Beatrice and The Welles Estate

tony · Post by **tony** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 10:50 am

Here's a link to some kind of message board; I found it googling Beatrice Welles; I think it's a Criterion board; at any rate, the 7th poster has summarized all of Bea's legal shenanigans, and I found it facinating:

http://pub125.ezboard.com/fcriter....8.topic

Jeff Wilson · Post by **Jeff Wilson** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 11:00 am

Sad thing is, that's just the stuff that made the courts; who knows what's gone under the radar in terms of intimidation and such.

Le Chiffre · Post by **Le Chiffre** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 9:31 am

The 1998 entry says Beatrice got Welles' Oscar away from Graver through the courts, but that Graver had requested and gotten a new trial over it scheduled for Sept. of 1998. I wonder what happened at that one.

The article also says that Graver, in addition to WORKING WITH ORSON WELLES, put together a collection of clips called THE UNSEEN WELLES. Maybe they were talking about ONE MAN BAND, but it would be nice to have a second compilation. Graver also directed 40 porn flicks?! That's interesting, since he apparently directed AMANDA BY NIGHT in 1981, four years before Welles' death. I wonder if Welles offered any "pointers".

Jeff Wilson · Post by **Jeff Wilson** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 9:51 am

Actually, Graver has directed more than 100 porn flicks at last count, according to the IMDB. The Unseen Welles thing may have been his presentation on Welles where he showed his copies of various odds and ends like Welles' Japanese whiskey commercials and such.

colwood · Post by **colwood** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 9:54 am

While reading Roger Ebert's recent Movie Answer Man columns at suntimes.com, I came across an interesting item (don't know if it's been mentioned here before). There is a rock group call the White Stripes and they recorded a song call The Union Forever. The music is original but the lyrics are apparently word for word the same as the "Mr. Kane" song from CK. The first link asks the question and Ebert responds that the WB legal dept is looking into if it is plagarism. The second link has a follow up question with Ebert commenting that he believes the song is more homage than plagarism. To hear a clip of the song, click on the third link.

http://suntimes.com/output/answ-man/sho-sunday-ebert23.html

http://suntimes.com/output/answ-man/sho-sunday-rebert09.html

http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search....2712424

I guess my question is how long till Beatrice files her plagarism suit?

tony · Post by **tony** » Sun Mar 16, 2003 1:26 am

I saw Gary Graver present "The Unseen Orson Welles" up in Toronto about 2 years ago, and boy was it dissappointing; I just remember he showed the Lucy show, Fountain of Youth, and Filming Othello (all great) plus about 45 minutes of very boring commercials made for foreign markets. The dissapointment came in that he didn't show any Qixote or Wind, as I recall. Also, Gary himself is not a natural showman: he's quite shy and softspoken (though very sincere, I think); the show was, shall we say, underwhelming, similar in this way to his doc. "Working with Welles".

blunted by community · Tue Nov 18, 2003 8:39 am

http://www.courttv.com/contact/contactus-popup.html

this is the court tv suggestion box. i posted i was interested in the beatrice/kane battle. maybe if a few others do, they might look at it.

i don't know if jw wants this here, and have wellesnet fall in beatrice's crosshairs, but maybe in 2 or 3 days after a few people have seen this and emailed court tv, jw can blow away this topic.

Oscar Christie · Post by **Oscar Christie** » Wed Feb 18, 2004 4:43 pm

What is the "newly discovered 1944 document" that Ms. W.-Smith claims gives her the copyright rights to "Citizen Kane"?

.Who Owns Kane?

.

blunted by community · Wed Feb 18, 2004 5:21 pm

it came and went. it was news for 2 weeks then i never heard about it again.

Hannaford · Post by **Hannaford** » Tue Mar 02, 2004 11:04 pm

ONE OF OUR CLASSICS IS MISSING

Why won't Beatrice Welles let audiences see her father's greatest movie? By Geoffrey Macnab

By Geoffrey Macnab, Friday August 29, 2003
The Guardian (UK)

An Orson Welles season without Citizen Kane? Thanks to the litigation surrounding the film, that is the prospect confronting London's National Film Theatre on the eve of its Welles retrospective. "Unless we're able to clear the rights, we won't be able to show it and we're having difficulty in ascertaining exactly which distributor owns those rights," NFT spokesperson Brian Robinson explains. "It will be a tragedy for an Orson Welles retrospective not to have Citizen Kane."

NFT programmer Geoff Andrew is more sanguine about the non-appearance of Kane: "Obviously it's regrettable if the legal situation stops us showing Kane, but it's not as if it's a rare or unknown film. The purpose of the season anyway was to suggest that there was far more to Welles than just this film, which keeps getting voted the best film ever made."

Welles himself would surely relish the absurdity of the situation. The actions of his own daughter, Beatrice Welles, are seemingly threatening to scupper the screenings of a movie the NFT has shown countless times before, which has recently been released on DVD, and which has been voted the top film of all time in five consecutive Sight and Sound polls: in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992 and 2002.

This January, 47-year-old Beatrice (the film-maker's daughter by his third wife, actress Paola Mori) filed a lawsuit against Turner Entertainment Co and RKO Pictures in the US district court in San Francisco, arguing that she was the owner of the rights to Citizen Kane. According to Variety, she claimed that there was a 1944 agreement between Welles and RKO (the studio behind Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons) that restored the copyright of both films to Welles. She believes that this contract makes Welles's heirs the real owners of the rights. Moreover, even if the court rules that Welles's original 1939 contract with the studio still stands, she insists that Welles's family is owed a large amount of unpaid royalties.

It's hard to know how seriously to take Beatrice's latest gambit. After all, this is only the latest in a series of interventions that have long vexed Welles fans and archivists. In May 1998, she threatened Universal with legal action over its restoration of Touch of Evil, thereby forcing the studio to cancel the long-planned Cannes premiere of the film that actress Janet Leigh had travelled to France to attend. She has also stifled an attempt by US cable company Showtime and Oja Kodar (Welles's partner in the latter part of his life) to complete The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's late film about an ageing movie director.

Beatrice hasn't won all her battles. Earlier this year, she was thwarted when she tried to auction off Welles's original screenplay Oscar for Kane (shared with Herman J Mankiewicz) at Christie's. Under rules drawn up by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1950, Oscars cannot be sold. (Bizarrely, it was once thought that the original award had been lost. Beatrice was issued with a replacement. She therefore now has two Oscars, neither of which she can put on the market.)

Few observers were able to work out precisely what she was complaining about when she challenged Universal over Touch of Evil, but the more noise she made, the more seriously she was taken.

"Universal did not consult with her or obtain her consent prior to their unauthorised alteration of the film. The suit was subsequently commenced to protect her rights. Later the suit was settled," her adviser Thomas A White explains by email. In other words, she was effectively fighting to protect the bowdlerised cut released by Universal in 1958 rather than the version put together by producer Rick Schmidlin and sound editor Walter Murch. The latter incorporated the specific changes Welles himself suggested in a 58-page memo he wrote to the studio after production was complete and he had been locked out of the cutting room.

"Studios, she learned from her experience on Touch of Evil, respect litigation," points out Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic of the Chicago Reader and world-renowned Welles expert. "She said that once she saw it she had no problems with the film at all, and she was very apologetic to Janet Leigh. But she none the less brought litigation against Universal Pictures and they made an out-of-court settlement. So she has been making a living doing things like this."

Rosenbaum, a consultant on the re-edited version of Touch of Evil, remembers that Beatrice wasn't consulted because no one could see any reason why she should have been. The rights to the film were held by Universal, not her. However, her suit was taken very seriously by the studio: "She was able to hold up the release of Touch of Evil on DVD for about a year!"

It occasionally seems that Beatrice is on a one-woman crusade to stop her father's movies being shown. "There is nothing that she has done to my knowledge that has improved the appreciation of Welles, unless you count the re-release of Othello... [the result of] everything else she has done has been to prevent people from seeing his work, or from reading his work, or from even writing about his work," says Rosenbaum.

Even the 1992 restoration of Welles's Othello (which Beatrice was behind) was dogged by controversy. Different actors were hired to re-dub some of the dialogue and there were complaints about the way the music and sound effects were changed. But it did introduce the film to a new generation of viewers. "Quite apart from the damage she did to the film, the fact that people became aware of it was a good thing," Rosenbaum concedes.

When I approached Orson Welles's estate to try to speak to Beatrice, I received a terse email from White, telling me that "Beatrice Welles does not do interviews". I asked why she was so wary about speaking to the press. White, an "artistic rights consultant" based in Beverly Hills, replied: "I don't think the word 'wary' is accurate. Not doing interviews is her general policy, and has nothing to do with what you're writing about." It's therefore difficult to quiz her about her relationship with her father, her Nevada-based cosmetics business, or why she has such an appetite for litigation.

Ironically, in her actions suppressing her father's work, she is behaving just like the production companies and distributors who treated Welles so shabbily. As Rosenbaum puts it: "If she has any interest in improving the quality of his [Orson Welles's] legacy, I have to be convinced. The results have been negative, not positive." That is a sentiment the programmers at the NFT are bound to share as they struggle to find someone else to fill Charles Foster Kane's shoes.

blunted by community · Tue Mar 02, 2004 11:48 pm

i can understand part of her resistance.

the TOUCH OF EVIL restoration is not a remarkable improvement over the one that was in circulation, and it came out with all the hoopla of an orson welles film, "finally restored to orson welles' vision," which is total BS. it can't be restored to orson welles' vision. the final dvd which replaced the previous version, IMHO, in even more truncated than the previous version.

look what happened to DON Q. this film did nothing to enhance welles' reputation. i love it, but it's only for hardcore welles fans. and even some hardcore fans can't watch it.

what i don't understand was the battle for the oscar. i thought it was for sentimental reasons, then it turns out to be just cold hearted greed. pretty sad.

.

Hannaford · Post by **Hannaford** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 12:07 am

Blunted:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be defending Beatrice Welles obstuctionism. If you are, would you explain why?
Do you think keeping Welles films from the market is a good thing? (just so Beatrice's pockets can be lined with money?) If you read the Guardian article, I can't believe you wouldn't see through Beatrice for what she really is... quite obviously someone out for money, pure and simple. Do you disagree with that, and really think she is concerned with her father's legacy? Did you approve of her version of OTHELLO? To me, it seems anyone who cares about Welles work reaching a wider public (or even a smaller public) - would find Beatrice to be nothing but an incredible hinderance to the Welles legacy, since all she has done to date, is to prevent Welles work from coming out. Isn't it enough Welles had to fight the little minds of Hollywood producers while he was alive... without having to fight his own daughter's greedy demands after his death?

blunted by community · Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:07 am

if you read the top of my most, you will see i wrote that i understand part on her resistance. and i understand part of her resistance in the few instances i posted.

those are the reasons that if it was me, i would be concerned about.

a long time ago when the estate started all the BS with TOUCH OF EVIL, the estate said that Universal was taking an Orson Welles picture for granted and the estate felt that it should be consulted on the people that are assigned to tinker with Welles' work, and on the people that end up on the disc.

i couldn't agree more. if you remember, heston was badmouthing welles. some of the stuff he said i read in articles, saw on tv, and it angered me. the estate i'm sure did not want heston badmouthing welles on his own dvd.

at the time that was happening deja was the only welles posting place and i posted something like, "when the little guy (beatrice/welles) is able to deal a sharp elbo in the face to the bloated big guy (universal/heston), i'm cheering." and i complained about heston badmouthing welles. thomas white emailed me, thanked me for my comment, said he would relate my comments to beatrice. i was whole heartedly on their side.

but they have gone bad since then.

if thomas white found me in deja, you can bet he drops by here.

beatrice has never spoken and we don't know what her relationship was with her father. without knowing her reasons, i feel she has been wrong more than she has been right.

they did butcher Othello, but Don Q was butchered as badly if not worse by the other side. at least othello go a symphony orchestra (that it didn't need). what did Don Q get? cursing by Franco.

there is really no one to blame but welles for the tangeled tug of war going on with his work.

Jeff Wilson · Post by **Jeff Wilson** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:36 am

The only problem with your argument is that Beatrice Welles does not own ANY part of TOUCH OF EVIL. She had no legal say in what Universal did to the film. The studio's advertising of it as a "director's cut," which the restoration team flatly denied from the start, was perhaps actionable, but otherwise, she should have had no more say about it than you or I.

blunted by community · Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:41 am

i'm well aware of that. she just has a lot of money to piss away, and in that instance i would have done the same. universal took a lot for granted. heston said a lot he should not have said. wouldn't you say they drew her hand?