The Magic World of Orson Welles (50 page)

In February 1975, when Welles decided to show two excerpts from
The Other Side of the Wind
before the American Film Institute, he added still another level of significance to the images, turning the televised “Life Achievement Award” ceremony into a frame for the sequences he had shot. The institute's award, of which he was the third recipient, is to some extent a public relations device, enabling the AFI to gather dozens of celebrities in one place and obtain prime-time coverage; Welles, however, was a slightly controversial candidate for the show. A week before the broadcast, syndicated columnist Marilyn Beck publicly chided the institute for selecting Welles and wrote that she was not alone in feeling he had wasted his talents. By contrast, the two previous awards had gone to John Ford and James Cagney—authentically successful American folk heroes whose achievements could be wrapped in the flag; in fact the Ford ceremony was attended by the then president of the United States, and Ford's last public act was to stand before television cameras and shout, in an aging voice, “God bless Richard Nixon!” Thus, even though the Welles program was hosted by such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson, it seemed much less a major public event.

In this somewhat cloudy, dubious atmosphere, Welles decided to make a pitch for his work in progress. To advertise himself, he exhibited two excerpts from
The Other Side of the Wind
that are critical of Hollywood and the “great man” myth that the AFI had assembled to honor. Reminding the audience of his habit of paying for his own movies out of his acting jobs, and describing himself as a “neighborhood grocery in an age of supermarkets,” Welles first showed a highly satiric piece of film depicting the Hollywood celebration in honor of Jake Hannaford; he followed this episode with a scene in which one of Hannaford's henchmen tries to interest a big studio boss in financing a picture. Taken together, these excerpts were one of the most interesting examples of Pirandellian theatrics in Welles's career.

Neither of the bits of film are in the style normally associated with Orson Welles, although they have a grotesque, somewhat frenzied quality that recalls his earlier work. The first is shot in color, with bumpy, handheld cameras, using zoom lenses to capture occasional close-ups, jump cuts to shatter the action, and overlapping speeches to give the illusion of unmanipulated reality. The setting is Jake Hannaford's birthday party. The director, followed by his entourage and a bewildering crowd of photographers who might well
be shooting this very footage, moves slowly through the night air toward a California-style house; meanwhile we hear a cocktail-party piano playing “It's De-Lovely” and a smattering of applause for the guest of honor. Drink in hand, Hannaford turns and gives a weary smile to the people waiting to receive him, his face caught in the painful glare of movie lights. He walks forward carefully, with a graceful, loping stride, while various figures gather around. Suddenly a man in an orange shirt runs frantically from behind the crowd of photographers, shouting, “Mr. Hannaford! Mr. Hannaford!” As one of Jake's cronies (Benny Rubin) raises an arm and yells, “Happy birthday, Jake,” the running man circles in front of Hannaford and offers to shake his hand. “Mr. Hannaford,” he says with great earnestness, “I'm Marvin P. Fassbender.” “Of course you are,” Hannaford says, like a doctor trying to reassure a mental patient, and then continues moving toward the house.

Everyone on the lawn seems to start and pause along with Hannaford, sucked along in the wake of celebrity. After a moment Hannaford stops at a doorway and turns to look behind, the camera zooming in for a close-up of his pained, slightly open-mouthed expression. A reverse angle shows a line of photographers, lights, and sound equipment scurrying forward en masse. Glancing to his left and then his right, Hannaford sees that he is flanked by more photographers moving their equipment toward him, knocking one another down in an attempt to gain a position in the front row. Defensively, he breaks out in a huge smile, providing a photo opportunity and forcing the crowd to halt for a good shot. In close-up we see the intently serious face of a young girl in rimless glasses holding lights aloft.

We now cut to the interior of the house, with the party in progress. The action appears to have been shot casually, using multiple handheld cameras, but behind the apparent randomness there is a careful plan whereby figures move in and out of range at the proper dramatic moments. The scene opens with Brooks Otterlake casually waving aside a reporter with a gesture of noblesse oblige: “This is Mr. Hannaford's night,” he says. “Let's save the questions for him, okay?” As the scene develops, however, it becomes clear that Hannaford is a relative bystander, with Otterlake claiming the center of attention in the room. Thus when the young director moves out of view, one of the reporters walks into the frame and asks, “You two are very close, aren't you?” “Yes, I'd like to ask you about that,” a woman's voice says, and the camera pans to find the Susan Strasberg character seated on a desktop, brandishing a cigarette. “Come on, Otterlake,” she says, hopping off her perch and crossing the room. “Why do you think you have to be as rude as
he
is?” “As rude as
you
are,” Otterlake answers. “In print, anyway.”

The director and the critic begin circling each other like prizefighters, moving cautiously in deference to each other's power; meanwhile Hannaford stands on the sidelines with the rest of the crowd, reacting occasionally. “She wasn't that kind to me in her review,” Otterlake says, raising his voice so that he can be heard by everyone. “Not that you did me much harm.” Suddenly he breaks into a Cagney imitation to disguise a boast: “I mean, how can you do much harm to the
third biggest grosser in movie history?
” Hannaford now interrupts with mock awe: “Do you
really
make that much? How marvelous!” “Yes!” Strasberg chimes in, ostensibly speaking to Hannaford but really aiming the remark at Otterlake. “Did you know that when his own production company goes public that your friend there stands to walk away with forty million dollars?” The camera quickly pans with Otterlake as he crosses to Hannaford and attempts to soothe him with flattery. “Yes, and she's going to keep on writing that I stole everything from you, Skipper. I'm never gonna walk away from that.” Hannaford looks around in apparent innocence. “It's all right to borrow from each other,” he says. “What we must never do is borrow from ourselves.”

The first excerpt ends here, punctuated with a cynical joke in the manner of
Citizen Kane
. The second clip, even more calculatedly bewildering and technically complex than the first, takes place in a major studio screening room, where an influential young producer—modeled quite obviously on Robert Evans of Paramount—is waiting to be shown rushes from Hannaford's latest film. The action inside the room is photographed in black-and-white, with a handheld camera, but when the actors are introduced, the movie footage is intercut with still photographs taken from slightly different angles, sometimes in color. As a result, everything comes to a stop, the faces and gestures of the two players momentarily frozen on screen, each photograph accompanied by the
click-whizz
of a camera shutter. Later, as Hannaford's film is projected, we see 35mm color footage played off against a conversation between the producer and Hannaford's representative. Welles cuts directly back and forth between the film and the conversation so that Hannaford's images occupy the full screen and are never framed by the “real” studio. The episode as a whole is therefore composed of several different grades of film stock in different media, moving rapidly and without transition from a documentary look, to still photographs, to wide-screen color.

At the beginning the producer (Jeffrey Land) is shown in two stills creating a stop-motion effect. A handsome young man dressed in a stylish leather jacket and aviator glasses, he glances impatiently at his watch. Soon Hannaford's stooge arrives (played by Norman Foster, Welles's collaborator on
Journey into Fear
and
It's All True
) and nervously introduces himself as “Billy Budd.” Trying to ingratiate himself, he calls the producer “Max” and reminds him that they are both former actors; almost instantly Billy recognizes that he has made a social error, and his voice trails off lamely. Opening a bag of gumdrops, he takes a seat in the row directly behind the producer, signaling the projectionist to begin. We hear the bleep of a synchronized soundtrack, a production leader flashes past, and in big-screen color we see a woman in a lavender dress (Oja Kodar) walking across a horizon and entering a phone booth. Subsequent footage, all of it wordless and Antonioni-like, shows the woman being followed by a young man on a motorcycle. The action is drawn out and is interrupted at one point by a title reading “scene missing.” Billy explains that everything we are seeing is in rough form, with only the slates cut out. When the male lead appears in a huge, glamorous close-up, Billy remarks, “According to Jake the box likes him.” “The box?” says the producer. “Yeah, the old magic box.” The producer pauses and then asks rhetorically, “Suppose the actor doesn't like the old magic director?” As the Hannaford footage runs by, the producer begins asking questions in a flat, hostile tone. Occasionally Welles cuts to a tight close-up of him, with Billy leaning over his shoulder.

PRODUCER
: What happens here?

BILLY
: I'm not really sure, Max.

PRODUCER
(reacting to shots of Oja Kodar walking down the steps of a building with a bag slung over her shoulder)
: What's in the package?

BILLY
: You mean what's she got in her purse?

PRODUCER
: It's either a bomb or her lunch. . . . What's the bomb for?

BILLY
: I don't know, maybe he's changed his mind and there won't be any.

PRODUCER
(reacting to shots of Bob Random looking at a series of wind-up toys)
: What are the toys about? . . . When does the bomb go off?

BILLY
: Well . . . we don't actually know.

PRODUCER
(turning back over his shoulder to give Billy a hostile look)
: He's just making it up as he goes along, isn't he?

BILLY
:
(The camera zooms in for a slightly larger close-up of his strained expression. He shrugs his shoulders.)
He's done it before.

Indeed Welles
was
making it up as he went along—changing certain characters, building relationships into the story, adding sequences, just as he had before. Like Porter, Griffith, Chaplin, and most of the directors who worked prior to the studio or package-unit systems of production, he often composed
films in his head, incorporating new ideas during the shooting. And in a decade when nearly all movie directors were growing intensely self-conscious—a decade when Orson Welles became one of the cinema's central myths—he had found a nearly inexhaustible subject, capable of endless elaboration. He simply turned the cameras on the working world around him, portraying the director as part hustler, part frustrated artist, and part aging Don Juan. This man is a flawed figure, but the disparity between his legend and his actual circumstances makes him seem at once tragic and fraudulent. We must assume that Welles had an intimate understanding of such phenomena, having made himself at a very early age into a kind of show business superman, and having developed at the same time an almost morbid fascination with the dangers of fame. He knew that as much as he wanted and needed power, its effects were corrosive.

In the early 1980s
The Other Side of the Wind
had been delayed for so long by legal complications that Welles feared it would look dated. Young directors, he told Henry Jaglom, were no longer auteurists and wanted to be more like Spielberg and Lucas. He thought that if he could liberate the footage, he might be able to turn it into an essay film about the making of
The Other Side of the Wind
. “I'm just a poor slob trying to make movies,” he once complained when a critic charged him with an inability to complete his films. In fact, he had always been able to make dramatic material out of the tension between a “poor slob” and his public image. He was one of our last romantics, but his romanticism was tempered by irony and intelligent detachment, the prerequisites for turning oneself into the basis of fiction. However unfinished and unruly his last projects might have been, whatever doubts may continue to be expressed about his “genius,” he was one of the few American filmmakers whose work will remain both eccentric and artistically significant.

How can we define a work amid the thousands of traces left by a man after his death?

—Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

Foucault's rhetorical question seems especially relevant to Welles, who left a collection of “traces” comparable to the vast inventory of Xanadu. Consider the holdings in the Welles archive at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. At the center of the archive are the files of the Mercury Theatre, purchased from Welles and Richard Wilson in 1978, documenting Welles's career during the thirties and forties. To these have been added materials from people who worked with Welles, among them photographer George Fanto and director Peter Bogdanovich. There are 19,875 items in the Mercury files alone, ranging from personal correspondence, publicity clippings, and family photographs, to the scripts and working records of some of America's most celebrated movies, plays, and radio programs. At one extreme the collection includes such fascinating trivia as Rita Hayworth's application for a driver's license and Eleanor Roosevelt's autograph; at another it is a mine of information about US foreign policy, the nations and culture of Latin America, and a variety of social issues with which Welles was concerned. Among the manuscripts are several unproduced items by writers other than Welles—for example, a play titled
Emily Brady
by Donald Ogden Stewart, and
Snowball
, a radio drama of 1943 by Howard Koch. (Koch's script—a story about lynch mobs—is accompanied by a letter from CBS executive Lyman Bryson informing Welles that “the present attitudes of stations in very large sections of the country” were such that they would not carry the program. “They would accuse us,” Bryson writes, “of insisting on the importance of
the race question with disproportionate emphasis.”) A preponderance of the material, however, consists of things signed by Welles himself, often containing holograph revisions and production sketches, such as
Marching Song
, the unproduced play he coauthored with Roger Hill during the early thirties. In this category alone there are over a dozen film scenarios, scores of essays, some charcoal drawings and set designs, and a smattering of unremarkable poetry—even a set of “classroom notes” for teaching
The Merchant of Venice
, together with a fascinating series of study questions and a lengthy fill-in-the-blanks examination.