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Orson Welles’ ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth on film
01.10.2019
08:55 am
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Poster for the ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth on tour in Indianapolis (WPA Federal Theatre Photos, via Library of Congress)

A theater company in St. Petersburg, Florida recently mounted a revival of Orson Welles’ “Voodoo” Macbeth, which transposed the medieval violence and witchcraft of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” into 19th century Haiti. The show and the stir it caused had much to do with the Welles legend. When it opened at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre on April 14, 1936, some 10,000 people surrounded the venue, blocking traffic on Seventh Avenue; when the show toured the country after a three-month run in Harlem, the playbill boasted that the original engagement played to 150,000 people. 

The original production was financed by the New Deal. During the second half of the thirties, the Federal Theatre Project funded performances to feed starving actors and keep stages open. One of these was the Negro Theatre Unit’s Macbeth, directed by a 20-year-old Orson Welles. Despite his youth, Welles was not timid around the Bard, having published a three-volume set of Shakespeare plays “edited for reading and arranged for staging” during his teens. Among other revisions and inventions (such as the unmistakably Wellesian costumes and sets), Welles’ audacious staging of Macbeth replaced the three witches with a troupe of Voodoo drummers and dancers.
 

WPA Federal Theatre Photos, via Detroit Public Library
 
There is a wonderful story about the theater critic Percy Hammond, who panned the show in the New York Herald Tribune and died shortly thereafter. The tale exists in many versions; here’s how John Houseman, Welles’ friend and mentor, who was in charge of the Negro Theatre Unit and brought Welles on board, tells it in Voices from the Federal Theatre:

When we did the Voodoo Macbeth, it was very successful, and we got very nice reviews except from a few die-hard Republican papers. Percy Hammond wrote a perfectly awful review saying this was a disgrace that money was being spent on these people who couldn’t even speak English and didn’t know how to do anything. It was a dreadful review but purely a political review.

We had in the cast of Macbeth about twelve voodoo drummers and one magic man, a medicine man who used to have convulsions on the stage every night. They decided that this was a very evil act by Mr. Hammond, and they came to Orson and me and showed the review. They say, “This is bad man.” And we said, “Yeah, a helluva bad man. Sure, he’s a bad man.”

The next day when Orson and I came to the theatre, the theatre manager said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but there were some very strange goings-on last night. After the show they stayed in the theatre, and there was drumming and chanting and stuff.” We said, “Oh, really?” What made it interesting was the fact that we’d just read the afternoon papers. Percy Hammond had just been taken to the hospital with an acute attack of something from which he died a few days later. We always were convinced that we had unwittingly killed him.

 

WPA Federal Theatre Photos, via Detroit Public Library
 
Jean Cocteau, who was then reenacting Phileas Fogg’s circumnavigation of the planet, caught the “Voodoo” Macbeth in Harlem. Welles’ biographer Simon Callow reports that Cocteau, though put off at first by the startling changes in lighting, came to appreciate its “Wagnerian” effect, which heightened the play’s violence. In Cocteau’s account of his travels, Mon Premier Voyage, after recording a few criticisms of Welles’ choices, he expresses his admiration for the show:

But these are details. At the La Fayette theatre that sublime drama is played as nowhere else, and in its black fires the final scene is transmuted into a gorgeous ballet of catastrophe and death.

 

WPA Federal Theatre Photos, via Detroit Public Library
 

WPA Federal Theatre Photos, via Detroit Public Library
 
Thanks to another New Deal program, the Works Progress Administration, some film of the original “Voodoo” Macbeth survives. We Work Again, the WPA’s documentary on African American unemployment, culminates in this footage of the production, touted by the narrator in the old-fashioned American rhetorical style:

The Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project produced a highly successful version of Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy Macbeth, which far exceeded its scheduled run in New York and was later sent on a tour of the country. The scene was changed from Scotland to Haiti, but the spirit of Macbeth and every line in the play has remained intact. In this contribution to the American theatre, and in other projects under the Works program, we have set our feet on the road to a brighter future.

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.10.2019
08:55 am
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Cast and crew remember Orson Welles and his legendary film ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ in 1993 doc
11.01.2018
08:35 am
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Wind poster
 
We’re on the eve of Netflix’s worldwide debut of The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles’s legendary unreleased film. After four decades in limbo, the picture was finally completed earlier this year. A new documentary on Orson Welles and Wind, entitled They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, will be available via Netflix on the same day as Wind, November 2nd. Though now obscure, there’s another documentary—directed by Welles’s friend and right-hand man—that largely focuses on The Other Side of the Wind.

Gary Graver was Orson Welles’s cinematographer from 1970 until Welles’s death in 1985. Graver was hired by Welles after cold-calling the maverick director, and the first picture he shot for him was The Other Side of the Wind. In 1993, the documentary he directed, Working with Orson Welles, was released. The doc zeros in on The Other Side of the Wind, which might seem odd, as only Orson’s most faithful would’ve known about the picture, but it speaks to Graver’s belief in the project. Working features interviews with some of the cast and crew (which often overlapped on Wind), including Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Harrington, Peter Jason, Cameron Mitchell, Susan Strasberg, and Frank Marshall, who wore many hats during the original production, and as producer played a major role in the completion of Wind. Graver also talks at length about the movie, and some of his test footage for it is seen in the documentary. Everyone expresses their fondness for the enigmatic Welles, and while they acknowledge that he was often difficult and unpredictable, one gets the sense they wouldn’t trade the experience of working with Orson Welles for anything. There’s a lot of love here.
 
Wind 1
A candid shot of Gary Graver, Oja Kodar (actress and Orson Welles’s longtime companion), and Orson Welles on the set of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ (photo by Frank Marshall).

Graver’s documentary was a straight-to-video release, and is now out of print. The doc is low budget, tends to jump from topic to topic, and is short on clips from Welles’s films (due to licensing issues, no doubt), but I think most Orson fans will look past its shortcomings and dig it. With anticipation high for the pending release of The Other Side of the Wind, the time for Graver’s documentary is now. It’s made all the more important as Mitchell, Strasberg, and Graver are now deceased.
 
Wind 2
L-R: Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Gary Graver, and others on the set of ‘The Other Side of the Wind.’

‘Working with Orson Welles’ has recently been uploaded to YouTube. Watch after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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11.01.2018
08:35 am
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‘New’ Orson Welles film announced: His final feature comes to Netflix in November
08.29.2018
11:01 am
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Orson Welles fans can rejoice, and start counting the days until the release of the great director’s final film, The Other Side of the Wind, which will premiere this weekend at the Venice Film Festival and on Netflix on November 2.

In 1970, legendary director Orson Welles (CITIZEN KANE) began filming what would ultimately be his final cinematic opus with a cast of Hollywood luminaries including John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg and Welles’s partner during his later years, Oja Kodar. Beset by financial issues, the production ultimately stretched years and gained notoriety, never to be completed or released. More than a thousand reels of film negatives languished in a Paris vault until March of 2017, when producers Frank Marshall (who served as Welles’s production manager during his initial shooting) and Filip Jan Rymsza spearheaded efforts to have the film completed after over 40 years.

Featuring a new score by Oscar-winning composer Michel Legrand and reassembled by a technical team including Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is Orson Welles’s vision fulfilled. It tells the story of grizzled director J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (Huston), who returns to Los Angeles after years in self-exile in Europe with plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie. Both a satire of the classic studio system and the New Hollywood that was shaking things up, Welles’s last artistic testament is a fascinating time capsule of a now-distant era in moviemaking as well as the long-awaited “new” work from an indisputable master.

Here’s the trailer. It just went live a few minutes ago.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.29.2018
11:01 am
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Orson Welles first attempts at movie-making ‘Too Much Johnson’
12.20.2017
11:23 am
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01toomujo.jpg
 
Scene: A suite at the St. Regis Hotel, New York City, 1938. The floor is knee-deep in coils of highly flammable nitrate film. It sprawls across the floor, hangs from light fittings, bedposts, armchairs, tables, and glistens like a pit of malevolent serpents.

Center of the room stands boy wonder, Orson Welles, fueled by coffee and brandy and chicken sandwiches. He stands, puffing on an oversized pipe, filling the room with big black cartoon clouds of train engine smoke punctuated with angry fireflies of tobacco sparks which threaten (at any moment) to set the whole place alight. Welles is intently staring at one roll of film he slides up and down between his hands. He is oblivious to the chaos and possible fatal disaster that surrounds him.

His assistant John Berry is wrestling with a movie projector on which a roll of film has become snagged and is now kindling to a burst of yellow flames. Berry carries the projector back-and-forth anxiously looking for a safe place to dump the now smoking machinery. In front of him, like the best stage farce, a selection of doors offer escape but all are closed shut.

At one, there is a-knocking of someone wanting to get in. The door opens hesitantly. It’s producer John Houseman who has come to see what’s going on with the latest project Too Much Johnson. Houseman enters, retreats, enters, retreats, as if shyly rehearsing dance steps. He eventually opens the door wide, coughs once, then enters the room. He opens his mouth to speak but the shock of seeing 25,000 feet of highly flammable film decorating the floor, Berry with a burning projector seeking escape, and an oblivious Welles smoking like a volcano is all too much for him. He attempts to retreat back to the hallway while comically elbowing Berry over who gets out first.

Exit Houseman and Berry with flaming projector.

This is roughly around the moment when Orson Welles fell in love with movie-making and decided making movies was to be his future career.
 
02toomujo.jpg
Orson Welles making magic out of thin air.
 
Welles and Houseman were the bright young bucks of NY theater. Their innovative, critically acclaimed, and highly successful productions of an all-black Macbeth in 1936, followed by Marc Blitzstein‘s socialist musical The Cradle Will Rock, led Welles and Houseman to form their own repertory company the Mercury Theatre in 1937. Their first production as the Mercury Theatre was a jack-booted, militaristic production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar called Caesar. It earned the pair column inches of praise and reputations as a major force in American theater.

In 1938 came productions of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Both of these received five-star reviews for their direction, acting, and original and creative approach to theater. Welles was always thinking up new and fresh ways to present well-known dramas. The Mercury’s next production was to be William Gillette‘s farce, about the misadventures of an amorous young man, Too Much Johnson which was more Welles’ baby than the “scholarly” Houseman’s, who was left to raise the cash and carry props. Gillette was the American actor who was famous for his character-defining performance of Sherlock Holmes—an interpretation that gave Arthur Conan-Doyle’s fictional hero many of the accessories, mannerisms, and tics still associated today with the renowned Baker Street sleuth.

Thinking of how to make Too Much Johnson seem new and original for the audience, Welles decided on filming a twenty-minute introduction to the play, with two ten minute sequences to be screened before acts two and three. There was no money to shoot these inserts, so Welles begged and borrowed and cajoled Houseman to raise whatever cash he could find. Too Much Johnson was to open at the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut. Welles was going to use the stage actors to perform in the inserts but gave so much of his time over to working on his filmed inserts, he left himself little time to focus on directing the actors for the stage production. Not that Welles was bothered—he was keen on improvising parts of the stage show.

Filming started in July 1938 amid all of Welles other commitments to radio, writing, and directing other productions.

Watch ‘Too Much Johnson,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.20.2017
11:23 am
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‘Dark Avenger’: The brief heavy metal career of Orson Welles
08.17.2017
09:16 am
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After the breakup of the Dictators, the New York proto-punk band Richard Meltzer credited with returning “THE SPIRIT OF WRESTLING” to rock and roll, their lead guitarist, Ross “the Boss” Friedman, formed the metal group Manowar. A harbinger of today’s Viking and power metal subgenres, the band posed for press photos in silky briefs, wielding swords. Note that their name begins with the word “man.”

(Deep thinker Scott Ian of Anthrax allows as how he “kind of liked the first album” even though he thought Manowar’s image “was a bit gay.” Reading these words, I feel as if Joey Belladonna himself is pouring gallons of boiled farina into a cerebral shunt that empties just behind my right eye.)

During a recent podcast appearance, Friedman remembered how, during the sessions for their debut album, 1982’s Battle Hymns, Manowar cast about for someone to read the narrative section of their “epic” song “Dark Avenger.” Like Odin, the song’s titular hero loses an eye; unlike Odin, he waxes grievous wroth about it and rides a demon horse back home from Hell to waste everybody, “raping the daughters and wives.” Oy.
 

 
Poor penniless Orson Welles dragged his ass into the studio to narrate the Dark Avenger’s katabasis:

He was met at the gate of Hades
By the Guardian of the Lost Souls,
The Keeper of the Unavenged,
And He did say to him:

“Let ye not pass Abaddon.
Return to the world from whence ye came
And seek payment not only for thine own anguish
But to vindicate the souls of the Unavenged.”

And they placed in his hands a sword made for him called Vengeance
Forged in brimstone and tempered by the woeful tears of the Unavenged

And to carry him on his journey back to the upper world
They brought forth their demon horse called Black Death
A grim steed so fiercely might and black in color
That he could stand as one with the darkness
Save for his burning eyes of crimson fire
And on that night they rode up from Hell
The pounding of his hooves did clap like thunder.

For thematic reasons which remain obscure, in the finished album’s sequence, “Dark Avenger” leads into bassist Joey DeMaio’s solo interpretation of the William Tell Overture.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.17.2017
09:16 am
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‘F for Fake’: Orson Welles asks ‘What is reality?’ in dazzling masterpiece of oddball art cinema
07.19.2017
01:20 pm
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“If my work hangs in a museum long enough, it becomes real.”

—Elmyr de Hory

If you’ve seen Orson Welles’ late period quasi-documentary F for Fake, then you know about the mysterious art forger Elmyr De Hory. In his freewheeling cinematic essay, Welles explored the funhouse mirror life of de Hory, who found that he had an uncanny knack for being able to paint convincing counterfeits of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Renoir’s work. After some of his fakes were sold to museums and wealthy collectors, suspicions were raised and his legal troubles—and a life spent moving from place to place to avoid the long arm of the law—began.

At the time Welles met up with Elmyr in the early 70s, he was living in Ibiza and had already been the subject of Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time written by the notoriously fraudulent “biographer” Clifford Irving, who himself figures prominently in the film. During the course of filming F for Fake, Irving (who was later portrayed by Richard Gere in The Hoax), was serendipitously revealed to have forged his own “autobiography” of Howard Hughes (not to mention Hughes’ signature) and sentenced to jail time. The resulting film, an essay on the authorship of “truth” in art, is a dazzling, intellectually challenging masterpiece that can never quite decide if it’s a fake documentary about a fake painter of fake masterpieces who himself was the subject of a fake biographer… or what it is. (It’s no wonder that Robert Anton Wilson was such a fan of F for Fake, which figures prominently in his book, Cosmic Trigger II).

F or Fake also calls into question the nature of “genius”: If Elmyr’s forgeries were good enough to pass off as Picasso or Modigliani’s work, or even to hang in museums under the assumption that they were the work of these masters, wouldn’t Elmyr’s genius be of equal or nearly equal value to theirs? (Worth noting that it was ego that got in the way of Elmyr’s scam at several points in his life: He was often left apoplectic at hearing how much crooked art dealers were making from his forged paintings!)

He didn’t intend to become an art forger, but life during the Great Depression and WWII wore down his scruples. He was imprisoned—or so he claimed, there’s no proof one way or the other—for a time in a Nazi concentration camp for being gay and when he got out he survived by cultivating his charismatic con man skills. One of his scams was pretending to be a Hungarian nobleman selling off his family’s art masterpieces after the war. Apparently he even sold his forged art via mail order. Some of de Hory’s many known pseudonyms included Louis Cassou, Joseph Dory, Joseph Dory-Boutin, Elmyr Herzog, Elmyr Hoffman and E. Raynal.

But Elmyr himself was often on the wrong end of a con, getting ripped off by his own (equally complicit) agents and dealers. He was arrested in Mexico but managed to get off and when they couldn’t pin any other crimes on him, Spain sent him to prison for a few months for homosexuality and consorting with bad people. When Irving’s book came out, the jig, as the saying goes, was essentially up.

De Hory’s former bodyguard and driver, Mark Forgy, the author of the 2012 book The Forger’s Apprentice: Life with the World’s Most Notorious Artist, has kept Elmyr’s archive since his death in 1976. In recent years Mr. Forgy has been trying to make more sense of Elmyr’s odd life locating dozens of his paintings and his birth records. From the New York Times:

He claimed that his father was a Roman Catholic and a diplomat, but the Budapest ledgers list Adolf as a Jewish merchant. The Nazis killed his entire family, Mr. de Hory said. But a cousin named Istvan Hont visited the artist’s villa on Ibiza, where Mr. Forgy was working at various times as a chauffeur, secretary and gardener. Mr. Hont, it turns out, was the forger’s brother.

Mr. Forgy knew that his boss copied masterpieces but did not much question their life on Ibiza, in which they kept company with celebrities like Marlene Dietrich and Ursula Andress. “I accepted the amazing with a nonchalance,” Mr. Forgy said in a recent phone interview. Mr. de Hory was the focus of Orson Welles’s 1974 documentary F for Fake, and Clifford Irving breathlessly titled his book Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.

After Mr. de Hory’s suicide, Mr. Forgy returned to Minnesota. “I went into deep seclusion” working as a night watchman and house restorer, he said. He held onto the papers and paintings. “I have schlepped them around endlessly,” he said. “The walls here in the house look like the Pitti Palace in Florence.”

His wife, Alice Doll, encouraged him in recent years to examine the stacks of false passports, Hungarian correspondence and Swiss arrest reports.

On December 11, 1976, Elmyr de Hory committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills after discovering that the Spanish government had agreed to hand him over to the French so that he could stand trial on fraud charges. Naturally there was speculation that he’d faked his death to avoid extradition, but Forgy, who was there when he died, has shot this theory down. After Elmyr’s death, his paintings—both his forgeries and his own original works—became so popular that forged de Hory art appeared on the art market! Heavy meta. Former Texas governor John Connally and a partner bought 100 of his paintings and sold them to wealthy buyers in the 1980s.
 

Elmyr’s portrait of Clifford Irving for TIME magazine’s coverage of the Howard Hughes hoax in 1973.
 

Portrait of a woman in the style of Modigliani, by Elmyr de Hory
 
More Elmyr after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.19.2017
01:20 pm
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Jean Cocteau’s poem for Orson Welles
04.21.2017
08:16 am
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Orson Welles by Jean Cocteau (from the frontispiece of André Bazin’s book on Welles)
 
Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau first met at a performance of “Voodoo Macbeth,” the all-black Shakespeare production Welles staged in New York in 1936 with funding from a New Deal program. They remained friends and encouraged one another’s rascality, according to Simon Callow’s account of the 1948 Venice Film Festival in One-Man Band, the third volume of his Welles biography:

He and the perenially provocative Jean Cocteau formed a sort of anti-festival clique, clubbing together to commit what Cocteau rather wonderfully called lèse-festival. [...] Together in Venice, the two men behaved like two very naughty boys. Welles shocked his hosts by ostentatiously walking out of the showing of Visconti’s uncompromisingly severe masterpiece, La Terra Trema.

 

Cocteau and Welles in Venice, 1948
 
Welles was a member of the Comité d’Honneur at Cocteau’s 1949 Festival du Film Maudit, at which both The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai were screened. (Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks made its European debut there, too, and Artaud’s “Sorcery and Cinema” was first published in the festival catalog.) Cocteau contributed this sketch of his friend to the program for Welles’ The Blessed and the Damned, an evening of two one-act plays that opened in Paris in 1950:

Orson Welles is a giant with the face of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog who has broken loose and gone to sleep in the flower bed. An active loafer, a wise madman, a solitary surrounded by humanity, a student who sleeps during the lesson. A strategy: pretending to be drunk to be simply left alone. Seemingly better than anyone else, he can use a nonchalant attitude of real strength, apparently drifting but guided by a half-opened eye. This attitude of an abandoned hulk, and that of a sleepy bear, protects him from the cold fever of the motion picture world. An attitude which made him move on, made him leave Hollywood, and carried him to other lands and other horizons.

Quoting some of the increasingly hysterical praise for Welles printed elsewhere in the program and then in the show’s reviews, Callow wonders: “At least Cocteau had the excuse of being an opium addict; what were these chaps on?”

Keep reading, after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.21.2017
08:16 am
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Touch of Basil: Orson Welles’ spicy salad recipe
01.06.2017
08:53 am
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While waiting for the third volume of Simon Callow’s Orson Welles biography to arrive in the mail, I’ve been watching a number of movies by and about Welles. Among them is a documentary that was to have aired on French TV in May 1968, before regular programming was preempted by real life. Portrait: Orson Welles is one of the bonus features on the Criterion edition of The Immortal Story, released last year, and in it Welles shows how he made a salad.

The instructions below are a composite of Welles’ words and those of the documentary’s French narrator. I can’t help you reconstruct Orson’s proprietary blend of dried herbs, but I do know where you can find sherry vinegar from Jerez.

I used to be a very keen, if messy, amateur cook. But in the last years—14 years now since I married Paola—I haven’t been allowed in the kitchen. So the only cooking—the only messing about, rather, that I’m permitted—is the salad[...]

I use dried herbs. This is basil; we use fresh basil when our friends bring it from Italy. Two different kinds of mixed herbs that I prepare myself, and a little garlic salt, and the olive oil; we have very good olive oil for salads in Spain. Of course, the secret of all is the vinegar, which comes to us from our friends in Jerez, where the sherry is made. This delicious vinegar is made from a mix of sherry and wine. Some lemon, pressed in this little German device which looks a little cruel, but it’s very efficient. A bit of pepper and salt, and very important, Tabasco, that great American invention. Be generous with that. And now after this has been mixed—I haven’t been given a fork, as I usually have, so I can’t mix it as well—a bit more oil, and we should be [Welles tastes the salad dressing] ready.

The salad itself, of course, is carefully dried and then put in the icebox to chill. It’s a simple lettuce that grows right outside the house. And we’re ready.

Cut to Jeanne Moreau, facing the camera in a severe sixties dress decorated with a labyrinth glyph, reading from Paul Valéry’s “Fluctuations on Freedom”; and then to Welles at the lunch table, improvising a monologue as Richard Nixon, in which the candidate promises to restore a “true blue America” by wiping out the Irish, Jews, and blacks.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.06.2017
08:53 am
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That time Orson Welles met Andy Kaufman
12.02.2016
02:12 pm
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Orson Welles and Andy Kaufman were arguably the two greatest pranksters in American history. Welles infamously sparked an intense bout of public hysteria when his 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds conned thousands of radio listeners into believing that a Martian invasion of Earth was actually occurring.  Welles’ final finished feature film, 1974’s documentary F for Fake, about the notorious art forger Elmyr De Hory is a dazzling, intellectuality challenging masterpiece that can never quite decide if it’s a fake documentary about a painter of fake masterpieces who himself was the subject of a true biography written by a fake biographer (Clifford Irving)… or what it is.

Meanwhile, Kaufman’s legendary ability to take a premise beyond its breaking point was so developed that to this day many people still believe that he faked his own death 32 years ago.
 

 
The two men not only met, but Welles interviewed Kaufman when he served as a replacement host on The Merv Griffin Show. Despite his notably curmudgeonly behavior in his advanced years, Welles genuinely gushed about Kaufman’s remarkable acting talents. The date of the show was June 25, 1982. Observing the proceedings was Barney Miller actor Ron Glass, who passed away earlier this week.

I was happy to learn that Welles appreciated the comedic heights achieved by Taxi, which he calls one of the few things on TV that is not a “criminal felony,” but it’s even more interesting to notice the man behind the Mercury Theatre, possibly the greatest theatrical ensemble ever put together, observe that Taxi, despite its marvelous cast, often fell short of its potential as an ensemble show because the plots were seldom confined to the taxi depot (which would have the effect of forcing multi-character interactions).

Welles acutely observes that “Nobody ever came from nowhere as completely as” Kaufman’s character Latka Gravas did. Kaufman comes out wearing a neck brace but never makes anything of it—this was no doubt a product of his wrestling escapades with countless female opponents.

Roll tape, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.02.2016
02:12 pm
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‘The Immortal Story’: Orson Welles’ first color film/final fiction feature finally coming to Blu-ray
05.18.2016
02:56 pm
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The Immortal Story
 
On August 30th, Criterion will release Blu-ray and DVD editions of Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story. This 1968 work was Welles’ first color picture and would also prove to be the last fiction film he completed, as well as his shortest feature at 58 minutes. It was originally produced for French television and ran at just 48 minutes, though the English-language version, which hit U.S. theatres in 1969, is ten minutes longer.

Criterion has produced a newly restored, 4K digital transfer of the English-language cut, but the French-language TV version will be included, as well. Criterion is also readying the restored version of Chimes at Midnight, Orson’s 1966 film, which has recently been making the rounds in art house theatres. Both films star Welles and actress Jeanne Moreau.
 
Orson Welles
 
Jeanne Moreau
Stills of Welles and Moreau in ‘The Immortal Story.’

The Criterion releases will mark the first time either picture has been made available on home video in the U.S. Pre-order both through Criterion’s website. Amazon has listings for The Immortal Story and Chimes at Midnight, though they can’t be pre-ordered just yet.

Here’s a restored clip from The Immortal Story:
 

 
H/T: Wellesnet

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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05.18.2016
02:56 pm
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Watch Burt Reynolds and the Muppets on the unaired pilot for ‘The Orson Welles Show,’ 1978
04.14.2016
10:34 am
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Between the twin humiliations of his frozen peas and Paul Masson commercials, and unable to finish his last feature The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles found himself on an LA soundstage with Burt Reynolds, wearing matching red shirts with enormous collars and chatting about showbiz for a TV pilot. This was Welles’ shot at hosting a talk show. There were no takers.

Like much of the great director’s work, The Orson Welles Show was made on the cheap, and if no one will confuse this unloved project with Chimes at Midnight, it’s not because Welles was slacking. In Orson Welles Remembered, the show’s editor, Stanley Sheff, says that he got the job by offering to work for free for three days, which “turned into a year of collaboration with Mr. Welles on The Orson Welles Show.” That’s right: according to Sheff, he and Welles put in a year of eight-hour days editing this 74-minute program on video, “working weekends and holidays when required.” Compare this with Citizen Kane, which started post-production in November 1940 and was first screened in January 1941.
 

 
Did I mention The Orson Welles Show was cheaply made? The budget was such that Sheff had to wear three hats, filling in for Welles as director for a few inserts and playing the part of the violinist in the big finish with Angie Dickinson. And according to the notes on YouTube, it’s not just the canned laughter that makes the lengthy interview with Reynolds (roughly the first half of the show) seem so odd:

Audience questions for the Burt Reynolds Q&A session were scripted, with members of the audience given line readings - this was necessary, as unlike normal talk shows filmed with a multiple-camera setup, the low-budget show was filmed with only one camera, and so it was necessary to do multiple retakes to get multiple camera angles.

The second half of the show runs at a higher gear. Welles intones something about “the unfathomable antiquity of ancient Egypt.” Fozzie Bear gets flop sweat doing his “A material” during the Muppets’ bit, which leads into an interview with Jim Henson (“think Rasputin as an Eagle Scout,” Welles says) and Frank Oz. But it’s the last fifteen minutes of the show that are pure Welles. Fans of F for Fake will discern a strong formal resemblance between that film and the elaborate magic tricks that close The Orson Welles Show; I’m guessing this is where all those hours in the editing room went.
 
Watch the pilot for ‘The Orson Welles Show’ after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.14.2016
10:34 am
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When Edward Gorey took on the Martians
03.22.2016
09:19 am
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H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel War of the Worlds has famously inspired at least seven motion pictures as well as an infamous, historic, and hysteria-inducing radio broadcast, directed and narrated by the late, great Orson Welles in 1938. The radio-play caused such panic that public outcry called for stricter regulation and guidelines by the FCC. Be that as it may, the overall success of the radio program helped to secure Orson Welles’ reputation and fame as a serious dramatist.

One figure not often associated with, but connected to the genius of War of the Worlds, was the American writer and illustrator Edward Gorey.

From 1953 to 1960, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting some magnificent book cover (and very often text) illustrated by the artist Edward Gorey. Gorey would eventually become quite successful as an artist and author of his own material, eventually penning over 100 books, but from 1953 to 1960, he lived in New York City and worked as an illustrator in the art department of Doubleday. He toiled alongside other unknown artists like young Andy Warhol, illustrating the works of famous mainstream authors such as Thomas Wolfe, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka.
 

One example of many of Gorey’s stunning book covers.
 
Thankfully, both Gorey and Warhol would eventually break out of their respective ruts and change the art world forever. Gorey’s unique pen and ink style made him popular with fans as diverse as children and goths. During his tenure at Doubleday, he illustrated kid’s books as well as classics like Bram Stoker’s horror masterpiece Dracula. When he struck out on his own, he even dabbled in what can only be described as “asexual pornography.” But it’s toward the end of his time at Doubleday that he was asked to add his stark trademark pen and ink style to illustrate a new edition of the H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds. This was for the Looking Glass Library series, which was published in 1960. (Most of Gorey’s own works are obscure and hard to find, but there are collections of his work available through The Gorey Store found in The Edward Gorey House online.) Gorey begins each chapter of The War of the Worlds with one of his eerily unmistakable pen and ink sketches.

Here are some striking samples of his work from this special edition of The War of the Worlds, when Gorey took on the Martians:
 

 

 
More Gorey, after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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03.22.2016
09:19 am
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‘Orson Welles’ Sketch Book,’ marvelous British TV series from 1955
01.14.2016
09:26 am
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By the mid-1950s the years of Orson Welles scrambling this way and that for some money to finance his cinematic and theatrical efforts were well underway. He hadn’t yet descended to the level of semi-literate frozen pea voiceovers, but he had begun his years defined by the endless process of trying to drum up some cash to make The Trial or F for Fake or Chimes at Midnight.

Anyway, in 1955 a young writer friend of his named Wolf Mankowitz (no, not Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael will be happy to tell you all about their collaboration) in England hit upon the idea of an informal storytelling show featuring Welles, which he thought would work well on the BBC. At the time Mankowitz was best known for his novel A Kid for Two Farthings.
 

 
The show ran in 1955 under the title Orson Welles’ Sketch Book. There eventually appeared six episodes, each lasting 15 minutes, Welles would free-associate with a sketchpad, and every few minutes a sketch relating to the story he was telling would be shown to the home viewer. In the show Welles discoursed on bullfighting, his infamous 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Harry Houdini, critics, a story involving an earthquake, and the Gate Theatre in Dublin, among others.
 

 
Welles’ stories always have an air of self-serving horseshit to them, but they are undeniably entertaining. In the show Welles is frequently shown using an actual quill to sketch with, which for some reason I find hilarious.

On the original conception of the show, Barbara Leaming reports in Orson Welles: A Biography:
 

Eager to work with Orson in England, Mankowitz made a deal with the BBC for a series of television shows titled The Orson Welles Sketch Book that would pay enough to keep Orson going until they put together something for the London stage. Mankowitz had created the television show to fit what he saw as Orson’s innate restlessness: “The problem with Orson,” says Mankowitz, “was to get him to stay i the same place in front of the camera for very long. So as he draws quite amusingly well, I had the notion that we could have him with his sketchbook, and that we would simply cut to the drawings when we wanted to get off him. You see, we simply needed a device to intercut so that we could lay his voice over and then when we had him back in the eye of the camera, pick it up from there.” The BBC programme turned out to be a big hit, and Orson was eventually offered a second series, titled Around the World with Orson Welles.

 
All six of the shows are on YouTube—and they’re all embedded here as well:

Orson Welles Sketchbook, episode 1: The Early Days

 
More of ‘Orson Welles Sketchbook’ and some of his sketches, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.14.2016
09:26 am
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‘Touch of Evil’: The movie that finished Orson Welles in Hollywood
01.06.2016
01:00 pm
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In February 1957, Orson Welles walked onto to Stage 19 at Universal Studios to begin directing his first Hollywood movie in almost a decade—Touch of Evil. The studios thought Welles was a risk—he was considered difficult, troublesome, a bad boy who just wouldn’t do what the studio execs told him to do. His last Hollywood feature had been the low budget Macbeth for Republic Pictures—a company better known for producing two-reeler westerns. At first Republic were keen on big old Orson bringing some high-falutin’ literary class to their stable, but after seeing the final cut, they took fright and delayed the film’s release for over a year.

Having his work held back or re-cut or burnt, encased in concrete and dumped in the sea—as happened to footage from his second movie The Magnificent Ambersons—was fast becoming the Hollywood norm for Orson Welles.

If Universal considered hiring him a risk—then it was a far greater risk for the writer, director and star to put his trust back with the studios—because no matter what he did or didn’t do, it was fairly easy money to bet that the no-neck Hollywood execs would royally fuck it up once again. And that, dear reader, is exactly what they did do.
 
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Bad cop, good cop: Welles as corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan and Charlton Heston as Mexican drug enforcement official Miguel “Mike” Vargas.
 
There are different stories as to how Welles ended up directing Touch of Evil, a low-budget film noir of murder and corruption in a small border town. One goes something like this: lead actor Charlton Heston suggested Welles as director—which is a probable—only agreeing to star once Welles was signed-up to direct and appear in the film. As Universal wanted Heston—they were only too happy to oblige.

The other has Welles pitching ideas and looking for a script or a book or a story so bad, so obviously unfilmable that only a genius of Welles’ waist size could make it work.

Welles took one look at the screenplay based on a cheap pulp novel by Whit Masterson—the pen name of writing duo Bob Wade and Bill Miller—and decided he’d found his movie. Unlike say Alfred Hitchcock who always had his films worked out shot for shot long before a camera turned over, Welles wrote and rewrote the script throughout filming—often improvising and collaborating with the actors on dialogue. Welles also took the unusual approach of rehearsing the script with the cast prior to filming. Actress Janet Leigh—who played Heston’s wife in the film—later recalled:

We rehearsed two weeks prior to shooting, which was unusual. We rewrote most of the dialogue, all of us, which was also unusual, and Mr. Welles always wanted our input. It was a collective effort, and there was such a surge of participation, of creativity, of energy. You could feel the pulse growing as we rehearsed. You felt you were inventing something as you went along.

Mr. Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want one bland moment. He made you feel you were involved in a wonderful event that was happening before your eyes.

Even with rehearsals, Welles spent most nights rewriting the screenplay—bringing in new characters, creating new scenes. After one long night at the typewriter he called up Marlene Dietrich saying he had just written her a scene in his new movie and would she be so good as to come along tomorrow and film it? Of course, Dietrich was delighted to do so—as indeed were many of the other actors who were taking pay cuts or “guesting” in the movie—all because they recognized Welles’ genius and wanted to work with him.

But the studios still didn’t trust Welles. They planted spies on set who fed information back to front of house. Welles was wise to their game. On day one of filming, he arrived on set at 9am and had the first set-up finished by 9:15. By 9:25 he had finished the second. By the end of the day, Welles had shot eleven minutes of script. To the studio finks it looked like Welles had been tamed, but he was actually playing them—the set-ups were mainly close-ups or long shot dialog scenes. After a few days of such phenomenal turn-over, the spies went quietly back to their desks and Welles was left to get on with the movie he wanted to make.
 
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Don’t interrupt, genius at work.
 
This was all fine until it came to editing the movie. Welles didn’t get on with the studio’s first choice of editor. The next thankfully understood exactly what Welles was doing and the pair cut a movie that was based on rhythms and innovative non-linear juxtapositions of scenes. For example, one scene would be cut with another scene—either happening concurrently or slightly ahead of the narrative. It then cut back to the end of the original scene. The audience were being given knowledge of events to come and insight into the actions of the characters. The editing style was about a decade or so ahead of its time. When the studio execs saw a cut of the movie in Welles’ absence—they freaked, barred Orson from the studio, reshot some of the material, shot additional scenes, and brought in a do-it-by-numbers editor who recut the whole thing in linear form.

In other word, the studio fucked it up—which they probably realized after the fact as they released Touch of Evil as a B-movie support to the Hedy Lamarr feature The Female Animal. Still Touch of Evil had enough of Welles’ creative genius to make it a powerhouse of a movie—one that has understandably grown in critical stature since first release. However, the film effectively finished Welles’ career as a Hollywood director.
 
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More from behind the scenes of Orson Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.06.2016
01:00 pm
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Orson Welles talks about the conspiracy to suppress ‘Citizen Kane’ in 1960 interview
05.21.2015
10:08 am
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This short interview from 1960 has some fascinating comments from Orson Welles on the uphill battle he faced getting Citizen Kane into theaters. It was often speculated of course, that the titular character was based on publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, who only exacerbated this notion by using all his resources to try and prevent the film’s release—this is without ever having seen it. (You’d think a strategy of denial might be a little less self-incriminating!) Welles manages to get in a snide jab with: “Kane isn’t really founded on Hearst… in particular,” specifying that Kane was a composite character.

Even more fascinatingly, Welles does not shy from the more explicit politics of the film, admitting “it was intended consciously as a sort of social document, as an attack on the acquisitive society, and indeed on acquisition in general.” This clear critique of power managed to get him branded as a Communist in the states and banned in the Soviet Union—can’t win for losing, I suppose. As it was, Hearst actually did succeed at limiting the run of the film in the US—by a lot. Few theaters even showed the film. The box office numbers suffered, and though Citizen Kane is now considered one of the greats, it damaged Welles’ career from the very start.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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05.21.2015
10:08 am
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