! The film that Jack Warner didn’t even dare release!’” This mockery of Daney’s cherished auteur clearly stung, and his description of Cukor was his revenge – not that worse homophobic things hadn’t been said over the years about Cukor, who didn’t disguise or deny his sexuality.
An indictment of precisely this cruel brand of homophobia and misogyny and machismo, which we now term toxic masculinity, The Other Side of the Wind has a startling prescience about the America that would receive it in 2018, depicting neo-fascist hero worshippers attempting to prop up their decaying leader – and expressing their contempt for “The Actress” (whom they believe to be Native American) by calling her “Pocahontas.” With these gargoyles Welles had in mind the far-right entourage of John Ford’s fellow Irishmen, whose company led to such moments as Ford proclaiming “God bless Richard Nixon” at the first American Film Institute award ceremony in 1973. Nicholas Ray however was happy to drink and drug with his college collaborators on We Can’t Go Home Again, and his film celebrates anti-establishment agitators. By showing that Hannaford actually loathes the young radicals of his day – Edmond O’Brien cackles with repulsive glee as he reads his boss’s letter denouncing them – Welles is framing Hannaford’s movie as just a desperate attempt to cash in on a movement. “The old guys are trying to get with it,” sniffs producer Max David (Welles’ satire of Robert Evans), who will pass on the project. Hence Welles’ visual connection of Antonioni with Hannaford, likening Zabriskie Point to We Can’t Go Home Again as two of the many failed bids for the youth market, made by veteran directors in the late 1960s and early ‘70s (alongside such other fiascos as Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, George Seaton’s What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, Richard Brooks’ $, Stanley Kramer’s R.P.M., Robert Wise’s Two People, Henry Hathaway’s Hangup, etc.).
Chasing trends never works, because an audience is like a dog: You can’t run after it, it has to come to you. All that was coming to Welles by then, however, were spooks, so he made a film parodying the spooky siege. Joseph McBride has recounted how he came to Welles working on a book and wound up being cast as a spook named Mr. Pister. Instead of Orson Welles having to sit still for them, he made the spooks sit still for him – and then everyone could see what they actually understood about how films are made. By the same token, it was also inevitable that Peter Bogdanovich would replace Rich Little in the role of the spook who hit the Big Time as a director and is now ready to leave The Skipper behind, because that was Bogdanovich’s own trajectory, starting out by interviewing legendary directors and going on to helm the box-office hits What’s Up Doc? and Paper Moon.
You regain control of a skidding car by turning in the direction of the skid; in making The Other Side of the Wind, Welles was trying to grab the wheel of reality. Transforming his offscreen circumstances into onscreen fiction, he was not just protecting himself but vindicating himself and banishing a baneful presence too, the specter of the has-been, the unemployable relic, the martyr, the second of the Three Great Directors – Larry Fine to Griffith’s Moe and Ray’s Curly. So the closer Welles’ reality hewed to that of Nicholas Ray’s, the more vehement about Ray his film had to be. There plainly was something close for him, and all those critics linking his name with Ray’s had to have been the least of it. Hadn’t Welles wanted to play the Hannaford role? Didn’t he in fact play that role, insofar as he himself shot, “avec un masque” (as he’s seen telling Jeanne Moreau in the documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead), all the Hannaford footage seen in The Other Side of the Wind?
With We Can’t Go Home Again, Ray was quite literally throwing footage against the wall and seeing what stuck, because that was all he had to show people – the fragmentary, student-quality scenes he had been making up with his students and their equipment. With The Other Side of the Wind, Welles was demonstrating that it was possible to make a great film using different footage shot and recorded on an array of cameras and mics. And he could do it because he had been exploring this filmmaking technique since the early 1950s and Othello: creating drama by editing together actors from different shoots, generating purely filmic spaces, purely filmic relationships between characters. Portrait of Gina, his 1958 pitch for a TV series, is built on this technique, and he’d raised it to a fine art by the early 1970s and F for Fake.
Welles also demonstrated that a great film could be made up as it was filmed. And he could do it because he had been scripting this particular made-up film since the late 1950s. That foundation enabled him to exploit his limited resources and capture the appropriate spontaneous moments that presented themselves in the 1970s. And “privileged” doesn’t even begin to describe some of the scenes:
• Dan Tobin, who’d minced proudly as Katharine Hepburn’s secretary in Woman of the Year, finding himself squeezed in a homophobic vise by Hannaford and his followers;
• Norman Foster, an actor/director/writer since the 1930s and Welles’ co-director on Journey into Fear, stealing every scene he’s in as a diehard Hannaford stooge, struggling to stay off the bottle and held together by candy and marijuana until he topples off the wagon;
• John Carroll as a Hannaford crony leading the partygoers in the darkened house through an impromptu chorus of “The Glow-Worm.” Zorro in the 1930s serial, Carroll had been a romantic lead who also played straight for the Marx Brothers and Abbott & Costello in the ‘40s.
Providing a last hurrah for such performers is a further pleasure of The Other Side of the Wind. The gap in decades between the making of their scenes and viewing them today only adds poignancy, even to such camp moments as George Jessel, Toastmaster General of the United States, toasting Jake Hannaford on his birthday, or little person Angelo Rossitto, one of Tod Browning’s Freaks, delivering fireworks to the party and then giving “Pocahontas” a loaded rifle from Hannaford.
Welles loved these veteran players, even as the industry was writing them off as has-beens. He made The Other Side of the Wind in the same spirit that Chaplin made Limelight: to stare has-been status square in the eye. Yet he was unable to complete his film, just as Nicholas Ray couldn’t complete We Can’t Go Home Again. Both men left the planet with their work unfinished, obliging their loyalists to struggle over their films for decades until versions could be finalized in the 2010s.
Once Hollywood’s support vanishes, it doesn’t come back. And the fact is, Welles’ American career hit the skids years before Ray’s did – after he filmed Touch of Evil in 1957, no one in Hollywood ever hired him to direct again. That same year Ray was fired from Wind Across the Everglades, but at least he managed to bounce back and direct two more pictures before being removed from King of Kings. The end came in 1963, when Ray departed the set of 55 Days at Peking in the midst of filming and under murky circumstances: perhaps a coronary incident of some kind, perhaps a dismissal with an ambulance deployed for a cover story. But the fact remained, no one wanted to bring him back. Or hire him to do anything else.
It was the third and final blow to Ray’s Hollywood career. James Dean’s death had been the second, putting an end to the projects they had envisioned after Rebel Without a Cause. The first great disaster for Ray had been the scandal that ended his marriage to Gloria Grahame in 1951: Ray caught her in the act with his 13-year-old son Anthony (from his first marriage to writer Jean Evans). Grahame and Ray divorced the following year; she married Anthony Ray in 1960 and divorced him in 1974. In The Other Side of the Wind, Paul Mazursky appears among the up-and-comers present at Hannaford’s party. According to Mazursky, Welles specifically sought him out to be in the film and greeted him on the set with, “Ho, ho, ho, Paul Mazursky! Come in! Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice – wonderful! Wonderful! I can’t tell you how happy I am that you came to my party.” The AD on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice – and on the film Mazursky was then completing, Alex in Wonderland – was Gloria Grahame’s husband Anthony Ray.
* * *
The Other Side of the Wind was an exorcism for Welles, an attempt to rid himself of the specter of failure and outsider – personified for him by Nicholas Ray. So he did what Ray had done, only better. Yet despite the extensive commentary written about The Other Side of the Wind, the connection between Jake Hannaford and Nicholas Ray has gone unacknowledged, perhaps because so many Wellesians – among them, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Patrick McGilligan – are also serious Ray enthusiasts. But then, The Other Side of the Wind was met in the States mostly with incomprehension and indifference upon its limited theatrical release in 2018. The critical responses – “mangled corpse,” “train wreck,” “an exhausted movie,” “a plane of tedium,” etc. – fall under the category of More Of The Same, pretty much on a par with the incomprehension and indifference that met Touch of Evil and The Trial. Even the uniqueness of this film was overlooked: an unprecedented convergence of talent in a deeply personal work by one of the great filmmakers – and a project over forty years in the making, painstakingly rescued from oblivion. The film’s narrative structure is equally unique, a director’s film footage intercut with the shambles of his life, seen only through a multitude of other people’s cameras.
No other film can be justly compared to The Other Side of the Wind – there has simply never been anything like it. For an American filmmaker, whose career began in the 1940s, to be the author of such a work in the 21st century – more than thirty years after his own demise! – would seem to indicate, even to the uninitiated, an accomplishment worthy of respect. It is possible that, the film being such a harsh and sweeping denunciation of the American film industry, commentators felt stung by the slap and were provoked to attack what they’d seen. But the more likely reality is that deadened sensibilities feel no slaps, and the interest and awareness simply were not there in the first place. This insensibility is one more facet of contemporary American life revealed by Orson Welles and The Other Side of the Wind.
SOURCES
“the gift of the unexpected letdown,” page 1
Gore Vidal, “Remembering Orson Welles.” The New York Review of Books, 1 June 1989
“Let’s not talk about Houseman,” page 4
Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. New York: HarperCollins, 1992, p. 176
“juvenile delinquent credit stealer,” page 4
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. New York: Knopf, 1996, p. 154
“the cinema is Nicholas Ray,” page 5
Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du cinéma. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1985, pp. 118–119
“seen as your disciples,” page 5
André Bazin, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi, “Interview with Orson Welles II” in Orson Welles Interviews, Mark W. Estrin, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002, p. 75
“In the course of the screening itself,” page 9
Vincent Canby, “Nicholas Ray: Still A Rebel With a Cause” in The New York Times, 24 September 1972
“a fight in a swimming pool,” page 10
Canby, The New York Times
“It seems at times that he has disappeared,” page 11
Canby, The New York Times
“Cut,” page 11
Orson Welles and Oja Kodar, The Other Side of the Wind: Screenplay. Locarno and Munich: Cahiers du cinéma – Festival International du Film de Locarno, 2005, p. 208
“the bisexuality of Jim,” page 14
“Profile of Nicholas Ray,” “Camera Three,” 1977
”Homosexual was not in my vocabulary,” page 14
Nicholas Ray, “I Hate to Bore People…” in I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies, Susan Ray, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 24
“In fact the ostensible reason,” page 14
John Houseman, Front and Center. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 78
“rather openly having an affair,” page 14
Gore Vidal, Palimpsest. New York: Penguin Random House, p. 278
“Cukor started howling,” page 15
Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema. Berg, 2007, p. 76
“God bless Richard Nixon,” page 15
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford. St. Martin’s, 2001, p. 711
“Ho, ho, ho, Paul Mazursky,” page 21
Josh Karp, Orson Welles’s Last Movie. New York: St. Martin’s, 2015, pp. 78–79
“mangled corpse,” page 22
Film Journal International, November 2018
“train wreck,” page 22
TheDailyBeast.com, 1 March 2019
“an exhausted movie,” page 22
Slate.com, 1 November 2018
“a plane of tedium,” page 22
The Guardian, 31 August 2018
(Nicole V. Gagné is the co-author of Soundpieces: Interviews With American Composers (1982) and author of Sonic Transports (1990), Soundpieces 2 (1994), and Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music (2019). She is also the librettist and co-composer of the opera Agamemnon and has written on film for Film Journal International, Cineaste, Brutarian, and fandor.com.)
“Orson Welles and the Other Side of Nicholas Ray or Johnny Got His Guitar”; copyright © 2022 by Nicole V. Gagné
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