The first excerpt ends here, punctuated with a cynical joke in the manner of Citizen Kane. The second clip, even more calculatedly bewildering and technically complex than the first, takes place in a major studio screening room, where an influential young producer—modeled quite obviously on Robert Evans of Paramount—is waiting to be shown rushes from Hannaford’s latest film. The action inside the room is photographed in black-and-white, with a handheld camera, but when the actors are introduced, the movie footage is intercut with still photographs taken from slightly different angles, sometimes in color. As a result, everything comes to a stop, the faces and gestures of the two players momentarily frozen on screen, each photograph accompanied by the click-whizz of a camera shutter. Later, as Hannaford’s film is projected, we see 35mm color footage played off against a conversation between the producer and Hannaford’s representative. Welles cuts directly back and forth between the film and the conversation so that Hannaford’s images occupy the full screen and are never framed by the “real” studio. The episode as a whole is therefore composed of several different grades of film stock in different media, moving rapidly and without transition from a documentary look, to still photographs, to wide-screen color.
At the beginning the producer (Jeffrey Land) is shown in two stills creating a stop-motion effect. A handsome young man dressed in a stylish leather jacket and aviator glasses, he glances impatiently at his watch. Soon Hannaford’s stooge arrives (played by Norman Foster, Welles’s collaborator on Journey into Fear and It’s All True) and nervously introduces himself as “Billy Budd.” Trying to ingratiate himself, he calls the producer “Max” and reminds him that they are both former actors; almost instantly Billy recognizes that he has made a social error, and his voice trails off lamely. Opening a bag of gumdrops, he takes a seat in the row directly behind the producer, signaling the projectionist to begin. We hear the bleep of a synchronized soundtrack, a production leader flashes past, and in big-screen color we see a woman in a lavender dress (Oja Kodar) walking across a horizon and entering a phone booth. Subsequent footage, all of it wordless and Antonioni-like, shows the woman being followed by a young man on a motorcycle. The action is drawn out and is interrupted at one point by a title reading “scene missing.” Billy explains that everything we are seeing is in rough form, with only the slates cut out. When the male lead appears in a huge, glamorous close-up, Billy remarks, “According to Jake the box likes him.” “The box?” says the producer. “Yeah, the old magic box.” The producer pauses and then asks rhetorically, “Suppose the actor doesn’t like the old magic director?” As the Hannaford footage runs by, the producer begins asking questions in a flat, hostile tone. Occasionally Welles cuts to a tight close-up of him, with Billy leaning over his shoulder.
PRODUCER: What happens here?
BILLY: I’m not really sure, Max.
PRODUCER (reacting to shots of Oja Kodar walking down the steps of a building with a bag slung over her shoulder): What’s in the package?
BILLY: You mean what’s she got in her purse?
PRODUCER: It’s either a bomb or her lunch. . . . What’s the bomb for?
BILLY: I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his mind and there won’t be any.
PRODUCER (reacting to shots of Bob Random looking at a series of wind-up toys): What are the toys about? . . . When does the bomb go off?
BILLY: Well . . . we don’t actually know.
PRODUCER (turning back over his shoulder to give Billy a hostile look): He’s just making it up as he goes along, isn’t he?
BILLY: (The camera zooms in for a slightly larger close-up of his strained expression. He shrugs his shoulders.) He’s done it before.
Indeed Welles was making it up as he went along—changing certain characters, building relationships into the story, adding sequences, just as he had before. Like Porter, Griffith, Chaplin, and most of the directors who worked prior to the studio or package-unit systems of production, he often composed films in his head, incorporating new ideas during the shooting. And in a decade when nearly all movie directors were growing intensely self-conscious—a decade when Orson Welles became one of the cinema’s central myths—he had found a nearly inexhaustible subject, capable of endless elaboration. He simply turned the cameras on the working world around him, portraying the director as part hustler, part frustrated artist, and part aging Don Juan. This man is a flawed figure, but the disparity between his legend and his actual circumstances makes him seem at once tragic and fraudulent. We must assume that Welles had an intimate understanding of such phenomena, having made himself at a very early age into a kind of show business superman, and having developed at the same time an almost morbid fascination with the dangers of fame. He knew that as much as he wanted and needed power, its effects were corrosive.
In the early 1980s The Other Side of the Wind had been delayed for so long by legal complications that Welles feared it would look dated. Young directors, he told Henry Jaglom, were no longer auteurists and wanted to be more like Spielberg and Lucas. He thought that if he could liberate the footage, he might be able to turn it into an essay film about the making of The Other Side of the Wind. “I’m just a poor slob trying to make movies,” he once complained when a critic charged him with an inability to complete his films. In fact, he had always been able to make dramatic material out of the tension between a “poor slob” and his public image. He was one of our last romantics, but his romanticism was tempered by irony and intelligent detachment, the prerequisites for turning oneself into the basis of fiction. However unfinished and unruly his last projects might have been, whatever doubts may continue to be expressed about his “genius,” he was one of the few American filmmakers whose work will remain both eccentric and artistically significant.
11
Between Works and Texts
How can we define a work amid the thousands of traces left by a man after his death?
—Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
I
Foucault’s rhetorical question seems especially relevant to Welles, who left a collection of “traces” comparable to the vast inventory of Xanadu. Consider the holdings in the Welles archive at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. At the center of the archive are the files of the Mercury Theatre, purchased from Welles and Richard Wilson in 1978, documenting Welles’s career during the thirties and forties. To these have been added materials from people who worked with Welles, among them photographer George Fanto and director Peter Bogdanovich. There are 19,875 items in the Mercury files alone, ranging from personal correspondence, publicity clippings, and family photographs, to the scripts and working records of some of America’s most celebrated movies, plays, and radio programs. At one extreme the collection includes such fascinating trivia as Rita Hayworth’s application for a driver’s license and Eleanor Roosevelt’s autograph; at another it is a mine of information about US foreign policy, the nations and culture of Latin America, and a variety of social issues with which Welles was concerned. Among the manuscripts are several unproduced items by writers other than Welles—for example, a play titled Emily Brady by Donald Ogden Stewart, and Snowball, a radio drama of 1943 by Howard Koch. (Koch’s script—a story about lynch mobs—is accompanied by a letter from CBS executive Lyman Bryson informing Welles that “the present attitudes of stations in very large sections of the country” were such that they would not carry the program. “They would accuse us,” Bryson writes, “of insisting on the importance of the race question with disproportionate emphasis.”) A preponderance of the material, however, consists of things signed by Welles himself, often containing holograph revisions and production sketches, such as Marching Song, the unproduced play he coauthored with Roger Hill during the early thirties. In this category alone there are over a dozen film scenarios, scores of essays, some charcoal drawings and set designs, and a smattering of unremarkable poetry—even a set of “classroom notes” for teaching The Merchant of Venice, together with a fascinating series of st
udy questions and a lengthy fill-in-the-blanks examination.
In looking through the archive, one is repeatedly confronted with the epistemological problem raised by Foucault: which of these things shall we define as the “works” of Orson Welles? The problem is especially vexing because most of the material is either incomplete or dependent upon something absent. For instance, we could make a good-size volume from the manuscripts of Welles’s public speeches, but even though the volume would contain some incisive political commentary, it would have relatively little literary value and would do very little to explain why Welles was one of this country’s most effective platform speakers. What is missing is his voice, which, with its slightly drawling transatlantic accent and its rich timbre, could make the city directory sound Shakespearian. As an actor, Welles often played men who mesmerized audiences on formal public occasions: he was Charles Foster Kane delivering an election speech; Father Mapple giving a sermon; Clarence Darrow summing up a case; and he was almost Kurtz, the antihero of Heart of Darkness—a man whose voice, as Joseph Conrad tells us, “rang deep to the very last.” Welles’s script for the unfilmed Heart of Darkness project is in fact one of the most interesting documents in the Mercury archive, and it ought to be transformed into that unique twentieth-century genre, the published screenplay. Nevertheless, readers would be haunted by a desire to see the images it describes, and they would surely want to hear Welles speaking those famous last words, “The horror! The horror!”
A similar feeling of absence hovers over the play scripts and set designs of Welles’s theatrical productions, such as his adaptations of Julius Caesar and Native Son. Theatrical literature, as Bertolt Brecht once noted, is always “provisional,” taking its specific form not only from movement, voice, and lighting but also from the interaction of performers and audience on a specific occasion. Once the occasion passes, the performance survives only in memory or in fragmentary records. Hence Welles’s work for the stage, like that of all great theatrical personalities, has passed into the realm of mere legend. His actual productions, such as Around the World, are hardly less present to us than the shows he nearly directed. For example, Moby Dick Rehearsed, the greatly admired play he staged in London in 1955, has roughly the same evidentiary status as the “oratorio” based on the same novel, which he attempted without success to produce in New York in 1947. The London play was quasi-Brechtian, but the proposed New York production, based on a script by Brainerd Duffield and a score by Bernard Herrmann, would have been Wagnerian and explicitly Freudian. According to the notes preceding its text, it was intended to pay tribute to an American author who, “driven by neurosis to create works of libidinal intensity,” had “enunciated Freudian truths in an era which made prudery a fetish.” Welles’s stage presentation would “lay bare the basic poetic stuffs of the novel itself. . . . Melody, symphonic and choral, movement, dance-gesture, light and color—all would blend in patterns to kindle the spectator’s latent responses.”
We can only speculate about what such an event might have been like, armed with the more permanent record of Welles’s films. But the evidence of the films is also partial. As this book indicates, anyone who tries to analyze Welles’s career in movies must inevitably confront questions of textual authenticity. How can we arrive at an accurate account of his intentions for The Magnificent Ambersons? How should the surviving footage of It’s All True be assembled? Which is the “purer” form of Touch of Evil—the short version released in 1958 or the longer versions, containing a few shots by another director? Of the many versions of Arkadin, one of them titled Confidential Report, which comes closest to the design Welles had in mind?
Some of these questions have answers, but I doubt that anyone will ever respond confidently to all of them, or to the many others that are raised by Welles’s unreleased or mostly incomplete pictures, such as Don Quixote, The Deep, The Other Side of the Wind, and The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps significantly, one of the obsessive images of his cinema is a room crammed with objects and figures, its crowded space distorted by a wide-angle photography that recedes into some vague horizon. In similar fashion, his career was cluttered and just beyond our grasp. Certainly he left behind a substantial body of material that ought to be restored, preserved, and exhibited. Nevertheless, his reputation will always depend to some degree on fragments and traces. Like Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Kubla Khan,” his life’s work denies us scholarly closure; a romantic artifact, its oneiric quality is heightened by a sense of unfulfilled possibility.
Coleridge tells us that while writing “Kubla Khan” he was interrupted by an unnamed “person from Porlock,” who knocked on the door at an inopportune moment and broke the mood of composition. Welles was beset by a variety of less quaintly literary frustrations, most of which I have discussed in the preceding chapters. For the sake of clarity, however, I should probably emphasize that none of these frustrations had anything to do with what Charles Higham has called a “fear of completion”—an idea born of vulgar auteurism and pop psychology. The absence to which I refer is more pervasive and overdetermined, resulting partly from the evanescence of theatre itself and partly from the material and ideological conflicts of Welles’s career. Let me also emphasize that I do not intend to close this book with a chapter on the death of authorship. Literary theory in the 1970s, some of it written by Foucault, taught that it does not matter who is speaking, since everyone is spoken by a language contract, which in turn is mediated by a social contract. Clearly, however, we do not need to adopt a textual utopianism or a romantic notion of creativity in order to insist upon what Edward Said calls the “worldliness” of discourse. Indeed we should recognize that films—like books and critical commentary—are forms of language through which real historical subjects carry on struggles for power. This idea was never lost on Welles, who attained worldwide celebrity as a result of the Mars panic and who, as we have seen, devoted many of his subsequent projects to the theme of demagoguery. From Charles Foster Kane, who declares that people will think “what I tell them to think,” to Henry V, who intends to “busy giddy minds with foreign wars,” the leading characters in Welles’s films often use language as a hoax, attempting to become colonizers of consciousness. Given the possibility of such ambition, it matters very much for us to know who is speaking and toward what ends.
Welles the auteur was himself driven by a kind of will to power, signified not only in the dynamic excess of his style but also in his embattled relation with the movies and the stage. He had taken his theatrical identity from a turn-of-the-century tradition of flamboyant directors, and throughout his career he struggled to maintain that identity in the face of a changing, increasingly corporate, culture. In an important early essay titled “The Director in the Theatre Today,” published by the Theatre Education League in 1939, he wryly commented on his art, pointing out that the profession of director was relatively new to theatrical history. Even as late as the nineteenth century, he noted, drama had been virtually directorless, centered on the emotional expressiveness of a lead player:
For thousands of years the director was a stage manager. . . . When Mr. Sullivan, for instance, arrived in a town like Galway to play “Macbeth,” . . . he would arrive at the theatre at seven o’clock for a consultation with this stage manager.
“I always come in at the center for ‘They have tied me to the stake,’” Mr. Sullivan would declare. . . .” Please have Lady Macbeth when she takes the daggers away take them by the blades.”
“All right. Is there anything else?”
“No. Just have everyone else stand six feet away and do their damnedest.”
Welles recognized that the “six feet away” school, laughable as it might sound to contemporary audiences, had produced the most impressively emotional actors in Western theater. But he also recognized that in the period between the 1880s and the 1920s a new fashion had evolved, devoted to carefully designed spectacles such as the ones managed by David Belasco or Hardin Craig, or to director-cen
tered ensembles like the ones founded by Constantin Stanislavski or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Welles remarked, “We are so proud of the fact that we don’t allow these old-time stars on the stage today, we forget that their influence from the fifth row center can be much more insidious.”
For Welles, the special business of the new director was “to make his playhouse a kind of magic trick in which something quite impossible comes to be.” This credo was obviously intended to point up his interest in magicians, but it also reminds us that stage magic had evolved in the same way as theater as a whole. Turn-of-the-century performers like Howard Thurston and Georges Méliès were in fact actor/directors, their presence in the spotlight signifying their power over the entire physics of the playhouse. The Mercury Theatre was clearly indebted to this type of spectacle, becoming a mixture of magical effect, Shakespearian acting, and thirties-style political drama—everywhere designed to manifest Welles’s skill as orchestrator. It mattered little whether he actually wrote the words or built the sets. “The great field of the director,” according to Welles, was “conception,” or the ability to control meaning. “The script of a play in most cases,” he claimed, “is a wandering and loosely knit affair embracing many plays. If a director is good enough he can use all these plays. . . . If he has a special point to make, he will select only one or two.” The stage setting would in turn be governed by the director’s central conception. “One director, for instance, presenting a Molière comedy may decide that the whole play shows the fundamental hardness of the world . . . and so his conception of the visual element in his production leads him to erect on stage a setting of stainless steel, which he decorates with rose leaves to show a kind of hopeless beauty. . . . Such a director has a feeling about texture.” As an illustration of his own practice, Welles commented on the Mercury production of Julius Caesar: “I wanted to present ‘Julius Caesar’ against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act; that was my conception of the production.”
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 36