Orson Welles

12 Responses to Orson Welles

1. steve on the mountain says:

   March 31, 2007 at 11:03 am

   I’m grateful that you couldn’t resist. Let’s see … what was I doing in my early twenties? Hmmm … oh yeah … well … fuggedaboutit.
2. red says:

   March 31, 2007 at 11:08 am

   hahahaha I know!!
3. Girl Detective says:

   March 31, 2007 at 12:10 pm

   You know, I am far too busy to be able to re-watch CK, The Third Man (could it be my favorite movie? Is there such a thing? your photo gallery made me wonder) and look into whether Heavenly Creatures is worth renting. Yeour gallery sparkled off all these in my brain. Drat you!
4. red says:

   March 31, 2007 at 12:25 pm

   The Third Man is so amazing, isn’t it? His entrance!!!
5. JFH says:

   March 31, 2007 at 1:39 pm

   Which came first Orson Wells the “radio voice” or Orson Wells the director/writer… I mean he had such a great voice, I wonder if he was discovered for his voice or his other talents?
6. red says:

   March 31, 2007 at 1:48 pm

   It all happened at the same time for him. He arrived in NYC at the age of 20 – at the age of 13 he had already edited an edition of Shakespeare. He was a true phenom. He had conned his way into a stage debut at age 16 at the Abbey in Dublin. He was a child prodigy. He came to NYC and got a job thru the Federal Theatre works project – and immediately became controversial. (He also immediately began to work in radio. He was the voice of The Shadow, among other things). He decided to put on a production of Macbeth in Harlem – and he would set it in Haiti. It became known as “voodoo Macbeth”. He cast all black actors – many of whom had never acted before – and he was the director – 20 years old. There is footage of the Voodoo Macbeth and it is truly phenomenal – It was a massive success – there were times when the ovations went on at the end for 20 minutes and they finally would just keep the curtain up so the audience could swarm up onto the stage. Orson Welles took over the town – he worked with the WPA in their theatre projects – and he also partnered up with John Houseman (later a major bigwig at Juilliard) and they created the Mercury Theatre. Orson’s goal was to create theatre for the masses – but only to do classics. Hence – the Julius Caesar I referenced below. At the same time, he and all his Mercury buddies were creating radio shows – all of these people would end up coming to Hollywood with him to be in Citizen Kane. Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead … so Orson was often doing double duty. He’d finish Julius Caesar and then race to the CBS radio studios – and then race to some late-night venue where he’d do magic tricks (he was very into magic). So there really wasn’t a question of Orson being “discovered”. It was more like he demanded success. He took over. He got a production contravt with RKO (after the war of the worlds panic made him national news) – where he could take his Mercury Theatre out to Hollywood and create a film – he had complete creative control (this was unheard of). Many of the people in Citizen Kane had never done a film before. This was his whole point. He was the quintessential outsider. Citizne Kane was never seen in any wide way until the 60s when the Europeans re-discovered it and it started showing up at film festivals, etc.
7. red says:

   March 31, 2007 at 1:57 pm

   Funny – I saw an interview with Welles much later in his life and he was talking about war of the worlds and the widespread panic that his fake broadcast had created. It was so big that he had to give a press conference the following day, apologizing and saying he had never meant to make people so scared. (which, of course, was a lie. The war of the worlds was a huge success BECAUSE he had set out to scare the amercian public out of their minds!!)

   Anyway, he was laughing a bit and he said, “Now, of course they’ve passed laws and everything saying that you can’t do that – you can’t pretend to be a news show without letting people know that it’s fake – People in other countries who tried to do what I did with War of the Worlds were put in jail. But I was offered a movie contract.” Big huge booming laugh.
8. red says:

   March 31, 2007 at 1:59 pm

   For anyone who’s interested – here’s a whole Library of Congress page dedicated to the Voodoo Macbeth.
9. red says:

   March 31, 2007 at 2:01 pm

   (That page, incidentally, is written by Wendy Smith – the premiere historian of the 1930s theatre scene.)
10. JFH says:

    March 31, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    That description always makes me wish for a time machine… just to catch that opening night…
11. steve on the mountain says:

    March 31, 2007 at 6:29 pm

    The time machine thing keeps coming up, doesn’t it? Okay, your time machine can make 5 stops. What would they be?
    Me?
    1.Opening night of a Fred and Adele Astaire Broadway show in the Roaring Twenties.
    2.Yeah, let me at that Laurette Taylor ‘Menagerie’.
    3.Let me avoid being purged and give me a day on the set with Eisenstein as he makes ‘Ivan the Terrible Part Two’
    4.Let me see Mozart conducting opening night of ‘The Magic Flute’.
    5.Give me a seat at Callas singing ‘Tosca’ in the early 1950s (Yeah, I’m an opera guy.)
12. red says:

    March 31, 2007 at 10:29 pm

    steve – awesome choices! Here are mine. I’ll meet you at Glass Menagerie in 1945!

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