Orson Welles: Hello Americans (14 page)

It carried on like this for two more days. On the fourth and last day, the crew moved to the Republic Theatre, again struggling to convey tons of equipment across the heaving city, the downtown streets jammed with decorated cars, ‘many of them convertibles
of ancient vintage … filled with ten to twelve costumed boys and girls, and how they held together is a mystery … Welles’s boys have their cameras pointed at the children whenever it was possible.’ Everywhere people were wearing papier mâché masks, no mere item of fancy dress but serious disguise, liberating the wearer into behaviour that would be inconceivable at any other time of the year: to lift
a mask or false face from the person wearing it was Pettey reports, a statutory crime. At midnight, the cameras moved to Avenue Republic where they found the wildest of all the Carnival dancers. ‘Here the fun was unrestrained, the only regulation being that women seated at boxes must remove their hats. No one seemed to care whether they removed anything else or not.’ Bonhomie was all-pervading.
‘Every single one of the million or more revellers tried to be as helpful as possible, even,’ he drily notes, ‘when their help served only to make things more difficult.’

On this final night, Welles ‘suddenly became enthusiastic, grabbed a 16mm camera and moved onto the dance floor at the Republic Theatre. Surrounded by the dancers who were at the height of their revelry, Orson joined in photographing
close-ups of the milling mob. When he returned to the camera platform, he was as wet as if he had just emerged from the sea.’ To say that Welles was entering into the spirit of things is to understate. ‘Perfume battles, exhausting innumerable atomisers, have been daily occurrences around the Copacabana Hotel between Orson Welles and Phil Reismann. They have chased one another around the
swimming pool, into the lobby, behind posts, and through the salon. At the present time it is a draw, but Welles expects to win eventually as he apparently has the largest supply of atomisers.’ He and his aides made their way across Rio in an old seven-passenger convertible with two motorcycle escorts, their sirens screaming.
‘Whenever
the sound of a siren is heard they scream “Orson is coming!
Orson is coming!’” Finally, the crew shot King Momo’s retirement ceremony, the official end of Carnival, and then – and only then – the rain, which had threatened when Momo entered the Carnival four days earlier, fell, as if to wash clean the licentiousness excess in preparation for Ash Wednesday. Pettey was not the only journalist covering the shoot:
Life
magazine had chosen it as the subject
of its regular ‘
Life
Goes to a Party’ feature. The photo-essay – like Welles’s film, in both colour and black and white – gives a vivid impression of the different strands of the Carnival, focusing on the samba schools, bluntly delineating the upper class, the low class and the poor white and black sections, noting the themes (Swiss mountaineering, Egyptian, Hawaiian), not batting an eyelid at
the transvestism and the near-nakedness. Here are the giant backdrop at the Praça Paris – ‘a combination of crinolines and samba under a big guitar’ – and the jam-packed crowds at the ball at the Teatro Municipal.
¹⁷
And here is Welles, ‘calling everything
empolgante
(terrific),
assombrosa
(stunning) or
encantadora
(adorable)’. He is photographed ‘sweating like all Cariocas’, pointing his 16mm
camera at the revellers, roaring with laughter, ‘feeling good’ in the midst of ‘one of the low-class “people’s dances’”, trying to organise poor whites and blacks who are ‘too dazed to respond to Welles’s direction’.

Life
catches him in the act of squirting ethyl chloride over another guest with Phil Reismann at the Copacabana Hotel. The accompanying photographs reveal a striking aspect of the
phenomenon of Orson Welles, his extraordinary mutability. In one picture, he is a handsome, dashing, raffish young man; in another, he looks like a fat, mischievous, rather ugly youth; in yet another, the concentrated artist, willing his listeners to do his bidding. Perhaps it was his desire to control his image that led to the falling out with
Life
’s representatives, which Tom Pettey relayed
to Herb Drake. Pettey was desperately trying to get the local press not to focus entirely on shots of Welles in nightclubs. There was a near-miss when he had arranged a press conference at which Welles had failed to make an appearance; eventually, though, he arrived and ‘came through nobly’.

Yet another, particularly beady, pair of eyes was trained on Welles as he improvised his way through the
Carnival shoot: those of Lynn Shores, the RKO production manager. He offers a view untouched by the euphoria of the journalists. ‘I am enclosing a sort of day-to-day report on this junket to date,’ he writes to his masters.
¹⁸
‘We
have
been shooting a certain amount of film during carnival, but I am afraid the results on the screen are not going to be terribly impressive from what I have seen so
far.’ Here is one man, at any rate, who is in no danger of going native. ‘What with the heat, the strange food, our inability to get anything moving in the speedy American way, and’ – the nub – ‘the fast shuffles that Welles cooks up, everyone is pretty much at each other’s throats in our organisation down here. However, he can’t complain as we have given him everything we have.’ The problem, and
it was an all-pervading one, was that in the aftermath of Carnival no one knew exactly what they were shooting. ‘As to the plans of this set-up, I am entirely in the dark. Harry Wild is also trying to get something out of Mr Welles. Each time Orson just shows him the cuff of his shirt.’ Clearly the team was not a team at all. A division was already evident. Dick Wilson, Shores complains, ‘sticks
so close to Welles over at the beach that we are entirely without any information here at any time’. Welles’s natural resistance to any form of corporate control was only enhanced by his physical distance from the studio, and he now began an elaborate game of cat and mouse, which would last for the length of the shoot. ‘I get along swell with Orson and Reismann,’ Shores reports, ‘and in their saner
moments we sometimes have a business-like conversation lasting at least a minute or so.’ Signing off, he drily notes, in a sardonic reference to the pious Catholic Joe Breen, RKO’s head of productions, that ‘conduct throughout has been up to the high standard Mr Breen hoped for’.

Welles was now able to stand back a little after the whirlwind of Carnival and take stock of the film he was making
or, more precisely, the film that was being made. ‘The problem of shooting carnival may be compared to the problem of shooting a storm,’ he wrote in his memorandum to RKO.
¹⁹
‘We shot without a script. We were forced to. A script was impossible. Even in those sequences in which it was possible to exercise directorial control,
I as a director was always the one to be informed rather than the people
working under me
. In other words, I couldn’t tell them what to do. They had to tell me.’ This was an alarming experience for a man accustomed to being obeyed. He had as little idea as anyone else of the value or quality of what he had just shot, working as they all were ‘without the critical advantage of nightly sessions in projection and cutting rooms’. He defends the large quantity of footage
shot. ‘Put it this way: we’ve had to take out all the paying dirt and ship it halfway round the
world
from the place where it was mined. We won’t get the gold till we go back to where operations are possible.’ This was his brief, he says (his italics): ‘
It was understood by all concerned before I left that carnival would be shot on the cuff
,’ but ‘none of us knew anything about it before we came
here, nor were there any sources of information available’. Because, he says, the film he had been despatched to Brazil to make was to be ‘unrelieved by story (or what is generally considered story)’, their treatment of the Carnival subject of Brazilian music had to be ‘definitive, and beyond reproach. Above all, it had to be entertainment.’ Accordingly, in the midst of filming the pick-up shots
from Carnival – and still with little more than a vague intuition about a unifying narrative – he set about investigating an entire culture. Thinking big was the only kind of thinking Welles knew. Largely at his own expense, under the direction of his friend the radical writer Robert Meltzer (a member of the Communist Party, and formerly Chaplin’s assistant on
The Great Dictator
), with input from
his other Mercury colleagues, he assembled a remarkable team, including two of Brazil’s best newspapermen, Rio’s leading historian, and one of Brazil’s leading playwrights. Their task was to provide both an overview of Brazilian culture and a detailed analysis of its individual manifestations, especially in so far as they related to Carnival.

Welles wrote Meltzer a memorandum that suggests the
scope of his intellectual curiosity, but also the charismatic authority that he exercised over his colleagues, many of whom were older and rather better educated than he was. The memo is a rare example of Welles’s approach to film-making in action. He manifests a surprisingly detailed and almost academic interest in the origins of the different forms of samba –
bateria, cuica, ganza, surdu, tamborim,
pandeiro
– issuing bossy demands for more and more information about origin, meaning and the future of Carnival:

What made carnival what it was? Is it what it was? Make a full report of the element of competition in carnival … Brazil is a country of clubs.
²⁰
Samba is a manifestation of this national tendency. What are the social, economic and moral motives behind all this organisation? Does the
old potency of Masonry relate to this? … all this requires absolute reams of written material to be composed by yourself
now
. Generalise, please, as little as you can. Particularise and specify as much as may be in this land of
mas
or
menos
. Above all, I beg of you don’t try to write well. Just notes.

Welles’s instinctive prelapsarianism rightly suggests to him that ‘carnival began raucous …
now it’s going commercial … if they don’t stop they’re going to turn it into Mardi Gras and the floats are going to end up as commercials’. Perhaps, he muses, the dilution of Carnival commenced with the emergence in Rio of a middle class, the
granfinos
. ‘Carnival,’ he says, ‘is a creation by somebodies and less than nobodies.’ His instincts as story-teller overcoming his socio-economic analyses
lead him to urge Meltzer to make ‘Mr and Mrs Granfino and Mr and Mrs Malandro’ real as characters: ‘Surround them with their worlds – their entire worlds complete with props – sights and smells and sounds, and even a couple of ideas. Do this thoroughly as though you were writing a good novel, and carnival will be better defined than it has been.’ Unrelentingly, he demands engravings, lithographs,
photographs and designs, which, like Napoleon returning from Egypt, he plans to take back to Hollywood with him. Once past the immediate intoxication of shooting the Carnival itself, he is beginning to edge towards a new sort of film: an anthropological, cultural, historical, musical, comical survey of a whole country. ‘The picture progresses,’ he ends. ‘Everything is just as it ought to be and
our subject is more perfect than I hoped. You are all I need – you and a woman – I need you both.’

Who would not follow such a man to the ends of the earth? This letter reveals the full force of Welles’s exploding mind and the overpowering immediacy of his personal engagement with individuals. As Geraldine Fitzgerald said of him, ‘he was like a lighthouse. When you were caught in the beam it
was utterly dazzling. When the beam moved on, you were plunged into darkness.’
²¹
Driven on by the need to articulate the substance of the film they wanted to make, Meltzer’s little unit produced a plethora of learned, colourful and often witty papers on, among many themes, Brazilian legends and folklore, ‘how different races and peoples contributed to carnival’ and ‘the whys of Rio’s carnival’.
It is worth quoting some of the contributions, offering as they do a strong indication of what Welles’s film might have dealt with. ‘The humiliated, the timid, the unsatisfied constitute the majority of this crowd of badly-mixed races that dances, sings, yells and drinks and shows costumes of violent colours, in a mad search for dizziness and vertigo,’ writes Rui Costa in his exuberant essay about
Carnival.
²²
‘It’s the Negro that can’t be a white man, the woman still waiting for her great love affair, the poor that can’t be a maharajah – and he brings on his head a cheap imitation of a turban.’

Professor Ghiaroni, in a paper entitled ‘Carnival and Respectable Gentlemen’, describes the
Gafieira
(‘the cheap public ballroom where people with little means and great desire for fun find all
the consolation they need for their hard work’), underlining its socially levelling aspect: ‘In Rio the customers are a mixed-up throng of white, blacks and half-breeds. But there is always a predominance of the latter, so that white men, even those on the same economic and social level, are looked upon with little sympathy. At the carnival, all these psychological boundaries fall and everybody puts
hands on the shoulders of everybody else, thanks to carnival’s roaring enlargement of the freedom idea, rather unsure during the rest of the year.’ Someone else anatomises the
chôro
, the classic Brazilian instrumental form; others, in great detail, analyse the samba. Meltzer himself writes a piece for this running symposium that he drolly calls ‘The Genealogy of Samba and Other Aspects of an Unquiet
Life’; it is entirely characteristic of the Mercurians’ jokey manner with each other: ‘Since it’s very probably true that nothing comes from nothing, you can say right to begin with that Samba must have had specific origins in time and space … it has a pedigree, ancestry, roots. The problem is to find out what the hell they are, exactly. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any single authority
competent to give this information in one-two-three form.’ His method, for all its playfulness, is essentially dialectical; he was, after all, a well-trained Marxist: