By RAY KELLY
The story surrounding a little known, and unfilmed, Orson Welles screenplay will be explained at a forthcoming literary conference in London.
Matthew Asprey Gear will deliver his paper, Surinam: Orson Welles’s Unproduced Victory Screenplay, at the Joseph Conrad Society Conference at the University Women’s Club at Mayfair on Sunday, July 7.
Surinam was prepared by Welles in 1973 as a project for The Directors Company, led by Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin. If produced, the movie would have been distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Gear, who penned the books At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City and Moseby Confidential: Arthur Penn’s Night Moves and the Rise of Neo-Noir, conducted extensive new research into the screenplay.
He combed through the various Surinam drafts and related notes found in the Welles archives at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s Bibliomediateca in Turin, Italy, and the University of Michigan Library Special Collections in Ann Arbor.
Wellesnet chatted briefly with Gear about his research:
When did you begin researching Welles’ adaptation of Victory?
I first read drafts of the Victory/Surinam screenplay at the University of Michigan in early 2014. The screenplay was certainly intriguing, but I had not yet read Conrad’s novel and wasn’t in a position to assess Welles’s engagement with the source material. Ultimately Victory/Surinam was not relevant to the scope of my book At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City, so I put it aside.
In the summer of 2018, I was at another Welles archive at the Museo Nazionale Del Cinema in Turin. I had a chance to look through another pile of hand-annotated and photocopied drafts of Victory/Surinam. By now I’d read the novel, and I realised that this project was another unmapped territory in the vast landscape of Orson Welles’s imagination.
I decided to write a comprehensive essay looking at Welles’s Conrad adaptations — Heart of Darkness for radio and screen, Victory/Surinam, and his wonderful abridged audiobook of The Secret Sharer.
What drew you to Surinam?
I hoped to emerge with a better understanding of Conrad’s influence on Welles as an artist. Adaptation was Welles’s most intensive way of reading — and often personalising — his favourite books. Conrad was in that select group of writers (including Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Isak Dinesen) with whom Welles felt a particularly close imaginative affinity. He returned to their works repeatedly throughout his life.
And beyond that, my research on Victory/Surinam is part of the ongoing effort by scholars to unravel the mysteries of Welles’s later career. 1973 is a fascinating transitional year. It seems he spent much of that year on hiatus in Europe. He had completed F for Fake and was waiting to resume production of The Other Side of the Wind in the USA. But of course he couldn’t sit still! He began writing a new batch of screen stories in collaboration with Oja Kodar. In addition to Victory/Surinam (written in the spring), they also sketched out projects that were never made including Crazy Weather and another with a variety of titles including Blind Window, House Party, and Mercedes.
How close did Surinam come to becoming produced?
Victory/Surinam came close to being produced at Paramount through The Directors Company — founded by Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin. But there were unexpected problems with the property because the novel was still under copyright. And then the Directors Company folded.
Joseph McBride called Victory/Surinam “one of Welles’s least dynamic screenplays” but I respectfully disagree. Welles was clearly writing with the bounds of a modestly budgeted production with a minimum of sets and characters, and he kept cutting it down until he found the core of the drama. What seems to be the latest extant draft screenplay restricts itself entirely to the novel’s second half set on a remote island. There are some moments which recall both Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai. I think it would have been a great movie.
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Gear was kind enough to provide the abstract for his paper. It reads:
“I think I’m made for Conrad,” Orson Welles once said. Throughout his life he turned repeatedly to Conrad for source material. He directed Heart of Darkness for radio and narrated an audiobook of ‘The Secret Sharer’ shortly before his death. He had less luck in the movie business; none of his planned Conrad films ever went beyond pre-production. This fact has obscured the central importance of Conrad to his work. While his Heart of Darkness screenplay has been explored by scholars, and his script for Lord Jim is lost, multiple drafts of Welles’s little-known adaptation of Victory have survived.
Welles’s attraction to Victory seems inevitable, as it refracts the motifs of a number of his most important literary touchstones. The novel is a version of Treasure Island in which the treasure is a mere rumour invented by a bitter colonial Iago, and also a grimly ironic version of The Tempest. Welles had reimagined those stories on the screen before.
Under a production deal with Paramount Pictures, Welles worked on his Victory screenplay in the spring of 1973. His final 131-page draft, titled Surinam, moved the historical setting forward into the 1920s and swapped Conrad’s Java for a Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Probably to accommodate a relatively small Hollywood budget, Surinam restricts itself entirely to the novel’s action-filled second half and features a mere six characters (with some incidental cameos). The result is something close to a Wellesian Straw Dogs, a lean and suspenseful siege narrative depicting a peaceful couple terrorised by the threat of rape and murder. The production was cancelled due to copyright complications.
This paper, based on extensive research of primary sources from the Welles archives at the University of Michigan and Italy’s National Film Museum in Turin, comprehensively explains the preproduction history of this little-known project, critically examines the adapted screenplay, and reassesses Conrad’s central influence on Welles’s work.
Victory has been adapted for the screen several times, including a 1919 silent version featuring Jack Holt and Lon Chaney, Sr; Dangerous Paradise in 1930 with Nancy Carroll and Warner Oland; the 1940 remake with Fredric March; and , more recently, a 1995 version with Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill.
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