Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  70 Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 15.

  71Quoted by Cowie (1973), title page. Originally appeared in French in 16 May 1958 and reprinted in Bessy (1963), 91-94. See also Orson Welles, "Ribbon of Dreams", International Film Annual, No.2 (London: 1958), 164, for another use of this evocative phrase in a different context. Again, in 1961, sounding "genuinely awed", he told Tynan (1961b/1967), 298, that: "The cinema has no boundaries. It's a ribbon of dream." Thus it's surprising that when in the early 1970s Bogdanovich asked about the meaning of this phrase, OW said, "I think it sounds absolutely great but I haven't got any ides of what it means." Quoting OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 280.

  72Cowie (1973), 216, quoting an article by Welles in La Démocratie Combattante (Paris: April-May 1952).

  73As his movie director-protagonist in his unreleased The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76) is quoted in a film clip.

  74Wood (1990), 299, citing "Welles Finishes Film No.1 From One-Man Plant," New York Herald Tribune, 8 Dec 1940.

  75OW 1953 interview in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, as quoted in Brady (1989), 453. According to journalist Stanley Karnow, Paris in the Fifties (NY: Random House, 1997), 86, Orson made this point (almost verbatim) on the one occasion they met—at the Calavados [sic] bar in Paris one evening around 1953-54. On yet another occasion quoted by Noble (1956), 176, he said, "There are a thousand ways of interpreting a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze."

  Orson's friend, avant-guard British theatrical director-producer Peter Brook, staged A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970 for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford on a stage set up as a playground with circus apparatus including Puck and Oberon on trapezes. Brook later recalled that he had been “particularly influenced” by the etherial movements of a Chinese acrobatic troupe he’d seen in Paris. Peter Brook, Threads of Time: Recollections (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 130.

  76Annemann editorial in The Jinx, No.6 (March 1935), [22]. Annemann's line was inspired by the title of the current Broadway hit musical, Cole Porter's Anything Goes starring William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore.

  Orson also believed that “a film is good only to the degree that the director has been able to control his various methods." Lest method undermine effect, mastery of technique in any craft is necessary. In magic we see this in the close attention given to methods by such performers as Houdini or Bamberg or Copperfield and such master illusion designer-builders that Orson would later work with as Don Wayne, Johnny Gaughan, and Jim Steinmeyer.

  Toland gives an extraordinary example of the depth of Orson’s immersion in technique:77 In Citizen Kane we made fifteen takes of a particular scene without obtaining one that was completely perfect. When the dialogue was right, the mechanics were off. Or it was the other way around. I suggested that we try to match the perfect sound track of one take with the flawless photographic mechanics of another. Orson Welles agreed. The experiment was a success.

  Sounds easy. But wait—surely it would take a miracle for one film strip to perfectly mate with another’s sound track without at least some words failing to synch with lips? Toland explained: Such miracles of matching are not unusual. Even the film can be stretched, in a manner of speaking. Frequently we have been able to re-pace the words of a speech on sound track by adding or cutting out tiny segments of blank film between those words.

  These were precisely the kinds of technical tricks that Orson always tried to learn because they gave him control, efficiently and artistically, of the final product.

  * * * To hide from the front office the fact that actual shooting on Kane had already begun, Orson orchestrated a crucial yet simple and effective deception operation at RKO's Pathé Studios in Culver City. Generously crediting the idea to his set designer, Perry Ferguson, it was a conspiracy of silence among his intensely loyal crew, the work being referred to only as standard sound and photographic “tests". These began on June 29th,78 a Saturday morning when few if any snooping executives would be around. Over the next 10 hours they shot the startling 3-minute opening scene in the newsreel projection booth that established the reason for the reporter's search for the man behind the public image of Charles Foster Kane. Much time and money were saved by using a real studio projection booth rather than the fabricated set called for in the script. At $809 Orson did run substantially beyond the test budget of $528—to create one of the most famous scenes in movie history.79 The next day, by borrowing an existing set, they filmed the Atlantic City nightclub sequence. On the third and last day they shot the stunning discovery of Susan Kane's suicide attempt. By then the studio’s spies had reported what Orson was doing; but, pleased that he’d at long last begun filming, the front office didn’t interfere.

  All three scenes were marked by extraordinarily original camera work. Professor Carringer hit the mark in noting that, “The one thing as much feared in Hollywood as a runaway budget was radical innovation." But he was half wrong to add, “If the truth were known, Citizen Kane now had both strikes against it. Welles had much to hide."80 Radical innovation true, runaway budget false.

  77 Toland (1941b), 650-651.

  78The relevant studio document is reproduced in Lebo (1990), 74.

  79Lebo (1990), 74, reproduces the initial and final charges. The nightclub scene (plus a living-room scene), budgeted at $1,038, cost $1,376.79. I've found no figures for Susan's famous suicide attempt scene.

  A hide-and-seek game between Orson and the studio's front office was inevitable given his desire to create unhindered and their curiosity about what the kid was doing with their dollars. Orson's contract had given him the not unusual right to run a “closed set", which meant he alone could decide who, if anyone, could visit a working set. But RKO's bosses pushed against this constraint and Orson pushed right back—deviously:

  To penetrate the cloak of secrecy the studio placed two or three spies on the set: the 1st Assistant Director (Eddie Donahoe), one of the make-up assistants, and possibly a 2nd Assistant Director. Their extra duties were quickly recognized by Orson and his crew.81 Indeed Donahoe had been initially fingered by director John Ford when, welcomed by Orson on a visit to the set, he spotted Donahoe and openly hailed him with, “Well, well, how's old snake-in-the-grass Eddie?"82 Ford knew, having learned the hard way that Eddie had been the RKO executives's designated informer while nominally assigned as Ford's first assistant on, with delicious irony, The Informer (1935)and then Mary of Scotland (1936). To assure their loyalty to him rather than the studio, Ford usually succeeded in having his brother or his brother-in-law as first assistant.83 Incidentally, RKO wasn't the only studio whose production office routinely placed spies on its sets, particularly during the 1930s and 40s. MGM cinematographer Joe Ruttenburg reports that it was usual at his studio.84 And Columbia, at least under Harry Cohn, was infamous for it's spies and bugging.85

  Knowing who the RKO spies were, I’m surprised Orson merely “quarantined" them, as he said, and never used them to pass back false information to their bosses. Instead, whenever his spies warned of front office interventions, he responded with practical jokes. Thus once when RKO's boss-of-bosses, George Schaefer, brought a group of major Eastern investors around to the set, they found Orson and his crew, who'd been alerted, on the street playing a game of softball.86 On other occasions when interrupted on the set Orson would stop production to “do tricks to amuse" the studio heads and their flunkies—plucking coins from their ears, producing flowers from nowhere, and so on, until they left.87

  * * * By chance, Joseph Cotten, on summer leave from Katie Hepburn's stage play, had arrived in Hollywood to do a radio show when he ran across Orson who promptly hired him for a key part in Kane.88 Jo had brought along his valet whom Orson soon grabbed for himself. Thus did George Chirello become Orson's gentleman's gentleman, although adding a refreshing dimension to the usual haughty meaning of that term as found in the film roles of the likes of Paul Stewart in Citizen Kane or Sir J
ohn Gielgud in Arthur. Called “Shorty" because he was a 4-foot 8-inch hunchbacked midget,89 the fortyish Italian-American had done some federal prison time for burglary—his gang members stuffing his small body through high windows. That Shorty attracted more women than his employer didn't seem to bother Orson. For the next five years, on and off, he would be Orson's faithful and protective butler-cookchauffeur and occasional bit-part actor and sorceror's assistant.

  80 Carringer (1985), 69-72. On the phony tests see also Ralph Hoge (Toland's grip) interview in Tales from Hollywood (1987); OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 57, 71, 77-78; Kael (1971),46; Lebo (1990), 73-80; Brady (1989), 254-256; Higham (1970), 17; Higham (1985), 158.

  81 For the studio spy system see Maurice Seiderman interview in Gambill (1978), 48; and his TV interview in Tales from Hollywood #5 (1987).

  82OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 28; Leaming (1985), 420.

  83McBride (2001), 300.

  84Ruttenburg interview in Chase (1975), 145.

  85Stone (1975), 64-65.

  86Richard Wilson interview in Action (May-Jun 1969), 27, naming Sid Rogell; Leaming (1985), 195, naming no one.

  87Reginald Armour (assistant to Schaefer) interview in Tales from Hollywood #5 (1987).

  88Cotten interview in Action (May-Jun 1969), 30.

  Hiring Shorty had perhaps begun as an example of reverse snobbery, a snub to the snobs of Hollywood. But their association soon bloomed to the point where an annoyed Shorty could call the boss a “sonofabitch" and Orson fondly reply with “Jailbird" or “Ginny bastard".90

  As old family friend Ashton Stevens had earlier observed, “Welles has a magnificent ignorance of the requirements of a snob."91 Orson agreed: “I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional—and I hate every kind of snob."92 Saying, “I have no more dignity than a nude at noon on Fifth Avenue",93 he lived as he preached. Some of us act snooty to shield fragile egos from imagined inferiors, lest the latter discover and exploit our weak points. Others have been taught by snobbish parents to be snooty. But, at least since the time he'd left Todd School, Orson was neither. For the rest of his life the many times he put on airs were to put off unwelcome fools.

  * * * {SIDEBAR} In examining Orson's long movie-making career, all the main critics gave passing notice of the influence of his magic on his scripts, visual images, and particularly his film editing. They saw this connection because Orson, as he'd always intended, made it obvious: Richard France felt that Orson had taken “Mankiewicz's script for Citizen Kane and turn[ed] it into a magic show."94 Jameson, analyzing The Lady from Shanghai, wrote “the magician in Welles gained the ascendency and the director began inventing sleight-of-hand tricks whose successful accomplishment would be remarked by hardly anyone but himself."95 Naremore's book was titled The Magic World of Orson Welles.96 And biographer Terry Comito has remarked that Orson was “always astounding audiences with audacious transformations and precariously balanced theatrical sleights of hand." Professors Leaming and Brady sometimes refer to the interplay between Orson's roles as both sorceror and filmmaker. Bret Wood diagnosed a pervasive “obsession with illusion". Of her director and almost-lover-for-a-night, actress Ruth Warrick said, “Orson mastered illusion, the essence of film." Higham dismissed Orson's move to Europe as a “loss of Hollywood's magic box". And John Houseman summed it up: “In all his theatrical work ... Orson was always, at heart, a magician."97

  89 Although Leaming repeatedly (1985, 1989, and on TV), like many others, called the late Shorty a "dwarf", his photographs from the Mercury Wonder Show and movie bit parts in Journey into Fear, Macbeth, and Follow the Boys clearly show a midget, although a pudgy one. And OW always referred to him in interviews as a "midget". Houseman gives Shorty’s nickname as “Alfalfa” and also describes him as a “midget”. Higham (1985) consistently misspelled his surname “Crivello”. Macdonald Carey, The Days of My Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 110, calls him “a sort of dwarf” when he met him working agin for Cotten in late 1941. Norman Lloyd in Tonguette (2004), 3, was explicit: “he wasn’t a dwarf”.

  90 Paula Millard-Petchon interview.

  91Stevens in 1938 as quoted in Higham (1985), 113.

  92OW 1954 interview in Noble (1956), 242.

  93OW quoted in Noble (1956), 186.

  94France (1977), 55.

  95Richard T. Jameson in Gottesman (1976), 75.

  96Foist upon the unwilling author by his editor, as Naremore carped in the revised edition (1978/1989 ed), xiii. The author had wanted Bright Lucifer: The Cinema of Orson Welles. Naremore telephone interview, 20 Apr 92.

  97Comito (1985), 37; Wood (1990), 262; Warrick (1980), 58; Higham (1970), 135; Houseman (1972), 233. See also the earlier Houseman quote in Noble (1956), 116-117.

  To Peter Bogdanovich's direct question, “Do you think magic has influenced your work in pictures?", Orson said “No."98 But it's evident from that conversation’s context that he was referring only to stage magicians' methods. As seen, he would drop these for camera tricks whenever he thought the latter would give a better effect. Otherwise, and contrary to his snap remark to Bogdanovich, he did often use secret techniques of magicians.

  James Naremore knew this to be true because of all of Orson's critics and biographers only he understood how magicians think. Having been a semi-pro conjuror during his high school years, Naremore was uniquely prepared to recognize that:99

  watching his movies is sometimes like attending a [magic] performance by Blackstone or Sorcar. In Citizen Kane, for example, there is a famous shot where the camera moves in to a closeup of a group photograph of the Chronicle staff while Kane talks about what good men they are; suddenly Kane walks right into the photo, and as the camera pulls back from the assembled journalists we find [Kane] at an Inquirer party six years later.

  {END SIDEBAR} Citizen Kane itself is often called “magical" but intending only a figure of speech. What hasn't been realized is that the adjective has much literal truth. For example, Orson directly applied his magician's knowledge to a crucial part of the production. He adapted an element of Black Art that he'd introduced to Broadway three years earlier in Faustus (and then in lesser degree in Caesar) to the set design of several scenes in Kane:

  Orson, set designer Ferguson, and cinematographer Toland, were stuck with a fixed financial constraint. The front office had rejected Ferguson's preliminary designs for sets because their estimated costs were far above budget. Laboratory special-effects (particularly mattes, miniatures, and the optical printer) cut costs drastically for many scenes but wouldn't be effective for others. This was most importantly true of scenes in the Great Hall at Kane's palatial Xanadu, which needed to look lavishly expensive, vast, and forbidding. The solution was an extraordinary technical innovation. Only three parts of the Hall were built on the big soundstage: the enormous walk-in fireplace (a four-year-old leftover from John Ford’s Mary of Scotland), the grand staircase (also from another movie, a musical), and the archway entrance (the only new construction). The wide spaces between these opulent architectural fragments were represented by deep shadows. But how to create shadow without the substance of a complete set walled on at least three sides?100 Two entirely different methods involving simple lighting alone without any camera tricks have been used in movies. The earliest, adopted in 1917 is described in the following sidebar.

  {SIDEBAR :} Sparkle Lighting for PANTHEA (1917)

  Canadian-American director Allan Dwan was a pioneering movie maker, having entered the business in 1909 with a degree from Notre Dame in electrical engineering. In 1917 he was directing Panthea, starring Norma Talmidge in the title role when he was able to apply his knowledge of electric lighting. As he enthusiastically recalled:101

  I got a good lighting effect in that picture. I wanted to show Panthea playing a piano for three connoisseurs who were judging her talent while her old music master nervously stood waiting in the doorway. We had no set provided for this and no money to make one, so I made a set out of nothing — and it was one o
f the best scenes in the picture. I put a window-frame way up high and shone a very powerful light from it right down onto her at the piano. And I sprinkled aluminum dust in the light so you could see the beam coming down — it was a terrific effect — and I threw a very faint light on these three men's faces listening, and in the doorway (which was also just a frame) was her professor. And it became a big set — all of it in one shot. ... And I used that trick again for a big banquet sequence in the same film. I had fellows up on the rafters just sprinkling aluminum dust like snow where the light would hit — it was a nice stunt. Everyone was covered with aluminum dust, but that was O.K.

  98 Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 180.

  99Naremore (1978/1989), 30.

  100Carringer (1985), 62. Also Hilyard Brown telephone interview 7 Mar 92.

  101Bogdanovich (1971), 43-44.

  As already explained, Dwan's sparkle lighting foreshadowed in technique but with a different purpose and effect Mielziner's and Orson's "light curtains" in the staged plays Panic (1935) and Caesar (1937), respectively.

  A somewhat different problem faced John Ford when he directed The Informer (1935). Given RKO's pathetic budget (under $250,000) Dublin's streets and rooms were mere painted canvas backdrops. The solution by Ford and cinematographer Joseph August was, in McBride's words, that they "flooded the picture with shadows, fog, and backlighting."102 Contrary to the openness of Dwan and Orson's sets, it gave a claustrophobic feel — as Ford & August intended.

  {END SIDEBAR}

  A second lighting method for creating the illusion of a very large room was introduced in Citizen Kane. In his carefully reconstructed history of the making of that movie, Professor Carringer writes, “Probably the most ingenious device was the black velvet technique, which was used not just in the Great Hall set but in other situations that had similar lighting."103 For “black velvet technique" read Black Art. But who was responsible? Again Carringer:104