ARTIGO PADRÃO – TESTANDO

ORSON WELLES by Joseph McBride

Published in 1972 by Viking Press, Inc.

Library of Congress catalog card number : 70-178854

Chapter 2

MEETING ORSON WELLES

‘Ah, but Orson. Mostly, he’s a child… You worry very much when you love Orson, because you never know where he is. He disappears, you don’t know where he is and it is nearly impossible to find him, because his life is always complicated… And besides, that huge, strong man, you know that he’s very easily loved, that he’s very fragile, but it’s very easy to hurt him… so you love him and you want to protect him. And if he calls you and says, “I need you,” then you say “Orson needs me and it s something important.” His career is so strange because he’s capable of such beautiful things and it’s so hard for him now to make a film that you wouldn’t be the little stone that would stop the machine from going, once he has the chance to make a film. I think that’s why we all do react that way. ( Jeanne Moreau )

Welles was always Somewhere in Europe during the four years I spent writing this book, so I never tried to arrange a meeting. But in the summer of 1970, when the book was virtually completed, I learned that he was in New York City. By the time my letter arrived, though, he was gone again. Then he was supposed to come to Chicago, but he didn’t. I began to wonder if Orson Welles wasn’t really a pseudonym for Howard Hughes. In August I went to Hollywood (surely the last place Welles would be) to interview John Ford and Jean Renoir, the other two of my three favourite directors. My stay was almost over when I learned that Welles was a couple of miles away, appearing on Dean Martin’s television show.

So I picked up the phone and called him. He invited me for lunch and mentioned that he was about to start shooting a new film, The Other Side of the Wind. Would I like to be in it? Flabbergasted, I said of course, it would be wonderful. He explained that he would be taking a troupe down to Tijuana on Sunday afternoon to film scenes of the hero, an ageing movie director, watching the bullfights with some of his young admirers — ‘test scenes’ to help him raise enough money to complete the film. I remembered that Welles had wanted to make a similar story, called The Sacred Beasts, several years before. This would be a ‘permutation’ of the earlier script, he said.

After spending an evening discussing the mysteries of Welles’s career with Peter Bogdanovich, the young writer-director who is collaborating with him on an interview book entitled This Is Orson Welles, I went to Welles’s rented house high in the Los Angeles hills. He was typing in the foyer, swathed in a massive white silk dressing-gown that made him look like a polar bear. I was waiting to hear his laugh — that immense, intimidating, chilling laugh so familiar from the screen — but when it came, I was surprised. ‘When Welles laughs, he starts slowly, cocking an eye towards his companion, watching his response. When the response is encouraging (how couldn’t it be?), the laugh swells and begins to gather force, like a typhoon, until his features are dissolved into a mask of Falstafflan delight. Still, the laugh is ingratiating, not intimidating, for Welles keeps a slight portion of that eye fixed on his companion.

Visitors were offered Wellesian cigars (seven inches long, by my measure) from a box on the piano. When there was temerity, Welles would insist. Soon there would be four or five miniature Orsons trundling around the house. I lit one and sat down to talk with a man who, a few hours before, I had known only as a figure of legend.

Welles had a good time puncturing my illusions. He poked fun at me for being so absorbed in movies. ‘I’ve never been excited by movies as movies the way I’ve been excited by magic or bullfighting or painting,’ he said. ‘After all, the world existed for a long time without people going to movies.’ I said that he had given his life to movies, but I could see that it was the other way around: movies have only served to give him to us.

We talked for a while about the endless vagaries of production and distribution, and then he brought another of my fancies down to earth. I asked him why, in recent years, his movies have had less and less of the razzle-dazzle of his youth. Could it be a kind of growing serenity? ‘No, the explanation is simple,’ he said. ‘All the great technicians are dead or dying. You can’t get the kind of boom operator I had, for example, on Touch of Evil. That man, John Russell, is now a lighting cameraman. I have to make do with what I can get.’ So much, I suppose, for my theory, but tant pis anyway.

Watching Welles work the next day, I realized something about him I had known but had never really understood. He genuinely lives for the moment. Though he takes great care with each detail of his work, he jumps at every chance to add something new, something unexpected, to his prior conceptions. ‘Movies should be rough,’ he told me. I asked if he had been working on the script of The Other Side of jhe Wind when I had walked in. He laughed and said there wasn’t any script, the film would be improvised. Seeing my surprise, he said that he had written a script which would have run for nine hours on the screen, but had put it aside because he realized that he was writing a novel. ‘I’m going to improvise out of everything I know about the characters and the situation,’ he said. He had a large cardboard box crammed with notes sitting next to his typewriter.

I was restless in my hotel that night. My only previous ‘acting’ experience had been a walk-on in one of my own films which was flubbed because I had misjudged the depth of field and walked so close to the lens that I came out as a blur. I had also appeared in two cinéma-vérité films, the Leacock—Pennebaker—Maysles Primary and Robin Spry’s Prologue, but those were records of big political events (a Jack Kennedy speech, the Chicago convention) at which I was a spectator. I suppose I should hav& been terrified, but all I could think about was how much fun it was going to be.

Shooting in Tijuana was impossible, I learned the next day, because of some government edict against taking cameras across the border. So we gathered at Welles’s house to shoot a birthday party at which the director-hero, Jake Hannaford, is besieged by the myrmidons of the media. ‘The joke is that the media are feeding off him,’ Welles explained, ‘but they end up feeding off themselves. It’s sort of his last summer. That’s what it’s all about.’ Welles sat down with Bogdanovich and me and two other young cinéastes, Eric Sherman and Felipe Herba, who had also been recruited for the fflm. Welles brimmed over with amusement as he told us about our roles —Bogdanovich would be a foundation-backed hustler following Hannaford around doing an interview book; I would be a pompous cinema aesthete spouting blather from my book about Hannaford; and Sherman and Herba would be a blasé cinéma-verité crew (‘the Maysles brothers’, Welles called them) doing a documentary about the great man. Welles said he did not yet know who would play Hannaford; so our scenes today would be shot with the hero off-screen (which would certainly help point up the isolation of the man from his sycophants).

Welles asked Bogdanovich and me to start throwing him fatuous questions which we could use in the film. Bogdanovich asked if his character should be effeminate, and it was decided that no, he should be excitable, like Jerry Lewis. So he began quacking away like Lewis, and Welles toned the voice down here, broadened it there, parrying the lines back and forth with him. I mentioned a pet theory I had about Ford, how his films since 1939 can be taken as an oblique reflection on the changes in American society, and Welles quizzed me on how I would develop it, warning me to keep it fairly straight. He finally went to the typewriter and we concocted a speech (Welles supplying the final wording): ‘The main thrust of my argument, you understand, is that during the Thirties Hannaford’s predominant motif was the outsider in absurd conflict with society. In the Forties he achieved salvation. In the Fifties…’ Here Bogdanovich would break in with, ‘Never mind the Fifties. Open the whisky bottle.’ Welles roared with delight; so much for the critics!
We spent half an hour thinking up these ridiculous questions. Once, when I suggested asking Hannaford about the work of Dziga Vertov, Welles said, ‘You’re kidding! Who’s that?’ ‘Dziga Vertov, the Russian director of the 1920s,’ I replied. ‘He made newsreels known as Kino-Pravda.’ Welles had a great time with that one before ruling me out of order. ‘Come on, now,’ he said. ‘You’re supjosed to be playing a serious character.’ We did wind up with a Godardian-Vertovian question, though. I would ask Hannaford, while riding in the back seat of his car, ‘Mr Hannaford, is the camera eye a reflection of reality, or is reality a reflection of the camera eye? Or is the camera a phallus?’

I was beginning fully to appreciate Welles’s sense of humour, which is sometimes submerged under the rhetorical cocoon surrounding his characters and usually fails to emerge from an analysis of his films. And when the shooting started, I could see first-hand the delight he takes in the physical act of direction. His young crew officially numbered four, but eventually all twelve people present pitched in to help, and almost everybody appeared before the camera, including Welles’s houseboy.

It seemed that what Welles was shooting today — brief, fairly simple hand-held shots — was pure caviar to the director. I quickly realized that I couldn’t be either good or bad, just myself, because the character I was playing was a fool. Comic relief was the order of the day, and Welles’s brio belied the idea that directing comedy is a dour business. It certainly was hard work, though. ‘Now you appreciate what actors go through,’ Welles told me when I sighed after the seventh take of one shot went wrong. Since I was the buffoon among buffoons, I was loaded to the teeth with props — a tape-recorder, a still camera, a coat over my arm, papers in my shirt pocket, and a gigantic whisky bottle. I apologized for my awkwardness with the props, and Welles said reassuringly that the only actor he ever knew who could handle so many props well was Erich von Stroheim. Adding to my surrealistic appearance was something Bogdanovich had noticed the night I went to his house — I had been without notepaper that day at a screening of Fellini’s Satyricon, and had scribbled some notes on my wrist in the dark. Welles told me that, in the film, I should have my wrist and arm covered with notes — ‘Oedipus Complex’, ‘Mother Fixation’, and so forth. When the shooting was over, he paternally insisted that I scrub my wrist and arm completely clean, even though I was too tired to lift a bar of soap.

In twelve hours of shooting, Welles completed twenty-seven shots. It was fascinating to watch him sculpt each shot from the bare bones of dialogue. For example, the pontificating about Hannaford in the different decades of his career was broken into two shots, the second of which required fourteen takes. I began to understand what Welles once said about his direction of actors: ‘I give them a great deal of freedom and, at the same time, the feeling of precision. It’s a strange combination. In other words, physically, and in the way they develop, I demand the precision of ballet. But their way of acting comes directly from their own ideas as much as from mine. When the camera begins to roll, I do not improvise visually. In this realm, everything is prepared. But I work very freely with the actors. I try to make their life pleasant.’ Setting up the first shot for the scene, Welles chose a stark wall, couch, and table for the background. Because the setting was a party, with cameramen s lights present, the lighting was not to be over-refined. Directing from a throne-like chair at the typewriter table (‘because this is an auteur film’), Welles took an active part in the lighting, ordering his cameraman, Gary Graver, to forget about an elaborate cross-lighting pattern he had set up when the director wasn’t looking. But he did tell Graver to set up a light behind a bedroom door in the background so it would cast a serrated pattern on the floor. ‘That’s the only beautiful thing I want in the shot,’ he said. Then, turning to Bogdanovich with an arch expression, he muttered, ‘Von Steinberg…’ Welles ran quickly and efficiently through the lighting, keeping Graver (whom he called ‘Rembrandt’) constantly on the move.

Bogdanovich and I were rehearsing our lines, and Welles interrupted us to give directions. The scene would begin with an off-screen hand giving Bogdanovich the whisky bottle from camera left, and bits of dialogue were added, to be spoken while I was talking. (When someone broke into the shooting of another scene to tell Welles that there was overlapping dialogue, he replied, ‘We always have overlapping dialogue.’) Bogdanovich would disdainfully ignore me while I was talking. When I would say ‘during the Thirties…’ he would give me the bottle, taking my tape-recorder, and tell me to open the bottle. I would ask, ‘How?’ In the meantime, the houseboy (standing in the background wearing a camera around his neck and munching a chicken breast) would slowly cross in front of us, and Bogdanovich would ask him, ‘Where’s Andy?’ The question would go unanswered — the houseboy would act stoned.

Then Bogdanovich would tell me, ‘There’s a cork, isn’t there?’ and I would look down and find no cork on the bottle. The Maysles brothers, who would be chattering in the background all the while, would now run like hell behind us with their equipment in search of a shot. I would resume my talking, and the Maysles’s assistant (actually Graver’s assistant) would dash between us holding a still camera and a blazing sun-gun, chasing after them. Bogdanovich would then interrupt me (‘part Jerry and part Noel Coward’, Welles told him) with, ‘Never mind the Fifties. Open the whisky bottle.’ In addition to all this, the tape flew off my recorder when I handed it to Bogdanovich during a mn-through, and Welles insisted on keeping the action in the film. So we rehearsed dropping the tape.

Finally, we were ready to go. The first part of the scene — up to the exchange of the bottle and the tape-recorder — went fairly quickly. Welles said he would cut to an insert of some kind and return to the same shot of Bogdanovich and me from the knees up. We began to shoot the second part of the scene. Chaos. I would bobble my lines, Bogdanovich would react too slowly, the guy eating the chicken would take too long in getting past us, the Maysles brothers would run through at the wrong time… After several takes fell completely flat, all of a sudden one of them worked. But in a rhythm totally different from what Welles had planned. All the cues were different, but it seemed to jell anyway. Welles said he might wind up using the shot, but would appreciate it if we’d try it again, his way. Bogdanovich and I started to chatter about ways to improve the shot. Welles ordered quiet. ‘The thespians are causing trouble,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’ Cowed, we fell silent. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it again, shall we?’ About an hour later, we were done.

The rest of the day was taken up with scenes of the media people assembled in various parts of the house, thrusting equipment forward at Hannaford, and with some hilarious scenes inside and outside a car moving through the streets of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. Welles told us to leave without him to shoot the scenes inside the car because it would be more interesting if we’d spring the results on him after following his instructions. ‘I did that with one scene in Touch of Evil,’ he recalled. ‘Remember that wide-angle shot of the two men driving through the street? There was no sound man, no cameraman, and no director.’ Where was the camera? I asked. ‘Strapped to the hood of the car,’ he said with a triumphant grin.

Relaxing aboard a home-bound jet that night, I began to think’ back on recent events. Four days earlier, Renoir had told me that to learn about directing, I should try a little bit of acting (he meant in an amateur movie). Now I had ceased looking over Welles’s shoulder and had begun looking directly into his eyes. My subject had climbed down off the pedestal I had built for him and, curiously, he now seemed larger than ever. As his cameraman said admiringly after the day’s shooting, ‘Welles doesn’t play it safe.’