By RAY KELLY
The seldom seen Orson Welles comedic play The Unthinking Lobster — published only in France as Miracle a Hollywood in 1952 — has been resurrected in Italy 70 years later.
Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Giagni recently translated the French book, adding his own notes on the satire of Hollywood’s religious epics, as well as a look at Welles work in the theater. Giagni’s 176-page Miracolo a Hollywood is slated to arrive in bookstores in Italy on October 25. He is best known to Wellesians as the co-director with the late Ciro Giorgini of the documentary Rosabella: La storia italiana di Orson Welles, which examined Welles’ work in Italy.
“I was curious to read the play and I found the French edition in a Roman library,” Giagni told Wellesnet. “It’s a very funny and sarcastic play, Welles makes fun of Hollywood establishment — producers, actors, Hedda Hopper, Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar, Cardinal (Francis) Spellman and Roberto Rossellini too — but above all it’s a text that speaks of fake and truth.”
He added, “Little has been known about The Unthinking Lobster, except the plot told by Orson Welles.”
In This is Orson Welles, Welles told biographer Peter Bogdanovich, “The Unthinking Lobster takes place in Hollywood while the town is in the grip of a cycle of religious movies. On one set an Italian neorealist is making the story of a saint like Bernadette who worked miracles and cured the sick. He has just fired the star and replaced her with a secretary from the typists’ pool because she seems to have a more spiritual quality. As it turns out, he’s only too right. The scene they’re shooting has a lot of cripples in it, and the Italian has insisted that, in the interest of believability, on the first day they must be real. So a lot of malformed, miserable people are brought in by the casting department. She blesses them and — behold! — they throw away their crutches — they are cured! She is a saint. So Hollywood becomes the new Lourdes. People go on their knees through the gates of MGM. Little pieces of film are sold as holy amulets… Except for the trade in sacred relics, business is terrible. The industry is only saved by the arrival of an archangel who goes into a conference with the studio heads, and makes a deal with them: heaven is prepared to suspend any further miracles in Hollywood if, in exchange, Hollywood stop making religious pictures.”
According to Giagni, the prestigious Italian publishing house Sellerio was eager to bring Miracolo a Hollywood to a new generation of readers.
Miracolo a Hollywood is available online at sellerio.it/it/catalogo/Miracolo-Hollywood/Welles/14365 It is also available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon in Italy at amazon.it/Miracolo-Hollywood-Orson-Welles-ebook/dp/B0BHL248YK/
There is no word on an English translation. A script is housed in the Welles collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The Unthinking Lobster premiered in Paris with Suzanne Cloutier, Hilton Edwards and Frederic O’Brady. Later, it had a brief run in West Germany.
A fragment of footage of The Miracle of St. Anne, included in Welles’ theatrical production, survives in the UCLA film archives
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