Orson Welles: Hello Americans (27 page)

The anonymous reviewer, noting that Hollywood ‘fears and hates the heavy-faced, heavily talented youngster’, declared him vindicated. Hollywood ‘gave much of the credit for
Kane
to cameraman Gregg Toland who photographed it. Stanley Cortez photographed
Ambersons
and it has all of
Kane
’s rich technique. Hollywood
is now confronted with the painful necessity of admitting that Outsider Orson Welles is its most important and exciting cine-maestro.’ The article continued with a precisely accurate account of Welles’s ousting from RKO, quoting in definitive form what Welles purportedly said when told that Mercury had been thrown
out
: ‘Don’t get excited. We’re just passing a rough Koerner on our way to immortality.’

All of this press coverage took place while Welles was in Fortaleza. His bust-up with RKO was still hot news. The
New York Times
article headlined
WELLES VERSUS HOLLYWOOD AGAIN,
telling its readers that there have been measured statements on both sides, added that ‘Hollywood is hopefully awaiting the fireworks which are regarded as inevitable when Welles himself gets home.’
²⁶
He did not return
direct to Hollywood, instead preferring to head for New York and his old chums after his pan-American detour. When he did, he was profiled by Theodore Strauss in the
New York Times
.
ROLLING UP FROM RIO,
the headline stated,
DESPITE A SEA OF TROUBLES, ORSON WELLES REMAINS HIS IRREPRESSIBLE SELF.
²⁷
Strauss found him in his old stamping ground, ‘21’, with his drinking pal Burgess Meredith; from time
to time during the conversation various distinguished figures came up to make cameo appearances: the critic George Jean Nathan and the maverick Anglo-Hungarian producer, the newly knighted Alexander Korda, among them. Welles, says Strauss, was chortling ‘like a Katzenjammer kid’. He was in expansive mood. ‘New York? Why, in Rio they told me in New York people are fighting over sugar. Imagine!
I had visions of people storming warehouses, riots in the streets, a whole epidemic of tabloid sugar murders,’ he tells Strauss, whereupon ‘the young gargantuan broke into explosive laughter … Orson Welles, after half a year below the Equator, was back, healthy, hulking and at the moment hilarious.’ Strauss recapitulates the story of Welles’s falling-out with RKO:
The Magnificent Ambersons
, Welles
says, was completed ‘without too frequent recourse to his advice as producer’; ditto
Journey into Fear
. He expresses some uncertainty over what he’ll do with the Brazilian material: maybe complete it with
Bonito the Bull
and a North American sequence. ‘Mr Welles was back and come hell or high water, he was enjoying his homecoming. Even the most casual onlooker could see that, despite the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune, Mr Welles was, happily, intact.’

So this was Welles’s tactic: no tidal wave of wire stories, as Herb Drake had recommended, no party before the studio issued its own story. Just a good-natured shrug and then back to business as usual. Life would resume, he seemed to be saying, as if the whole RKO interlude had never happened. He had already – almost from the
moment he stepped off the plane – started making various appearances, including one in the radio propaganda feature
Men, Machines and Victory
, and was the guest of honour at a meeting to raise money
for
Russian War Relief. These two activities – political activism within the framework of the war, and serious public-service broadcasting – would dominate his professional life for some time. For
the moment, as a film director, he had burnt the one bridge he had.

In fact,
It’s All True
gnawed at his brain throughout the coming period, and indeed for many, many years after that. Welles knew that there was the seed of something exceptional in that material, and he was no doubt right. It had long outgrown its original purpose of fostering hemispheric unity – Brazil had now joined the war
on the side of the Allies, anyway, in the very month of August in which Welles returned to the United States – but in his work on the origins of the Carnival and the controversial filming in the fa
velas
, in the Urca Casino sequence, and above all in the
jangadeiros
section, which had brought forth from him such epic visual poetry, he glimpsed something wonderful and utterly original. He came to
believe that in some ways the work was cursed, and often told a story about the
macumbas
who had come to him on one of the many occasions when filming was suspended for lack of money; Welles was fascinated by their voodoo-like sect, and used them in several sequences. During his discussion with them, he had been called away to talk to head office, and when he came back, the
macumbas
had gone,
leaving only the screenplay on the table, impaled by a needle to which a piece of wool was attached. ‘That was the end of the film,’ Welles said.
²⁸
‘We were never allowed to complete it.’ (The events of the story in fact happened to Richard Wilson, but Welles annexed them to himself as somehow expressing a deep truth.) Nonetheless, both he, and, to a lesser extent, RKO, attempted for some time
to find a way to convert the huge amount of footage into a viable film. The Office of Inter-American Affairs issued a statement in September referring to the dispute between Welles and RKO and claiming that everything possible was being done to resolve it; they hoped to accomplish this within thirty days. ‘If RKO does not wish to continue the production, which may require additional expenditure of
upward to a half a million dollars,’ the statement continued, ‘it is our hope that another major studio will assume responsibility for the completion of the picture under Mr Welles’s supervision.
²⁹
It is the government’s wish that the picture be completed with all possible speed and that its production be of a quality that will
accomplish
the Co-ordinator’s purpose and be satisfactory to the Brazilian
government and its people.’

RKO quite clearly did not want to continue with the production, though in view of the authority and prestige of the I-AA they gave an appearance of attempting to do so. Privately, their position was unchanged: ‘It appears that the indiscriminate mingling of blacks and whites in the Welles Brazilian film will be found objectionable south of the Mason-Dixon line in the
United States and in a good many countries of Latin America,’ wrote William Gordon to Charles Koerner, noting that in a recent film Samuel Goldwyn had on these grounds deleted close-ups of the two coloured members of Gene Krupa’s band. Gordon, the self-described expert on South American affairs, also notes that although Latin American countries are on the whole free of racial prejudice, they don’t
want the world to think they are preponderantly black. ‘It is my studied opinion that the carnival film will propagate a contrary view which is apt to be greatly resented by those other countries.’
³⁰
Having drawn a blank with RKO, the I-AA next moved on to Twentieth Century Fox, who were interested in the film, but Welles was not interested in them. In an exceptionally revealing letter, he wrote
to Nelson Rockefeller, ‘it is my definite feeling that any deal of the kind 20th can offer represents a serious mortgage on the coming years’ – that is, they would be offering him much less than his accustomed fee as director.
³¹
‘Money, for me,’ he added, ‘is no object as regards
It’s All True
and never has been any object.’ This was a frank admission of exactly what Schaefer and pretty well everybody
else at RKO had been saying from the beginning. Rockefeller replied with a steely letter:

I naturally hesitate to encourage you to accept any contract that your lawyers advise against and which, as you state, may mortgage your future.
³²
However, if you want my candid opinion, the collective future of the American people is in danger of being mortgaged, and individual or personal sacrifices that
any of us can make today that will contribute even in a small way to the preservation of the freedom and human dignity of the people of this country seem to me to be a privilege. Few people have the great talent that you have to offer and, knowing you as I do, I am confident that, in the last analysis, your own decision in this matter will not be influenced by anything but your true desire to serve
your country in this time of need.

This letter clearly indicates why Rockefeller was Rockefeller, and Welles was Welles, and confirms the truth of former Vice-President Wallace’s wisecrack about him: ‘Nelson Rockefeller’s definition of a co-ordinator is someone who can keep all the balls in the air without losing his own.’
³³
Back Welles went to RKO, where the new executive president, Peter Rathvon,
in schoolmasterly vein, told him the conditions under which they might be interested: ‘If on your own responsibility you are willing to spend time on the picture I should think the proper procedure should be the preparation of a complete layout of the work to be done on the Brazilian section … not an off-hand stab but a complete study and layout.’
³⁴

Three days later Welles was telling the
New
York Times
that he didn’t understand RKO’s refusal to spend the extra $ 200,000 needed to complete the film, because once it was completed they could invoke the co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs’ guarantee of $300,000 payable on completion and release. To his friend Ferdinand Pinto, the owner of the Jangada Clube in Rio, he wrote that his quarrel with RKO was assuming ‘Homeric proportions’.
³⁵
As he also wrote that they were refusing to release the film, though it had been completed in August, this letter cannot be regarded as a strictly factual document. In December, Welles held a screening of a selection of the footage to various producers and studios; there were no takers. There was a screening early in 1943 for the I-AA; vague plans were advanced for a collaboration with Fox. A
few months later Welles applied to Rathvon for a greatly reduced budget of $75,000 to complete
My Friend Bonito
and a further $25,000 to knock the Carnival material into shape. To this end, he finally produced, in a sixty-five page document, the unifying structure for which everyone had so long been clamouring.

The format was not excessively ingenious: Welles himself – fancy! – was to be at the
centre of the film with his real-life secretary Shifra Haran and the cameraman Harry Wild, pooling their brains about how to make a film concerning Latin America that is not a documentary, or a travelogue, or an illustrated lecture. ‘He’s ready to leave elaborate historical pageants to other movie-makers,’ Welles writes of himself.
³⁶
‘The way he looks at it, people are interested in people, and
he’s going to use his camera to show American people to each other.’ The various already filmed sequences are linked by newly filmed passages: ‘Since the focus of the main part of our picture is on simple people, the incidental characters in the linking sequence are, wherever possible, presented as cultivated and well-to-do. The purposes of this tactic are, I am sure, self-evident.’
Several
of
the linking scenes involve Welles, Wild and Haran discussing the movie they want to make, reviewing on a projector the footage they’ve already got; the film thus becomes a film about filming. The
jangadeiros
’ story is shown in fragments, while Welles reads Jacaré’s own testimonial: ‘We are part of another land. We belong to a great nation – Brazil. There is a President in a capital city. He is
just. If he knew of these things, he would never permit them. We will go to him and he will help us.’ They determine to interview Vargas, who now appears being humbly questioned by Welles. ‘The producer’s relations with the President of Brazil were of the very warmest,’ says the treatment. ‘No possible official objection need be expected.’ The sycophantic portrayal of Vargas ends on his ‘sly, warm
smile’.

In places, the treatment aims for whimsical charm and even has elements of a romantic caper about it, specifically in the relationship between Welles and Shifra, with a hint of amorous expectations on Welles’s part. It presents Welles in an unaccustomed role – one with which he would occasionally flirt in the years to come – that of dashing leading man. Baulked of a date with Shifra,
he mediates between Dorothea, a Chilean girl, and a young Brazilian waiter, who have no common language. Welles now becomes fascinated by Dorothea himself and woos her by taking her to the
favelas
to listen to the music. They encounter Grande Otelo: ‘From here we will come upon him often as a type among carnival celebrants, a personalisation of many popular aspects of the institution. This we
think has been managed in the completed film in terms of truly uproarious entertainment.’ Sitting in his car with Dorothea, Welles produces the instruments used in the Carnival, and plays them ‘expertly but glumly’. Next day, he brings her to the location as they shoot the Carnival sequence. Sweeping across the vast numbers of revellers, Welles notes, ‘Here we demonstrate another of the amazing truths
about carnival: the unpoliced good behaviour of carnival’s mobs.’ This sequence is intercut with the Urca Casino footage: ‘When it seems that everything has been shown, the star enters to top everything. In our case, the star is the Americas. Rio’s carnival becomes Pan-America’s carnival … the Americas, all the Americas together, are joined in fact as well as in idea, today rather than in the
future.’ The Carnival sequence ends with Otelo snoozing, then waking and wandering through the debris, singing ‘Farewell Praça Onze’.

The scene changes to Welles interviewing a government representative, Donna Maria, extolling the beauties of the changes that
have
been wrought in Rio, including the demolition of the Praça Onze and its replacement with the Avenida Getúlio Vargas. Welles allows
himself an uncharacteristic panegyric for the new versus the old: ‘Rio’s one of the only beautiful old towns where new things are even more beautiful than the old ones.’ And he gives Donna Maria a speech in which, bright-eyed, like the heroine of a Soviet propaganda movie, she tells him, ‘the hills up there, for instance, where the poor people live, where the Schools of the samba come from – you
were up there photographing one of them, Senhor Orson – do you know we’ve got new housing projects for all those places – model homes? They’re going up right now’. ‘That’s fine,’ says Welles. The film ends with the return of the
jangadeiros
to Ceará. As their plane soars into the sky, Welles’s narration tells the story of the success of their petition: