By RAY KELLY
In 2006, Joseph McBride published “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career,” his third book on the late filmmaker with a critical look at the projects undertaken in his final decades.
McBride was the ideal choice for such an undertaking, having worked on Welles’ last major project, The Other Side of the Wind, from its first day of shooting in August 1970 and lobbying for its completion after Welles’ death in 1985. His determination to set the record straight on Welles’ work — beginning with his “Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael” (Film Heritage, fall 1971) and more recently “Mank and the Ghost of Christmas Future” (Wellesnet.com, November 2020) — has earned him the respect of Welles enthusiasts.
Given the completion of The Other Side of the Wind and unearthing of other Welles work, McBride was asked by University Press of Kentucky to update his book for a paperback edition. It is set for publication on January 11.
From his home in Berkeley, California, McBride discussed “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?”
While preparing for this interview, it occurred to me that I first spoke with you 15 years ago for a newspaper article on “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?” In that conversation, you noted that Welles was dogged in his final years (and beyond) by accusations that he was a profligate filmmaker crippled by a fear of completion. Has his reputation improved since then?
This book was hard to write. It took five years of outlining and writing to encompass Welles’s wide-ranging career in a reasonably “short” book that combines critical study with memoir (I admire but don’t envy Simon Callow with his ongoing Welles biography of epic length). My first goal was to correct the mistaken impression the American public has that Welles was a failure after Citizen Kane and that he wasted his final years doing TV commercials, eating, and drinking. All of that is factually untrue and a ridiculous caricature reflecting American disdain for independent artists. As I told the untold story of his prolific last fifteen years in the U.S., when I knew him and he was constantly making films, I realized I had to go back in his life and revisit his entire career to show how and why he was always an independent filmmaker before that term was in vogue and how he wound up making films entirely independently.
I think since my book came out, and time has elapsed, people are able to see his career in greater perspective, as a rich and daringly individual body of work from beginning to end. I am happy that younger viewers, unlike many baby boomers, don’t get bothered by Welles making TV commercials and acting in lousy films to pay for his own independent films (my son reacted to his infamous audiotape of making his peas commercial by admiringly calling Welles a “badass”). And I think the greater respect paid to independent filmmaking today has raised our awareness of what a groundbreaker and exemplary figure Welles always was. The “fear of completion” myth has been partly put to rest by the belated emergence of “The Other Side of the Wind” and other long-unseen Welles films and by our knowledge of many others that still remain to be widely seen, whether completed or not, an issue that seems relatively unimportant in the overall scheme of things.
Unlike most Welles authors, you had the opportunity to watch Welles at work on multiple occasions over a period of years. What is the biggest misconception most people have about him?
The biggest misconception about Welles the man was that he was a dour figure, an ogre, an intimidating bully. That is the impression fostered by almost every film and TV show that portrays him as a character. But it’s far from the truth. He was a constantly entertaining director who made his actors’ lives pleasant by telling stories and jokes and even singing songs, although he did treat his young crews roughly at times, becoming impatient with their imperfections. But anyone who was treated that way by Welles (as I was to some extent because I was a non-actor) understood and accepted it because we knew we were doing the best work of our lives, and he was so much fun to be around. My face used to hurt from laughing so much on our 18-hour shooting days.
The biggest misconception about him professionally, and it’s a damaging and still unfortunately widespread one, is that he was a profligate filmmaker who wasted money and couldn’t finish his films. Charlton Heston, who starred in Touch of Evil, said Welles was the most efficient director he ever worked with, and I witnessed that for five years while working on The Other Side of the Wind. The reasons he had trouble completing films were many, mostly having to do with the quality we value him for today, his independence, using mostly his own money to make films the way he wanted and without interference. That is not the commercial way to make films in the U.S., and as Jean Renoir put it, Welles was an aristocrat working in a popular medium. I discuss in “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?” the problems that paradox caused him as well as the many enduring works of art that resulted.
Your book makes a compelling case that a contributing factor to Welles’ decision to leave the United States in the late 1940s was that he feared he would be called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). How much did his progressive politics hinder his career?
Not many people realize Welles was blacklisted or “graylisted,” since he wasn’t called before HUAC, but if you read the evidence in my book, you will see that was the principal reason he left the country in the fall of 1947 for a long European exile. He was what was called, with unconscious irony, a “premature anti-fascist”; the FBI, which had been following him since he offended William Randolph Hearst in 1941 with Kane, tried to find that Welles was a Communist, but he never was. His exile hindered his career in the sense that he couldn’t work in Hollywood, but his stock as a director there was low when he left. So I see his European period as a time of daring experimentation — both in unusual independent features, such as Othello, Mr. Arkadin, The Trial, and his masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight — and in fascinatingly unconventional documentaries, mostly for British television. He continued on the fertile path toward non-studio, on-location filmmaking he had begun with his unfinished documentary It’s All True in 1942, and it was the path he followed for most of his remaining career, including after he made Los Angeles his base again from 1970 onward.
Looking back over the past decade, I am not sure what is more amazing: the discovery of the long-lost Too Much Johnson or the completion of The Other Side of the Wind. Both are addressed in your new epilogue. Can you share a bit of what it was like for you as a historian to finally see Too Much Johnson and for you as participant in The Other Side of the Wind to witness its completion?
Naturally as a longtime participant in Other Wind, as an actor/writer for five years (1970-76) and as someone who tried for years to raise end money for that troubled production and finally served as a consultant on its completion, I was thrilled to see this dream project finally realized by a brilliant team of filmmakers who faithfully carried out Welles’s vision in 2018, with the generous support of Netflix. I was even more thrilled to find that the film is better than I had imagined, since I had not seen all the footage and had not realized while working on it how great some of the performances are. It is a fully achieved late Welles masterwork. And what a miracle it was when his early, pre-Kane film Too Much Johnson was rediscovered in a warehouse in Italy in 2005 by a cinephile who unfortunately did not live to see it fully identified and finally released, Mario Catto.
That playful 1938 silent film, never completely edited by Welles, is a delightful narrative of scenes taking full advantage of natural New York locations, silent comedy techniques, and some truly hair-raising stunts by the dashing young Joseph Cotten. Too Much Johnson fills a key gap in our understanding of how savvy about filmmaking Welles actually was when he made Kane at twenty-four in 1940-41. For the new edition of “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?” (also its first in paperback), I was able to update it to comment extensively on the final form of Other Wind and the rediscovered treasure of Too Much Johnson.
When “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?” first came out, it was almost impossible for most people to see later period films like Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story or Filming Othello. Is the Welles canon as fully available as you would like?
Thanks to Criterion and other home video companies, numerous Welles films, including the ones you mention, have been reissued in sparkling DVD and Blu-ray editions for all to see. Other Welles films have been restored, including narrative features and documentaries and TV shows, and are now available for us to enjoy and study. It is a boon to scholarship that so much of his cornucopia-like body of work keeps pouring out. As I write in the book, his career is far from over. There still exists a considerable body of film footage that has not been made widely available.
That includes the holdings of the Munich Film Museum, which has most of his unfinished late work and has made assemblies of some of it for showing at archives and festivals, including such beautiful work as The Dreamers, Orson Welles’ Magic Show, and The Merchant of Venice. I wrote my book partly to call attention to and describe that wealth of material, which I hope will be released on home video.
There also exists his longtime labor of love Don Quixote, which is scattered in various European archives and needs a team to bring it all together in a way befitting Welles’s artistry. But I unfortunately am not available for another 48-year job, as I was on The Other Side of the Wind. Some younger cinephiles will need to take up the torch.
(Joseph McBride is a professor in San Francisco State University’s Cinema Department, former writer for Daily Variety and author of 23 books. His books include “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge (Columbia University Press) and “Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy” (Hightower Press). “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career” is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and University Press of Kentucky.)
Related content
Before the Beginning and After the End: Insider’s Look at the Saga of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’
Mank and the Ghost of Christmas Future
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