Orson Welles: Hello Americans (16 page)

We’re working too hard down here for good letter writing, or even one good long letter.
²⁵
Since you are my most understanding friend, I won’t even attempt to explain my silence or alibi the brevity of this. I have great hopes for the film itself. Quite apart from its importance as a documentary, its entertainment value promises to be great. The carnival
sequence alone … is going to mark a totally new departure in musicals. Indeed every aspect of this picture is as fresh as even you could ask for. – This is a big job and a tough one, and I am truly and deeply grateful for the opportunity. I do think our rewards will be great. This is real pioneering and – after all – [he added in the special tone he reserved for Schaefer] pioneering is what we like
best. Fondest regards.

In stark contrast to the evidence of the production reports or the admittedly biased letters of Lynn Shores, Welles wrote to Jock Whitney that they were definitely on schedule and – if anything – doing a little better than might have been expected. A certain amount of string-pulling had been deployed. ‘You may have heard that the city of Rio – and, for all I know, the United
States of Brazil – was without anti-aircraft searchlights for more than a week.
²⁶
How we got them is a matter between Dr Assis Figuerido and his God. How they were transformed into plausible Technicolor units is a wonder of absolutely Old Testament proportions.’ He praises the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the team – ‘reflectors gleam and everywhere things buzz and hum and click’ – but they
are still in desperate need of the promised supplies; ‘that boat’s got to come or we’ll all run screaming into the jungle’. Phil Reismann wrote to Whitney that Welles’s good humour was ‘positively Brazilian; his enthusiasm always informed; his tact is limitless. Besides which,’
he
added, ‘he’s rare good company’, something no one had ever disputed about Orson Welles.
²⁷

George Schaefer, meanwhile,
quietly reminded Welles on 27 February that
The Magnificent Ambersons
– from which this Brazilian venture was, in RKO’s eyes, a mere (if worthy) diversion – was due for an Easter release. Easter Sunday that year fell on 3 April: a print would be with him for his approval by 15 March and must be immediately returned.
PLEASE ORSON
, Schaefer begged Welles, in the slightly pleading tone he so often
adopted in their exchanges,
DO EVERYTHING MAKE THIS POSSIBLE
; and he added:
HAVE HEARD OF EXCELLENT PROGRESS VERY HAPPY EVERYTHING WORKING OUT SO WELL. KIND PERSONAL REGARDS
.
²⁸
Schaefer, with exceptional restraint, made no attempt to convey the precariousness of his situation. The studio was haemorrhaging money, by no means exclusively on the independent units such as the Mercury. Its star-packed
Sing Your Worries Away
lost $225,000;
Valley of the Sun
, a Western, lost $185,000. The board had been reluctant to renew George Schaefer’s contract: a new board was about to take over, and the old board was eager not to tie its hands. Schaefer had been allowed to continue as head of studio on an informal basis, but there had been ominous visits from New York, culminating in the sacking of two
of Schaefer’s lieutenants, McDonough and Lesser. Joe Breen was on vacation, and Charles Koerner, also from head office, a famously tough cookie, stepped in for him; he never stepped out. The tumbrils were rolling; the days of Schaefer’s
ancien regime
were numbered.

Far removed from all this, at the beginning of March, Orson Welles wrote, in his unmistakably open hand, a curious kind of a haiku,
half reminder, half reassurance, placed firmly in the centre of a blank foolscap sheet of paper: somewhere, deeply buried beneath all that talent, arrogance and charisma, there was in Welles an unexpected vein of deep humility.

Nothing has ever been too good for the public.

Nothing has ever been good enough for the public.

WELLES’S RESPONSE TO
Schaefer’s telegram of 27 February was to put everyone working on
The Magnificent Ambersons
at RKO on triple shifts. He had wired Robert Wise to make as many alternate cuts of dissolves, sound and music as possible, and now asked Jack Moss, in charge of the Mercury office in Hollywood, to start running the film nightly, and to take active command
of the production.
GET IN NORMAN JO DOLORES FOR JURY AS MANY TIMES AS POSSIBLE EVERY OPINION MUST BE COVERED BY AN ALTERNATE,
he told Moss.
¹
This was, in the most literal sense, editing by committee, Moss being the chairman.
YOU HAVE BEEN AWAY FROM AMBERSONS LONG ENOUGH TO BE FRESH AND YOU KNOW I TRUST YOU COMPLETELY
– an extraordinary act of faith in a man who, until two years before, had been
an obscure vaudevillian, one who, moreover, had never written, directed or produced a film in his life, and whose only appearance in one had been mute. The note of panic in Welles’s communication and in the many that followed is unmistakable. He telegrammed Schaefer to reassure him that he was in almost daily contact with the office, and that the studio was working on the film ‘at breakneck speed’.
He had, he said, conceived an idea that the world premiere should be in Buenos Aires, the day before the Hollywood premiere; he wanted to do the narration himself in Spanish and Portuguese.
RESULTANT INTERNATIONAL PUBLICITY WILL BE ENORMOUS SHOWMANSHIP TERRIFIC,
he insisted, continuing with a touch of deluded grandeur,
MAGNIFICENT PAN-AMERICAN GESTURE BESIDES KEEPING ARGENTINE FROM FEELING LEFT
OUT OF OUR S AMERICAN PICTURE
.
²

Schaefer replied with understandable exasperation that he had no objection to a Rio world premiere of
The Magnificent Ambersons
(he wired Phil Reismann to the effect that a Buenos Aires opening was out of the question), but he was absolutely desperate to get on with the American one since the picture had already cost more than $1m – $150,000 more than the strict
limit he and Welles had agreed. His own position at RKO was now vulnerable in the
extreme
. The ruthless Charles Koerner was daily strengthening his position there, laying plans for the studio’s return to financial health. His first target was the Mercury. ‘With respect to Orson Welles or Mercury Productions in which we are interested,’ he stated in a crisp memorandum, ‘please make sure that no
commitments of any nature whatsoever are entered into without first checking with the writer.’
³
In so far as the erratic communications system, now rendered even more unreliable by wartime restrictions, would allow, Welles was in constant contact with the Mercury office, not only about
The Magnificent Ambersons
, but also about
Journey into Fear
. In the light of the current international situation,
he now felt that the latter film required some reshooting; to this end he proposed to shoot cutaways of himself in Rio, for which he would need the full Colonel Haki wardrobe and, most importantly, his false nose. In the meantime, he hastened to assure Schaefer:
EVERYTHING HERE PROCEEDING BEAUTIFULLY IN SPITE OF NON ARRIVAL OF BOAT STOP CANNOT OVERSTATE OUR ENTHUSIASM CONFIDENCE EFFECTIVENESS
BEAUTY SOLID ENTERTAINMENT VALUE SHOWMANSHIP THIS PICTURE.
⁴

He was the only person who thought so. In the absence of the boat bearing the additional equipment required, the team’s activities were at best desultory, at worst non-existent. The weather, which had broken at the end of Carnival, had never recovered and continued to be appalling, bitterly cold with rain and thunderstorms. They shot
the samba clubs in Technicolor in the afternoons and at night; Welles was not present for this work, which would have been second-unit material, if they had had a second unit, and was generally supervised by the grossly disaffected Lynn Shores. Despite the fact that Welles had arranged a rise in salary for him –
AS FAVOR TO ME,
he had wired the front office – Shores’s festering resentment continued
to inform his reports back to RKO’s Walter Daniels.
⁵
‘I have a lot of things in my mind which may explode before you receive this letter,’ he wrote to his master.
⁶
‘We have not made a shot worth while this week, and if we had been shooting continually all week, the shot would still not have been worth while. I do not like to be pessimistic on this trip but the longer we are here the more involved
we get and seem to be working toward no end … Welles is definitely throwing the shooting of this picture onto my lap. Confidentially I believe there is nothing promising here. The shooting of the carnival was a big disappointment to all of us, and I know to him personally.’ The crew was unhappy. ‘I am working under continuous pressure from both ends. Welles wants me all night for meaningless conferences,
and the boys
want
me all day for shooting and general lending ear to their beefs. Whatever they feel about Welles they are taking out on me.’ He hoped that on arrival at the studio ‘the lights and equipment will keep the boys occupied to the extent of keeping them out of too much unoccupied mischief … I am doing everything humanly possible to preserve law, order, morale and progress.’ Almost any
human group has its Lynn Shores, grimly rejoicing in the prospect of disaster; here he had material in abundance to feed his
schadenfreude
. ‘I hate to continually bombard you with pessimistic letters,’ he avers. ‘Someone has got to be a little truthful about this jaunt … the details of the daily manoeuvre down here would fill a book and be most amusing. Someday I may write that book.’ Tom Pettey
was writing to Herb Drake to much the same effect. The crew was deeply unhappy, not only about the work or lack of it in Rio, but about the low profile of the venture: ‘everyone in Hollywood will forget about us and we will become forgotten men’.
⁷

Partly to counteract this, early in March, Pettey concocted one of his striking press releases, which does not entirely dispel the impression that
no one really knows what he’s doing, least of all Welles: ‘The glimpse into the future that follows may go through as outlined, may be changed, may be done altogether or in part. No one can tell as no one knows what difficulties may be encountered in a war-ridden world. Anyhow, here’s the story as it stands today. A big smiling man in a plum-coloured suit – easily the most stared-at man in the salon
of the Copacabana Hotel in Rio de Janeiro – leaned across the coffee table and began talking with a couple of newsmen …’
⁸
The picture, the much-stared-at Welles tells them, will be a long one. ‘We don’t know how much it will cost because we don’t know what difficulties we may have to face in the way of delays and transportation.’ Then he outlines a general plan: ‘Devices – pictorial, musical and
by sound – will be utilised at the opening to establish a mood, bring all sections of South and Latin America to the screen.’ Over it all, apparently, will be ‘the Welles voice’.
Bonito
will follow, and lead into the
jangadeiros
’s story. There will be sequences shot in countries other than Brazil, including, for example, a short account of the conquest of Peru, to be shot around Lima. More than
half the picture will be shot in Brazil. ‘I’m not trying to make a documentary film,’ Welles concluded, ‘nor am I interested in making a travelogue. I want to tell some of the stories of South America in an interesting manner and bring certain phases of Latin entertainment to the movie-going
world.
The picture will have music, colour, romance, and will be of the land, the sea and the cities.’
Pettey reports that Welles is fully aware that he is facing tremendous difficulties. ‘It’s a safe bet that out of Welles’s South American trek will come a new and novel production. It will be a great production if he gets an even break with fate,’ says Pettey, gamely. ‘In a few weeks Rio will have a first class movie studio. It may result in fine pictures being made right here in Brazil … the Welles
crew and the man will be remembered in Brazil for years to come. They brought something to the country and are taking nothing away except pictures …’

The horror with which George Schaefer and the heads of production at RKO must have read this press release may well be imagined, the prospect of restaging the conquest of Peru perhaps bringing a touch of the surreal to the situation. In fact, Welles’s
extrapolation of the possible contents of the film hark back to his radio past, where the conquest of Peru could be easily and effectively knocked off in fifteen minutes of air time, and everything could be changed on the floor (indeed, only a few months hence he was to produce just such a sequence for his programme
Hello Americans
). But if Welles was still unclear about the film he wanted to
make, he was by no means unengaged by its possibilities. Tom Pettey described seeing him one evening, apparently set up for ‘a night of relaxation’.
⁹
But no: as he passed Welles’s hotel room much later, ‘the lights were burning at 3 a.m. and the typewriters going’. Welles’s thoughts were turning increasingly to the story of the
jangadeiros
and their charismatic leader, Mandel Olimpio Meira, known
as Jacaré. He was planning a reconnaissance trip to the far north, to Fortaleza, to the town from which the rafters’ odyssey had set out. Lynn Shores was darkly suspicious: ‘I believe Welles’s intentions are to leave me at Fortaleza to finish the
jangada
picture and bring one complete unit back to Rio where he will start filming dips and dabs of the carnival cut-in.
¹⁰
The trip is assuming all
the proportions of a typical Orson Welles production in that we are attempting to start three or four different things at once instead of sticking on one till it is accomplished. Welles has not seen a camera since the finish of carnival two weeks ago.’

In fact, the Carnival, even the account of the origins of the samba, was beginning to seem very small beer next to the heroic story of the
jangadeiros
, which had a particular advantage over the Carnival material: it was a reconstruction of an event that had already happened, and was therefore available to interpretation, reinvention and control. Documentary was a medium of which
Welles
had still not quite got the hang; this was drama. Even with the
jangadeiros
material, he was uncertain as to what he wanted to do with it until he had gone north,
though he now had a title for it, which gave an immediate sense of the epically simple manner he proposed for the sequence:
Four Men on a Raft
. He was sure of one thing: the film must be shot in Technicolor. An increasingly frantic George Schaefer was equally sure that it must not: the expense would be prohibitive, to say nothing of the logistical problems of transporting a Technicolor crew to
the north. He cabled Phil Reismann to that effect:
MOST IMPORTANT THIS BE THOROUGHLY UNDERSTOOD BY WELLES AND YOURSELF. YOU CAN SHOW THIS CABLE TO WELLES. PLEASE EXPLAIN TO HIM THAT BECAUSE OF CERTAIN BOARD AND GOVERNMENT RESTRICTIONS I HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE.
¹¹
Reismann replied with an emollient and cleverly calculated letter, assuring Schaefer that the cost of shooting the rest of the Carnival
picture would not go much beyond the salaries of crew and the very nominal studio rental; even Shores admitted that filming had been cheap: ‘money really does go a long way down here’. The whole movie to date, claimed Reismann, had cost a mere $19,000. Welles insisted, Reismann added, that the
jangadeiros
story was always part of the theme (which was true enough) and that Hollywood always knew
it was going to be in Technicolor (which was not); without the
jangadeiros
, the Carnival story would not be much more than newspaper coverage.