Orson Welles: Hello Americans (64 page)

In San Francisco they had in addition to contend with the continuing strike of Hollywood technicians, which had
been mooted before shooting started, but had not been expected to last; budgets had been drawn up on the assumption that it would soon be over and had to be revised drastically. Despite a large and in some instances retroactive pay rise, labour troubles persisted throughout the shoot. As a result of the strike, painting costs increased, Dick Wilson calculated, by 1000 per cent. To the disapproval
of the union, Welles had personally designed the hair-raising murals on the interior of the Crazy House, and decided to paint them himself, his tiny chauffeur/butler/odd-job man Shorty Chirello at his side, holding the paint pot for him like a medieval apprentice. When Welles, dissatisfied, wanted the walls to be repainted, the production co-ordinator (Columbia’s man, Jack Fier) refused to authorise
it, so Welles and a couple of chums broke into the studio and did it overnight. As a result they were picketed by the paint unions, who thereby won triple time to redo it. The construction of the Crazy House, which was done from scratch, was a massive job, with its 125-foot zigzag slide, which the cameraman had to ride to give O’Hara’s point of view. It was forty feet wide and twenty feet deep.
The dragon’s mouth (itself thirty feet wide) ended in an eighty-foot pit. The maze of mirrors used 2,912 square feet of glass and eighty plate-glass one-sided mirrors; it cost $60,000 to build – at least $15,000–20,000 more than it should have done because the prop shop insisted on building it. Throughout the shoot on American soil, the camera crew were working an unofficial go-slow: ‘the guys walking
up and down on the outside,’ as Wilson said, ‘radically affected the work of the guys walking back and forth on the inside’. Welles raged at them (‘there’s too much stalling around here … someone go put pressure on those men. Go rub up against them the wrong way’),
⁸
but to little effect. For a while
the
great Rudolph Maté (Dreyer’s cinematographer on
Vampyr
and
Joan of Arc
) relieved Lawton and,
according to Dick Wilson, things speeded up immeasurably, so clearly some of the slowness came from the cinematographer himself, always a nightmare for the mercurial Welles.

Somehow he maintained his exuberance. Thomas A. Brady found him on the set in Hollywood in December of 1946, chivvying the crew, indefatigably energetic, ‘followed by 23 assistants and technicians in a queue … when the queue
had dwindled to three people, Welles turned and spoke charmingly to a minor actor who thanked him for his engagement on the picture’. In answer to another reporter’s question, Welles very sensibly replied that Columbia had treated him with ‘the utmost generosity up to that time in matters of fiscal and artistic autonomy’. And it was true: up to that time. Brady reports that he went off to get
some sleep. ‘Have the doctor meet me in the car,’ said Welles to some assistant. ‘He can attend to my needs on the way home. I am to be called at 6:30 tomorrow morning: I must go to the baths.’ At which, says Brady, he wrapped his coat around him ‘after the fashion of a black cape’ and strode out into the mists of the Hollywood night. The following morning, he directed the first scene of the day while
a barber shaved him and cut his hair – a feat, says Brady, ‘which even Cecil B. DeMille has never equalled’. Welles’s instinct for publicity was clearly unimpaired. Despite what he had said, and in addition to what he clearly perceived as an obstreperous attitude from the crew, he was dealing with constant long-distance input from Harry Cohn, who was concerned to feature his star as prominently
and as attractively as possible. To this end he encouraged Welles to create a sequence in which she sang (providing, as it happens, a musical equivalent of the scene in the novel in which Elsa somewhat unexpectedly recites a poem: ‘Deep on the couch of night a siren star/Steeping cold earth in swooning loveliness …’); this added a couple of days to the schedule. Another two and a half days were
required to shoot a sailing montage decreed by Cohn. The fight in the judge’s chamber was another unscheduled extra, though this appears to have been Welles’s own idea.

The result of all these delays and additions was that a film scheduled to take sixty-five days to shoot took ninety-eight, at a cost of nearly half a million dollars more than budgeted. Dick Wilson wrote a lengthy memo to Welles
to support him in his arguments with Columbia, rebutting many of the charges of wastefulness and extravagance of which Cohn accused him. There is no question
that
they faced trying circumstances, not of their own making; it also appears to be true that the studio’s accounting practices were somewhat dubious. Once again, it seems, Welles and his partners (in this case, Wilson) had been oppressed
by a rapacious and inflexible organisation; once again, they can have expected nothing else. It seems that Welles had underestimated his opponent, not for the first time. ‘He snarled at you as you came in the door,’ he told Barbara Leaming of Harry Cohn, ‘and you could gradually throw him little goodies and he would quiet down and start lashing his tail.’ Wrong. Cohn had bugged the portrait of him
that hung in Welles’s office at Columbia; Welles cheerily greeted it, every morning and night, with the words ‘Well, that winds up another day at the Mercury. Tune in tomorrow.’ This devil-may-care attitude is endearing, but it was no defence against the ruthless man for whom they were working, who wanted nothing more or less from them than a profitable movie. He was clearly no George Schaefer,
supporting and sustaining Welles, aiding and abetting him in his artistic dreams, as became immediately evident in his responses to the rushes.

From the beginning, Cohn and Jack Fier (about whom Welles quipped, perhaps somewhat desperately, ‘we have nothing to fear but Fier himself’) were convinced that the film would never work, their opinion being confirmed by the veteran editor and feared
termagant Viola Lawrence, who reported that the footage was ‘a jumbled mess’.
⁹
Welles had no approval of the final cut; indeed, he seems not to have been involved in the editing process at all. At no point did they accept or acknowledge Welles’s stated intention of giving the film ‘something off-centre, queer, strange’,
¹⁰
which had a ‘bad dream’ aspect, as he put it. They refused to understand
that he wanted the film to be satirical in feel. In fact, their whole purpose was to introduce coherence and logic – and give Rita Hayworth her proper quota of close-ups. Where Welles had evolved a subtle and complex critique of her glamour – first showing Grisby, for example, studying her voyeuristically through his telescope, and then making the audience into voyeurs by letting us see her through
the telescope, too – Lawrence and Cohn steamrollered him into shooting a large number of pick-up close-ups of Hayworth, which, though undeniably lovely in themselves, destroy the film’s visual and imagistic coherence; the film’s eye, as it were, stops being beady and cynical, and suddenly mists up. The result is yet another Welles movie that must be discussed in terms of what might have been, rather
than what is: another mutilated torso. Welles reckoned that
Cohn
lost about 20 per cent of the footage – a substantial amount – cutting a number of important details; worse than that, he imposed on the film a dreary score by Heinz Roemheld, which Welles wittily and appositely demolishes in a memo that is one of the most useful surviving accounts of his complex understanding of sound, the precision
of his requirements and, en passant, the fineness of his taste. It also confirms just how significant a contribution he expected music to make to his work.

The memo to Cohn was written after the unsuccessful first preview, for which (as is not uncommon) a temporary soundtrack had been provided, music written by the distinguished film composer and former avant-gardist, George Antheil, for something
quite different. Antheil’s score had, says Welles, ‘an atmosphere of darkness and menace, combined with something lush and romantic’, whereas the title music as it stood was ‘atrocious’. The score as a whole depends to the point of exasperation on a constant recycling of the Roberts and Fisher song ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’ sung by Elsa (in fact sung by Anita Ellis on the soundtrack), but ‘there
simply isn’t enough musical content in [it] to support its use throughout a serious melodrama’. Moreover, ‘Mr Heinzman’ – at all times Welles refers to Roemheld as Heinzman – ‘is an ardent devotee of an old-fashioned type of scoring now referred to as “Disney”. In other words, if somebody falls down, he makes a falling down sound in the orchestra.’ This is precisely the practice Bernard Herrmann
abolished in his scores for Welles, creating instead constant interplay between the music, the image and the text – and silence. Of Roemheld’s inanely associative and compulsively voluble music, Welles notes: ‘If the lab had scratched initials and phone numbers all over the negative, I couldn’t have been unhappier with the music.’ In the sailing montage, ‘he seems to have gone out of his way to create
an effect totally different from the one I indicated … the temporary track … had
variety, movement, romance
. It conveyed the feeling of a journey – a journey – a journey taken into a picturesque and highly-coloured world. It had besides this, a quality of
satire
.’ He cites the musical response to Hayworth’s second dive: ‘the dive itself has no plot importance. What does matter is Rita’s beauty,
the beauty of the scene, the evil overtones suggested by Grisby’s character, and Michael’s bewilderment. Any or all of these might have inspired the music. Instead the dive is treated as though it were a major climax, or some antic moment in a Silly Symphony; a pratfall by Pluto the Pup, or a wild jump into space by Donald Duck.’ The entrance to the bay at Acapulco
had,
in the preview version,
‘a very curious and sexy South-American strain’, which established the ‘rather sinister sort of glamour’ the scene required. What Roemhold provided is corny, ‘second-rate Germanic filler’. It is all a matter, he says, ‘of taste and dramatic intelligence’. Again Welles stresses the deliberate oddness he is aiming for: ‘Our story escapes the cliché only if the performances and the production are
original
or at the least, somewhat
oblique
. This sort of music cue destroys that quality of
freshness
and
strangeness
which is exactly what might have saved
The Lady from Shanghai
from being just another whodunit.’

Welles implies that he wants this disorientation simply to take the curse off drearily familiar material; almost all of his work, in theatre, on radio and in film, administers shocks
to the audience. This is to some extent congruous with Brecht’s
Verfremdungseffekt
: making things strange, unexpected, therefore puzzling and arresting (the opposite, in Brecht’s formulation, of the narcotic and lulling); but in his use of this procedure, Welles speaks simply as a smart showman, a knowing manipulator of audience responses, an entertainer. Where he and Brecht coincide perfectly,
though, is in wanting an active, not a passive, audience. ‘The strongest mediums are those which ask the most from the public,’ Welles said in an interview, and this notion was of course anathema to the Harry Cohns of this world, who delighted in Roemheld’s music – ‘the poorest and the purest corn’, as Welles says, and thus perfectly undemanding. Sequence after sequence is rendered ordinary, banal,
stagy, phoney or just dull. ‘The audience should feel at this point [in the Chinese Theatre], along with Michael, that maybe they are going crazy. The new dubbing job can only make them feel that maybe they’re going to sleep.’ The music for the Crazy House ‘is an insult to the material … this is a chance for the score to tie together the whole “bad dream” aspect of the production and resolve it
– to deliver the story to its climax
on a new dimension
. Given the faintest premonition of what sort of music was going to be imposed on this difficult and costly sequence, I would never have gone to the trouble or expense of shooting it.’ The end of the picture, he says, is done incalculable injury by a particularly swoony and meaningless reprise of ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’. His comments on the
sound are equally trenchant: he discerns a process of ‘smoothing-out’ in both the effects and the voices. Tracks are frequently dead; vocal tracks lack ‘peaks and accents’. In the song sequence, ‘Grisby’s voice is no longer intrusive and nagging … all the “levels” are so precisely balanced that the sequence achieves,
for
the first time since I started work on it, an overall quality of flatness
and banality.’ The courtroom scene is deprived of ‘the vitality and punch it previously possessed’, with the echo effect that Welles wanted dropped entirely. The tension created by an over-amplified recording of heavily and deliberately corny Hawaiian music has been lost. Michael’s run from the pier, in which ‘a careful pattern of voices had been built up with the expenditure of much time and effort
by me’ – has been ‘junked in favour of a vague hullabaloo’. The interesting sound pattern they developed for the Crazy House has been dropped.

This eloquent and precise document is a vivid record of the amount of detailed and conscious thought that Welles brought to every aspect of his films. It is one of a long line of similar memoranda to the powers-that-be – stretching from
The Magnificent
Ambersons
to
A Touch of Evil
– railing against bad and insensitive decisions that have wrecked, or will wreck, his work. They always concern the post-production on the film, editing, music, sound; and they are always too late. This particular memo is an expansion of notes given to Welles by Dick Wilson; it evidently took Welles some time to gather his thoughts and express them with force. Even
as he writes, he seems to know that nothing is going to happen, and indeed, in this case (as in the others) it didn’t. Its only purpose seems to be to set the record straight, an understandable impulse, but an ineffective one. The question arises: how did such a talented, bright, powerful – indeed formidable – man allow himself to be constantly worsted by less intelligent, less talented, altogether
less remarkable men than himself? Knowing how critical post-production was to his work – more, perhaps, than to that of any other major director – how did he allow this to happen, again and again?