Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Welles, meanwhile, had first flown to Washington to be briefed by the State Department, then to Miami where he was met, as agreed, by Robert Wise with the footage of The Magnificent Ambersons. Working round the clock for three days and nights at the Fleischer Cartoon Studio, he and Wise put together a rough-cut of the film; then he dictated a telegram to Jack MOSS: BECAUSE OF THE ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF WORK BOB WISE HAS TO DO ON AMBERSONS, BECAUSE OF THE NECESSITY OF SPEED AND OF SOME CENTRAL AUTHORITY, I WOULD LIKE YOU TO MAKE CLEAR TO ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS THAT HIS IS THE FINAL WORD. HE IS TO HAVE A FREE HAND … I WANT TO KNOW THAT HE WON’T BE SLOWED DOWN AT ANY POINT BECAUSE HIS AUTHORITY IS QUESTIONED. I DICTATE THIS AT THE AIRPORT JUST BEFORE DEPARTING.7 Meanwhile Wise, in the hope that he might come to Rio at some later point, sped back to Hollywood with the rough-cut while Welles headed off for Brazil, on, of all aptly named vehicles, a Mars Flying Boat.

  Tom Pettey had prepared thoroughly for Welles’s arrival, ensuring that it had maximum coverage and impact: among other things, he made certain there was a large crowd waiting for him at the airport. Welles was duly fêted; and he readily submitted to the adulation that greeted him. It made a pleasant change, no doubt, from the sniping and pettiness of Hollywood, as did the opportunity – always eagerly seized by Welles – of immersing himself in another culture, another life. He had been thoroughly prepared by his office, with digests of books on Brazilian history, geography, culture and politics; he had begun to learn Portuguese, by no means the easiest of languages. His capacity to absorb essential information rapidly had never been more effectively deployed than it was here, and he immediately seduced his hosts with his well-informed curiosity and his boyish delight in what he discovered. RECEPTION OF ORSON WELLES RIO NOT ONLY EQUAL TO BUT SURPASSED DISNEY’S SUCCESS HERE STOP ORSON CAN QUALIFY FOR MY MONEY AS A GREAT AMBASSADOR, wired Phil Reismann, who had travelled with Welles, to George Schaefer within a few days of their arrival.8 KNOW THAT IT IS NO SURPRISE TO YOU THAT HIS OUTLOOK AND UNDERSTANDING ARE INTELLIGENT AND COMPREHENSIVE AND THAT HE HAS A COMPLETE GRASP OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS JOB. Reismann was convinced, he said, that despite the handicap of a lack of equipment, they were going to get ‘a great and unusual picture’, THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS US FROM BEING EXTREMELY HAPPY, he added, in the same flirtatious tone that Welles employed when communicating with Schaefer, IS THE FACT THAT YOU ARE NOT HERE.

  Welles had arrived five days before Carnival, in the midst of a pre-Lenten debauch, which was if anything more feverish than the event itself. His hedonistic impulses needed little encouragement; he plunged right in. The day after he arrived, A Noite published a photograph of him partying at a rehearsal of one of the numbers. He was immediately adopted as an honorary citizen of Rio, his appetite and his sense of fun warmly approved of: CARIOCA CITIZEN KANE, said the headline: ‘this enormously sympathetic big boy who’s being seen around the streets of our metropolis is without doubt an authentic first-rate Carioca’, making him an honorary citizen of Rio.9 Apart from the sheer indulgent joy of it, this immersion in the life of the streets was essential to discovering the spirit of Carnival, where to be merely a spectator is to miss the point; it is, indeed, scarcely an option. The samba rhythm – insistent, hypnotic – that overtakes the city cannot be resisted.

  The daunting task of capturing the true Carnival, as it wended its way across the whole city like a frisky, many-headed dragon, called for a novel strategy. ‘The moment the Producer-Director-Writer arrived,’ reported Herb Drake a little breathlessly, ‘Technicolor cameras began to turn out test shots among some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.’10 Recounting ‘what might be called a day with Orson Welles in Rio’, Drake describes a cycle of filming, eating, drinking, meeting the press, more eating, drinking, clubbing, and out-of-hours location scouting: ‘3 a.m. found Welles inspecting the photographic possibilities of the Municipal Theatre where one of the biggest balls of the carnival will be held. You can bet there will be some changes made. Doors will come down, walls will be opened and there will be entrances where no entrances existed before.’ There is more clubbing: Welles crowns a beauty queen – ‘and that is a story in itself.’ He was in bed by dawn – with or without the beauty queen, Drake fails to record. In a private memo to his boss, Tom Pettey reported that ‘Welles and Phil Reismann have been playing all the time and I’ve had a hell of a job protecting them.’11 All his young life (he was now twenty-six) Orson Welles had been instinctively drawn to the underbelly – Harlem, the dives of Chicago – and here it came straight for him. Then as now, Brazil had a singularly uncomplicated attitude to sex; it had been the country’s good fortune to have been colonised by the lax (not to say lethargic) Portuguese, whose administrators had utterly failed to instil the slightest sense of Catholic guilt in the native population. Welles ate, he drank, he smoked, he blithely shovelled amphetamines down his throat in the belief that they were helping him to lose weight, and he reached out for all the flesh he could get his hands on, which was a great deal.

  For all the frolicking, the immediate pressure on the RKO team was immense: in so far as they knew what they had come to Brazil to do, it was, at the very minimum, to capture the Carnival on film. Carnival lasts exactly four days, during which short period the bulk of the material had to be shot. Despite Welles’s thorough briefing on the background, neither he nor anyone else on his team was familiar with the city of Rio de Janeiro, or had any experience of a comparable phenomenon – let alone of filming it. Moreover, they were severely limited technically, both in terms of the equipment they had brought with them and the available local back-up. ‘It must be remembered,’ Welles wrote in a memorandum to RKO a couple of weeks after Carnival, ‘that our group was practically’ pioneering in the motion picture business in Brazil’, which is not strictly true, although it must certainly have felt as if it was.12 They had the cooperation and the commitment of officials (Dr Assis Figuereido, head of the State Propaganda Department – the DIP – was particularly keen to help), but there was nothing even they could do in the face of national temperament. At least ten days before Carnival, the production had informed the DIP that they wanted to get shots of Rio at Carnival time and were assured that it could be arranged without much difficulty. When it came to the day actually scheduled for the aerial shots, William ‘Duke’ Greene, the chief Technicolor cameraman, went to the airport to inspect the plane, and was informed they were not allowed to make use of it. ‘We were told that perhaps later we would be able to get a plane.’

  Everything that makes the Brazilian Carnival extraordinary was inimical to the process of film-making. Welles and his team soon became acquainted with the two quintessential Carioca types: moleque, the street urchin, witty and fleet of foot, and malandro, the fixer, avoiding work at all costs, opinionated, pugnacious, lascivious, bibulous, boastful. Welles wrote in his memorandum:

  The human element in particular, the people untrained in the industry and ignorant of its problems, were many times quite impossible to control.13 Other headaches included the general Brazilian tempo of business activity, such simple hazards as key people lacking telephone service, two-hour lunch periods for business establishments, gasoline shortage … things a

  Hollywood studio through its equipment and organisation could achieve in a matter of hours required as many weeks. None of the organisations on which we could rely was accustomed to actual production problems, the North American tempo of work, or especially professional motion picture discipline.

  Here was the paradox: their purpose was to catch the exuberance, the anarchy, the formlessness and the sheer foreignness of Carnival, but to do so they needed to be brilliantly organised. The team’s attitude towards the event and the people they were filming – Welles’s, in particular – was by definition affirmative, but from a practical angle it was hard not to see both event and people as simply a problem. Up to a point, every film shot on location assumes the character of a war fought against the indigenous people; this one was no exception, even though the co
mmander-in-chief was temperamentally inclined to go native. Inevitably they would not be able to capture everything they needed during the Carnival itself; unquestionably there would have to be subsequent reconstructions of sequences or parts of sequences. ‘Even had our information been the most accurate, and our equipment the most effective,’ Welles wrote, ‘we should have been unable to get a thorough coverage of carnival during the actual days that it lasted. To do this,’ he added, ‘would have required us to be everywhere at once, at all hours of every day and night.’ The scale of the thing was vast: there were something like two million participants involved. Clearly, though, however fraught with difficulties it might be, it was essential to film as much of the live event as was humanly possible.

  They duly threw themselves at it. Three years later, on one of his Orson Welles Almanac radio programmes, Welles delivered an account of Carnival that vividly expresses his view of what he was about to film:

  Carnival isn’t a religious observance, but it is fundamentally the celebration of a religious people.14 Wherever the money changers have taken over, carnival is no more. Wherever work is so hard that a holiday means a rest instead of a good time, carnival is only a word for a tent show. You have to save up for carnival. You have to save something yourself out of the business year. You have to play hard at carnival – not in contest with anybody, not for points in a score – carnival calls for the aimless exuberance of childhood. And if you never felt like dancing around and making a fool of yourself in a funny hat, you won’t know what I’m talking about and you won’t care. There are some who disapprove of carnival because they think it’s only an excuse for getting drunk. I’m glad to say that I was in Rio three years ago for the last great carnival in that greatest of carnival cities and I saw with these two eyes a couple of million people dancing and singing in the streets (most of them don’t even go to bed for three days) and nobody anywhere in that enormous jamboree stopped celebrating long enough to take a drink … it’s brighter than a circus, bigger than the world series, and louder than the Fourth of July. It is all of those times rolled into one. It’s New Year’s Eve, Halloween night and Christmas morning. It’s wild and gay and it’s absolutely sober because in carnival you don’t need liquor to help you forget you’re growing old. You’re too busy remembering what it was like when you were young.

  In truth, the booze never stops flowing and the dope never stops being puffed and the coupling is pretty much non-stop, but though Welles somewhat sanitises it, his point about the youthfulness of the experience is particularly pertinent here. The whole city becomes a child again – a sexy, exuberant child. And so did Welles.

  Tom Pettey of the press office was reporting everything to Herb Drake while it was happening; his description of what he saw is a record not only of the young Orson Welles in action – half teenage delinquent, half inspired artist – but of a Rio Carnival that no longer exists, one that spread everywhere, possessing the city, not confined, as now, to the Sambodromo, the official stadium. Pettey’s report also shows not only the degree to which the Carnival affected Welles, but the degree to which he affected it; the filmed event becomes something else, lit, staged, observed. On the Saturday they kicked off by shooting, under lowering skies, the formal opening of the proceedings, the triumphant entrance of King Momo, the Carnival’s Lord of Misrule. After this, Welles and the crew immediately dashed in their cars to the elegant suburb of Petropolis on the hillside, for the official opening party, colourful but restrained. The following day, they were out shooting whatever moved. The mood of the 1942 Carnival was particularly explosive: the war hovered over everything. The Rio press insisted: ‘for 1942 the order is FORGET THE WAR!15 We may have the noisiest carnival of all time,’ though one of the most popular sambas was the defiant We Know How to Fight: ‘We will fight in the blue skies that cover South America’; the underlying text was: ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’

  The RKO convoy, cheered on by the revellers, itself became part of the revelry. For Technicolor night-shooting there were six army searchlights, manned by eighty Brazilian officers and soldiers, and supervised by the RKO technicians. Simply trying to get through the thousands of people ‘who behave abnormally all during carnival’, as Pettey said, with all that equipment was a major problem for the crew; the soldiers had no experience and little knowledge of what was demanded of them, piling mayhem on chaos. Five huge lights were set up near the Palace Hotel on Avenida Rio Branco. ‘It was difficult to shoot anything except upturned faces and waving arms, as the crowd was so dense there was hardly an inch between the persons.’ None of the crew had the slightest idea whether what they were shooting was good or bad. For hours the four great Carnival clubs filed past the Technicolor cameras and moved on down the Avenida amidst the applause of the throng. Welles set up cameras to photograph the floats as they turned across the plaza; one float that they focused on closely depicted Pan-American Unity. Somewhere in the midst of all this Welles had spotted the great black singer-dancer known as Grande Otelo and they followed him whenever they could on his riotous, eccentric path through the throng.

  On Monday night, the crew took over the Municipal Theatre where the Grand Ball was to take place, installing lights, strategically placing them all over the theatre to make it possible to obtain shots from every conceivable angle of the dance floor and interior; the chief colour cameraman, Duke Greene, had worked for two weeks in advance to ensure the proper colour combinations. Welles, Pettey notes, had a particular flair for doing three or four things a once. That night he was ‘a director of the movie production, a judge of costumes, a good-will envoy, and last but not least, a participant in virtually every one of the dances’.16 The air-conditioning was primitive: a dance floor packed with a hundred tons of ice. They might just as well have been on the set of The Magnificent Ambersons.

  It carried on like this for two more days. On the fourth and last day, the crew moved to the Republic Theatre, again struggling to convey tons of equipment across the heaving city, the downtown streets jammed with decorated cars, ‘many of them convertibles of ancient vintage … filled with ten to twelve costumed boys and girls, and how they held together is a mystery … Welles’s boys have their cameras pointed at the children whenever it was possible.’ Everywhere people were wearing papier mâché masks, no mere item of fancy dress but serious disguise, liberating the wearer into behaviour that would be inconceivable at any other time of the year: to lift a mask or false face from the person wearing it was Pettey reports, a statutory crime. At midnight, the cameras moved to Avenue Republic where they found the wildest of all the Carnival dancers. ‘Here the fun was unrestrained, the only regulation being that women seated at boxes must remove their hats. No one seemed to care whether they removed anything else or not.’ Bonhomie was all-pervading. ‘Every single one of the million or more revellers tried to be as helpful as possible, even,’ he drily notes, ‘when their help served only to make things more difficult.’

  On this final night, Welles ‘suddenly became enthusiastic, grabbed a 16mm camera and moved onto the dance floor at the Republic Theatre. Surrounded by the dancers who were at the height of their revelry, Orson joined in photographing close-ups of the milling mob. When he returned to the camera platform, he was as wet as if he had just emerged from the sea.’ To say that Welles was entering into the spirit of things is to understate. ‘Perfume battles, exhausting innumerable atomisers, have been daily occurrences around the Copacabana Hotel between Orson Welles and Phil Reismann. They have chased one another around the swimming pool, into the lobby, behind posts, and through the salon. At the present time it is a draw, but Welles expects to win eventually as he apparently has the largest supply of atomisers.’ He and his aides made their way across Rio in an old seven-passenger convertible with two motorcycle escorts, their sirens screaming. ‘Whenever the sound of a siren is heard they scream “Orson is coming! Orson is coming!’” Finally, the crew shot King Momo’s retirement ceremony, the official end of
Carnival, and then – and only then – the rain, which had threatened when Momo entered the Carnival four days earlier, fell, as if to wash clean the licentiousness excess in preparation for Ash Wednesday. Pettey was not the only journalist covering the shoot: Life magazine had chosen it as the subject of its regular ‘Life Goes to a Party’ feature. The photo-essay – like Welles’s film, in both colour and black and white – gives a vivid impression of the different strands of the Carnival, focusing on the samba schools, bluntly delineating the upper class, the low class and the poor white and black sections, noting the themes (Swiss mountaineering, Egyptian, Hawaiian), not batting an eyelid at the transvestism and the near-nakedness. Here are the giant backdrop at the Praça Paris – ‘a combination of crinolines and samba under a big guitar’ – and the jam-packed crowds at the ball at the Teatro Municipal.17 And here is Welles, ‘calling everything empolgante (terrific), assombrosa (stunning) or encantadora (adorable)’. He is photographed ‘sweating like all Cariocas’, pointing his 16mm camera at the revellers, roaring with laughter, ‘feeling good’ in the midst of ‘one of the low-class “people’s dances’”, trying to organise poor whites and blacks who are ‘too dazed to respond to Welles’s direction’.