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I'd like to beat the drum a little for a terrific new book just published by University of California Press, Catherine Benamou's It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey, which is far and away the definitive book on It's All True, Welles's doomed documentary project about Latin America in the 1940s. Maybe the fact that the same publisher is bringing out a book of mine about Welles in a couple of months gives me a special interest in the subject; I should also note that Benamou, who's been working on her book for well over two decades, is an old friend. (She also arranged recently for the purchase of two major Welles collections by the University of Michigan, which are going by the name "Everybody's Orson Welles." I was privileged to be the first visitor to this mountain of material in Ann Arbor last summer, which is where I collected the stills used on my own book jacket.)
Some readers may be put off a bit by Catherine's academic language, but the fact remains that so much fresh and even startling information is available here—information that corrects countless myths—that if you care about Welles at all, you can't afford to ignore this book.
The received wisdom about It's All True, commonly known as Welles's Brazilian "misadventure," is that he got so carried away by partying at the carnival in Rio that he cost RKO a fortune without any clear plan in mind for the film. Benamou fully demonstrates that virtually none of this scenario is true, and it can be attributed to the studio's successful propaganda in justifying its firing of Welles—thereby dooming The Magnificent Ambersons as well as curtailing Welles's equally ambitious three-part documentary feature, which would have had other segments filmed in Mexico and Peru.
In fact, if Welles was staying up most nights, this was partly in order to meet with his Brazilian collaborators (mainly performers and researchers) to plan the next day's shooting, which would usually start around 8 AM. Arguably the true scandal of what he was doing was political—shooting a documentary whose major characters were all poor nonwhites, to the consternation of many government as well as studio officials.
Also, do you know anything about Coffrets Chantal Akerman boxset release? I've only seen a poor copy of Jeanne Dielman on film last year in Philadelphia (at my school, UARTS).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19983
Readers of Mr. Rosenbaum know (or at least this reader of him thinks he remembers) that he's not always excited about the NYRB's film coverage but this article seems to be informed and is well-written.
To David:
I can only tell you that www.dvdbeaver.com, an invaluable resource, reports that both this PAL release and a stand-alone PAL release of Jeanne Dielman are "possibly without English subtitles". The listing on French Amazon doesn't say, and I've learned from experience that when French companies don't mention English subtitles, chances are they aren't included. I should add, however, that the spoken French in the film is fairly minimal.
To FrF: I agree with you that the Sanford Schwartz article on Welles is much better than the usual NYR film piece. In fact, it prompted a letter from me that said so; I only took issue with the claim that there are only 12 "finished" Welles films and the kind of validation of David Thomson's Rosebud that I find almost invariably separates the Welles nonspecialists from the specialists. (This letter prompted a thoughtful, personal, and friendly letter to me from Schwartz, which leads me to suspect that neither my letter nor his reponse will be published.)
As for the 12 "finished" films, I argued that (1) this tally omits Filming Othello, Welles's last feature, and (2) the whole notion of what a film or a finished film is when it comes to Welles is almost always muddled; e.g., The Magnificent Ambersons, "4 Men on a Raft" in It's All True, and Mr. Arkadin are all "finished," but not by Welles; and why are all of Welles's TV pilots left out of the reckoning?
I'm a huge Welles enthusiast (I was a research assistant on the "Encyclopedia of Orson Welles"). Personally, I like the fact that Callow seems very fair in how he assesses Welles's career. He doesn't take the positions that you and Bogdonavich have taken with respect to his preceived career failures but neither does he come off as Thomson does on the subject.
The Ambersons portion is so heartbreaking, especially when Callow reports how David O. Selznick asked the head of RKO to give a copy of the original Ambersons to the Museum of Modern Art only to have his pleading met with total indifference and contempt.
http://www.cineaste.com/314featurewellesbookreview...
Can I ask you, though, as a Welles scholar, what do you make of all of the eccentric boasts that Welles made about the supposed amazing events of his life?
Callow quotes Welles in "The Road to Xanadu" as saying he had lunch next to Adolph Hitler as a schoolboy on a trip to Germany. In "Hello Americans" he talks about traveling the rainforests of Brazil with headhunters. (These are just two examples of many amazing tales Welles told about his own life, by the way.)
As tales of a born fabulist, these are undeniably entertaining. But as one of the researchers trying to get at the truth of Welles life and work, how do you square his obvious predeliction to exageration about his life with the fine points of his work? And why did he feel the need to fabulize so much of his life? Is this more rooted in pathology than charm?
For instance, in the Orson Welles Almanac dvd, Welles tells the story of how a Voodoo Priest came to curse the entire production of "It's all True." Do you take that seriously? Is it meant to be taken seriously?
Just wondering what your thoughts are on this.
His taste for theatricality, especially in public situations, obviously led to certain exaggerations--and in some cases, such as the origins of "The Lady from Shanghai," outright lies--but I've generally encountered fewer of these than his usual reputation would suggest.
To answer your question broadly, I think he liked to tell colorful stories, which sometimes persuaded him to bend facts, but my own meeting with him suggested that when ethical issues were at stake, he usually was at pains to tell the truth. And in some cases--such as what a world traveler he was as a teenager--I once saw a copy of his passport at age 16, and can only report that what he claimed was absolutely true.
I was lucky enough to be in LA a few years ago when the American Cinematheque was doing a Welles retrospective at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and they devoted one of the last nights of the series to a program entitled "The Unseen Welles."
His cinematographer who just recently died - Gary Garver is his name (I think)- brought various film clips from his own archive of stuff he worked on for Welles. He said that it was the one and only time that most of what he was screening would ever be screened (including footage from the Other Side of the Wind.)
Highlights from that night included what he said was the last filmed footage of Welles that had ever been shot - a day before his death, various scenes from the Merchant of Venice, various commercials for Japanese television, and a good 20 minutes of footage from the Other Side of the Wind among other things.
Any idea what will happen to Garver's archives now that he has passed away?
The correct name of his cinematographer is Gary Graver; if you check the archive of this film blog, you'll find a tribute to Gary that I wrote when he died. His widow Jillian (whom I know) and his son Sean (whom I don't know) are undoubtedly the ones who have inherited his archive; check out the web site www.garygraver.com for more details.
There seems to be some genuine reason for hope now that a final agreement to complete "The Other Side of the Wind" and show it will be reached, but the necessary agreements still have to be signed.
To the Editors:
I’m grateful for Sanford Schwartz’s article about Orson Welles in the March 15 issue of the New York Review
of Books, which strikes me as being far more sensitive to Welles’s work and some of the issues posed by his troublesome career than most pieces I’ve read on the subject by nonspecialists. Even if Schwartz’s ideas about Welles as a proto-surrealist are more provocative than convincing to me, they do lead to some arresting observations about his visual style. So I hope he’ll forgive me for pointing out an error in his piece and a few assertions that I believe are misleading. They all derive from confusions that invariably greet any effort made to describe Welles in relatively simple terms.
First, the error: “Although [Welles] was involved with many films that for one reason or another weren't
brought off, he actually finished only twelve, a group that includes the fairly short F for Fake and The Immortal
Story, both made for TV.” But if we’re including films made for TV (which incidentally don’t encompass F for Fake), there are at least four TV pilots Welles finished (one of them, in my opinion, a major work--the 25-minute, 1958 The Fountain of Youth). There’s also the 84-minute essay film Filming Othello (1979), which would bring the number of features to thirteen. But part of the problem with sticking to even this number is that, as James Naremore points out, it’s not always a simple matter determining what a “work” by Welles consists of, much less a single finished feature. Both The Magnificent Ambersons and Mr. Arkadin qualify as finished only in the sense that they were completed by others, whereas Welles completed the editing of two separate versions of his Macbeth and at least two versions of his Othello (and lamentably, along with The Fountain of Youth and Filming Othello, neither of these Othellos is currently available; we only have the second edited version with a substantially and posthumously altered soundtrack). Schwartz describes the posthumously edited Four Men on a Raft as “a surviving section of the Brazilian documentary,” but what survives is the footage of an unfinished film, whereas we know that Welles came far closer to finishing Don Quixote--before proceeding to dismantle it, which happened long before the posthumous “completion” of that film by Jesus Franco. So what films count as finished, and what films don’t? Sticking with the usual consumerist models doesn’t really clarify matters.
And some of the same confusion crops up in assessing Welles scholarship, as opposed to lazy mythic speculation.
One sure way of distinguishing Welles scholars from nonspecialists is how they regard David Thomson’s completely unreliable Rosebud, which Schwartz calls “often dazzling and insightful,” though it’s backed by no independent research or personal acquaintance with Welles, isn’t mentioned once in either of Simon Callow’s massive volumes, has been rebutted at length by both Joseph McBride and myself, and, as a highly fanciful portrait of Welles’s character, refuted by countless people who knew him. For me, the one hour I once spent with Welles at a lunch has sufficed to disprove Thomson’s contention, seemingly seconded by Schwartz, that his “warmth was confined to nostalgia”--although I would hope that a closer look at the films would also undermine this impression. Even the unedited footage of Four Men on a Raft challenges such a claim.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader
Chicago, IL