Orson Welles: Hello Americans (12 page)

The committee next considers the technical complications of an almost unprecedented operation, far from home – ‘It’s easier,’ says
Welles,
‘to get to the Far East or London’ – and the problem of the amount of stock needed; film in South
America is not up to Hollywood standards, so they have to bring it with them. Welles returns to the question of personnel: he will not, he insists, put up with organisation men. The one thing not discussed, inevitably, is the film itself. The meeting is adjourned with several major questions unanswered: the matter of the Technicolor technicians, the amount of stock needed, and finally, crucially,
the nature of the film they are about to make. Harry Hopkins suggests that they should make an interesting, instructive, visually exciting travelogue, called
Orson Welles Sees South America
. No comment is recorded. Hopkins obviously hadn’t got the measure of Welles at all. That the Office of Inter-American Affairs, if not the government, wanted something more than a travelogue is indicated in
a memo written to Jock Whitney by the Brazilian division a mere day after Welles had agreed to direct the film. Reporting the great excitement in Brazil at the idea of Welles coming to Rio, the writer suggests as a possible subject the heroic journey recently made by some fishermen (
jangadeiros
) from Fortaleza, in the far north of the country. They had travelled an astonishing 3,000 miles of rough
coastal seas on a raft to deliver a petition to the President, Getúlio Vargas, in Rio de Janeiro, demanding the right to form unions and receive pensions. ‘These
jangadeiros
are almost legendary figures in Brazil … and a well-executed short subject of the type suggested should have an enthusiastic following both in Brazil and in the United States.’
¹⁸
How this could fit into the Carnival sequence
was unclear, but the idea no doubt sowed a seed in Welles’s mind.

In the weeks before his departure, Welles continued to shoot pick-ups on
The Magnificent Ambersons
and to act in and advise on
Journey into Fear
, while still producing and fronting
The Lady Esther Show
. One of these broadcasts featured an adaptation of a Carl Ewald story,
My Little Boy
, which had been one of the Mercury Theatre
on the Air’s greatest triumphs. By some curious synchronicity, two days later Welles was reported in the
Los Angeles Times
as having adopted a seven-year-old Czech boy, Peter Neuschul. His paintings had been shown in Prague and London; both his parents were painters. Of this child, little more is ever heard; perhaps the adoption was a mere formality, involving a payment for subsistence (though
Welles was notoriously dilatory in paying the legally binding sums prescribed by the divorce courts for the maintenance of his own daughter Christopher), Young Neuschul wrote to him on a regular basis for a year or so, then
there
was silence. Welles was an intermittent correspondent at best, but loving messages flooded in to him during this time in an unbroken stream – from Thornton Wilder, Alexander
Woollcott, the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. To reverse Oscar Wilde’s comment on Shaw, Orson Welles had many enemies, but his friends most certainly loved him.

Before flying to Brazil via Washington, he arranged to meet Robert Wise in Miami with the footage of
The Magnificent Ambersons
. He stayed up all night to record the narration for the film and to shoot the penultimate scene of
Journey
into Fear
, and on the following evening, 1 February, he introduced the final
Lady Esther Show
of the season,
Between Americans
. It ended with a rather solemn farewell speech: ‘Tomorrow night the Mercury Theatre starts for South America.’ He reports that he’s been asked to do a motion picture ‘especially for Americans in all the Americas, a movie which in its particular way might strengthen the
good relations now binding the continents of the Western Hemisphere’. Increasingly preoccupied with the question of what it was to be an American, he was moving towards a more inclusive notion, which would dominate much of his thinking over the next few years. The people of these ‘United Nations of America’, he says in this farewell broadcast, now stand together. ‘We’re going to have to know each
other better than we do. My job – the Mercury’s – job is to help with the introductions … and now it’s time for goodbyes. As always, we remain
obediently
yours.’ The plan was to release
The Magnificent Ambersons
in time for Easter, which in 1942 was at the beginning of April, in eight weeks’ time; there was no possibility of the filming on
It’s All True
taking less than that, and thus no possibility
of Welles being involved in detailed post-production.

In effect, Welles was handing the film over to his associates at the most delicate stage in its life. A rough-cut is like a suit at a final fitting: the raw materials are in place, the shape is essentially there, but all kinds of vital alterations can still be made, while perhaps the most striking aspect of the garment – its finish – is, as
the word implies, the very last stage of the process. Nearly 30 per cent of
Citizen Kane
was made after the end of principal photography; many of the most famous sequences in that film were achieved by the use of special effects, all contrived in post-production. During that period of the process, Welles had made radical use in particular of sound (including music); his minutely detailed work
with Bernard Herrmann was one of the most striking elements in the film, but much of this work – and the work with special
effects
– had been done, slowly and painstakingly, after the end of shooting.

In leaving the country (no matter how complex and specific the instructions he left behind), Welles was forgoing these possibilities. Only by watching the film take shape at the Movieola could Welles
discover what he needed, and make arrangements for its urgent implementation. Vern Walker, who had created so many of the effects in
Citizen Kane
, prepared a final list of outstanding trick and matte shots for
The Magnificent Ambersons
on 4 February – two days after Welles had left Hollywood for Brazil. Most unusually, the bulk of Herrmann’s musical score had been recorded by the end of principal
photography, but Welles now had no opportunity to work on the critical process of mixing the music and sound. Herrmann had written an immensely sophisticated score, mirroring and counter-pointing the grand themes of the film, the courtly elegance of the world of the Ambersons versus the growing power of the machine, the whole made organic by its use throughout (as in the radio broadcast) of a
motif from the Waldteufel waltz
Toujours ou jamais
– initially gracious, later boisterous, until it finally disintegrates altogether. As he had shown both in his radio work and in
Citizen Kane
, Herrmann conceived of music not as a duplication or an underlining of the mood of the images and the text, but as an additional element, making its own comment, creating space by its absence as much as
by its presence. Every bar, every orchestral colour, every rhythmic transformation was closely linked to the frame for which it was composed. This being the case, the closest collaboration between director and composer was indispensable. But Welles would be thousands of miles away, with all the complications of wartime communication. So what? He had already directed
Bonito
at long distance; why
not post-produce
The Magnificent Ambersons
by telegram and telephone? The answer to that question would soon be given, and in no uncertain terms.

IT’S ALL TRUE
, Welles’s great new venture, was informed by a characteristic mixture of political idealism, artistic excitement and calculating self-promotion. Alongside his loftier ambitions, Welles never lost sight of his public profile. Shortly after his departure, Herb Drake wrote to his associate Tom Pettey, who was already in Brazil as part of the advance guard, to tell
him that Welles had called him from Pittsburgh en route to Washington. ‘He has left the country furious with yours truly because he has exaggerated expectation of newspaper response.’
¹
The Brazil story had made little impact on columnists and trade papers; Welles had been over-sold. ‘Newspapers are a little tired of Welles activity, we need a lull.’ Another problem was that Drake knew next to
nothing about the venture. ‘He left me with only limited notion of what he is doing. Please get from him as much theory as possible. He tells me he wants to plug the expedition rather than the picture.’ Drake was a particularly shrewd observer of his volatile boss, and in their exchanges over the Brazilian episode he and Pettey offer sharp, sometimes acid analyses of his behaviour. ‘OW has certain
unpleasant habits such as reading your mail so be circumspect,’ advises Drake. ‘Don’t mind him any if he is rude, he regards this as a time-saving expedient. You will find it difficult getting a logical answer from him about what he is going to do. He trusts always his genius or his charm to get him out of any situation. Sometimes irresistible force meets the immovable object. At such times, go into
bomb shelter.’ How to handle Orson is their daily study. Clearly the whole organisation is similarly preoccupied: Drake recommends that Pettey should show Dick Wilson ‘this letter and all others I send you’.

The advance guard of which Pettey was part had left for Brazil in high spirits, ten days before Welles. In his first letter back to Drake, Pettey describes the perils of travelling during
war without papers and with the bare minimum of comforts: in the plane, on the way to Puerto Rico, it is, he says, ‘colder than a producer’s
heart
’.
²
Their arrival in Rio was timed to enable Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who had been negotiating with the Brazilian government, to return to Washington on one of their two planes, a Clipper, which had carried the crew and the bulk of the
equipment – eighty-six cases and 4,500 pounds of Technicolor equipment, including two cameras and 50,000 feet of film. Later equipment went by army bomber, with the passengers sitting on the floor and hanging on through the curves. The rest went by freighter: a boom, a dolly, black-and-white cameras, two portable generators mounted on truck-trailers and arc lamps. They were in effect moving a small
studio to Brazil.

But if travelling was strange, arriving was even stranger. Nothing in the past experience of any of the team prepared them for the startling novelty of life in Rio de Janeiro. ‘The first thing on arrival everyone went out and bought white linen suits and we all look like a bunch of broken-down Ambassadors,’ wrote Lynn Shores, the hard-bitten RKO production manager, who filed
regular reports to his bosses at the studio.
³
‘It is practically impossible to get tight here as it comes out under your arms as fast as you pour it in,’ adding a comment that set the tone for his subsequent dealings with the local population: ‘We can expect nothing from down here as the countries are virtually as far apart in relations as can be.’ The team had nearly two weeks to fill before
Welles’s arrival. During that time they had a sort of crash course in Brazilian life, under the guidance of Raymundo Magalhaes, a local newspaper magnate: they were shown motion pictures of the previous year’s Carnival, of life in the interior, and of the customs and lives of the
jangadeiros
. The government, Pettey’s first press release concluded, ‘would like for Orson Welles to film some of the
daring exploits of these hardy fisherfolks’.
⁴
It’s All True
was already beginning to look rather more complex than anything Harry Hopkins or RKO had in mind.

Meanwhile the various departments of this somewhat uneasily mixed group – the Mercurians, the Technicolor cameramen, the regular camera crew and sound people, and the RKO production functionaries – staked out their own territories as they
waited for Welles to arrive. No one had any experience of making documentaries, which is a vastly different undertaking from making a film in a studio, with its controlled environment, its pre-existent screenplay and its trained actors; no one knew much about Brazil, or even Rio; few of them really understood why they were there; and there was no clear chain of command. ‘We already have 22 generals
here now,’ wrote Lynn Shores to William Daniels of the
RKO
front office. Shores was a cynical old pro with no illusions about art, endowed with the full complement of prejudices – racial, sexual and political – of his breed. He just wanted to be able to get on with the job and get the hell out of there, and was already restless, as was Ned Scott, the stills photographer. ‘I’ll go nuts with another
inactive week ahead of me,’ he wrote.
⁵
But the temporary lull was congenial enough to some members of the crew, who were charmed by the country and its people and delighted to be away from the conventions of North American life. Some of the crew started shooting at random: ‘We were on our own,’ recalled the second cameraman, Joe Biroc.
⁶
‘We photographed what we wanted, where we wanted. Worked
24 hours for 4 days – then took a week off. One crew member shacked up with a red-headed girl. At the end of the shoot he went back to his wife, but he couldn’t stay away. He left the wife, and came back to Brazil.’

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