Orson Welles: Hello Americans (18 page)

Two days later, at the second preview in Pasadena, the film was 1,500 feet
shorter. The reaction of the infinitely more sophisticated audience in that city of playhouses and museums was commensurately warmer: ‘Much better than
Citizen Kane
. Orson Welles is a genius.’
⁴
‘This preview cannot be praised too highly. Depressing but better than any propaganda picture.’ ‘Definitely 10 times better than
Citizen Kane
.’ ‘Orson Welles is the most tremendous director of the day.
This is by far one of the finest pictures I have ever seen.’ Generally the reaction in Pasadena focused on Welles, for or against. It is notable how much personal feeling he provoked: ‘I do not like Orson Welles “running his shows”. He should “keep quiet”.’ ‘The G—d— thing stunk/only Orson Welles could think up a thing like that.’ There are more lighting comments, including, quite wittily: ‘The blackout
doesn’t have to be observed on the screen. Turn on the lights!’ And then there are the sort of reports that would have pleased Welles: ‘The setting accurately portrayed the scenes of my own childhood and I saw some of my unlovely relatives.’ The Mercurians were all delighted, feeling vindicated; but Pomona could not be undone.

Two days after Pasadena, Schaefer wrote to Welles:

I did not want
to cable you with respect to
The Magnificent Ambersons
as indicated in your cable of the 18th only because I wanted to write to you under confidential cover.
⁵
Of course, when you ask me for my reaction, I know you want it straight, and though it is difficult to write to you this way, you should hear from me. Never in all my experience in the industry have I taken so much punishment or suffered
as I did at the Pomona preview … they laughed at the wrong places, talked at the picture, kidded it, and did everything that you can possibly imagine. I don’t have to tell you how I suffered, especially in the realisation that we have over $1m tied up. It was just like getting
one
sock in the jaw after another for over two hours. The picture was too slow, heavy, and topped off with sombre music,
never did register. It started off well, but it just went to pieces … I queried many of those present and they all seemed to feel that the party who made the picture was trying to be ‘arty’, was out for camera angles, lights and shadows, and as a matter of fact, one remarked that ‘the man who made that picture was camera crazy’.

Pasadena did not change Schaefer’s opinion. It was ‘better; but
not enough. The Pomona audience was young – it is the younger element who contribute the biggest part of the revenue. If you cannot satisfy that group, you just cannot bail yourself out with a $1m investment.’ Their initial discussions, he reminds Welles, were all about making low-cost movies – and here they are with two pictures having cost $2m. They won’t make a dollar on
Citizen Kane
and will
probably not break even. ‘All of which reminds me of only one thing – that we must have a “heart to heart” talk. Orson Welles has got to do something commercial. We have got to get away from “arty” pictures and get back to earth. Educating the people is expensive, and your next picture must be made for the box-office.’ At least he was talking about a next picture. ‘God knows, you have all the talent
and the ability for writing, producing, directing – everything in
Citizen Kane
and
Ambersons
confirms that. We should apply all that talent and effort in the right direction and make a picture on which “we can get well”. – That’s the story, Orson, and I feel very miserable to have to write you this. My very best as always. Sincerely yours.’

This is a noble letter, written entirely in sorrow,
not in the least in anger. But it is the letter of a beaten man, and a confused one. Schaefer, like Welles, believed that The People would lap up quality; now, the moment he meets rejection, his only concern is for the box office, for which the adolescents of Pomona are to be the arbiters. He approvingly quotes the amateur critic who accuses Welles of being ‘arty’ and ‘camera crazy’. He was, of course,
running scared: the corporate dogs were yapping at his heels. Jack Moss had wired Welles after what he called the
UNSATISFACTORY REACTION
in Pomona;
⁶
he attributed it to the audience’s youthfulness and impatience with the film’s length, but nonetheless, he insists,
THEY WERE OVER AND OVER HELD BY THE DRAMA
. Welles’s other colleagues were less inclined to spare him. Bob Wise wrote to him somewhat
wearily, ‘You asked for a more detailed report of preview audience
reactions
and I have never tackled a more difficult chore.
⁷
What I mean is it’s so damn hard to put on paper in cold type the many times you die through the showing – the too few moments you are repaid for all the blood and suffering that goes into a show. With God’s help and a sigh, here’s a rough breakdown of the previews.’ The
audience, he says, were restless during the first three or four reels; there were few laughs until the second half of the snow scene: ‘The really important thing is the length of the film and the definite audience disinterest and inattention during all this.’ There was, too, growing resentment at ‘the hysterical sort of boy that George seems to be in these scenes’. In the scene of George reading
Eugene’s letter to his mother, there was ‘not a laugh but a reaction that said: “Oh God here he is again.”’ On Welles’s final line, ‘That’s the end of the story,’ Wise reports that there was a round of applause ‘and what seemed to be a sigh of relief’. At both previews, many people walked out throughout the showing. ‘The picture,’ he says, in a striking phrase, ‘does seem to bear down on people.’
Nonetheless, he adds, ‘we are all certain that the basic quality of the show was appreciated and it is merely a matter of gentle, tireless and careful study and work to resolve
The Magnificent Ambersons
into a real proud Mercury production.’ The very things, in other words, that Welles wasn’t able or willing to give it; the very things he lavished on
Citizen Kane
in such profusion.

Worse was
to come. Welles had a professional respect for Wise, but Joseph Cotten was perhaps his closest friend, a core Mercurian, his second self. Cotten’s report suggested a general unease with the whole enterprise. Welles had written, he said, ‘doubtless the most faithful adaptation any book has ever had’, and when he finished reading it he had had the same reaction as when he read the book.
⁸
‘The picture
on the screen seems to mean something else. It is filled with some deep though vague psychological significance that I think you never meant it to have. Dramatically, it is like a play full of wonderful strong second acts all coming down on the same curtain line, all proving the same tragic point. Then suddenly someone appears on the apron and says the play is over without there having been
enacted a concluding third act.’ He reiterates Wise’s prescription: ‘It’s all there in my opinion, with some transpositions, revisions and some points made clearer.’ He thinks that Welles doesn’t realise that he’s made ‘a dark sort of movie. It’s more Chekhov than Tarkington.’ The situation was clearly absolute hell for everyone involved. All who had seen the film knew that something was wrong, and
were unable in conscience to say, hand
on
chest, ‘It’s a masterpiece, leave it alone’; nor were they able to say exactly what was wrong, though they all made suggestions as to what to cut, what to shift. Conscious that Welles was feeling usurped, Cotten sought to reassure him: ‘Jack [Moss], I know, is doing all he can … his opinions about the cuts, right or wrong, I know are the results of sincere,
thoughtful, harassed days and nights, Sundays, holidays.
Nobody in the Mercury
is trying in any way to take advantage of your absence.
Nobody anywhere
thinks you haven’t made a wonderful, beautiful inspiring picture. Everybody in the Mercury is on your side always … we all love you … and until then remain forever as all of us do. Obediently yours.’

Welles was not so certain.
SURE I MUST BE AT
LEAST PARTLY WRONG,
he wired Jack Moss,
BUT CANNOT SEE REMOTEST SENSE IN ANY SINGLE SUGGESTED CUT OF YOURS, BOB
’
S,
JOE
’
S.
⁹
He was convinced that the crucial new scene he had suggested, in which George discusses Eugene, cannot have been well enough shot by Wise, and he ‘absolutely insisted’ that Norman Foster reshoot it. He proposed new music for it; and a redub of Fanny’s line ‘George, George’,
which had earned such a big laugh at Pomona.
SURE THIS WILL KILL LAUGH OR I’M CRAZY STOP I GUESS I AM ANYWAY MUCH LOVE ORSON.
Nothing could better demonstrate the impossibility of Welles’s situation. Any or all of what he had suggested might have been perfectly sensible or effective, but to do it by remote control, as he had done with
Bonito
, was doomed. He was working from the answer print, but
had no means other than guesswork of judging the effect of his proposed changes. Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), he kept up a steady bombardment of suggestions, some of which were effected. According to the assistant editor Mark Robson, he and Wise would work ‘100 – 110 – 120 hours a week … we were so overwhelmed by the amount of work that we both moved away from our houses and our homes
and into a motel in Culver City. There were endless hours and I don’t think we were paid any more for the 100th hour than for the first.’ Among their many re-edits was the destruction of the lovingly planned and superbly executed seamless tracking shot at the Ambersons’ ball, which now, with cutaways, became a conventional sequence – still beautiful and absorbing, but no longer a metaphor for
a way of life; no longer a unique artistic gesture.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, the work seemed to have ground almost to a standstill. ‘Events change from day to day and nothing – not even life and death – means very much here,’ wrote Tom Pettey. ‘It is a lazy land and I’m afraid the germ has got into the company.’
Curiously,
his faith in the venture had grown, certain that they were going to get ‘a
real pix’, and he added: ‘I will stake my money on Welles coming but of this with added fame.’
¹⁰
Welles had told him that he would take thirty days to complete the Carnival reshoots and the Urca sequence; then he was off to the north, to Fortaleza, while – dreams of Peruvian conquest still in the air – another crew went to Lima. Such desultory shooting as there was, was done by Lynn Shores; when
he was absent, Dick Wilson or Bob Meltzer took over. Shores struggled with the fact that what they were trying to shoot no longer existed. Rio was a different city from the thronged, colourful, sexy metropolis of February. ‘Once a year in December there is a packed house at the Jockey Club, otherwise it looks like Pomona fairgrounds on a blue Monday’ – an unfortunate reference whose significance
he could not have known.
¹¹

The entire front entrance of the Copacabana was being rebuilt and was thus a mass of scaffolding and unfinished masonry. ‘The beaches are full of little black children except on Sundays when sometimes there is a turnout for about an hour. This turnout we are trying to get for ourselves.’ The weather was atrocious, and the natives uncooperative. Sailors enlisted as extras
simply didn’t turn up. ‘I can only do what one individual in a foreign land can try to do under conditions where getting a cup of coffee is almost a Federal deal.’ There were problems with fuel for the generators: they needed 20,000 gallons of the stuff. ‘At present there is not this much gas in all Brazil.’ No one was any closer to knowing what the film was supposed to be. Welles changed his
mind all the time: ‘That is all we seem to be doing – getting ready to shoot something but we never shoot it … we would all like to work if somebody would please tell us what to do.’ Shores himself had been writing scenes, then shooting them, ‘and it still isn’t any good’. Tom Pettey bemoaned that ‘We still haven’t done any of the script stuff.
¹²
The studio has been ready and waiting for 10 days
or so. Urca nightclub could have been done weeks ago. We made a couple of abortive stabs at the Rio
Jangadeiro
shots, but they will have to be done over as Orson didn’t like the set-ups and walked out.’

Where was Welles? What was he doing? Partly, he was simply having a very good time. Cy Enfield recollects Jack Moss showing him some of the Brazilian footage at around this time. It showed chorus
girls in a line. Welles had told Moss, ‘I fucked her, and her, and her.’ He was also planning his radio broadcasts. He was giving lectures. He was dreaming his
jangadeiros
sequence. Above all, he was trying to influence the reworking of
The Magnificent Ambersons
. During this period, he was running up telephone and cable bills of $1,000 a week, a phenomenal figure for 1942.

Back in Hollywood,
Lynn Shores’s reports had spread panic. Walter Daniels, Shores’s spymaster, noted in a memo to Reg Armour that there was ‘no assurance that our trek is paying off as we had hoped’.
¹³
The Carnival footage, he says, is no good; ‘The picture will be salvaged at the studio here – as all location pictures are – by shooting additional scenes in colour to bridge and point up action.’ He tells Armour
‘to
instruct
Mr Welles’ to give Shores an outline of
Four Men on a Raft
and let him film such long shots and location shots as may be necessary, while returning himself to finish the film in the studio. ‘I feel that Shores is capable of doing a good job on his own with less cost in time than can be accomplished by the present set-up.’ This astounding suggestion was not followed through, though
Welles did indeed give Shores a further outline of
Four Men on a Raft
. Reg Armour nonetheless forwarded the memo to his superior, Charles Koerner, with Shores’s latest letter. The noose was tightening around Welles’s neck. It seems that he had no inkling of the gravity of his situation. The ‘large dreams’ of which he had spoken to Phil Reismann were becoming more real to him than Hollywood’s reality;
and Rio was providing him with a very satisfactory lifestyle. Shores reported that he had taken a year’s lease on an apartment. ‘Just why I cannot seem to find out.’
¹⁴
Shores had taken a small apartment, too, ‘in self-defense’. Tom Pettey reported the same thing to Herb Drake: ‘it looks like Orson is going to make Rio his home and I’ll be damned if I am … I’ll continue to give you all the news
that’s safe to print.
¹⁵
There really are some swell stories here, but not the sort a press agent does. I’ve killed more stories than Sgt York killed Germans since I’ve been here and some of them died hard.’