Arena - The Orson Welles Story Part 1

hello who arson wells just a moment oh mr wells telephone how do you work this thing the other end hello awesome how's the weather down there the weather i'm sorry i can't give you that information that's a civilian secret oh how about moving your show over to camp howard tomorrow swell thanks a million awesome wells here power tomorrow [Applause] so in 1944 orson welles was 29 years old he's been working his magic now for another 40 years and we talked to him tonight about his life and work his major triumphs and his biggest disappointments i've never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick you know yeah i don't know anybody who's who wants to see a magic trick so i do it professionally it's the only way i get to perform you know you know there are people in the world who say show us a trick you know i want once i went once to a to a birthday party for louis v mayer with a rabbit in my pocket which i was going to take out of his hat and on came judy garland and danny k and danny thomas and everybody you ever heard of and then al jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me you know and at the dawn was starting to rise over the hillcrest country club as we said good night to louise mayor nobody'd ask me to do a magic trick but the rabbit and i went home what what makes a good magician he said seriously seriously what makes a good magician he's a man who can get that rabbit out ladies and gentlemen we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the intercontinental radio news it is reported that at 8 50 p.m a huge flaming object believed to be a meteorite fell on a farm in the neighborhood of groversville i wrote the script and directed it my name is orson welles this is a mercury production oh my goodness i never saw that before all right you want me yeah that's wonderful technology has finally reached the movies after 40 years of paralysis yes i was interested in a phrase you used in fact to hugh weldon you said that when you arrived in hollywood you had the confidence of ignorance yes can you tell me what that meant well it was pretty much like my uh my beginnings in the theater i had the confidence of ignorance uh not knowing anything about it uh there was no basis for fear in other words if you don't know that there's a if you're walking along the edge of a cliff and you don't know it's the edge of a cliff you have perfect confidence you know and i didn't discover the cliff in the theater or in films until after i'd been in it for a while what happens then when ignorance turns into experience then you have to be very careful not to listen to anybody you know because when you're you have to remember your old ignorance and ask for the impossible with the same cheerfulness that you did when you didn't know what you were talking about it does seem that you try to recreate a sort of innocence in your approach to every single film i like that very much i i i think that's that's true and i seldom like anything it's said about my films so we we're off to a good start [Laughter] since the 1940s wells has been written about in more or less conflicting detail and if his biographers have got it right he was an enorm fonterrible from birth an expert magician and water colorist by four a musical virtuoso at three a theatrical impresario a scholar of shakespeare and nietzsche a subject for study by astonished child psychologists perhaps wells the consummate storyteller has playfully encouraged these and other legends about him but there's no doubt that the young george orson wells from kenosha wisconsin was a prodigious child didn't you play king lear at the age of nine no no certainly not is that a biographical one of those one of those exaggerations i played i played mary the mother of jesus at the age of 13. even better yes very good in drag but no didn't touch king lear until later on how much of this the whole business of the child prodigies the musical part of it is true i was one of those abominable little creatures you know with a baton and i played the violin and i played the piano and there's nothing more hateful on earth and i was one of those and my mother was a professional musician died when i was uh nine and i stopped playing immediately it's kind of trauma a traumatic shock from her death combined with i think essential laziness the delight of not having to go on doing those scales and abandon my career in music that's what i was supposed to be destined for but all the other stuff about being studied as a child prodigy yes i was sort of yes i i was i was i had a very strange i was spoiled in a very strange way as a child because everybody told me from the moment i was able to hear that i was absolutely marvelous i never heard a discouraging word for years you see i didn't know what was ahead of me i painted it they said nobody's ever seen such painting you know i played nobody's ever played like that and it just seemed to me no limit to what i could do in his early teens wells decided to leave america and go on his travels he took his brushes and canvases he decided to be an artist in a moment of autobiography from his film f for fake he describes the turning point in his life i too was once a hungry painter but not here in france no i was hungry in ireland i'd come there to paint bought a donkey and cart filled the cart with paints and canvases and went traveling at night i slept under the cart [Music] it was a very nice summer but then when i got to dublin the donkey had to go up for auction so did i my paintings were gone all given away to the irish farmers who'd give me food i'd run out of paint and money i was 16 years old my career as you might say was at the crossroads winter was coming in [Music] oh i guess i could have found myself an honest job as a dishwasher or something but no i took the easy way i went on the stage i'd never been on the stage but i told him in dublin i was a famous star from new york and somehow got them to believe me that's how i started began at the top and i've been working my way down ever since now i've got here what michael mcclearmore writes about you in his autobiography it's the story of when you arrived at the gate theatre in dublin i know i know that story we found a very tall young man with a chubby face full powerful lips and disconcerting chinese eyes he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patients as though here was our chance to do something beautiful at last and where we going to take it he had some ageless and superb inner confidence that no one could blow out that was his secret it's a wonderful description can you consider that the author was in london at the time this was happening in dublin michael was in in london the first six weeks that i was in the gate theater and i got my job only with hilton and michael never saw any of the stuff that he writes about but he couldn't have told the story as well he hadn't put himself in as an eyewitness so that's perfectly all right i saw this brilliant not necessarily an actor but a brilliant creature of 16 telling us he was 19 and telling us he'd had lots of experience which was obvious to us he'd had none at all but he was more than brilliant and hillson said we've got to use that boy whether you whether you like it or not and i very soon did like it because i think he's a wonderful person awesome a wonderful undis still undisciplined creature of an enormous shall we call it talent i i only use the word genius but it very seriously like love but you were saying you were what 18 years old yeah no i was yeah it varied from 18 to 20. when i couldn't explain how i got to be that famous at 18. i would raise it up a little that's why i smoke a cigar i got cigars and smoked them that day in order to look older and kept the cigar in order to seem like an older actor in fact i played mostly old parts in dublin yes and then in america too when you went back to america the year oh yes because there were no parts for anybody with such a baby face now there was one other thing you appeared in about this time also as an old man and i think that was your very first film hearts of age it's not a film at all it was a little joke one sunday afternoon we'd all seen car we'd all seen either benue or cocktail or somebody's surrealist movie we said let's make one and from two o'clock in the afternoon till five we shot some dumb stuff and put it together just to amuse ourselves and it's terrible that it suddenly found its way into the ur you know he's written a book about it well with apologies to orson welles we found the print of that home movie and here's a brief extract from it it was this sequence that prompted one critic to see prophetic references to the imagery in citizen kane well's first wife virginia nicholson appears made up as an old woman and orson welles himself is about to appear on film for the very first time when he was barely out of his teens orson welles really had become a star of the new york stage and at the age of 23 he received the ultimate accolade the cover of time magazine he joined forces with the producer jon houseman to create one of the legendary theater companies of america the mercury theater their first production was a modern dress version of julius caesar with wells as brutus it was a spectacular success and then wells astonished new york with a lavish production of macbeth which broke all the conventions of the broadway stage and used an all-black cast i wanted to give the black actors a chance to play classics without it being funny you know or or even exotic it's just there it is and uh i directed macbeth without ever giving them a reading and none of them had ever seen a shakespearean play and it was extraordinary the the how good shakespeare is if it's spoken by somebody who's never heard somebody say it before and we had some marvelous effects and of course it was a big production went we had i think almost 200 people on the stage and we had voodoo drummers and witch doctors from the west coast of africa and real oh real ones yes and uh it was it was the only i think it's the by all odds my great success in my life was that play because the opening night there were five blocks in which all traffic was stopped you couldn't get near the theater in harlem everybody who was anybody in the black or white world was there and when the play ended there were so many curtain calls that finally they left this curtain open and the audience came up on the stage to congratulate the actors that was that was magical but the vast scale and ambition of wells and hausmann's productions was landing them in trouble these are the designs for their julius caesar the mercury theater was living from hand to mouth and wells had to begin a hectic double life i'd been contributing from my radio salary i kept putting a thousand dollars or so every week so we'd get the show on and we got all our plays on before anybody else because i was doing radio all day long soap operas and everything else i used to go by ambulance from one one radio station to another because i discovered there was no law in new york that you had to be sick to travel in an ambulance so i hired the ambulance and i would go from cbs to nbc they'd hold an elevator for me i'd go up the fifth floor go into the studio whichever i was booked for i say what's the character they say 80 year old [ __ ] and i'd go on and do the 80 year old [ __ ] and then rush off somewhere else and i was i had been for a year and a half auditioning hopelessly as an actor never could get a job on radio suddenly i got one part and in about a month i was making in those days tax-free about fifteen to eighteen hundred dollars a week as an unknown radio actor without my name being mentioned the weed of crime bears bitter fruit crime does not pay the shadow knows [Laughter] next week same time same station blue coal america's finest anthracite will again present another thrilling adventure wells played anonymously the hugely popular hero the shadow for a year until one notorious halloween 1939 when his cover was blown and his name became a household word ladies and gentlemen we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the intercontinental radio news faced with a dull script of war of the worlds wells came up with a brilliant idea the invasion from mars would be presented like real-life news flashes uh bulletin has handed me martian cylinders are falling all over the country the enemy is now in sight above the palisades five five great machines not even wells had anticipated what was to happen next on the city's west side now the smoke spreading faster has reached times square people are trying to run away from it but it's no use they they're falling like flies even before the broadcast had finished the roads were jammed with thousands of cars heading for the hills all over america the panic was uncontrollable there were attempted suicides even reports of rape by martian invaders [Music] to x2l calling cq to x2l calling cq new york the next morning the name of olsen wells was headlines all over america isn't there anyone the thing that gave me the idea for it was that i i people were we had a lot of real radio nuts on as commentators of this period people who wanted to keep us out of out of uh european entanglements and fascist priests called father coughlin and people believed anything they heard on the radio and i i said let's do something impossible and and make him believe it and then tell him show him that it's only radio so that was what started it and then of course they passed a lot of laws now you can't do it you can't give a news broadcast say this is the news without uh all that but the people who tried it in other countries were all put in jail and i got a contract hollywood that it really is the truth orson welles arrived in hollywood in 1940 at the age of 25 and on his own terms a cart blast contract with rko but as the gossip columns began to point out months were slipping by and well still hadn't got a project off the ground there was a year before you made cane yes and that year i was i was was i was busy preparing and to make the art of the heart of darkness i wrote the script and we designed the sets and we were all ready to go and we couldn't get 50 000 off the budget so they wouldn't let me do it so that was the first film i was going to make the contract was negotiated in new york and this superb contract only happened because i didn't much want to make a movie and i thought the only way i'd possibly make it would be without anybody interfering so i asked for things nobody ever had and nobody ever has had since written out they they have that kind of power now because once you let a director loose with 40 million dollars there's nothing you can do about it but in my case uh i was given a limited budget but unlimited control and the studio wasn't even allowed to see the rushes you believe such a thing because you were 25 and you had this amazing contract did you sense an enormous amount of resentment oh yeah of course of course a big resentment uh ward bond cut my tie off in the middle of jason's restaurant and we went out in the in the parking lot and had it out and i there was a tremendous resentment from of course because nowadays every star has directed a movie even the tv stars direct some of their segments it's perfectly normal for actors to direct themselves but nobody had done that since van strawheim and and it was unheard of and then that i should be the author and absolute producer now of course the producers hated me most because if i could do all those things then what is the need for a producer were you able just to barge through it did it affect you personally no because i i was very lucky you see i brought all my mercury actors with me so i had a little world of my own and i thought that'd be a great thing in a movie to have nobody in the film you'd ever seen before because that was those were in the days when every studio made 120 pictures a year and those faces were all so well known and i thought to see a movie in which everybody is new and i like my people and we got along well together and we we've been in the theater and radio together so why not in films you also got along very well with uh greg toland oh yes he came to me you know i i i didn't ask for him one day in the office they said there's a man called toland waiting to see you and he was of course the leading cameraman and he said i want to make your picture and i said well that's wonderful why i don't know anything about movies and he says that's why i want to do it he said because i think if your left is alone as much as possible we're going to have a movie that looks different i'm tired of working with people who know too much about it and uh he was the one who said uh we came to a moment in the first week of shooting where or no the second week where i suddenly was told by somebody that it was not the job of the director to do all the lighting up to then i'd been doing all the lighting with toland behind me balancing it and so on but saying don't tell anybody you see then i had to go and apologize to him and everything then then then another of an awful moment came when i didn't understand directions and that was because i had learned how to make movies by running stagecoach every night for a month because if you will look at stagecoach you will see that the indians attack left to right and then they attack right to left and so on in other words there's no direction followed every rule is broken in the picture and i sat and watched it 45 times so of course when i was suddenly told in an over shoulder shot that i had to look camera left instead of camera right i said no because i was standing here that argument you know so we closed the picture down and about two in the afternoon and went back to my house and told and showed me how that worked and i said well god there's a lot of stuff here i don't know and he said there's nothing i can't teach you in three hours and that's when i said that which has been taken as a as a very uh pompous statement that i learned everything in three hours it was tolland's idea that anybody can learn it in three hours and that he taught it to me in three hours everything else is if you're any good or not you don't have to look hard for a shot in citizen kane to prove the technical brilliance of wells collaboration with greg toland this famous shot is a combination of complicated crane movements flyaway scenery and optical effects at the end of the shot there's a dissolve disguised in a flash of lightning wells and tolan never claimed to have invented new techniques what they did was to combine existing ones into a virtuoso catalogue of effects film sets with complete ceilings overlapping sound deep focus photography expressionist lighting and if you doubt wells own contribution to the look of kane as some critics have look first at the lighting designs for his 1937 theater production julius caesar this is three years before he went to hollywood and here's the sequence in the thatcher library from citizen kane [Music] the story told through this dense and complicated array of techniques is an investigation into a man's life kane is seen not simply at different stages of his life a bravura piece of acting by the 25 year old wells but also through the eyes and the testimony of different witnesses in fact which came first was it the story of citizen kane or was it the idea of looking at a life from a lot of you that was what came first but my my co-author mankowitz took off with me on the idea of making it based on some big american figure and we thought of a president we had that was because hughes had got a starting thinking that way and i wasn't going to play played hughes because i wouldn't have been good in it it was going to be cotton who would have played hughes and we said well let's get a part i can play and finally before we decided what sort of big man it would be we began on this idea of seeing it from various points of view and the original the original scripts or at least story lines had much more dramatic differences a point of view it was much more of a trick it was much more rochamone than it ended up being in other words the story got a little better than the than the gag what sort of things were they what sort of things well just that you know the man who hated him and you saw it i'm sorry for instance a man who hated him he would then see a scene in which cain was totally hateful somebody who loved him you would see him totally lovable and that isn't so in the movie you know we see what he is all the time i think or at least we tried to do it guidance of spain off jersey coast is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper i don't know how to run a newspaper mr fetch i just try everything i can think of god you know perfectly well there's not the slightest proof of this ah murders off the jersey oh mr bernstein excuse me can you prove it isn't this just mr bernstein i'd like you to meet mr thatcher i'll just follow you guys leland uh mr thatcher my ex-guardian we have no secrets from our readers mr bernstein mr thatcher is one of our most devoted readers he knows what's wrong with every copy of the inquirer since i took over read the cable girls delightful in cuba stop could send you prose poems about scenery but don't feel right spending your money stop there is no war in cuba sidewheeler anya yes dear wheeler you provide the pro's poems i'll provide the war that's fine yes i rather liked myself right away i came to see you about this campaign of yours you said once that kane seemed to you to be really quite close to parody as a character he said once he was rather close to burlesque i didn't know if you meant the way you played him or the way he was i don't know what i meant by that maybe that comes from one of those foreign language interviews where i pretend i understand the question and say yes you know there's a whole lot of things i'm supposed to have said that really come from me not hearing very well or not being as good a linguist as i pretend to be and there's a kind of interviewer and you're not one of them who who tends to make it make a statement and then say isn't that true and if i get very bored or or i absolutely yes you know and that may be how come the parody because i can't imagine what i would have what i had in mind what most people thought wells had in mind was a real-life newspaper tycoon the biggest of them all william randolph hearst the baron of the yellow press and one of the most powerful men in america look first at the description of citizen kane's fictional palace xanadu from the march of time sequence here on the deserts of the gulf coast a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built 100 000 trees 20 000 tons of marble are the ingredients of xanadu's mountain contents of xanadu's palace paintings pictures statues the very stones of many another palace a collection of everything so big it can never be cataloged or appraised enough for ten museums the loot of the world [Music] livestock the fowl of the air the fish of the sea the beast of the field and jungle two of each the biggest private zoo since noah and now look at these shots this is a home movie made at william randolph hearst's real life palace san simeon eight years before kane marion davis the actress was to hearst what the singer susan alexander was to kane except that hearst had found himself a devoted lifelong companion a woman admired by everyone for her talent and her intelligence i thought we were very unfair to marian davies because we had somebody very different in the place of marion davies and it seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick and does still strike me as being something of a dirty trick what we did to her and i anticipated the trouble from earth for that reason [Music] what are you doing oh one thing i never can understand susan how do you know you haven't done it before makes a whole lot more sense in collecting statues you may be right i sometimes wonder but you get into the habit not a habit i do because i like it i thought we might have a picnic tomorrow susan huh i thought we might have a picnic tomorrow it was the opening night of citizen kane in san francisco and i found myself going to the top of the mark uh in the elevator with mr hearst and i introduced myself this strange dinosaur you know he had ice cold blue eyes and had a very high unicoined voice like that and i said mr hurst i didn't bother him with my father any of that i just said i have some good tickets for the opening of citizen kane would you like to come and uh he didn't answer and i got off the off the elevator thinking as i still do that if he had been charles foster kane he would have taken the tickets and gone he didn't say anything no but you uh you seem much more open now perhaps with the passage of time to to talking about hurst at all in connection with citizen kane because well rehearsed you see uh launched such an attack on us particularly on me or his his minions did it was kind of can no man rid me of this and so on and uh i was once this would get terribly long and anecdotal but i'll try to tell it very quickly i i was lecturing in buffalo and after the lecture i was with some people having dinner and a waiter said this policeman wants to see you and i turned white i always feel guilty when policemen want to see me and the cop turned out to be very nice he said don't go back to your hotel room i said why he said they've got an underage girl undressed and photographers waiting for you to set up so i didn't go back to my room that night i just stayed up took the plane in the morning but that was that was as far as they were prepared to go i would have gone to jail of course and they had the producers in hollywood ready all together to pay rko to burn the negative it was nip and tuck you know whether the negative would be burnt the picture never shown the controversies over citizen kane didn't stop in the 1940s in 1971 an american critic pauline kale published her account of the writing of kane together with a shooting script she paid particular attention to wells co-writer hermann mancovitz and drew some devastating conclusions based on the evidence of a couple of mankowitz associates one of them his secretary is quoted as saying that wells did not write or dictate one line of the shooting script of citizen kane and another alleged that wells actually tried to bribe mankovitz not to take a screen credit so that kane would be seen to be holy a wells creation i thought it was a very very cruel mean-spirited and essentially destructive job uh i think the thing was a perfectly uh perfectly clear attempt to assassinate orson um trying to take away the one picture that he you know that everybody said well he did make citizen kane so she wanted to say well he didn't bogdanovic published his response to kale in a short essay and through his friendship with wells was able to clarify the other side of the story and to detail his evidence against the allegations including those of mankovitz secretary that wells wrote none of the shooting script the point is that most of orson's writing was done with his secretary with his writing i found his secretary who said well she i told her that and she said well um i don't know what all that stuff was that i was typing and then you know and uh the thing is she never met orson she never even bothered to that's significant she didn't even want to talk to him here she's writing a book about citizen kane which includes the screenplay the presumption of not even wanting to speak to after all okay let's say he didn't write it he did certainly no question directed and if he didn't even do that he's in it but perhaps she thinks that's peter laurie you know she tried to take you know she tried to indicate that peter laurie that he'd stolen peter laurie's makeup from mad love some piece of junk which i took the trouble to see you know she was that's another thing that critics do they mention pictures that nobody's ever heard of because nobody can dispute them and who's going to bother to go run them you know i did and it's a joke you know it's like a it's like a bad joke we've found a copy of even more recent research by a film historian he's had access to the vital evidence that kale couldn't have had or perhaps didn't seek the various versions of the shooting script which demonstrate the extent of wells contribution he's also taken the trouble to seek out crucial evidence in memos and letters of the time this one alone is clear proof that wells wrote at least three scenes himself sadly these refutations were published only in obscure critical journals while kale's one-sided account was intended as and has become the standard work most of wells collaborators including greg toland have died long since but we found one member of the original team still working in hollywood wells had taken on for citizen kane a young film editor from the staff of rko he's now the successful hollywood director robert wise working with him was was never very long on an even keel it was either up or down marvelously exciting stimulating maddening frustrating uh he could one moment be guilty of a piece of behavior that was so outrageous and make you want to tell him to go to hell and walk off the picture and before he could do it he'd come up with some idea so brilliant they'd literally have your mouth keeping open and so you never walked you stayed did the film kind of fall together as some films appear to do or did you really have to work at it a little bit well snow films really fall together most editors will tell you that but it was very well planned the the whole continuity so many of those very effective long dissolves from one sequence to another with one side of the frame kind of going out and the other coming and those were all planned in the camera and not shot in the camera but planned to go that way so i think it was very well laid out very well planned you're beautiful oh i can't yes you are you're very very beautiful i've never been to six parties certainly there was a lot to do within the the boundaries of a given sequence for instance that marvelous breakfast table scene you know the moves and whips back and forth between uh arson and his wife and the the kind of growing uh estrangement between them that was the concept but the the timing of it and working out took weeks and weeks to do in the cutting room the speed of those whip pans charles do you know how long you kept me waiting last night well you went to the newspaper for 10 minutes where the voices would come in before we got to the incoming individual and the whole timing the rhythm of that your only correspondent is the inquirer sometimes i think i'd prefer a rival of flesh and blood oh emily i don't spend that much time on the newspaper it isn't just the time it's what you print attacking the president you mean uncle john i mean the president of the united states he's still uncle john he's still a well-meaning fat head who's letting a pack of high pressure crooks run his administration this whole oil scandal he happens to be the president charles not you that's a mistake that will be corrected one of these days but it was a very well planned picture very well prepared does that include the structure as well yes very much so i don't think that we changed one bit in terms of the continuity not not that i can remember it's been 40 years now but i believe it was all pretty well as as quite well as indicating the script as far as the continuity of the succession of the scene i don't think we changed any there's another legend that seems to have attached itself to you over the years and that's that you're a profligate spender that you go way over on your budget and your shooting schedule i've never gone over schedule or over budget nor on camp no in fact we were under budget on kane and under schedule but we did that by a trick because i said i know anything about movies so for about 10 days i'm just going to shoot tests and what we did was shoot cane we shot 10 days of cane before we admitted we were actually shooting but we were on we would have been under schedule anyway do you get upset these days and there's now so much literature on you do you get upset by some of those legends particularly the ones to do with people the ones that suggest that you've um behaved irresponsibly very badly i'm much too upset about them all my all my loving friends and uh keep telling me to stop brooding about it but i uh i i it bothers me terribly anything has to do with my behavior i don't mind what this how they criticize what i do but they they totalize about about me bother me much more than they ought to i don't know why i'm so touchy about it i had uh i went into mr chowa's restaurant in in london once to have lunch alone i like to eat lunch alone or dinner alone i brought a book and they have italian waiters there you know an italian waiter came and said to me in italian did you ever make a picture after citizen kane and i had just been told by hugh weldon that i was out of fashion in one of his famously tactful moments so this came at the wrong moment and i said patiently to him yes after citizen kane i made magnificent ambitions and then i listed my pictures now joan didion wrote a piece in esquire a few months afterwards when she described me coming in to mr charles with impressive silence and how all heads turned i opened a book and sat reading it studying the book and so on and then suddenly the silence was broken by me saying i made citizen kane in 1940 and so on you know but you know that i've been brooding about that thing for six years now that i just sat and delivered a monologue to the audience of lunches at mr charles about the pictures i'd made so those guys those kind of things do do make me brood a bit but that's the worst of them that's my real obsession the picture of somebody sitting by himself in a restaurant and suddenly reciting his screen credits in fact it wasn't joan didion who wrote the article in esquire the real culprit was one robert allen arthur oh after citizen kane you made the match yes yes wells doesn't appear in his second film but from the start the voice of the storyteller is unmistakable the magnificence of the ambersons began in 1873. their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their midland town spread and darken into a city in that town in those days all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else's family horse and carriage the only public conveyance was the streetcar a lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window the car would hault it once and wait for it while she shut the window put on her hat and coat went downstairs found an umbrella told the girl what to have for dinner and came forth from the house too slow for us nowadays because the faster we're carried the less time we have to spare were you deliberately looking for something in which you wouldn't appear yes why was that well i didn't want to be uh i didn't want to be uh i made a mistake i shouldn't have done it i had a i was obsessed in my hot youth with the idea that i would not be a star i would only incidentally play great roles now there's no such thing as incidentally playing great roles because you're not going to get them offered to you or anything and i was in a position to promote myself as a star and i should have i should have gone back to new york and played hamlet and and as long as it was going i didn't i had this idea that that uh i wanted to be known as a director that was it and uh i loved amberson's wanted to make a movie of it my gosh old times certainly are starting off not a bit there aren't any old times where times are gone they're not old they're dead there aren't any times but new time the magnificent amazons may not have the technical dazzle of cane but it has its own style more subtle no less marvelous wells intention had been to create an elegy on a disappearing america the decline and fall of a great family their mansion house and their way of life a world of security and tradition destroyed by progress and the age of the machine so your devilish machines are going to ruin all your old friends eh gene do you really think they're going to change the face of the land they're already doing it major it can't be stopped automobiles automobiles are a useless nuisance what did you say george i said automobiles are a useless nuisance never amount to anything but a nuisance they had no business to be invented of course you forget mr morgan makes them also did they share an embedding if you weren't so thoughtless you might think you're rather offensive i'm not sure george is wrong about automobiles with all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization maybe that they won't add to the beauty of the world or the life of men's souls i'm not sure but automobiles have come and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring the real point of ambitions everything that is any good in it is that part of it which was really just a preparation for the decay of the ambersons you'll never see that part of the film these stills are all that remain of three or four missing reels the film was cut by the studio in wales absence at least 45 minutes of his version has totally disappeared it was thought by everybody in hollywood while i was in in south america that uh it was too downbeat famous hollywood word at the time down beat so it was all taken out but it was the purpose of the movie just to see how they all slid downhill you see in one way or another how their relationships how they turned away from each other and all of that kind of thing let me just get it clear it's you couldn't do anything about that you didn't have the same sort of contract no i could do nothing because while i was in south america rko was sold to howard hughes and another group of people and a new studio head came in and they asked to see the movie and they previewed it out in palmdale or something in a rough cut and said it was a downbeat and they started cutting it they they actually shot the last there are three scenes at the end i didn't even write or shoot wells has expressed enormous bitterness over the cuts that were made in it well i'm sorry about that because i was involved in all the cuts but one of those circumstances that couldn't be helped he was in south america making a film for the government to help our war effort and that good neighbor policy we had to south america he had been sent to brazil to do that uh he was not up here when we previewed the film after we got it all finished uh we had sent him a print and he had some some changes he wanted made which we made but then we took the picture out for preview and the audience just wouldn't sit still for it they laughed at it left at some of the performances they walked out in droves and it was about as disastrous as the preview as you could possibly imagine and the studio was very naturally very upset they had a lot of money in this film they wanted to get on out so jack moss who was his man here is the social producer on the film and i were kind of caught in the middle between orson is his his inability to come up here and do anything about it but still wanting a voice in it in the studio on the other hand who was wanting to get something done with this film that would allow him to release it consequently we did cut about 25 or 30 minutes the original film and we had to make two or three or four new bridge scenes tied together and there was a new ending shot and then finally after the fourth preview after making all these changes and all we finally had a preview that the audience seemed to sit for and at least not walk out and didn't get any bad laughs and that was the way it that was the way it went i can only say that all of us up here did the very best job we could with the problem one of their solutions was actually to shoot and tack on a happy ending for the ambersons set in a hospital corridor where agnes moorhead and joseph cotton seem all set to walk into the sunset i wouldn't tell this to anybody but you but it seemed to me as if someone else was in that room and it through me she brought her boy under shelter again and that i'd been true at last to my true love not well's style and certainly not his intention there's no scene in a hospital nothing like that ever happened in the story and the great long scene which was the key long scene at the end which was aggie moorhead in a in a third-rate lodging house near where the elevator was passing and some they're playing a comic record to black crows on a gramophone some old people in the back who are playing cards and joe cotton has come to see how she is and that was the best scene in the picture that was what the picture was about i held the preview cards in my hand which i didn't tell you and uh there were these terrible reactions to the picture that said that you know everybody who made it ought to be hung hanged and the other uh 5 to ten to twenty that said it was only the greatest movie ever made that they'd ever seen i think they were probably close to the truth it probably was uh among the five most important films made i think in america ever and uh it's i think the greatest artistic tragedy in the movies that that particular film was so mutilated because you barely get a sense of what it was was that was that kind of cutting reordering and even remaking of a film taken for granted in those days because you wonder joseph cotton and robert wise were very close to olsen and they you know and cotton i know felt very bad about doing it and yet he wrote orson you know several letters in which he explained why he thought it was best and uh and you know you feel sorry as you read it because you know he's he's betraying orson but he doesn't really realize it it's very sad it wasn't anybody came out of it good i would i would have to say this that i think from a purely artistic point of view purely that it was probably a better film and it's in its entirety looking at it from a film buff standpoint i suppose i don't think there's any question there but we are faced with the realities of the other the other part of it i only have to say this that i think the fact that the that the film has come down through the years in its own right is somewhat of a minor if not more than that classic means that we didn't really bastardize it completely it's gone whole end of it the whole the whole an actual plot was changed in other words it's about the time major amberson dies the picture starts to go to become another picture becomes their picture do you ever get over something like that not really you don't you don't but you see i was in terrible trouble then because i was sent to south america by nelson rockefeller and jacques whitney i was told that it was my patriotic duty to go and spend a million dollars shooting the carnival in rio now i don't like things like carnivals and mardi gras and all that but uh they put it to me that it would be a real contribution to inter-american affairs in the latin american world and so on so without a salary but with a budget of a million dollars i was sent to rio to make up a movie about the carnival but in the meantime comes the new government archaeo is now a new government and they ask to see the rushes of what i'm doing in south america and they see a lot of people black people and the reaction is he's just shooting a lot of jigaboos jumping up and down you know they didn't even hear the samba music because it hadn't been synced up this footage had been lost for nearly 40 years it's a tiny roll of disconnected technicolor shots a fragment of the rushes of what should eventually have been orson welles third film it's all true we found this role with the help of an archivist at rko in a hollywood film library labelled a stock footage of the carnival wells himself has probably never seen it it's all true was to have been a combination of documentary footage and three dramatized short stories one of them about a group of brazilian fishermen that's probably why these final shots are included in the role so i was fired from our field they made a great publicity point of the fact that i had gone to south america without a script and thrown all this money away that i never recovered from that from that attack so the fact that they had also they had promised me when i went to south america that they would send a moviola and cutters to me and that i would finish the cutting of amberson's there they never did they cut it themselves so they destroyed amberson's and the picture itself destroyed me i was i didn't get a job as director for years afterwards so then i did jane eyre joan fontaine starred with orson welles in robert stevenson's film jane eyre in 1944 it was the first time in his hollywood career that wells had been forced to work as an actor under someone else's direction can i do anything stand out of the way i'm sorry did it look at that stage as if people were kind of breathing a sigh of relief thing oh yeah thank god we've got awesome wells into it rko had a stationary that year its official stationery archaeo pictures and its slogan for that year printed on every piece of paper that went out for marchio was showmanship instead of genius in other words the reason you should buy an rko picture was that you didn't get arsene wells the genius came from i never said i was a genius nobody ever called me a genius seriously certainly not in those days but luella parsons called me the would-be genius and she called me that she was the first columnist and she called me that so often that this terrible word got stuck to me so showmanship instead of genius you see and that was their big selling point they didn't have me anymore and the next picture i did do was the stranger and i did that to show people that i didn't glow in the dark you know that i could say action that cut just like all the other fellas the stranger directed by wells in 1946 starred edward g robinson as a nazi hunter whose search for an escaped war criminal leads him to america and a small midwestern town wells is the nazi kindler sheltering under a false identity as a respectable teacher and loretta young plays his unsuspecting wife robinson mingles into the social life of the town waiting for the break in wells impeccable facade you have no faith in the reforms that are being affected in germany i don't know mr wilson i can't believe that people can be reformed except from within the basic principles of equality and freedom never have never will take root in germany the world of freedom has been voiced in every other tongue all men are created equal liberty gallatin fraternity but in german there's marx proletarians united who have nothing to lose with your chains but max wasn't a german max was a jew wells originally told the studio he wanted a woman for robinson's part agnez moorehead i thought it would have been much more interesting to get borman trapped down by a spinster lady than by eddie robinson but they they wouldn't agree to it and robinson wasn't actually a crony of yours or uh no i didn't know him at all and uh he uh he got into a big sulk the first week i couldn't understand what it was about he said you keep shooting me on my bad side now could you imagine eddie robinson having a bad sign and i was shooting him that way because loretta young's side was the other one you see so i told her about it she said all right shoot me on my bad side and keep him happy [Laughter] but he was a immensely effective actor and uh he was very good in the picture here you and professor england aim to fix the clock that's fine well's favorite sequences in the stranger are the scenes of small town life like robinson's visits to the drugstore and his dialogue with the bit part player billy howes robinson wasn't so keen on these scenes figured to tell time rightly [Music] and will the angel circle around the belfry [Music] is that a man or woman angel mr wilson i don't know well record don't make much a difference amongst angels well we was very unhappy about the drugstore situation he kept going back to the drugstore playing checkers and and with the druggist who never moved always sat in his chair and that was a he was billy house a burlesque comedian that i found and put in the movie billy house had a very unhappy first week too as long as well as eddie i saw him mournfully standing around between takes i finally took him away and said billy tell me what what's troubling you and he said either give it to me or to the other son of a [ __ ] but let's decide and it was his stand-in and he thought the stand-in was there to play the part in case he wouldn't be good enough he just saw that other fat man he says that give it to him i don't care just let me know where i am he was a sweet man so he cheered up a lot after that but um but eddie eddie's point was that he was a supporting actor and why should he why should a scene go to him and scenes didn't go to supporting actors you know in hollywood in those days unless they were featured players of so well beloved and so highly paid by the week by the studio that they had to be given so if they were you know any of those wonderful people there were an awful lot of great character people but here was an unknown actor given great hunks of scenes that should have gone to the money you know and he was very unhappy about that i tried to persuade him that it wouldn't cost him anything and that that's the first time you came up against that kind of yes yes well i was working with two stars and my had to decide you see when you work with stars you have to make love to them yeah when you work with actors you have to make look it's the business of the director is to be a kind of carry on a continual courtship with the people he sticks in front of the lens and when you deal with stars you know real stars uh you have to uh you have to really make love you know and uh it seemed to me natural to direct my attentions to miss young that's the little jealousy there between eddie and particularly because she allowed me to hold her arm there's a shot where i hold her arm and she's five stories above and she really is i'm holding her arm and eddie was too scared to put his feet over the edge you see so there was a lot of there was a lot of unhappiness about that was nothing we could do about the fact that he was scared but uh except double him you see that that was a real clock tower it was built a clock was the size where now some skyscraper stands and we were running around on that here [Music] we had a uh one shot that would put poor john russell out on a flagpole hanging onto his camera and it was the one shot where i fall and it could never be duplicated because the stunt man and all that got paid so much for doing it and the next day it rushes we put in all the sound effects over black film in order to make russell think he'd forgotten to rack over that's the sort of cruelty that was common on the sets in those days and we were all very forgiving doesn't matter we'll do it again tomorrow night he gets so scared in 1943 wells and joseph cotton had co-written and starred in a grangino thriller journey into fear and there were rumors that wells had taken more than a passing interest in the direction that's colonel hockey this is his office he is the head of the secret police victor police the books about me which give me credit for that picture are wrong because it really is norman foster's picture and he deserves any credit that's going and if you'd seen the picture before they cut out what didn't uh advance the action you would have realized what a good move he made oh yeah yeah in spite of my very hammy performance but it was supposed to be a hammy performance it wasn't unconsciously so that's all i can say in my bed well that's interesting it does it it always seems as if there's something missing from journey into fear i don't know what well some of the things are plots plot points at one marvelous moment a man who's been killed in the third reel looks through a porthole so it naturally confuses you is the humor in journey into fear and little little naturalistic that's a few yeah little jokes that don't advance we rehearsed all that before i left we rehearsed all that and a lot of that is joe cotton too we've been working together so long in the theater we've developed a kind of mercury style and you know when i when i keep nagging on about this cutting against this cutting but i'm not a director who likes to linger on things uh you know the most most of the directors of the generation after me particularly european directors and now americans too in english everybody they stay on a shot forever if somebody's going to walk down a road my god they walked the whole way and you say to yourself they're not going to make us see her right off the horizon on it yes antonioni's the king of it but they all do it you know i i get away from it my pictures are pretty fast moving i think it's a bright guilty world in 1947 wells went tropical with an exotic thriller called the lady from shanghai travelogue scenery luxury living but shot through with well's own sense of parody and the bizarre what's your guess michael think the world's coming to an end there was a start to the world sometimes so i guess there'd be a stop [Music] how'd you like five thousand dollars that's what i said five thousand dollars fella and what do i have to do for it i'll fill in the details later meanwhile think it over michael it's five thousand dollars it's yours all you have to do is kill somebody who mr grisby i'm particular who i murdered good boy and from his supporting players glenn anders here he coaxed performances that go right to the edge i wouldn't like to kill just anybody is it someone i know oh yeah but you'll never guess i give up it's me i'm perfectly sober michael i'm willing to pay five thousand dollars if the job is well done this is a straightforward business proposition i want you to kill me what's wrong fella when he first viewed lady from shanghai producer harry cohen offered anyone in the room a thousand dollars to explain the plot to him not even wells took him up on it the gossip columns had a field day wells's co-star was his recently divorced wife rita hayworth and the circumstances of the making of the picture in the first place are almost as bizarre as the story wells had actually left the movies for a year and returned to the theater to lose a lot of money putting on a new musical it was called around the world in 80 days i put all my money into it and before the opening in boston the costumes were sitting in the railway station and there was there was 55 000 to pay for them or they wouldn't go to the theater for the opening night so i i was in the box office and i was trying to think who in hollywood could send me 55 000 before in the next three hours i thought harry cohen only one with the courage to do it i called him up and i said harry he said what is it what do you want i said i've got the greatest story you've ever read and i turned the paper back around that the girl and the box office was reading it was called the man i killed i said it's called the man i killed written by such and such a paperback buy it i said you get me fifty five thousand dollars to boston in two hours and i'll make the picture write it and direct it and act in it fifty five thousand came i did around the world eighty days lost a fortune on it but we had a musical that brecht went to see seven times and was i think the best thing i ever did in the theater but it was a financial disaster so i went back to hollywood to pay back my debt i intended to make a b picture i hadn't said i'd be in it that was wrong i shouldn't have told that i i was going to direct it and so i had a french girl that we'd seen a picture of in life magazine we got her over and all set to shoot it in about four weeks and go and i had divorced from rita and she came to me and said i want to make your picture i want you to come back with me and harry sent for me and said i want you to do that with rita for her sake well that turned it from five weeks to a big super movie and the essential plot is the plot of the book and when i pointed to which i had never read so the theory which has been printed a thousand times that this was an act of vengeance against rita that it was a great device which i was going to degrade her and so on it's nonsense because all that's in the book she'd read the book and wanted to play this character sure she was an actress you build her up as this soft focus yes all that then put her in the gutter at the end take your arms away [Music] comes a change in weather comes a change [Music] you do seem to need that edge all the time don't you that it's a sort of balancing act between drama and melodrama and paradigm yes and uh i'm bored with stories that don't seem to be balanced dangerously like a you know if you walk down a highway with a story instead of on a tightrope i'm bored with it you know you to some extent though setting out to make a critique uh the very kind of film that the studios wouldn't like because you had a leading man who was stupid enough to get himself into the situation the part you played you had a a sort of sex goddess playing a parody almost of a sex yes there's of course of course there's that element wells delight in subverting the classic scenes of melodrama runs right through lady from shanghai a defense attorney cross-examines himself in court a clandestine lovers meeting takes place in the threatening and surreal setting of a public aquarium and in one of well's most stunning set pieces he turns inside out the traditional b-picture finale the shoot-out well dear you aren't the only one who wants me to die our good friend the district attorney is just itching to open a letter that i left with him the letter tells all about you lover so you'd be foolish to fire that gun these mirrors it's difficult to tell you are aiming at me aren't you i'm aiming at you lover of course killing you is killing myself it's the same thing but you know i'm pretty tired of both of us [Music] and this by the way was the film that hollywood the studios and even wells friends thought was probably the worst thing he'd ever done his reputation as a rebel an uncontrollable kind of anarchist who didn't fit within the system had grown so big that it looked as if no one would ever touch a wells project again and that reputation never left him i've never heard you or read you being bitter about hollywood no i'm not i'm not i don't think it'd be ridiculous to be bitter about hollywood anybody who goes to hollywood can see right away what the setup is in in in my early days it was much more fun it was much more fun to outwit the dinosaurs than it is to out with the college graduates from the conglomerates you know uh but uh hollywood is hollywood it's a there's nothing you can say about it that isn't true good or bad and if you get into it you you have no right to be bitter you're the one who sat down and joined the game you know is it is it a clash of really a clash of temperaments between you and the system i mean there have been fine films made within the hollywood system yes indeed ford made all his pictures within the system but he outwitted the system uh because he he made pictures his taste and his instincts were such that he could make pictures which were sometimes in the mainstream and always marginally the sort of pictures that the bosses wanted he succeeded not by his originality but by the depth of his sensitivity but uh the people who have done well in the system are the people whose instincts whose desire who want to make the kind of movie which producers want to produce not what the public wants but producers want to produce people who don't succeed the people who've had long bad times like renoir for example so i think the best director ever are people who didn't want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make producers didn't want to make a renoir picture even if it was a success people don't realize that nobody in movies is interested in money everybody thinks hollywood is interested in money because they talk about money all the time well they talk about sex all the time and they don't do much of that they're really interested in it's all an ego trip they're interested in in uh having produced this picture in power in um status all sorts of things money is only uh is only a the counters in the game nobody's really interested in money there wouldn't be it nobody would go into movies if they were really interested in money because if you're interested in money you'd go into a business that in which you make bigger sums easier so that's the the trouble with hollywood isn't isn't it isn't its money aspect and as you speak of a clash of temperaments not at all it's uh uh the pictures i like to make are not the pictures hollywood producers and particularly modern hollywood producers want to make by the breaking of my thoughts something wicked this way comes another project that hollywood wasn't ecstatic about was well's 1948 version of macbeth republic pictures accepted it but they gave him only 21 days shooting and a tiny budget did the the budget and and the shooting schedule dictate the way you yes yes sure quite clear sure and the uh and the uh the set was badly executed from i made a careful model of it and by the time it was built it looked a little bit like the the salt mine in the in the cereal you know and i wasn't too happy about that of course the style of it was entirely dictated it was done as a as a as a b picture [Music] within the almost impossible limits he was set well still manages to create an inventive and sometimes even witty version of macbeth i thought i'd have a great success with it and then i'd be allowed to do all kinds of difficult things as long as they were cheap but life magazine came out that they always margaret gelhorn always hated me anyway she came out that week with help holy murder macbeth or something like that you know and uh it was a big critical failure it's the biggest critical failure ever had you have said that it poses great problems when you actually appear in films in your films because of your presence or your personality yes because uh much more than in the theater uh there's a there's i have a kind of personality which requires that i play certain kinds of parts or i discombobulate the scene and that's uh it's a kind of handicap there used to be a there used to be a form a division of actors in france in the comedy franchises were called king actors they weren't necessarily the best actor they were the actor who played the king you know and i'm a king actor maybe a bad one but that's that's what i am you see and i have to play authoritative roles but uh truth was quite right when he says about me that i always show the fragility of the great authority and that that's that's the thing i do i think i would be intolerable if i didn't if getting macbeth done in record time was something of a minor miracle wells next venture into shakespeare was to prove the most tortuous journey he ever undertook the tragedy of othello this is a motion picture based on the play by william shakespeare [Music] the cast of characters in the order of their appearance iago michael mcleod desdemona suzanne croutier othello orson welles a large company biggest company i've ever had as a director on location of about 70 people i think it was besides the actors and everything came to mogadar on the west coast of africa to shoot othello and we arrived and got a telegram the day after we arrived that uh scalera the biggest italian movie studio with whom i had a contract to make the picture had gone bankrupt and we had no money we were in africa and we had no costumes nothing but wells refused to give up he began to pour his own money into othello that didn't get him far into the schedule and he gathered his cast and crew from all corners of europe suzanne cloutier from paris and his old boss michael mcclearmore from dublin wells got into the habit of suddenly leaving his crew on location flying off to star in someone else's movie and rushing back weeks later with the money to shoot a bit more story has grown up that these unfortunate actors were left stranded while orson welles turned off i didn't know what they enjoyed the actors loved to tell that story that story because of course they were stranded but what they forget is that they were stranded in the in the four-star luxury hotels of europe they were in the stranded in the in the grand hotel in the europa in venice and in the in the colon door and the provence and so on and they were stranded only to the extent that i didn't want to send them home i wanted to keep them together and i went off to get money and left them at great expense eating and sleeping in luxurious conditions during the two years it took to make othello wells had plenty of opportunity to use what he calls divine accidents the first sequence to be shot was the murder of rodrigo it's a brilliantly cinematic idea to set it in a steam bar but in fact only iago's costume had arrived the others had been impounded when the italian studio went bankrupt so wells decided to shoot the scene in a bath house where the actors didn't need any clothes at all i had a very good art director for that picture uh trauna was one of the best in movie history but because of lack of funds we ended up shooting it mostly in real places there was much room to do but he designed a wonderful othello which somebody should do someday the invention continued all over europe with wells art directing on the run and creating marvelous set pieces like the fight scene filmed in a sewer in portugal [Music] and outside a citadel in morocco on the edge of a cliff he found the setting for the funeral that makes a stunning opening for the film it's quite a sequence the opening of othello it was done entirely with never more than about uh 60 people except for one shot in morocco where a lot of jewish tailors run toward michael they had to be jewish tailors because it was it was ramadan the arabs were all starving to death [Laughter] so we had all the jewish tailors who were busy making carpaccio costumes for us when we needed that crowd seed we got them all out and put we took sardine cans and flattened them out and tied them with strings on them so they would shine in the sunshine and they came running forward all the jewish tailors in their sardine cans for that one shot the long filming schedule caused other problems wells often had to shoot his pickup shots in different locations this fight starts in a street in morocco the final punch is delivered 2 000 miles away in italy we're about i don't know at least seven or eight different italian cities including from torcello to uh to uh the south of italy just whether it would be a little piece that would be right you know didn't need something added to it and of course that determined the kind of cutting which i wouldn't have done otherwise you know i would have played longer scenes but i had to it had to be done in in cuts because it had to be done in cuts because i need a little water i think i said that i think it said when i find that cutting early on a bit confusing in othello yes so do i so do i i don't like to i don't like uh several bits there in in venice i think the weakest thing in the picture is venice and it's some of it's quite weak indeed i think do you do you accept the the label people have put on it they've called it a flawed masterpiece because they've drawn attention to that and to the dialogue sound that which they find poor and that against these brilliant images yes well they they uh uh i don't know what happened to the sound it was all right when we uh we're done with it but something something happened in uh in making this distribution copies or something that did hurt it so it's flawed and to the extent that we weren't able to control the quality of the of the release print was actually all right as we did it with awfully good music wonderful music i don't know flawed masterpiece i don't know masterpiece i you know i i can tell you things i don't like in all my movies and if that's if that makes it flawed then it's flawed and i don't think i ever made a masterpiece you know but there are wonderful things in a fellow in its marriage of film and theater in wells use of his real-life film set and in his own performance a fine woman a fair woman a how the world is not a sweeter creature she might lie by an emperor's side and command him tasks a that's not your way hanger i do but say what she is [Music] so delicate with her needle an admirable musician she will sing the savageness out of a beard um can we can we go on to what we call that i see i see that othello is not one of your favorite movies after after one of those questions would you agree that it's a flawed masterpiece i love those questions we then after a slight pause say could we go on [Laughter] could we go on to something else i think we'd better uh mr acardin well that's the real flawed one yeah is it oh yeah that's that's a disaster mr arkadin released in england as confidential report is another investigation into a man's past my travels took me from helsinki to tunis brussels a mysterious and powerful stranger has hired a small-time investigator to inquire into his past his secret purpose is to cover up his tracks simply by disposing of every contact the investigator makes wells plays the mysterious arcadin a kind of perverse cane figure another of his explorations into the mythology of power it's a story about curious forms of vanity because he's a man who commits these terrible murders because of because of his interest in his image in other words nothing will happen to him if any of the things which are found out about him are printed nothing will happen to our cotton it's really about vanity and about people's preoccupation with with their image even somebody as powerful as architect but that film was taken away from me completely and was totally destroyed in the cutting that is the real disaster of my life that one you know a flawed masterpiece how are you there's there's your flawed masterpiece i got it i hate to think about it the beginning of one of well's most spectacular opening sequences it develops into a continuous three-minute 20-second crane shot wells had been living and working in exile in europe for nearly 10 years when he returned to hollywood in 1958 to create almost by accident one of his most unforgettable screen performances and one of the finest crime thrillers ever made the script had originally been sent by universal to charlton heston under the title badge of evil it was a fairly routine police story but even had it been a better script as i pointed out to them uh with the exception of westerns they've been making police stories longer and often than any other single genre and therefore it's extremely difficult to come up with a script which as a script will uh will survive on its own i said the director is even more important than this than in most kinds of pictures i said who's going to direct it they said well we haven't picked a director yet we have orson welles to do the heavy though this was on the long distance phone and after a static filled pause i said why don't you have him directed he's a pretty good director you know and the reaction at first was a prolonged silence as though i had suggested that my mother direct the film and after a while i said uh yeah that's right we'll uh we'll get back to you so they quickly called me back again and said will you direct this picture we can't pay you any more i said i'll direct it but if i also get to write it every word of it an entirely new script they said yes so i had three weeks before we was to start i hired about about 12 secretaries around the clock and made an entirely new script orson then uh proceeded to rewrite the entire script in about 10 days by himself which i knew he would and vastly improved the whole script and his part which i knew he would uh the touch of evil is of course really the story of the decline and fall of captain quinlan orson's part uh my part the mexican lawyer vargas serves as uh a witness well here comes hank at last if you've heard of hank quinlan our local police celebrity i'd like to meet him that's what you think did they uh carcinois that uh planted ahead of time where we did it you jackass you figured it was a bomb then hank player cheap rudy lineker could have been struck by lightning uh where's the daughter marsha got her right here waiting for you hank there you go you don't even want to question the daughter rather go and put a tail on her oh she's there with some jane that's really like some uh striptease what do you know the d.a in a monkey suit orson welles plays hank quinlan the crooked policeman who regards himself as judge and jury he always gets his man even if he has to concoct the evidence or plant the murder weapon himself i hear he even invited some kind of a mexican charlton heston is a high-ranking mexican policeman vargas he discovers the truth about quinlan's years of successful crime busting and decides to expose him i wonder what makes you so very sure it was dynamite or i like what he's gay back sometimes he gets a kind of a twins like folks do for a change of weather intuition he calls it you must be physically the most grotesque character yes yes it's pretty grotesque and i gave a dinner party not long after i started the picture for all my old producer friends and big star friends the old hollywood brigade my wife laid on a splendid meal and i was a little late so they were all there having their drinks before i would sit down i came in in order to arrive in time in my makeup and costume and they all said how are you arson you're looking great you know i was an absolute monster you've been cooking at this house just cleaning up oh have you forgotten your old friend i told you with her clothes i'm hank quinlan i didn't recognize you you should lay out those candy bars [Music] it's either the candy or the hooch i must say i wish it was your chili i was getting fat on it anyway you're sure looking good you a mess honey [Music] they didn't know they had marlena dietrich she turned up in the rushes they said that's marlena dietrich and they called her up and said you're in this picture and she said yes and they said well what's your salary and she says you don't put my name on the picture it's the minimum you put my name on see my agent so so they saw our agent they were delighted and it was roses all the way until that gate closed on me it's still a mystery i have no idea what that was about once again wells was barred from the post-production of his own film and cuts were made in it why again in this case were you shut out from i have no idea it's never been explained because they love the rushes every day the head of the studio came to me and wanted me to come to the office and sign a deal for several pictures you know it's great stuff then they saw a rough cut of it and i was they were so horrified that they wouldn't let me in the studio and nobody's ever explained what horrified them they tried very hard to really to stop it heston had won an oscar and was a great star and they released it without a press release without press showing second on the bill with a b picture in america and it was shown in brussels right afterwards at the world's fair where it got the prize for the best picture of the year and the distributor the belgian distributor who had put it into the contest against the will of the studio and had worked for the universal for 20 years was fired it then opened in a small theater in paris publicis where it ran two years it's made a lot of money even in america to their tremendous rage you know the last thing they wanted was a success and nobody has ever explained it to me chuck heston doesn't know i'd they never told him they certainly never told me we don't know what it is it was too dark for them too strange to i think you know i i don't think we would have had that reaction now they're a little too tough a little too uh black but that's a guess i just don't know there is a kind of a maverick streak in arson that you see in less gift many less gifted directors uh you might even the greeks might label it the sin of hubris uh i'm not certain that's so in arson's case orson really it seems to me just wants to work but at the same time there is something in him that drives him to alienate uh the people with the money perhaps uh there is a subconscious streak that makes him resent that unlike a painter who if he had to could uh work in a supermarket bagging groceries uh and earn the money to buy paints that as a director he cannot do that he must somehow persuade a studio to give him the money and perhaps on some subconscious level orson has never been able to accept this i cannot believe that he would not have been more successful than he has been at getting them to give him the money to make films there is a a myth in the film community for example that arson is an unreliable director that he is profligate with no disrespect to directors like mike nichols and michael cimino and spielberg and coppola orson hasn't spent as much money in all the films he has made in his life as they have wasted in overage on any one film and this is a simple statement of fact and i i dare say they would subscribe to it a touch of evil not a great film but certainly one marked with patches of brilliance was shot on the shortest schedule i ever worked on and it came in unscheduled and slightly over budget uh the budget was less than a million dollars was it yes it also um so much of it gives very little room for maneuver i mean that the famous opening shot is one shot the chapman boomshot yes he didn't did he cover himself no no we spent all night shooting that shot uh if indeed if you look in the printed take you can see the touches of dawn breaking on the horizon that was the last shot you were going to get that was it that and he used the last time yes but uh the hard thing about that shot was the uh small part player who played the customs inspector at the very end of the shot kept blowing his lines which is one can understand he would see this vast entourage bearing down on him from two blocks away and finally orson said to him look i don't care if you forget the lines he said just move your lips he said i beg you just don't say oh gee mr wells i'm sorry but it is one of many remarkable strokes in our film uh you folks are american citizens i am yes where were you born what philadelphia my name is vargas hey jim see who's here sure mr vargas hot on the trail of another dope ring on the trail of a chocolate soda for my wife your wife daddy a bride officer hey can i get through a lot of talk up here about how you crack that granny business yeah i hear you caught the big boss only one of them the grandes are a big family good night hi no purchases mr lineker hey hey i got you the american citizen missed i got this ticking noise oh okay no really this is a noise in my head why do you realize this is the very first time we've been together in my country do you realize i haven't kissed you in over an hour are we on yeah yes uh uh our viewers will know that because this is on film there are conversations that go on between uh rates between reloading and uh somebody said that uh touch of evil seemed very unreal and yet real and i corrected that statement said what i was trying to do was to make something which was unreal but true and i think that's the definition of the highest kind of theatricality the best kind and that's the kind of theatricality that can exist in films too as well as theater and i think because there is you know what is more unreal and stylized than cagney it's a totally stylized unreal performance no human being ever behaved the way he does and every moment of cagney entire life in films his truth he never had a second that wasn't true you know now that's that's the he certainly was larger than life he did everything dangerously and uh you know as though we were playing in madison square garden and it was always cinematically true but unreal that's the difference i guess i think there's always that term for the viewer anyway that a kind of moral ambiguity about the characters in the the quinlan yes character that although he's sort of violent well you know what renoir said he said everyone has his reasons and that's that really sums it up you know there's no villain who doesn't have his reasons and the bigger the villain the more interesting it becomes if you the further you explain his villainy not in psychiatrically not because mama didn't love him but because because you humanize him the more the more human you make the monster the more interesting the the story must be it seems to me also quinlan's instincts turn out to be right even though the methods that's right you see his method is totally wrong and my my position in the political or moral sense is completely anti-quinlan i'm absolutely on the side of heston myself personally but playing quinlan and having a character like that i had to make him a real person i've been trapped into a true person what i hope is a true person a true monster because he was a successful cop using means which do work but which are simply against every every good instinct that we have in the democratic world he's everything we we hate but he isn't what we hate it's his method and yet he would never have got those people behind bars if he hadn't done it and it's that ambiguity which gives tension to a story you know that ambivalence rather you also allow him this this fantastic epitaph at the end yes yes well she was pretty good pretty good casting for that she was some kind of a woman yes it's her last great performance no doubt about it so it turns out quinlan was right after all isn't somebody going to come and take him away yeah in just a few minutes he really liked him didn't you the cop did the one who killed him he loved him well hank was a great detective all right and a lousy cop is that all you have to say for him he was some kind of a man what does it matter what you say about people [Music] goodbye tanner [Music] got another fraud masterpiece in part two orson welles talks about his acting roles including the legendary harry line about his european films the trial with anthony perkins and jean-maro about the film he likes the best chimes at midnight with well's own portrayal of falstaff he takes us through his later work in drama including the immortal story and talks about his discovery of documentary and about his unfinished projects some of the most talked about unseen films in cinema history [Music] and the second part of that arena documentary the orson welles story is here on bbc4 on sunday at 11. next tonight our orson welles weekend continues as we take a journey into fear [Music] you

Channel: Fintan McGrath

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Rating: 4.8688526 out of 5

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Id: jFqW6b1hfFY

Length: 111min 25sec (6685 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020