Orson Welles in Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, BBC TV, 1955
If I could go back in a time machine and tell my 16-year-old film-geek self, “One day, you will write an Orson Welles cover story for Sight & Sound, tying in with a season of his work you’ll co-programme at the National Film Theatre”, he would basically explode with disbelief and pride. Spoiler alert: 38-year-old film geek Ben is pretty damn stoked too.
I remember seeing Citizen Kane on TV when I was about 12 or 13 and being transfixed by its beauty and strangeness: the magnetic character at the film’s core, both attractive and repulsive; the fairytale quality of the film, so visually intoxicating yet full of traps; the peculiarity of watching this ‘greatest picture ever made’ out of a sense of budding cinephilic duty, bracing for something dry and edifying but being confronted with something still juicy and weird.
In 2005, I got to write a short critical biography of Welles. I made no pretence of doing original archival research but it gave me a chance to really get inside his work, to unpack the quivering tension between body and voice that runs through it, and to discover the things he did with television for a brief moment before that door was closed.
Sight & Sound cover, July 2015
A few years later I got to explore that last subject more deeply when I wrote a thesis about his brilliant TV pilot The Fountain of Youth as part of my MA at Columbia Journalism School. (It was later published by Cultural Formations.)
Now I’ve had the chance to be involved with the BFI’s two-month season celebrating the centenary of Welles’s birth, The Great Disruptor, programming it alongside the redoubtable Geoff Andrew. Featuring all Welles’s features as director, some examples of his starring roles, and other lesser-known goodies, it starts today and you can see details here.
As part of the season, I’ll be giving a talk on Welles’s radical but little-known approach to television on Thursday August 6 at 6.30pm. Check it out here.
And, ahead of the programme’s launch, I wrote a cover feature for Sight & Sound focusing on some lesser-known aspects of Welles’s work – even three decades after his death, new facets of his compendious oeuvre continue to come to light, from his first professional experiments behind the camera to his most ambitious unfinished feature – and, of course, that TV work.
And here’s that feature in full, reprinted with permission…
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RARE GENIUS: THE OTHER SIDE OF ORSON WELLES
With all that has been written about the great director, it might sometimes feel as if there’s nothing new to say about him, but the restless polymath left such a vast body of work it’s still possible to find underappreciated gems – from his recently rediscovered first professional film outing to a 1950s TV travelogue series to his late unfinished opus ‘The Other Side of the Wind’
By Ben Walters
Not long after Orson Welles’s death in 1985, Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that “the legacy he left behind – a wealth of material including countless films, scripts and projects, scattered over many years and countries, in different stages of completion or realization – is immeasurably larger and richer, and more full of potential surprises, than any of us had reason to suspect”.
Three decades on, in the centenary year of Welles’s birth, we know just how accurate that insight was. In life Welles contained multitudes: director, actor, producer, writer, sage, showman, monster, magician, inspiration, cautionary tale. He was renowned both for his achievements (Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, F for Fake… you know the titles) and for the ones that got away; for showing the world how movies ought to be made, then somehow losing his own path. His place in the pantheon is secure – Kane’s position for a half a century from 1962 atop this magazine’s Greatest Films of All Time poll played a part in that – yet there is still so much about his work that remains unknown or underappreciated.
So with a cheerful disregard for settled opinion of which Welles might have approved, let’s look at three projects from the beginning, middle and end of his career – projects that expand our understanding of his genius yet will be unfamiliar to many who love his work – and raise a half-full glass to rediscoveries still to come.
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TOO MUCH JOHNSON
It was always a crucial part of the popular Welles legend that the creator of Citizen Kane was a cinematic ingénue, a newcomer to both the industry and the medium who simply hit the ground running. And it’s true that Welles had kept his distance from the studios: he turned down various acting roles and even a gig heading up David O. Selznick’s script department before landing that golden ticket with RKO in July 1939, the contract that gave an untried 24-year-old the power to write, produce, direct and star in two features.
So, yes, Welles was new to Hollywood. But he wasn’t, in fact, new to filmmaking. As a teenager, he had experimented with putting theatre on screen, shooting scenes from a youthful stage production of Twelfth Night with a static camera; and also with more overtly cinematic forms, co-directing as a lark a silent single-reeler called The Hearts of Age, a witty and grotesque pastiche of surrealist and expressionist tropes. His most tantalising celluloid experiment, however, drew its inspiration instead from Mack Sennett-style silent comedy.
Shot in 1938, the ten 35mm nitrate reels of Too Much Johnson represent Welles’s first professional moves into filmmaking. At 23, he was already one of the United States’ most renowned theatre directors, having taken Manhattan by storm with his ‘voodoo’ Macbeth, fascist Julius Caesar and controversial leftist musical The Cradle Will Rock. But Welles always liked a varied aesthetic diet and for his latest production he turned to an 1894 farce called Too Much Johnson, a convoluted concoction in which Welles’s regular collaborator Joseph Cotten would star as a man whose lover’s incandescent husband pursues him to a Cuban plantation.
Perhaps inspired by the earliest days of cinema, when shorts were habitually programmed alongside live turns within variety bills, Welles hit upon the idea of amalgamating the production’s live action with cinema. Not simple, quick inserts, mind you: the plan was for a full 40 minutes of filmed material, starting with a lengthy prologue covering our hero’s dalliance with his lover, her husband’s discovery of them, and the subsequent madcap and increasingly populous chase through the streets and parks – and across the rooftops – of Manhattan that leads to the port where the boat to Cuba lies. Later interludes, filmed upstate in a quarry dressed with a couple of potted palm trees to resemble Cuba, included a visit to a cemetery, a clifftop duel and a scrap in a pond.
Long thought lost, this material turned up in storage in Italy in 2008 and proved revelatory. In both theatre and radio, Welles had already demonstrated that his genius lay in two particular facets: first, his knack for galvanising a crew of talented collaborators to push themselves to new levels of invention under his leadership; and second, his uncanny ability both to perceive the distinctive formal attributes unique to a particular medium and to intuit the most effective technical means of expressing them. In other words, what’s so striking about the Too Much Johnson footage is that it shows Welles thinking as a filmmaker from the start – not recording a stage play but doing things that can only be done with a camera.
One obvious expression of this is the evident delight taken in shooting on location. The early action spreads boisterously across a plethora of architecturally distinctive lower Manhattan sites, some identifiable by street signs. Characters are forever skidding round corners and clambering in and out of windows – indeed the rooftop scenes are the most striking of all, with Cotten giving Harold Lloyd a run for his money, dangling off the edges of buildings while swinging a ladder. The ‘Cuban’ scenes, meanwhile, have a powerful sense of scale, even grandeur, as characters scale cliffsides and scrabble across quarry sites.
It wasn’t just the choice of locations: it was the way Welles (working with Pathé news cameraman Paul Dunbar) photographed them. His basic sense of film grammar – close-ups, midshots etc – is plain, but his sophisticated visual aesthetic is no less evident. The footage is replete with images one could call quintessentially Wellesian: gorgeous shots of ship’s rigging against a moody sky; a character in jeopardy as geometric architecture looms overhead; a spider-web of washing lines or double helix of adjacent fire escapes; a suffragette march framed by the splayed legs of standing male observers. Action takes place on multiple planes, resulting in a potent depth of field and there’s a pronounced interest in the vertical – indeed the vertiginous – in the shape not only of rooftop and clifftop pursuits but the use of overhead perspectives of a kind quite unavailable to a theatre director. A pursuit through teetering piles of market crates anticipates in slapstick Xanadu’s packing cases in Kane.
Too Much Johnson was also where Welles truly fell in love with editing. Working on the material in his hotel suite while simultaneously trying to rehearse the stage elements of the production (and develop a high-profile new radio drama to boot), he reportedly became so absorbed in the process he didn’t bother to leave the room when some film caught fire. He more or less completed some sequences, which again show not just a familiarity with conventions – from cross-cutting to trick effects such as jump-cuts and invisible cuts – but also an interest in Eisensteinian montage.
But this footage never reached audiences in 1938. There were questions over film rights to the material and the technical facilities of the Connecticut theatre where the production was to debut. There was also the fact of having so much to do in so little time. Whatever the facts of the case, the filmed material remained unseen and the stage production never reached New York. Welles’s first professional cinematic venture was also his first unfinished film. No matter. A couple of months later, his broadcast of The War of the Worlds made the front pages. And soon after that, the offers from Hollywood got serious.
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AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES
The Hollywood offers that followed The War of The Worlds eventually yielded Kane, which proved more strange, more wonderful and more of a headache than RKO had imagined. Then followed the slow professional falling off of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the abortive It’s All True from 1941, The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952) – all undertakings of unique invention, charm, imagination and vision, all contributing in one way or another to the story of Orson Welles the fallen idol, the maverick, the liability. Welles was no less smitten with filmmaking – and the success of The Third Man (1949) had affirmed his international celebrity status – but the industry was out of love with him as a director.
By the early 1950s, he had his eye on another medium. Television had piqued Welles’s curiosity at the end of the war but he had been living in Europe throughout the period of its cultural ascendancy in the US. In 1953, Peter Brook invited him back to America to play King Lear for a CBS special and Welles was hooked. His own ideas for TV, however, were less theatrical. Here, he realised, was a platform that was closer to radio than cinema: a domestic, conversational medium ideal for the kind of conspiratorial storytelling that had always been his preferred mode.
His breakthrough came in 1955, when the BBC’s Huw Wheldon offered six 15-minute slots in which Welles would simply chat to the camera about a range of interests, from acting to politics to autocues, pausing occasionally to show off a drawing on the subject at hand. Orson Welles’ Sketch Book was first-person, one-to-one TV, the closest most of us would ever get to dining with Welles: casual and intimate, it anticipated the small-screen interpersonal rendezvous of YouTube and Skype by half a century.
The new commercial network ITV took notice: its London franchise, Associated Rediffusion, signed Welles up to deliver 26 travelogues for a show that would be known as Around the World with Orson Welles. The format built on the sophisticated, worldly and solicitous persona that Welles (“your obedient servant”) had crafted as host of various radio shows during which he introduced viewers to some of his favourite people and places – but it would also give him the opportunity to develop a distinctive, discursive visual grammar with which to illustrate his essayistic adventures.
So here he was in Vienna, hearing about the decline of traditional café culture under the onslaught of the espresso and watching the pastry for apple strudel being teased out in great sheets; or in Paris, talking to the idiosyncratic artist Raymond Duncan and lamenting American conformism; or the Basque country, learning about the local ball game of pelota and the benefits of open borders; or in London, talking to Chelsea pensioners and widows in a Hackney almshouse about age and dignity. There was controversy too: an episode shot in Madrid that centred on a bullfight provoked consternation in the British press, and another shot in Lurs in northern France, investigating the notorious recent murder of a holidaying British family, aroused local anger and remained untransmitted.
The programme’s tone was inquisitive, courteous and romantic, combining epicurean enthusiasm with subtly progressive bite. Just as compelling was the form. In storytelling mode, Welles went out of his way to advertise the mechanics of the medium, typically beginning a segment with, “Now let’s take the camera over here for a minute,” and frequently including shots of his own handheld Cineflex. As well as deliberately including his shoulder and ear in the frame to establish his presence with an interviewee, Welles developed an innovative and sophisticated dynamic of simulated eye contact, using cutaways (often shot at a later date) to create conversational links between himself, his subject and, through the camera, the viewer at home. Other novel approaches included the use of synchronised sound for location shooting and handheld footage to simulate a panicked flight.
It all testified to Welles’s desire to bring the world into the audience’s home as evocatively and empathetically as possible; he probably wasn’t joking when he noted in a Viennese kitchen: “If television were improved, we ought to be able to broadcast some of these marvellous odours.” Media controversy wasn’t the only off-screen hitch, however. Welles’s commitment to the project dropped off long before the delivery of 26 episodes; indeed, not all of those filmed were completed, with the producers obliged to add stock footage to pad out the Paris show and bring in Kenneth Tynan and his wife Elaine Dundy as narrators for the Madrid episode.
But Welles’s engagement with the medium remained passionate and sincere. A year later, he took his televisual storytelling mode up a notch, adding rear-projected still photos, on-set scenery changes and tricksy lip-synching techniques for ‘The Fountain of Youth’, the bravura pilot for a dramatic series that never found a backer. Other such attempts notwithstanding, Welles never found a creative foothold in the industry – though paid work on voiceovers, adverts and talk shows were plentiful. That distinctive new formal grammar, however, with its knowing, expansive tone and playful use of montage, would eventually find both fuller expression and critical appreciation. That happened when Welles applied it to a later project that began life as a piece for television but was eventually expanded into a feature and released under the title F for Fake (1973).
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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
Welles returned to the US in 1956 and embarked on ventures he hoped would revive his relationships with New York theatre and Hollywood filmmaking. In both cases – a disastrous King Lear at City Center and Touch of Evil for Universal – they proved to mark the end of the affair. His careers on the mainstream American stage and screen were done. Relocating once again to Europe, he continued to create new work on his own terms, under the circumstances at hand: The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968) all demonstrated his ability to cut his coat according to his cloth with unmistakeably Wellesian results.
While filming The Trial in Croatia in 1962, Welles met the person with whom he would form the most enduring partnership of his later years. Oja Kodar was a young writer, actress and artist who became Welles’s lover and creative collaborator, and relocated to the US with him in the late 1960s. There they met the young cameraman Gary Graver, recently back from Vietnam, whose dedication to facilitating Welles’s work would prove no less dedicated than Kodar’s over the next 15 years.
In August 1970, they started work on the project that would become the best known of the many productions left unfinished when Welles died. The Other Side of the Wind was centred around a teasingly self-reflexive concept. It was the story of Jake Hannaford, an American filmmaker – iconic, charismatic and mercurial but out of favour, rumoured to be washed up – who returns from exile in Europe to make a new picture conceived to give the New Wave and new Hollywood upstarts a run for their money.
Welles’s film would focus on the events around Hannaford’s 70th birthday party, culminating in his death at the wheel of the sports car he intended as a gift for his young male star. These events were to be filmed in a mixture of formats (35mm, 16mm, Super 8, colour, and black and white) and intercut with excerpts from Hannaford’s own picture, also called The Other Side of the Wind. Both modes offered opportunities to satirise aspects of contemporary cinema culture. Hannaford’s picture was a gorgeous, pretentious pastiche of Antonioni-style avant-garde ennui while the party was to be a cacophonous, barbed shindig populated by thinly veiled versions of contemporary film-world personalities, from the Maysles brothers and Marlene Dietrich to Welles-sceptical critics such as Charles Higham and Pauline Kael. Dennis Hopper played himself and Welles’s protégé Peter Bogdanovich did the same in all but name. Some way into production, John Huston agreed to take the main role.
Hannaford himself plainly overlapped with Welles in many ways, from the contours of his career to such particulars as a fondness for Spain and cigars. Yet in other ways they were antithetical: Hannaford was macho in ways Welles had never indulged, and the character’s sense of self and art were more fragile and contingent than his creator’s. In other words, Welles was subjecting himself to the kind of is-he-isn’t-he treatment that he had applied to William Randolph Hearst three decades earlier.
The Other Side of the Wind was evocative of Citizen Kane in other ways too. Both took a boldly refracted formal approach, using the testimony of a shifting roster of acquaintances – and, in the later picture, a dizzying variety of recording technologies – to explore an ultimately elusive central figure. In both films, that elusiveness was literally inscribed on the screen: interlopers seeking access to Kane’s compound are presented with a sign reading ‘No Trespassing’, while viewers trying to watch Hannaford’s final project are confronted with a holding card saying ‘Scene Missing’.
Hannaford was struggling to find completion funds for his film, a situation in which Welles found himself too: the studio system had radically changed yet he seemed no better able to navigate the new Hollywood than the old. He kept shooting for years, then years more passed as the terms of post-production and the legal status of the footage became mired in querulous negotiations that continued until Welles’s death in 1985. Since then, half a dozen attempts to broker deals between the various interested parties have come and gone (they’re detailed in Josh Karp’s new book about the picture, Orson Welles’s Last Movie). The day after the centenary of Welles’s birth in May, an online crowdfunding project launched, supported by most of the key players, with the aim of raising $2 million to complete the picture.
The neatness of the idea of an unfinished movie about an unfinished movie is part of what inspires the project’s continued fascination for Welles-watchers. But there were other reasons too. For one thing, there were so many great yarns about the production, which involved imaginary midgets, illicit shoots on the old MGM lot and financial backing from a company associated with the Shah of Iran. For another, of all Welles’s unfinished projects, The Other Side of the Wind seems to have been most tantalisingly close to completion at the time of his death.
Perhaps the main reason, though, is the awe with which so many who took part in the film’s production and post-production have reported Welles’s artistic approach, speaking of a radical expressive departure executed with intuitive technical brilliance. We won’t know whether such claims are justified unless the latest completion attempt or one of its successors bears fruit. Until then, we can only echo the words used by one of Hannaford’s collaborators when a studio producer questions his ability to spin gold from chaos: “He’s done it before.”
Too Much Johnson and Around the World with Orson Welles will screen as part of ‘Orson Welles: The Great Disruptor’ at BFI Southbank, London, in July and August. Ben Walters will give a talk about Welles’s TV work as part of the season. Touch of Evil is rereleased by the BFI in UK cinemas on 10 July. The Third Man is rereleased in UK cinemas by StudioCanal on 26 June. Too Much Johnson, The Immortal Story and Chimes at Midnight are all released on DVD and Blu-ray by Mr Bongo on 29 June. Around the World with Orson Welles and the new documentary Magician: The Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles are out on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI in August. Josh Karp’s Orson Welles’s Last Movie is out now from St. Martin’s Press. Further details of the crowdfunding appeal for The Other Side of the Wind can be found at www.orsonslastfilm.com
