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Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 9:16 am
by Roger Ryan
Tony - You're not the only one to see the similarities between Welles and Brian Wilson. I spend a great deal of time over at www.smileysmile.net discussing Wilson and "SMiLE" and all, and I'm amazed at how many times Welles or one of Welles' projects comes up in discussion.
There's more than enough heated opinions on other sites concerning Wilson's involvement in the 2004 "SMiLE", so I won't go into here (okay, just a little...for me, the fact that Brian told Peter Reums back in '81 that he envisioned "SMiLE" as a three-movement piece, that he recalled from memory the lost melody line to "Do You Like Worms?" and that he personally called Van Dyke Parks in to assist in completing the work is enough to convince me that Wilson was an active participant in finishing "SMiLE", although I give a huge amount of credit to Darian and Parks as well. It's as "finished" as anything's going to be 40 years after its original conception and it exceeded my expectations).
While I agree with you that "Pet Sounds" is Wilson's "Citizen Kane" (how could it not be?), I think "The Other Side Of The Wind" is more comparable to "SMiLE" than "Ambersons" would be, if only for its rather psychedelic experimentation with different film stock and interchangeable snippets. Unlike "Ambersons", TOSOTW remains an enigma as to how Welles wanted it put together.
Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 2:45 am
by tony
Roger: I think Kane is closer to Smile; kind of a mosaic; and PS is closer to Ambersons, with it's melancholy and sadness.
Someone said it's like Welles produced his modernistic piece before his classical piece.
As for Smile, my view simply is that Wilson is too damaged to have done any substantial work on "Smile 2004": I saw him perform both Pet Sounds with orchestra and Smile with band and Stockholm Stings; he was interviewed in Toronto just before the concert, and I have the DVD: I studied all these sources closely, and my opinion is that Melinda just forced him out to tour and record; in no way should this guy eon the road, travelling the world. Mark and Darian loaded all his 66-67 tracks into computers and sequenced it; he did remember that one line from DYLW, and Parks dropped in one afternoon to contribute a couple of lines; the band learned it, copied the original tracks as closely as possible, and they recorded it. Brian's voice is heavily massaged, because beleive me, the guy cannot hold a note, let alone sing a melody; I was with 2 friends at the concert, and we were appalled: he simply should be left alone to watch tv, but I think he has a very ambitious wife. You know, Smile for me will always be what Brian Wilson recorded up until he had the total nervous breakdown around April/May of 1967; after that, he was weakened in a way, a mental and emotional way, that Orson Welles never was. It seems to me Welles was more fragile than we perhaps know, and far more sensitive (I remember him telling Bogdanovich, I think it was, that he liked to think he had no enemeies except John Houseman.) But Welles was always together (except when he freaked out and disappeared, or got angry, etc., something that Wilson was known to do also). Wilson gave "normal" inteviews until 72 or so, but after that his damage was so serious that he became seriously mentally ill, and has remained so until now. But Welles could be "crazy", unpredictable, self-destructive, angry, explosive, rude, etc. but he could never be called mentally ill. Another difference is that Welles was always an aristocratic artist, and Wilson never was. However Welles was also a populist, and so was Wilson, and both had about 5 years of trmendous popularity followed by decades of relative failure compared to the forces they once were. The big difference remains always, in my mind, that one lost his mind, and the other kept his: the huge difference.
Anyways- those are my ramblings on the Wilson-Welles American dyptich: as Bazin said, Kane and Ambersons are Welles's great dyptich: and certainly Pet Sounds and Smile are Wilson's great dyptich: and all four works were composed by the time the fellows were 26.
Jeesh! :p
Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 3:28 pm
by Roger Ryan
I was afraid the thread would turn into this!
The case of Brian Wilson is a very complicated one. He has never been a particularly confident or powerful performer (even in his heyday of the 60s) and he will never approximate the kind of "normal" behavior that most fans and the media seem to demand of him. By putting these two elements at the forefront of any discussion of his work, the man's artistry is discarded.
You are correct that Wilson continues to battle with mental illness (a fairly extreme bi-polar disorder) as he has almost all of his life. Years of inappropriate treatment and drug abuse (both prescribed and not) have taken their toll, but Wilson remains resilient and capable of quality work. "SMiLE" is the album everyone wanted him to finish even if he didn't really want to. Yes, his wife and manager call the shots from a project standpoint, but "force" is too strong a word. Wilson simply won't do, or won't do well, anything that he doesn't have some interest in. "SMiLE" was resurrected as a concert performance with the idea of simply finding a way to compile the material in a live setting. Therefore, it's logical that Darian Sahanaja (Wilson's live musical director) would collaborate with him. At the point where Wilson decides on his own to bring in Van Dyke Parks is when Wilson decides that "SMiLE" as a project needs to be completed and that is an artistic decision that only he could make.
I disagree with your assertion that Wilson is incapable of singing well. I've attended a number of his concerts over the last 7 years and believe his live vocals have improved with each tour. He is still an inconsistent vocalist even within a single concert, but his two "SMiLE" performances in Detroit found him delivering better lead vocals for the most part than what appeared on the album version with its studio trickery to smooth the rough edges. Wilson will never sound like a 23 year-old again, but I think he sounds pretty decent for a 64 year-old and the sad thing is that Wilson's vocals actually require less auto-tune digital manipulation than many of the twenty-somethings who have top ten hits today.
Bringing this back on topic (!), isn't damning Wilson's latter day work because he is persumably incapable of living up to his "Pet Sounds" zenith the same as saying that Welles was incapable of delivery anything as good as "Citizen Kane" in his later years? Through age and circumstance the artist may be able to create something unique to his talents, but the project is dismissed by fans and critics alike because it doesn't resemble the thing that made us fall in love with the artist 40 years earlier. Wilson completing "SMiLE" in 2004 fashion suggests what might have happened if Welles completed "Don Quixote" as an essay film in the late 70s or early 80s. There would be those who would think that Welles blew it by not completing the work in the same way he intended to in the 60s. No matter how good the essay film would be, it would not be the true "Don Quixote" and therefore it would be inferior to a version of the film that had never been completed anyway!
If I may continue the comparison a little further, let me suggest that Wilson's 2005 Christmas album is like the studio picture Welles never agreed to make when he was 63. The deal was set up with a major label (Arista) where Clive Davis set the parameters as to which traditional carols Wilson would record. Sounds like an artistically stifling deal, doesn't it? Except that Wilson turns around and invents some truly unique arrangements for the material and delivers one of the best produced albums of his career. Of course, it's an easy album to ignore as it's not a "major artistic statement", but a degree of welcomed artistry is still there.
It probably would have been wrong for Welles to abandon his maverick status, but part of me would have loved to see another one or two formula studio pictures directed by the man just so I could revel in the small exhibition of his talent.
Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 4:20 pm
by tony
Roger: we can agree to stop here as we've both outlined our positions, and I agree with most of what you say. I bought the Christmas album as you did, we seem to both be knowledgable fans, and we agree that there are remarkable similarities between Wilson and Welles. I would add, though, just as a final comment of mine, that I believe a huge difference between the generations is the relative ignorance of Wilson's generation (and of suceeding generations) of literature, music, art, history, civics, science, etc.: having been born in 1942, Wilson was 6 when TV came in, and his was the first TV generation. In addition, he was 25 when the whole drug scene entered the music profession and culture, and Welles's generation was the last to not have TV and the whole drug scene; I've always felt Welles didn't have these enticements (not to mention the whole sexual revolution) to screw him up. Goodness knows Welles was also an addictive and excessive personality, and might have succumbed to the seductions of the 60s and 70s had he not been older. :;):
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 12:15 am
by Le Chiffre
How do you know he didn't, Tony? His TOSOTW crew reportedly consisted largely of young people (hippies?) who were probably doobing it up on the set, according to this eyewitness account. I've always wondered if they ever got Welles to partake...
You guys have made me want to dig out of storage my VHS copy of the THEREMIN docu, just so I can see Brian Wilson's infamous, borderline insane "Children of God" ramblings. Wilson lived just a couple of miles from me for quite a few years, but I was never a huge Beach Boys fan, so I never tried to meet him. If I had read your posts back then maybe I would have tried.
I think "The Other Side Of The Wind" is more comparable to "SMiLE" than "Ambersons" would be, if only for its rather psychedelic experimentation with different film stock and interchangeable snippets.
This reminds me of a what Harlan Kennedy said in Film Comment after watching the "Wind" footage from ONE MAN BAND:
"Thirty years after KANE, (Welles's) mind had moved on from epic poems to cryptogrammatic sonnets. Even THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND looks looks like a series of audiovisual shards and slivers contemptuous of fitting into a larger mosiac".
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 1:49 am
by tony
I've been wondering about TOSOTW: if they're really putting it together, what music could they use? Does anyone know if Welles ever specified the music he wanted?
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 2:07 am
by Kevin Loy
For that matter, does anyone know if they are looking for somebody to contribute a soundtrack? 
(just kidding, of course)
I assume that, given the little bit of piano music in the one "party" scene featured in One Man Band, Welles must have indicated some ideas of what he wanted to use (that is, if a soundtrack wasn't actually commissioned)
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 2:19 am
by ToddBaesen
The music for OSOTW is a very important question, since, as as we have seen in the case of IT'S ALL TRUE, nothing less that a first rate score will suffice, and particuarly in the case of OSOTW, the wrong score could easily ruin the entire effect Welles was intending for his movie.
Apparently, Welles would have asked Michel Legrand to score OSOTW, once it was completed, but who knows what Legrand would have come up with? It's quite possible Welles would have thrown it out if he was not happy with the music Legrand came up with. But if OSOTW is ever finished by Bogdanovich and friends for Showtime, it seems to me that Legrand should be the first person to be approached...
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 10:50 am
by Roger Ryan
mteal wrote:How do you know he didn't, Tony? His TOSOTW crew reportedly consisted largely of young people (hippies?) who were probably doobing it up on the set, according to this eyewitness account. I've always wondered if they ever got Welles to partake...
You guys have made me want to dig out of storage my VHS copy of the THEREMIN docu, just so I can see Brian Wilson's infamous, borderline insane "Children of God" ramblings. Wilson lived just a couple of miles from me for quite a few years, but I was never a huge Beach Boys fan, so I never tried to meet him. If I had read your posts back then maybe I would have tried.
I think "The Other Side Of The Wind" is more comparable to "SMiLE" than "Ambersons" would be, if only for its rather psychedelic experimentation with different film stock and interchangeable snippets.
This reminds me of a what Harlan Kennedy said in Film Comment after watching the "Wind" footage from ONE MAN BAND:
"Thirty years after KANE, (Welles's) mind had moved on from epic poems to cryptogrammatic sonnets. Even THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND looks looks like a series of audiovisual shards and slivers contemptuous of fitting into a larger mosiac".
I recall Welles talking about trying cocaine on Errol Flynn's yacht during the making of "The Lady From Shanghai". He claimed that he never tried it again, but could easily see giving his life over to the drug if he had another life to spare.
At the time Wilson was being interviewed for the theremin documentary he was coming off some extremely heavy psychotrophic drugs wrongly prescribed to him by the notorious psychotherapist Eugene Landy. Suffice to say, the footage captured Wilson at his most whacked-out state.
That eyewitness report from the set of TOSOTW is fascinating (who's the author?). It reminded me that during the "SMiLE" era Wilson would invite various friends into the recording studio for an informal party and tape the proceedings hoping for some improvised "moment" that could be incorporated into the album. Not dissimilar to what Welles was doing on TOSOTW.
Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 11:49 am
by Kevin Loy
ToddBaesen wrote:The music for OSOTW is a very important question, since, as as we have seen in the case of IT'S ALL TRUE, nothing less that a first rate score will suffice, and particuarly in the case of OSOTW, the wrong score could easily ruin the entire effect Welles was intending for his movie.
Apparently, Welles would have asked Michel Legrand to score OSOTW, once it was completed, but who knows what Legrand would have come up with? It's quite possible Welles would have thrown it out if he was not happy with the music Legrand came up with. But if OSOTW is ever finished by Bogdanovich and friends for Showtime, it seems to me that Legrand should be the first person to be approached...
I don't think the problem was that the soundtrack for "It's All True" was merely less than first-rate...but that it was decidedly less than fourth-rate. I think that a second-rate soundtrack is something that just kinda exists: it doesn't really enhance or detract from the picture. I'd say that, for as much as I love the film, "The Trial" has a second-rate soundtrack (for one thing, Welles used the ghostwritten 'Adagio in G Minor' by Albinoni too much), but I certainly don't think less of the film becuase of it. Still, I don't think it enhances the film the way that, say, the soundtrack to Kane does.
But "It's All True" boasts a mostly lousy soundtrack (as others have noted). The actual "samba" pieces aren't bad (and it is interesting to hear Welles contrast "samba" and "jazz" at one point, since this was several years before even Dizzy Gillespie's experiments with latin sounds), but most of the rest ranges from simply being unimaginative to deathly dull.
Outside of that one example and "The Lady From Shanghai", I think that Welles' films all boasted great soundtracks.
You are right, though: if a soundtrack has yet to be completed, they would need to find a good composer who could do a good job with this film. Legrand would be a good choice, if for no other reason than the fact that he worked on F For Fake.
Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 11:04 pm
by tony
I've sometimes wondered if Welles's deciding to use Albinoni and Satie in the 60s wasn't a case of economics rather than aesthetics, as those works are in the public domain.
Still, for Falstaff he used Francesco Lavagnino, and was going to use him again for Quixote in 1970, so...
Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 11:34 pm
by Kevin Loy
Is the Adagio in G Minor by "Albinoni" actually in the public domain? It has always been my understanding that the piece was basically ghost-written around a very small fragment (that might not have even been by Albinoni) by a musicologist in the 1900s...and that he might have secured copyright for it as well.
The Satie pieces, of course, were in the public domain...but the performances themselves were not.
Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 11:59 pm
by Le Chiffre
That eyewitness report from the set of TOSOTW is fascinating (who's the author?).
I don't know who that author was Roger, but I believe he may have written this companion piece too:
The last time I saw Orson Welles
The Last Time I Saw Orson Welles
Any Seeker of Truth, I believe, would like to think that once he's climbed to the Top of the Mountain, the words of wisdom so painfully attained at last are transmitted ceremoniously, with some sense of ritualistic human continuity of the spirit by a Wise Man who is happy to be of help.
It doesn't always happen that way.
My mentor was an alcoholic. Which is not to say he wasn't a good teacher. Every day for four years we had lunch in the same Mexican restaurant around the block from Warner Bros. in Toluca Lake. The food was good and under the circumstances not driving was good too. My mentor always had the same meal--something Mexican and three double vodkas.
One day, quite unexpectedly, we changed our habit. I had some black and white dupes that I needed to get made down in Hollywood, and my mentor liked the little Mexican restaurant across the street from Paramount where our sound editors worked. He and his wife were going through some stuff and I guess he didn't want to be alone at lunch, so we drove in together.
He drove. Which, believe it or not, was a Good Thing.
I dropped the work print off at the dupe lab and we went to lunch. By the second double vodka he was really on a roll, regaling me with hilarious stories about drunken lunches of the past. It wasn't the first time that it had occured to me that all film editors were drunks. There's something about sitting in a dark room all day, playing with pictures and sounds and making magic, and then having to protect your work from assholes and sharks that...wears...on you. All the Original Gangster editors I knew drank. Happily. It came with the territory.
We were on the cusp of the modern film era, however, so not only did my mentor drink but he also liked to pick himself up after, brighten himself up so to speak, illuminate the still-dingy recesses of his booze-besoddened brain, with cocaine as well. Before, during, and after the meal.
We took a longer lunch than usual, because it took time to make the black and white dupes. Nonetheless, dues had to be paid. There was work to be done, and he called for the check. He picked up the tab a lot. A great guy.
We had actually paid and were pushing our chairs back when my mentor glanced past me and his mouth fell agape:
"Oh my God!"
I turned and saw Orson Welles and two young studio types in suits gregariously blustering their way into the room, as though they had come to celebrate a three picture deal between the man who brought us Citizen Kane and Paramount Pictures. They sat at the table next to ours, a respectful distance away, and the waiter showed up immediately.
"We can't leave," my mentor said. "I love Orson Welles."
And so did I, of course. We ordered Mexican coffees, made a trip to the men's room, and settled in.
I literally remember nothing of what Orson Welles said to those two young executives. I was certainly drunk as the proverbial film editor after a bad preview, and my mentor must have been catatonic--vodka and tequila and coffee and the men's room for hours and hours.
My sense, however, of Orson Welles in action is acute. He was performing for those two guys. Selling them on whatever it was they thought they were selling him. He was flattering and bequiling, flirtatious and conspiratorial. And he included us, the obviously loopy film editors in the corner, in his performance.
The executives glanced over our way too from time to time, smiling in their snakey little supercilious way. I think we were all grateful to him, for allowing us to be up there, on top of his Olympus with him for a little bit, even if all he was actually doing was trying to hustle a picture out of Paramount.
My mentor was positively blissed out by the experience, but reluctantly, after three Mexican coffees et al, he agreed we needed to leave. The waiter had delivered two more bottles of good red wine to Orson's table, so it was obvious--if we didn't go we'd pass out.
Orson Welles reminded me of Charles Foster Kane himself, thunderingly creative in the back of that little Mexican resturant, and it was on electrical clouds of laughter and delight that we managed to find the door and, eventually, our car.
We went to pick up the dupes, had to wait a little bit, and then drove back down Melrose to drop them off at the sound editors on the Paramount lot.
We were two or three blocks away from the studio, and on the radio Mick Jagger was singing that great syncopated line "I saw her today at the reception...", when I glanced out of my window into a little side street with a Spanish name:
Halfway down the block was Orson Welles, leaning against a palm tree, puking lunch into the Hollywood gutter.
Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 2:28 am
by tony
Not that this resolves the copyright issue:
"Adagio in G minor is a piece arranged by Remo Giazotto based on the fragments of a Sonata in G minor for strings and organ, composed by Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni , which were found amongst the ruins of the old Dresden State Library which was bombed during World War II. It has been used in numerous films.
But his most famous work is his Adagio for Strings, which he didn't really write at all! The melody is sad but very beautiful and uplifting, and was used in the film Gallipoli. However, it turns out that Albinoni did not actually write the Adagio! Instead, it is a 'reconstructed' piece by Remo Giazotto, an Italian musicologist. Researching Albinoni's life and music in the 1940s, Giazotto found a small piece of music manuscript in the Dresden State Library (which was later bombed). Although it seemed to have been written by Albinoni, only the bass line and six bars of melody had survived. But from this small fragment, Giazotto reconstructed (or perhaps constructed) the entire piece which lasts nine minutes, and is now the most common piece to be connected with the name of Albinoni by modern audiences. So very little of the famous 'Albinoni Adagio' is actually the composer's.
Remo Giazotto
(born in Rome, Italy in 1910, died Pisa, 1998) was an Italian musicologist, mostly known through his systematic catalogue of the works of Tomaso Albinoni. He also wrote biographies of Albinoni and other composers, including Vivaldi. He was also the composer of the famous Adagio that is always wrongly attributed to Albinoni. Giazotto based it on a fragment of music by Albinoni that he discovered in the Dresden State Library shortly after the Second World War (at that time, he was also completing his biography and catalogue). The fragment only contained the bass line and six bars of melody and is believed to have been the slow movement of a trio sonata. Giazotto composed the now-famous Adagio in 1945. It's actually a 20th Century forgery; nevertheless, it's a powerful and deeply moving piece, marked by the somber interplay of organ and strings."