TWO BY TWO (Welles's Noah Film)

[Le Chiffre]

With the new Noah's Ark film with Russell Crowe coming out soon, it might be a good time to revisit Orson Welles's own plans for a Noah film in the early 1950's:

From Jonathon Rosenbaum's chronology of Welles's career at the back of THIS IS ORSON WELLES:

TWO BY TWO. A modern retelling of the story of Noah, also written for Korda. OW to PB: "I wrote a book, a movie script and a musical play - sort of comic fantasy on the flood. They're all on the short side. If the world was indeed, as we're told in the Bible, consumed by flood, then obviously we can't imagine what anything on Earth was like before everything was destroyed. So why not assume that the world was just like it is now? That's the premise. Noah - in a world just like ours, is living in a DP camp. He's a nice old drunk whom God happens to take a shine to."

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From ORSON WELLES IN ITALY:



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Finally, here's a beautiful little animated short, with Welles narrating the story of Noah's Ark for the Genesis Project, a religion-based distribution company from New York:
https://vimeo.com/89216155

[Le Chiffre]

Something interesting I didn't know before: apparently around 1970 Danny Kaye starred on Broadway in a musical based on Noah's Ark with the same title as the Welles project, TWO BY TWO. And like Welles's ill-fated KING LEAR stage production, Kaye broke his ankle early into the play's run, and wound up doing a lot of vaudevillian adlibs from his wheelchair, to a mixed reaction. The musical was based on an early 50's play by Clifford Odetts called THE FLOWERING PEACH.

[RayKelly]

In the recent Wellesnet interview, Beatrice Welles said she found a copy of the script for "Two By Two," as well as many other projects.

[Le Chiffre]

That's great news. Hopefully they'll publish it sometime; I'd love to read Welles's take on the story. I found the new Noah film by Aranovsky to be somewhat bewildering, although there are some spectacular things in it. It certainly has caused plenty of debate among critics and various other pundits and scholars.