Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The director of photography is the technician who records the images, but, in the nature of things, he or she is often the person who engenders them. It is perfectly possible as a director to concern yourself with the dialogue, the characterisation, the hair-cuts or the extras and leave the pictures to the cinematographer. Many famous directors have done just that. Welles was not going to be among them. The appointment of his director of photography was the crucial decision now the screenplay existed. In this instance, he needed someone who was open to suggestion, who had initiative and was good-humoured, who was also aware that his director, however imaginative and intelligent, was not going to have all the answers, nor would he resent him for that. Praying for such a paragon, Welles’s prayers were answered beyond his wildest expectations. Improbably, the most famous cameraman in Hollywood, who was also its boldest experimenter, as well as being the most agreeable of men, approached Welles out of the blue and offered him his services. This was Gregg Toland, fresh from The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home and Wuthering Heights, for his work on which he had just won an Oscar, and he was the last of the instruments of Welles’s destiny.

  ‘I know nothing about film-making,’ said Welles when they met. ‘That’s why I want to work with you,’ said Toland. ‘That’s the only way to learn anything – from somebody who doesn’t know anything.’ The first thought that struck anyone who met Toland, according to his friend George Turner, was that he appeared frail, even ill. ‘He had a sallow complexion, was under-weight and walked with a stoop that made him appear older than he was. He seemed to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. When he spoke of the thing that dominated his life – cinematography – the melancholy look vanished. No one could speak more eloquently or knowledgeably or with greater enthusiasm. When he was at work, an even greater change took place: he was a dynamo of energy to whom long hours and difficult working conditions meant nothing.’16 Temperamentally opposite, Welles and he were perfectly matched in their passion for work, and each realised that the other would be an ideal collaborator. In fact, Toland knew Welles’s theatre work, having been especially struck by Julius Caesar, with its boldly sculpted light and swift transitions. He knew that Welles was no slavish adherent of naturalism and had a hunch that Welles would allow him to pursue certain developments further than any of the distinguished directors for whom he had most recently been working – Wyler, Ratoff and Ford – even though Ford had allowed him an extraordinary degree of freedom in the highly composed Long Voyage Home. Toland was a man with a mission; in his own sphere, he was as determined a self-publicist as Welles, writing passionately polemical articles in the specialist press. He had already created something of a division in the ranks of cinematography.

  After early experience with the ceaselessly experimental Arthur Edeson, he had frequently worked with the highly original director/designer of The Shape of Things to Come, William Cameron Menzies. Famous for his speed and adaptability, Toland quickly worked his way through the system, avoiding being attached to a studio, which would have curbed his independence and required him to do routine work. Eventually he signed a contract with Goldwyn which provided him with two unique opportunities: the virtually unheard-of right to work with the director and designer six weeks before the start of shooting and free access to Goldwyn’s experimental laboratory. He made tough demands of himself. ‘Not only should the cameraman know all about the science and mechanics of photography but he should be a student of the drama,’17 he wrote. ‘I found it to my advantage to take a course in playwriting. Also a course in hair-dressing and another in screen make-up. I continually observe and study new styles in women’s clothes, from the viewpoint of their values in enhancing certain dramatic methods.’ Along with this thorough practical preparation, he had a slightly mystical, slightly subversive view of his profession. ‘Of all the people who make up a movie production unit, the cameraman is the only one who can call himself a free soul’ – because, he says, you don’t see the results of the cameraman’s work till the rushes are viewed, twenty-four hours later. ‘No, the cameraman is perfectly at liberty to carry out his own ideas, even to introduce an occasional revolutionary departure – within the bounds of reason, of course.’ These were the bounds he sought to test with Welles.

  ‘A great deal has been written and said about the new technical and artistic possibilities offered by such developments as coated lenses, super-fast films and the use of lower-proportioned and partially ceilinged sets,’18 he wrote. ‘We (cinematographers who have experimented with them) wished that instead of using them conservatively for a scene here or a sequence there, they could experiment free-handedly with them throughout an entire production.’ Because of the special character of Citizen Kane’s screenplay, ‘as both Welles and I saw it, we were forced to make radical departures from conventional practice.’ Of course Welles was delighted to facilitate Toland’s experiment. It was in his nature to innovate; besides, it was what was required of him.

  Toland swiftly converted him to the principle tenets of his celluloid faith, all of which were designed to honour its greatest gospel: Realism. As in every age, in every art, the innovators claim that their development breaks the mould of convention to restore the fresh impact of truth. ‘Both Welles and I felt that if it was possible, the picture should be brought to the screen in such a way that the audience would feel it was looking at reality, rather than merely at a movie.’ For Toland, and therefore for Welles, that meant, self-evidently, sharp-focus, great depth-of-field and ceilings on rooms. The finished result seems to us, now, the opposite of real. It seems stylised in the extreme. Paradoxically, though, it meant that Welles could stage the film almost as if it were a play. He had to make no concession to the camera; it would follow him wherever he wanted it to go. Another crucial principle that Toland gave to Welles was that of continuous action. ‘I was constantly encouraged by Toland, who said, under the influence of Ford, “carry everything in one shot – don’t do anything else.” In other words, play scenes through without cutting, and don’t do alternate versions. That was Toland in my ear,’19 Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘And secondly, I didn’t know to have all kinds of choices. All I could think of to do was what was going to be on the screen in the final version.’ The single biggest difficulty for someone directing a film for the first time is that (with rare exceptions) he or she will never have edited one. It is extraordinarily difficult to judge what shots will be needed when the picture is edited, to imagine in advance the sequence of shots within a single scene, or the breakdown of the scene into different cuts (close-up, two-shot, three-shot and so on). This problem of ‘coverage’ is one Welles never had to face. According to Toland ‘we tried to plan the action so that the camera could pan or dolly from one angle to another whenever this type of treatment was desirable.’20

  Another concomitant of Toland’s belief in realism was the notion of seamlessness, something on which Welles had placed considerable stress in his screenplay of Heart of Darkness. Welles, said Toland admiringly, ‘instinctively grasped a point which many other far more experienced directors and producers never comprehend; that the scenes and sequences should flow together so smoothly that the audience should not be conscious of the mechanics of picture-making.’ This, too, seems very nearly the opposite of what was achieved, though technically it is true that Citizen Kane is a film of a thousand transitions, all of them carefully worked out and then shot in the camera, with lights on individual dimmers to facilitate the smoothness that Toland so desired. Toland knew that everything they were attempting must be planned to the last detail. He and Welles, co-conspirators, set to with evangelical determination. ‘To put things with brutal frankness, these things simply cannot be done by conventional means. But they were a basic part of Citizen Kane and they had to be done.’ In order to achieve the sharp focus that he believed was the essence of realism, he experimented with high-powered arc lights, coated lenses, super-speed (XX) film and low f= stops. He describes the shot of a
man and a loving-cup which would, he said, normally be cut ‘between close-up and cup. Yet we were able to keep the man’s face fully defined, while at the same time the loving-cup was in such sharp focus that the audience was able to read the inscription from it,’ he writes. ‘Also beyond this foreground were a group of men from 12 to 18 foot focal distance. These men were equally sharp.’ His excitement is palpable even now; it must have knocked Welles sideways.

  He was preparing to demonstrate nothing less than the future of film in Citizen Kane. There was no universal agreement that his developments constituted progress. Within the cinematographic profession, there was a large body of practitioners who regarded the principles of ‘good photography’ as hard won and not to be easily traded for flashy sharpness: ‘that illusion of roundness which – fully as important as depth of definition – is a necessity in conveying the illusion of three-dimensional reality in our two-dimensional pictures.’21 There was concern, too, that so-called universal focus, whereby the whole screen was equally sharp in focus (the Holy Grail of Toland and like-minded cameramen), would confuse the eye, which would scarcely know where to look. These debates recall those that raged around the introduction of stereophonic sound and, later, compact discs: warmth, naturalness, mellowness would all be banished. These, of course, were the very last things that Welles or Toland were interested in: sharpness, fluidity and contrast were their ideals. They gloried in their Brave New World. It was pan-focus this, and pan-focus that – a phrase which, Welles delightedly confessed to Bogdanovich, didn’t mean anything at all. ‘We called it pan-focus in some idiot interview – just for the fun of it.’22

  Perry Ferguson was party to all Toland’s experimentation; they were of pressing concern to his department, as floors were cut up, sets built on parallels, muslin ceilings (to allow both light and sound to pass through them) installed. His particular problem was one of budget. The scale conceived by Welles was one which the film could not afford; it became necessary to cheat many of the settings, particularly those at Xanadu, as Mankiewicz and Welles had named Kane’s castle (having first toyed with calling it Alhambra). This he proposed to do by borrowing many of the crucial architectural elements of the set from the RKO stores; other settings would simply have to be filmed from cunning angles to conceal the fact that they were only partly there, the larger part of them shrouded in darkness created by velvet drapes. Ferguson, too, seems to have got into the swing of all this with great enthusiasm. Imagination and technical cunning were taking the place of sheer expenditure.

  As the three collaborators thrilled each other with their daring, work on the script continued, Welles constantly feeding back developments in pre-production to Mankiewicz, who did his best to absorb them. Welles had by now cast all the leading roles, as much as possible from his usual pool, but slightly differently in composition to the Heart of Darkness cast: the Five Kings contingent had thinned out (Emery, Readick and Barrier had no parts in Citizen Kane), the old pals, Sherman and Carter had gone. Joe Cotten, who had been triumphantly playing in Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn in New York (she had seen him in Too Much Johnson and obviously not held it against him) was cast in the crucial role of Jedediah Leland. Welles remained desperately eager that the actors should be unknown faces in Hollywood. Only Coulouris, somehow typically, had let his celluloid virginity go, but in heavy disguise. Agnes Moorhead came to Hollywood to play Kane’s mother after having worked with Welles for some years on radio: she had been Margot Lane to his Lamont Cranston, the Shadow’s shadow. The two newcomers to the group were Ruth Warrick and Dorothy Comingore as Kane’s two wives. Warrick, a radio singer and off-Broadway actress (and former Miss Jubilesta) was to play Kane’s first wife, Emily: ‘I’m not looking for an actress who can play a lady,’ he said to her. ‘I want an actress who is a lady.’ Comingore he cast as Susan Alexander Kane (‘probably the most important character in the picture’, he told her, alarmingly). He was looking for someone who could convincingly be ‘frightened, whining, pathetic’. Stepping outside his regular troupe, he obviously sought to cast to type.

  With Comingore, particularly, he detected something within her own personality that he knew would be invaluable to Susan Alexander. An old girlfriend of Chaplin’s, her career had failed to take off despite his attempts to advance it. She had even changed her name; Welles insisted that she change it back. To an extent he reproduced in his behaviour to her Kane’s behaviour to Susan; but to a large degree he sought to root all of the characters in the specific actors he had cast, just as he had meant to in Heart of Darkness. In the case of his old team, the parts had been precisely tailored to them: to some aspects of them that Welles perceived. Now, in mid-June, he held unofficial rehearsals at Mankiewicz’s house (to avoid paying full salaries as required by Equity) with any of the actors who were available; more modifications took place. The Revised Final Draft was delivered on 24 June. By 7 July, the accounts department gave their verdict: the script as it stood would cost $737,740, fully 50 per cent over the agreed figure. Schaefer none the less gave the film the go-ahead. His anxieties of the previous year had given way to a much more bullish mood; thanks to 1939’s royal flush of successes, RKO finally freed itself from official receivership in January 1940. ‘The new RKO’ was much publicised under Schaefer’s headline: ‘Quality Pictures at a Premium Price’. To confirm the new mood, he spent $390,000 in seven days. Citizen Kane would be the living proof of RKO’s new-found status.

  The script had further evolutions to undergo, each resulting in greater concision. The Second Revised Final Draft dropped an attempted assassination sequence. In this draft the celebrated breakfast scene between Kane and Emily, covering in one brief montage the whole history of their marriage, was introduced. This was Welles’s idea, stolen, as he was always delighted to admit, from Thornton Wilder’s then famous experimental one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner written seven years earlier, in which ninety years of a family’s life, over several generations, are played around the same unchanging seasonal table. Under financial pressure, the scene in which Susan plays with a jigsaw puzzle had to be moved from a dining-room set, which could not be afforded, to the Great Hall, which was already being used for several other scenes; it is the location which, as Carringer says, makes the scene. In the Third (and Final) Revised Final script the newspaper party and opera review scenes which had both been broken up by other scenes, were, for financial reasons, both played straight through. This is the script that was filmed; even then, of course, changes were made. Robert Carringer’s detailed exposition of the development of the screenplay is an entirely convincing account of the nature of creation in a collaborative art: there was no master script, neither Welles’s nor Mankiewicz’s nor indeed Toland’s – no pure concept, unswervingly followed and masterfully realised. Under legal and financial and creative pressure it had changed and changed and changed. All was compromise: adaptation, alteration, condensation; trimming, sharpening, honing. In this, as in all of the lively arts, the readiness is all: the ability to accommodate new inspiration and to shed what no longer works, to recognise solutions wherever they come from, to be willing shamelessly to beg, borrow or steal whatever is useful to you. At this stage of his life, Welles was supremely responsive to all this, a creative opportunist without peer.

  Now, approaching countdown, he was about to put the script (and his own abilities) to the proof. Toland was not available to shoot the tests; instead another distinguished cameraman, Russell Metty (later to shoot A Touch of Evil), was responsible for them. Make-up was a crucial consideration. Welles had come across Maurice Seiderman literally sweeping the cut hair off the floor of RKO’s make-up department. The twenty-five-year-old Russian immigrant, who had worked on Gunga Din and Swiss Family Robinson, had no official job in the department; he was not a union member, never became one and is thus uncredited on the film. Welles noticed him experimenting with latex and, passionately interested as he was and always had been in make-up, discussed its possibilities. He bec
ame convinced that Seiderman was the man for the job. Once again, he added someone to his team who was bursting with ideas and theories and would go to any lengths to explore them; someone, too, who would respond to his ideas and theories, rather than fob him off with routine applications. Welles was convinced, for example, that film stars represented types rather than detailed individuals; it would therefore be necessary for his actors to learn to concentrate and simplify their personas – particularly, their appearances. Accordingly, he had Seiderman sculpt make-up portraits for them that, in Frank Brady’s phrase, ‘followed Hollywood genre types’.

  His own make-up was based on photographs of Samuel Insull, the Chicago magnate, and, inevitably, Hearst. (Seiderman made a cast of Welles’s head: looking like a young pharaoh, large-eyed, large-eared, bald and boyishly imperious, it is an essence of his young self.) Ageing from twenty-five to seventy on camera presents huge challenges; in this case, the actor was as heavily made up young as he was old. He was certain that Kane should be beautiful as a young man, and equally certain that he would need a great deal of help in order to fool anyone into believing that he was. He had, for a start, a false nose. Like Laurence Olivier, he had always found the organ with which he was born disappointing, and rarely appeared in character without augmenting it in one way or another. For Kane it was nobly aquiline. Then, conscious of his jowls despite the fierce diet (supplemented by Benzedrine) that he had been following, he had Seidermann apply fish skin behind his ears to pull back his facial flesh. The effect is of cheeks being permanently sucked in, but it achieves the desired result: he looks very dashing. ‘Norman Mailer wrote that when I was young, I was the most beautiful young man anyone had ever seen,’23 he told Bogdanovich. ‘Yes! Made up for Citizen Kane! And only for five days!’ The ageing process called for skull caps upon skull caps, a network of rubber bands to create the flexibility of flesh, artificial jowls on top of the natural ones, contact lenses (just invented) on contact lenses. Technically, Seiderman, like Toland, was passionately for realism; given the materials available to him, he succeeds to a striking degree. But his real concern was to create a bridge between the actor and his character.