Orson Welles attended Todd School for Boys in Woodstock Illinois from 1926 to 1931.

Welles is pictured here in the top left below a window of Grace Hall, the 1915 Prairie Style building where the actor and director lived as a student. He studied film and radio in the basement studio.

As a student, Welles collaborated with Headmaster Roger Hill to write the “Everybody’s Shakespeare” series of plays that provided a simple adaptation for high school student’s Shakespeare productions. Between 1932 and 1942 over 100,000 copies of these plays were sold

An active member of the Todd Troupers theatrical group, Welles often returned to Todd after graduation to assist with theatrical productions while studying at the Chicago Art Institute.

Welles made his little-known first film at the school when he was 19. “The Hearts of Age” is an eight-minute silent short, which he co-directed with William Vance in 1934. The film stars Welles’ first wife, Virginia Nicolson, as well as Welles himself.

You can now view it on YoutTube. The plot about old age and mortality is a series of cryptic expressionistic images connected with rapid-fire editing, arguably influenced by surrealism and the work of Jean Cocteau.

Welles plays Death.

The studio head strides across an acre of finely clipped lawn towards the administration building, cigar clamped in his mouth. He’s clutching a sheet of paper typed with the weekend receipts. He’s fuming.

No, it wasn’t a good weekend. It wasn’t close to a good weekend. Dismal is more like it.

Why had the audiences stayed away in droves? What had he ever done to them?

He stops. Something is wrong.

He turns and peers up at the open windows of a large two-story building on his left. He shakes his head, whips the cigar out his mouth and hollers out to the top floor at the top of voice.

‘Get back to work you lazy bastards!’

Sounds of dozens of Underwood typewriters whirring and clattering to life. Yes, it’s the writers’ building.

‘I don’t pay you to think. I pay you to write, Goddammit!!’

Sounds as typewriter bell double dings.

Orson Welle’s real home wasn’t quite as lavish and gargantuan as the mountain and Xanadu estate Charles Foster Kane built for himself.

It was at 1717 North Stanley Avenue, Hollywood Hills. There was no chain mail fence surrounding the property. There was no W forged in steel above the gate. No moat, no zoo, no army of servants.

It was just around the corner from the hookers on Hollywood Boulevard. Southern Colonial in style, crown moldings, ceiling detailing, wainscoting, wonderful light. It’s where he shot bits and pieces of various films. It’s where he edited many projects.

It’s where he died. Alone on October 10, 1985, aged 70, after filming an interview on “The Merv Griffin Show.” He was working on a script for “Julius Caesar” that he was scheduled to shoot the next day.

Welles was found by the actor Paul Stewart. The same actor who found Charles Foster Kane dead in his bed in “Citizen Kane.”

Quickly putting down a scene is a sure fire way to see where I’m heading.

It may not always be in the right direction. Often it’ll be a trigger for another scene or some underlying tension (which is just another word for drama, right).

Will the third test scene below end up in the screenplay I’m writing on Orson Welles?

Jump in and share with your friends.

“BOSCUTTI’S ORSON WELLES” TEST SCENE 03 SHORTY

 
EXT. LOS ANGELES AIRPORT TARMAC – 1943 – MORNING

American Airlines DC-3 lands and steers towards a white art deco hangar. Propellers on the polished aluminum aircraft back spin and slow as it moves forward. Polished aluminum stairs are rolled across the warm bitumen towards the rear door.

Gleaming maroon 1942 Lincoln Continental swerves across the tarmac towards the plane. A beautiful, elegant limousine with a long hood and apparently no driver. A naval officer in full uniform reclines in the back seat.

Limousine sweeps to a stop at the base of the stairs just as the rear door of the plane opens. ORSON WELLES steps out into the soft California sunshine, smiling. Tall, proud, larger than life.

The driver’s door on the limousine opens and a hunchback dwarf in full chauffeur uniform clambers down from the driver’s seat. This is SHORTY CHIRELLO.

Shorty pulls down the bottom of his jacket, reaches in for his cap and snaps it under his arm. He walks round to the rear passenger door, dutifully opens it and stands at attention. He looks a little grim.

Welles dances down the stairs, grins at Shorty and hops into the spacious limousine. Shorty slams the door.

 
INT. LIMOUSINE – CONTINUOUS

The naval officer in the back seat is actor JOSEPH COTTEN. Smooth, handsome, gentlemanly. It’s hard to tell whether the uniform is a costume or for real. His voice is traced with a Southern drawl.

COTTEN
You’ve grown a mustache again.

WELLES
Thank you for noticing, Jo. Nice uniform.

COTTEN
Well, you know I’ve always wanted to see the world.

Shorty tosses his cap across the front seat, climbs onto the driver’s seat and swivels into position. There are wooden blocks on the brake and accelerator pedals so his feet can reach them. His head hardly reaches the top of the seat.

He can see the reflection of Welles and Cotten in the rear vision mirror mounted on the dash.

COTTEN
Shorty, to the studio directly, if you please.

Shorty shifts the limousine into gear.

WELLES
No, no, no. I have to see my darling Lolita first.

COTTEN
Dolores?

WELLES
I promised.

COTTEN
Didn’t you give her up?

WELLES
How can I possibly give up on the most exciting woman I ever met?

COTTEN
Orson, you say that about everyone woman you bed.

WELLES
But it’s Dolores? You love Dolores. Everyone loves Dolores.

COTTEN
Actually, I love my paycheck a little more.

Welles recoils in mock disgust.

COTTEN
Shorty, to the studio.

WELLES
(grinning)
Shorty, to my love nest.

The limousine idles.

SHORTY
You knuckleheads want to work out where you want to go first?

Welles stares at Cotten.

WELLES
I’ll toss you for it.

Cotten pulls a nickel out of his pocket, flicks it in the air and slaps it down on the back of his wrist.

COTTEN
Call it!

WELLES
Tails!

Cotten lifts his hand away with a wry smile. Welles looks down. It’s heads.

WELLES
Best of three?

Sketching out scenes is a quick way to get a screenplay rolling.

Not everyone likes doing it. Some like working out a beat sheet first and then fleshing it out, line by line. Some like noting snippets and dialogue on cards to see how they stack up.

I like roughing out scenes in the hope that they’ll either end up in the final draft or (fingers crossed) illuminate the theme. Sometimes they shine a light on what’s going on without me even noticing. Okay, a lot of the times.

You can see the second test scene below for the screenplay I’m writing on Orson Welles. The format is easier on the eye than the industry standard.

Tune in and share with your friends.

“BOSCUTTI’S ORSON WELLES” TEST SCENE #03 ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT

 
TELEVISION SCREEN – 1985

Television static zaps to life as a gleaming “Entertainment Tonight” title bleeds against a purple background. It’s the intro after a commercial break, backed by a synthesized fanfare.

Cut to the television studio with attractive female anchor MARY HART trying to look serious. Behind her lies the night lights of Los Angeles. Over her shoulder is a black and white still of a older man, smiling and bearded. It’s captioned Orson Welles 1915-1985

MARY HART
Tonight comes word that actor Orson Welles has died in Los Angeles at the age of seventy.

She wears a navy dress, full hair, shoulder pads, black necklace. The colors are over saturated, exaggerated. It could be the camera or the make up.

MARY HART
We’ll have details later.

Cut to male anchor ROBB WELLER backed by the same twinkling Los Angeles, a sea of lost lights. Over his shoulder is a color still of a smiling Yul Brynner. It’s captioned Yul Brynner 1920-1985. Weller wears a gray suit, white shirt and pale lavender tie. He is trying to hide his smile.

ROBB WELLER
Actor Yul Brynner died of lung cancer early today in a New York hospital –

Television static twitches to a different studio shot with Hart behind a white desk, clutching her hands. Over her shoulder is a large framed color still of an older, bearded Orson Welles. It’s captioned Orson Welles 1915-1985.

MARY HART
Orson Welles, who made radio history with “War of the Worlds” and gave us the film classic “Citizen Kane,” died today of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles. He was seventy. Senior correspondent Rona Barrett is here for a look back at an extraordinary career, Rona…

Cut to Rona Barrett in the studio, backed by the dark lights of Los Angeles. She wears a violet dress, gold earrings. Over her shoulder is the color still of Welles.

RONA BARRETT
Thank you, Mary. He was an extraordinary larger-than-life figure who lived life to its fullest. At age twenty-six, he knocked Hollywood on its ear with his first film, “Citizen Kane,” for which he won an Oscar for Best Screenplay.

Color still dissolves to black and white still from “Citizen Kane” when Welles as Kane meets the old newspaper editor for the first time. Barrett’s delivery is almost breathless.

RONA BARRETT
It was a triumph he could never equal.

Black and white still dissolves back to color still of Welles.

RONA BARRETT
But he did go on to leave his mark with such films as “The Magnificient Amberson,” “Lady from Shanghai,” “The Third Man,” and “Touch of Evil.” He was married three times, including once to Rita Hayworth, who gave him a daughter.

Color still dissolves to a glamorous 1943 black and white still of young Welles and Hayworth enjoying themselves in a nightclub.

RONA BARRETT
In the last twenty-five years of his life, many of his film projects were left uncompleted.

Black and white still dissolves back to color still of Welles.

RONA BARRETT
But he contineud to work steadily as an actor. In everything from films like “The Muppet Movie” to wine commercials.

Color still dissolves to color publicity still of Welles holding up a glass of Paul Masson wine.

RONA BARRETT
But his name will be forever linked to “Citzen Kane.”

Cut to office scene from “Citzen Kane” with Kane in his gaslit newspaper office at dawn, a loose sheet of paper in his hands. Standing in shirt sleeves by the window as dawn rises. Jedediah Leland, played by Joseph Cotten, and Mr. Bernsetin, played by Everett Sloane, look up to him, worn out after a long day.

Newsboys can be heard from the street below. Kane starts to turn off the gaslight.

KANE
I’ve got to make the “New York Inquirer” as important to New York as the gas in that light.

LELAND
(quietly)
What’re you going to do, Charlie?

KANE
Declaration of Principles. Don’t smile, Jedediah.

He steps to the desk, slips into shadow.

KANE
Got it all written out. Declaration of Principles…

BERNSTEIN
You don’t want to make any promises, Mr. Kane, you don’t want to keep.

KANE
(gently)
These will be kept.

He looks at what he has written.

KANE
“I’ll provide the people of this city –

RONA BARRETT (V.O.)
Director, actor, producer, a living legend in Hollywood.

Cut to ferris wheel scene from “The Third Man” where Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, grins at Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotten.

RONA BARRETT (V.O.)
A legend that will continue.

Cut to 1984 Directors Guild of America Awards. Welles is at the podium having just been presented the D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award. He shares the small stage with band musicians wearing tuxedos.

WELLES
When I first came to this town I suppose I was the most unpopular boy in Southern California. For one thing, I was the only working member of the film industry who wore a beard.

Murmurs from the audience.

WELLES
Can you imagine how shocking that was? Look around you tonight. I wish I could claim I have done as much for movies as I have for beards.

Laughs and claps from the audience.

Cut to Rona Barrett in the studio backed by the lights of Los Angeles. Over her shoulder is the color still of Welles. She is smiling.

RONA BARRETT
The L.A. County Coroner’s Office is saying Welles died of natural causes. But in recent years he has suffered from diabetes and a heart ailment. Welles last role was to introduce a black and white episode of ABC’s “Moonlighting,” which will air next Tuesday night.

Television image shudders to a freeze frame. Sound of match being struck.

How does Orson Welles feel about working under a neophyte director name Henry Jaglom who is making his first movie? In a 1970 New York magazine profile by Julie Baumgold he feels pretty damn good.

Tuesday Weld tosses her head. There’s a small tempest of blond split ends.

The man with the clapboard runs in, clacks it in front of Orson Welles’ face, runs out and drops to an immediate crouch. Very still.

“Tell me a story,” says Tuesday, peering at the magnificent hulk on the rock beside her.

“Somewhere in the world there is a city that contains all cities…” says Orson Welles, sending private sonic booms of Jewishness through the wires to the director’s headset.

Immediately the sky cracks open. A savage glare streaks through the dun. Regular God-of-Vengeance bolts are coming now and huge plops of rain, pocking the duck pond.

The actors move for the plastic blankets. But the director is impatient. They are wasting the frenzy. He sends them back to the rock. Tuesday’s long white maidenly dress turns limp and sheer against her flesh. Welles sits immobile, gloriously roughed up from above, a cranky barbarian idol you tiptoe past, depositing your piece of worship, and leave relieved.

“Look at the sky,” the director calls. Welles raises his head and bellows, “God. God. God.”

And yes. Welles stops the storm.

A little overdue action from up there. Harking, at last, to the master of the hoax. It’s none of this mongrel magic like pulling dollar bills from Tuesday Weld’s hair or levitating silver balls that he has been doing throughout the filming of A Safe Place. No, this is real, and Welles is laughing. He walks over to the camera and the rapturous crew, the ego crusts washed off. The pouches under his eyes spilling sweet stores of sweat and rain. “This is the greatest day of my life. If this had happened on a movie of mine, I wouldn’t just be standing here. Be excited, Henry”, he says to Henry Jaglom, his stunned director. And in the care going back to the Essex House, “God must really love you, Henry. He would never have done that for me”.

Little bits of Henry Jaglom’s 32-year-old life came up into his throat and kicked around there as he stood outside. Orson Welles’ door at the Plaza a couple of months ago at midnight. Like the first time he met Jerry Lewis and Lewis kept handing him a cigarette, making him reach for it, then drawing back finally reaching forward, deliberately cracking the cigarette in half and dropping it into Henry’s hands. The time Henry walked into the screen room to edit Easy Rider. Vomiting in the Peruvian Andes… things like that.

Orson Welles emerged from the Plaza chiaroscuro in deep blue silk pajamas. Henry has been warned that Welles has no interest in acting in a movie made in America. Also out of the question was anything with sex or any part not written down. Welles stood there in the doorway, looking at Henry in his jeans and workshirt and Gucci bracelets in the same way he occasionally looks at a cigar ash which has spilled on his suit.

That night Henry said, “I want to persuade you to act in a movie that I have written and I am directing even though you have never heard of me and it is a part not written on paper but one we must create.” As Henry tells it, “Welles got up off bed and I was sure he was going to throw me out and I got mad. ‘Shut up and sit down and listen. I’ve flown all the way from California just to talk to you and you are going to give me an hour and then you can throw me out’. ‘Go right ahead’, Welles said, sitting down and folding his arms, ‘but I’m not going to listen’. I told him he would be someone who does not exist except in the mind of a young girl who needs him. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Welles said. ‘That’s why it can’t be written on paper’, I said. I was so desperate that I created on my feet, there and then, the part of a lapsed rabbi from a family of ‘wonder rabbis’ – I always thought there was something very Jewish about Welles – a man who never quite made it and came here to become a chess burn living off the few dollars he wins at chess and cheap magic. He believes he could do real magic if he can only do one thing. ‘What? I had no idea, of course, so I said, ‘I can’t tell you that now’. And then it occurred to me. ‘He makes himself disappear.’‘Can I wear a cape?’ Welles asked.”

At the end of a day on the chess mound, the men lift their elbows off the little newspaper pillows, pack their plastic castles into paper bags and leave the park. The carousel hurdy-gurdy surrenders to beer-sponsored rock at the Wollman rink. The park is taken over by its Levi’d nightlords. It is twilight now. Half the mound is roped off where they are filming A Safe Place.

By dramatic rights Orson Welles should be approached through some elaborate cluster of bodies and objects like the great hall of statuary in Citizen Kane, the hundreds of burning candles in The Trial. Here, perhaps, among 1,000 chess players. Because he is always, as Cocoteau described him, “a solitude surrounded by humanity”.

Orson Welles gets up from a red bench and there is a stir of people turning sideways, pulling in limbs, the crew leaping backward in their sneakers as though the man could scorch. Welles stands in the waiting room of his own greatness, a man who has done the Big Thing. Maybe a man has only one empire in him, one Big Thing. If so Welles did his Big Thing 30 years ago. Now, a branded genius, he is wrapped in the automatic majesty of the Big Man. Borrowing further from the “great bastards” he has left crumbled in their fabulous ruins: Kane in his unfinished Xanadu, O’Hara in the smashed Hall of Mirrors, Falstaff, Othello, Macbeth, even Edward Rochester, blind in burned-out Thornfield.

Orson Welles roars – sitting still and silent. Rising up from the character of the battered old Jew. The pale eyes are concentrated as those above a surgical mask. Without makeup, he has this perfectly ordinary face: a highland boy with turned-up nose, a giant soiled Wisconsin cherub under the gray beard. His small feet are tucked under him, the ankles rolling over the leather. Across the chess table from him is a tiny Jewish ancient. A petrified quiver of a man, 60 years an actor, who is to play chess with Mr. Welles. He is there as a human prop, a tool for Welles to work with. He will be edited out of the film, but neither he nor Welles knows this.

Welles is given some chess pieces and asked to set up his game for the next shot. He says he can’t.

It seems strange that Orson Welles doesn’t know chess. Somehow, just as one thinks of Robert Mitchum frozen in some blue neon back room, his exhausted eyelids hooded over a colossal poker bluff, one sees grandmaster Welles in a leathery club gloating ten moves ahead over his endgame.

Welles, at the end of his first day of shooting, has made it clear he is on the wrong side of the camera. “He hates being an actor: he fights the process”, Henry Jaglom says. And if a movie set is a temporary country, a director is a permanent dictator. Dissolve the country and he searches out another. And then there is that wonderful time of lighting it and building it and peopling it and the obedience – it is so quick, so sure. Without his country, his stockpile of obedience, a director is usually cranky, and Welles is a director.

Somehow every other director is a usurper, and here is Henry Jaglom, bounding around in his white Caperzios, throwing handfuls of crushed rice cakes down his throat. With his pony tail, his cultured jeans, Mighty Mouse watch and $1 million from Columbia Pictures. Plus the holy rights of Final Cut and Autonomy – rights that have kept Orson Welles on his knees in the money temple for 30 years, rights that no UCLA student or former film critic would consent to work without today.

Henry is an actor who once psychedout in a movie called “Psych-Out.” Who spend six months blazing like a rhinestone for Screen Gems. Who went to Peru to film a bit in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” equipped with 40 cans of Chicken of the Sea tuna and 30 cases of Almond Joys. After a few desperately sick days Henry punched his fist through a glass door to get at the company doctor who had refused him medicine and wound up in a healing week-long orgy of room service at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Henry’s biggest credit, however was a part in the editing of “Easy Rider,” that great blaze on the torch of the nightgowned Columbia Pictures nymph. It was “Easy Rider” which lead to Autonomy-Final Cut deals for Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Henry, mostly under the aegis of Bert Schneider (middle son of Abe, President of Columbia Pictures), who is producing Henry’s film. Bert Schneider, creator of the Monkees, producer of “Five Easy Pieces” and “Drive,” a man who looks like a hearty Peter Fonda, is the perfect producer for the new directors in that he understands, says yes, and disappears.

So easy. While Welles is down on his knees in the temple. A jilted god. Eight films in twenty years – only once with the right of final cut. “After Citizen Kane,” the Big Thing, there remain only pieces of exploded genius ego. A celluloid triangle of films unfinished, disowned, canceled. And Welles, who has hustled moguls all over the world for money, had his office bugged by Harry Cohn, sold his God’s-own-voice-over voice to Eastern Airlines, a South Seas travelogue and his most recent self travesty, an album called “The Begetting of the President.” Magician of the makeshift, obliged to be inventive against unnatural obstacles that money could have solved. Always in exile, in transit.

It has not been an easy day.

After refusing to work the day before because his props weren’t ready, Welles called Henry that morning at two to quit.

“I did a strong number on him and told him that he didn’t work today. I’d see to it that he wouldn’t work for the next six or seven years. He’s so damn insecure, but of course he needed money,” says Henry.

And so Welles appeared. Fluffing, balking, refusing to look directly into the camera because he said it was the most revealing thing an actor could do.

There on the mound Welles bumped right up against that other great twentieth-century victim of precocity, Tuesday Weld, the original sixteen-year-old sinner who was always going on thirty in her mount. Just another Hollywood ponytail doing movies like “Rock Rock Rock!” and “Sex Kittens Go To College” before crawling out from the vivacious vacuity to become a Real Actress in “Lord Love a Duck” and “Pretty Poison.” Ironic, these two in a movie whose theme is the unwillingness to be reconciled to the loss of childhood.

Tuesday and Welles do a scene. She drifts in like a flower wilting, trailing her lightly bitten nails over Welles shoulder. She leans down and he plucks a dollar bill from her hair.

The scene is done again and again, as everything has been that day. Welles is enraged that they are being given equal treatment. He is a star in a character part, only there for a week; she has the rest of the picture. So he has spent the day crowding her out of shots, walking in front of her, pushing her back to the camera. When the camera is on her, he plays the scene badly. When it is on him, he plays it well. He keeps wanting her to exit so that the shot will end with him looking after her. Orson Welles does not like to be seen walking away.

Orson Welles also does not like anything in his line of vision. He stops, enraged, because he can see Tuesday brushing her hair. Finally Henry has to use two cameras. He keeps one on Welles, sneaks the other on Tuesday.

At the end of one scene Henry says to Welles, “You over-acted that”.

“Don’t forget this is your first movie, Henry.”

“Yes, and yours was ‘Citizen Kane’.”

Part of what Henry is filming is Loose Movie Soup. The idea is to have people kind of dropping in around the camera and chatting it up, being their own Fabulously Interesting Selves. Then Henry throws in someone else and they all chat it up – the Russian professor from the University of Tennessee, the Israeli seaman, the Peruvian female photographer who is dressed like a train conductor, the speech therapist from Brooklyn who tells about her two imaginary childhood friends. All of them looking into the camera, heads usually cocked into artistic wistfulness, telling their stories, script less, makeup less in a kind of supreme Warholian flounder. And if the great god of vibes is good they will reach the full fever pitch of some heavy, all-night discussion held in the University of Pennsylvania dorms in 1951, or in the lobby of the Turista Hotel in Cuzco, discussions which Henry will never forget.

It is not necessary to have actors for Group Movie Soup, just these Fabulously Interesting People with their Real Faces. Of course, one peril in using amateurs is having the Russian professor from the University of Tennessee suddenly mention the director’s name in the middle of the take (“Don’t ever say ‘Henry’, Jim”). Well, too bad.

What about acting? It has become reacting. Right back to all those Actors Studio improve classes. Spontaneous response. The cult of Chance and Accident. A climate of mystification, in which almost no one has read the script except the director – a fact which lends him definite authority and omniscience.

Good Loose Movie Soup is made to work in the editing room. While the producer who has promised autonomy stands and chews his cavalry twill cuffs out in the hall, the director puts the bits together like Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane doing one of her mammoth jigsaw puzzles.

Henry Jaglom has worked with Tuesday, a professional since she was six, to get her into the Soup – to rid her of her trained rigidity and makeup kit. “He actually got her working without makeup”, is repeated all over the set, in some kind of New Hollywood litany. In six weeks of throwing people into scenes like so many won-tons, he has brought her to a looseness where she asks, actually asks, to work without rehearsals.

Just at this point in her spiritual development Welles arrives, a perfectionist in this mass wing-it who is known to have directed himself through 78 takes of one scene before being satisfied, and then doing two extras to be sure. Yes Welles appears carrying a black granular leather-bound script. Insisting that his long monologues be blocked out on idiot cards. He takes one look at the newly unfettered Tuesday and says; “I think I’ll play this scene with the Tuesday Weld system: Winging it.”

For Henry, Welles’ way just isn’t life: “Welles is one of the best examples of a false way of working where things are structured, disciplined and organized. He is without spontaneity; an accident throws him. He works better with a piece of glass than a person”.

So Welles is not only a dictator without a country, but a reactionary. Forget his deep-focus lens, the modern-dress “Julius Caesar,” the all-Negro “Macbeth,” the overlapping dialogue, the telescoped time elapse. Forget the fact that Welles was into the buddy system with the Mercury players – using his manager, chauffeur, cook, secretary and public relations man in “Journey into Fear” (1942), upsetting his actors so they could give spontaneous performances in “The Lady from Shanghai” (1948).

Welles and the young Winger are side by side in front of the pony rides at the zoo. Welles is staring into his idiot cards, talking and talking, but no sound seems to come out. The great tunnel boom slips into his beard, travels into his wallet pocket mike, through his vest down his left leg, strapped with silver tape, into wires on the ground to the man with the headset and tape recorder and to Henry. The scene ends.

Welles, the best guardian of his own specialness, usually manages to vanish after shooting, standing over to the side watching for the crowds to clear. But now he is trapped. They are coming at him, holding out those little white scraps of paper. The civilians, as he calls them.

Welles gives them a look that would stop the King family from breeding. But they still come.

For them, Welles’ Big Thing was scaring half the people in the state of New Jersey (and a fair part of the whole country) out of their minds with the prospect of Martians trampling their Easy-Grow lawns. Gulling them, in fact, so you’d think that they’d be ashamed to admit it. But no, they’re proud. It seems wherever Welles goes there’s one of them, some definite New Jerseyite, his plaid sports shirt unbuttoned to show a dashing inch of Fruit of the Loom, coming at him clutching the wrong piece of his past. It usually begins like this.

“Jees, Mr. Welles, I can remember when you scared me out of…”

And Welles sits there confronted with this discharge of his glory, this easy part, this cheaper dazzle.

Sometimes the buffs were worse. Those earnest filmic creatures with their dank Elgin pallors and camera of eyeballs. They usually turn up with one of the little fascinating filmic mutilations in mind. Welles braces himself, one of his four public expressions sliding over his face: the Suffer the Little Creatures To Come Unto Me; the Hearty Brusque; the Great Protective Bland; and the basic Beat It, Kid look.

Then, too, he has developed a television persona. No longer is he the token dramatic voice paraded out to the single spotlight with his abridged Shakespearean monologue. He has become a sort of populist intellectual scaled down and muted so the box can contain him, suddenly acceptable.

90 minutes on Dick Cavett, guest host on the David Frost swivel chair, swiveling to Norman Mailer and conducting this perfectly David Frostian (temporarily quash the ego) interview, only occasionally bursting forth.

Welles gathers himself into the green Rebel station wagon which rolls through throngs of oblivious kids. At lunch he often goes back to the Essex House, which is fringed with the autograph claque waiting for “Tuesday”, as they refer to her, implying great stores of informal friendship. Welles is staying at the Essex House with his Yugoslavian mistress, Oja, in an adjoining room. She is never seen. The door is always closed and the only evidence of her existence is the occasional food tray in the corridor showing signs of a mild appetite.

Henry walks through the zoo where he used to go when he was a rich little boy in New York, following bums around to stuff a dollar in their pockets. “This movie gives me a chance to play with my life as a toy”, he says.

This day is going better, for Welles and Jaglom have made a pact. Welles can do any scene as many times as he wants until he feels it’s right. He has control over how it is shot. “He was astounded”, Henry says. He said no one had ever offered him that before. Welles will also be allowed to tell some of the long stories he has wanted to get into movies for twenty years. Henry intends to cut them out.

A marmalade orangutan shaped like a diseased persimmon sites with her hand in her lap looking at Welles. Welles squints. Pinches his face. Then relaxes. As though in a primal struggle with demonic bathroom problems. He is trying to make the animal disappear.

The ropes are up. The zoo crowds are tight and hot and silenced. Children nudging against their legs.

Between takes they find out the movie’s name, identify Welles, feeling in this way that they, the herds, can own a piece of the special beasts. There are all these metaphysical cages to deal with – the animal in his cage, Welles in his cage of wires and excess flesh, the crowd behind the ropes.

The crew is in a pit inside the Ilama cage shooting through the slimed-up bar. Welles is telling an informal version of Noah and the flood.

“Orson – er, Mr. Welles, if you could just get up”, says Henry.

A man holds the idiot cards.

“I like the cards to go too fast. I see them at a glance. I haven’t had four years of the Dean Martin Show three times a year for nothing”.

A pigeon flies down and perches at his feet. In the line of vision. “Beat it, pigeon,” he thunders.

Welles tells Henry to get his earphones on. Tells the camera it could be closer. Changes words in the script.

“It’s all right, the zebras can move all they want,” he shouts at the keeper.

“Can we open our minds to a thought? It’s not that I care but…”

“I haven’t got the guts to ask for another iced coffee, but if I hope and pray.” Welles’ seventh iced coffee is brought. He stretches out his arm and a technician is there to take the burning cigar. He holds out the mirror for Tuesday to comb her hair. “Now that’s what I call class, Orson Welles holding your mirror,” he says.

During one take Welles turns towards Tuesday, flings one leg over her and starts to straddle her.

“Cut”.

The crowd gasps. The crew laughs. They love him – expert to expert. “He could belch and it would be the world’s finest belch”, is the general attitude. The crew in their complicated mechanical world of dials and meter and lenses and filters and rolls of silvery magnetic tape are caught in the hostile gusts of Henry’s fantasy. Here among the clappers of clapboards, holders of reflectors, manipulators of shadows, masters of camouflage, spinners of wire, gaffers, sound mixers and grips, is a private unionized short-haired magic. Men who cannot understand fantasy. The crew are men who need order, and somehow in the chaos, the filmic brilliance, and the authority that is Welles they find it.
Henry Jaglom: “We are rolling.”

Orson Welles: “Yes, but the word is ‘Action’ when you want to go.”

Welles belongs in a palanquin on the sweaty shoulders of young cinematography majors. At the very least he deserves a Nubian or two following him around with a perpetual bench and a fan fronds. The afternoon of the storm Welles arrives at the duck pond and makes for a bench in the shade. Two men are sitting on it and Welles presents himself standing between them. One moves over. Welles gives him another look. He moves over further. The man looks ready to bolt. He fidgets around in his pocket, ruffling Welles, finally pulls out a scrap of paper and passes it to him. Welles signs his name. They still haven’t said a word.

The first takes are M.O.s (mittout sound), as they say. To set up the focus, the doubles for Tuesday and Welles are posed out on the rock in the duck pond having their second-rate charisma metered. Now Welles is out on the rock saying, “Reach into my pocket”. Tuesday draws out a glass globe of New York with all the postcard buildings together under a silver sequin snowstorm.

“Henry, you’re stealing from the best,” says Welles.

The cameraman is upset that one of the shots is not going to match – that the whole damn movie, in fact, will never come together in the cutting room. Later Welles tells Henry his method for dealing with crews: “When they give you trouble, just answer those c— s—— in monosyllables – ‘This is the dream sequence’ or ‘This is the fable sequence’ and be done with it. Never try to explain. I have a formula that I use: MP/YP. My Problem, Your Problem. It’s your problem to shoot, my problem to use.”

Jewishness has settled on Orson Welles. Persecution becomes him. Huge moral weights seem hung, talith-like, from his shoulders. He looks ready to argue obscure Talmudic interpretations while winding his phylacteries and taking his tea from a glass. His suit, severely crumpled from the previous day’s storm, has the exact Hasidic shabbiness of a voyage, shoulder to frock-coated shoulder, in a ship’s hold. He walks along with his script and his Dunhill Shakespeares ($32.50 a box). He lowers himself onto the bench, barely seeming to suppress the oys of muscular fatigue, and sits apart saying his lines to himself with the hand gestures and shoulder action appropriate to persecuted people, tempering the joy, tempering grief into a series of shrugs.

He tells a long story about a rabbi and a cantor. “What then?” is the punchline. He repeats the words, his voice roaming over them, mournful, triumphant, questioning, turning the little knobs in himself. The voice slightly up in joy. Reform, Conservative, Orthodox. Vocally traveling from Poland to Russia, the wandering Jew who can tell you great, life-changing stories.

The black couple lounge against their pram. They are both Flaunt-It-Baby lean and liquid, dressed all taut and snappy in high colors. The woman’s shirt is tied up high under her breasts. The man’s shirt says ART BOREDOM in two-inch-high capitals. Between them and Orson Welles is a kind of wary recognizance. Art, boredom, reactionary, irrelevance and We-Are-Our-Own-Show, Man plus kind of normal desire to stare. The rest of the bandshell area of Tompkins Park is filled with a scrabble of mongrel dogs. Welles has come down off the stage and is standing in front of the graffiti.

The stage is wrong for the illusion he wants to do, a hideous green men’s room-tile mosaic flanked by dirty doors. He stand there as a man beside the open hood of a Rolls-Royce – helpless before the collapse of a fine, expensive piece of machinery. All the mechanics of his illusion are fully displayed. Hanging out, as it were. He demands the area be cleared.

Welles agrees to stay over till they can find a better location for the trick, though this was to have been his last day. They do a couple of retakes of one of the monologues. Finally, on the ninth take he decides he just can’t look into the camera:
“I don’t believe the Jewish delivery is to anyone. It’s Biblical, angular, to the ground.”

A loud voice is coming from the crowd. This is part of the danger of using public places and making them private. An angry black man is just not having any of it. “Hey, man – this is my park. I got a perfect right to go where I want. No, I won’t be quiet. I’m going to say exactly what I want.” He does.

Orson Welles watches, waiting to do his job.

“If I could only do here what I did in my bathroom at six this morning I’d have Oscars reaching from here to…” Just imagine – Welles in the roseate dawn davening into his Essex House mirror. His face lathered up, stropping his English razor while the elusive Oja drifts around him. And the deep Jewishness of his voice, heavy as a block of halvah.

Tuesday is excused to her “air-conditioned depositorium,” as Welles calls it, so “you can prepare to drive me mad later this afternoon.” Welles is doing a story that he always wanted to do in a film. Henry is appeasing him, but he will cut it out of the picture.

“Burdens, burdens. Young and beautiful, old and rich. Burdens is when you have a director that doesn’t say ‘cut’”.

Welles on his last day is downright jolly, even making jokes: “You know the story about the man on the park bench. A pigeon craps on his hand. He turns to the man next to him and says, ‘And for other people they sing.’”

Right in the center, the hully-gully heart of the earth bowl, Orson Welles works his magic. It is unbearably poetic. The deep green end-of-day stillness, the silent crowds fringing the hills and the magician in the very center.

The whole scene reflects off a silver globe shimmering in the dusk, rising up out of the old man’s carpetbag. Rising to his hands. Being banished and summoned. Hovering tremulously midair. Rising, swooping. Welles makes Biblical sweeps, fluttering his thick fingers.

“Oh, heavy, man. Far out,” says a young Farmer Gray type. He is naked except for a pair of brown overalls spilling rolls of slack flesh out the sides and he is focused in tight on that silver ball. A communal rapture rises from the hills. The kids on their way to a rock concert have found magic. They are all kind of strung out and pulled into that silver ball. Hyper-paranoids, washed in a stoned benevolence, they have found that magic is a safe place for their heads. Taught to look by a 21-inch box, they can see what the camera sees, squeezing out of the frame the two men up on ladder holding the tungsten wire that supports the ball, doing a mad parody of Welles’ actions.

“Cut! You must let me cut because I know the routine,” Welles says. At last, he is directing. “Let’s not have any civilians touching that wire”.

Suddenly with that tribal talent that can hear the plugs on the amps being socketed, the kids run to line up for the concert. The meadow is almost cleared.

They are doing that last scene.

“That was fan-tas-tic,” says Tuesday, cradling the silver ball.

“End-sticks,” says Henry. The man with the clapboard bangs it down. “We’re wrapping.”

Welles shrugs, weary with the trickery, the impossibly beautiful sham instead of the final magic to restore his powers.

Henry cuts. Welles shakes hands with the crew, looking carefully for anyone he may have missed. Tuesday hugs him. Henry thanks him almost humbly.

A few days later “Citizen Kane” is shown on television, ridden with commercials, some of them advertising a hollow little movie so “important” that it would be shown without commercial interruption.

Christopher is the daughter of Welles’ first wife, Virginia Nicolson, a socialite who had a brief acting career and an equally brief marriage to the mercurial young Orson.

Their relationship came to a sudden end when Virginia visited a hotel room Welles was keeping in New York City and found a cache of love letters from other women, including her nest friend. Even though Virginia was pregnant with Christopher, she tried to throw herself out a window but couldn’t get it to open.

The fact that Virginia’s last name is often misspelled (as Nicholson) in writings on Welles is a sign of how deeply she and her daughter vanished into obscurity, making them tantalizingly vague figures in biographies of Welles. You could get cryptic glimpses of Christopher, at age nine, acting in her father’s 1948 film of “Macbeth,” oddly cast as the murdered boy child of Macduff.

Welles assumed his first-born would be a boy. When she was born he sent a telegram to friends and associates that stated, ‘Christopher, she is born.’

When she asked him about her name, he replied, ‘Your name has a marvelous ring to it, don’t you think? You’re the only girl in the world who is named Christopher, and that makes you unique as well as beautiful.’

Chris became the only girl to attend the Todd School for Boys, the progressive Illinois boarding school run by Roger Hill, Orson’s surrogate father. The same school Orson and his forgotten brother, Richard, attended.

Has anyone found Welles’s Rosebud? In a 1996 Los Angeles Magazine adaptation from a controversial new biography by David Thomson, the director of the greatest film of all time is finally revealed not as a martyr to Hollywood but as the auteur of his own failure.

He was alone on the night of October 9, 1985, which is not the same as lonely. He was not well or strong. He was too heavy, he has diabetes; his heart was exhausted. He had his own mother lode of disappointment, rejection and failure. But that fragility is not the same as self-pity or even melancholy. He had always been the most important person in his own drama. His “failure” was a sustaining tragedy – his thing, his song. He was not a possessive man in obvious ways, not with money or people. He let those things slip through his hands. But some airs and attributes he kept: command, the magician’s power, the rights on self-destruction.

He was uncommonly lucid about himself and acted on it. He was not like others. They could not be like him. Why are there so few of you, he has taunted audiences, and so many of me?

He had known great friendships, he had moved men and women with his anecdotes, laughter and heady company – yet something in him was resistant to giving up loneness, something implacable in his soul that depended on being isolated, whether in Xanadu or a relatively modest place in the Hollywood Hills.

He dies alone that night, sitting in his chair, typing up script for things he meant to film the next day. In the early hours, he called his friend Henry Jaglom, a director born two years before Citizen Kane opened. His best friend? There were arguments over that. Some said that for years, Jaglom had made a habit of recording his conversations with Welles. Some said Welles had never known about the recording – he’d been set up, bugged, like the character he played in Touch of Evil. Some said Welles had discovered this and felt betrayed.

Perhaps. But Welles knew Jaglom – he’d had years to look into the face of a smart, talented, rich, insecure and very needy man. He saw how he was a model and a father for Jaglom, a god who might grant him admiration or fellowship. And Welles was fascinated by neediness in others – he could see it from a distance, like connoisseur. Moreover, he had been in the business of being betrayed all his life. He used it as a way of always being right, superior and alone.

He wasn’t a simple or straightforward person, not necessarily a nice man – no one to sentimentalize. Still, he left a message on Jaglom’s answering machine in the middle of the night: “This is your friend. Don’t forget to tell me how your mother is.”

When Jaglom woke up, the friend was dead – which surely adds to the magic of the message. There’s no reason to think Welles intended the sentences as last words. But he had a habit of leaving words hanging in the air, pregnant yet not quite born – rosebuds. Put it this way: He talked like a man who was forever uttering last words and leaving us to wonder whether rosebud was the promise of sweetness and flowering or a knob of youthful hardness. He had been wondrous and distant from birth, a prince and a devil, truly a director, someone who shaped everything, not least his “failure.”

No one had ever given Orson Welles so large and irremovable a “no” before 1942, when he was 27 and he lost The Magnificent Ambersons. There were parents who adored him – perhaps worshiped is a better word, for it conveys an obligatory distance. But there’s no suggestion anywhere that they ever dreamed or dares to say, “No, don’t play in the snow in just that sarong,” or “No, don’t make up those ugly words to go with Verdi.”

Richard Welles was an occasional inventor in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a dandy – his son would remember spats that were white, dove gray and mauve. He was also a drunk and a gambler who had his own brand of cigars. His son later claimed his father had designed an airplane and broken the bank at Monte Carlo. His wife, Beatrice, was a concert pianist until family hardship made her take up typing. She was ill often. According to her son, she was also a champion shot, a skilled jockey, a suffragist, and a scholar of East Indian literature.

One day, Orson’s story went, he had been practicing scales with a teacher when he stormed out, saying he would kill himself. He climbed out a window – this was the Ritz in Paris – and perched himself on the railing. But when the teacher fetched Mrs. Welles, she said, “Well, if he wants to jump, let him jump,” No one ever said, “No.”

By the time Orson was 15, both his parents were dead. The next year he went off to Ireland, alone, on a painting holiday. But when he arrived in Dublin, he offered himself to the Gate Theatre as providentially available young actor – “Orson Welles from America.”

His debut was noticed but was certainly not providential. He went to Spain for a while, writing pulp fiction and watching brothel life. Then, in the late 30’s, he took on New York. He staged his Harlem Macbeth, his modern-dress “Julius Caesar” and that sublime schoolboy trick, “War of the Worlds.” By then, there no need to pay his dues or eat Hollywood’s shit. He was Orson – he would eat steaks and cheesecake.

It worked, of course. RKO gave him carte blanche, and he made a film that, 55 years later, still looks the greatest of American films – as well as hid dead end. “Citizen Kane” was the first movie in America that needed to be seen more than once, that aspired to the depth of literature and music, that was also a black comedy about the fatuity of success, money, power and happiness – those bright apples in the eyes of Hollywood, FDR and William Randolph Hearst.

Not that Kane was simply about Hearst – Welles was far too self-centered for that. Kane’s character was based more on Orson: his charm, energy, self-destructiveness and solitude. After Kane, Welles knew he commanded a new world, but what next? He thought of politics – there’s little doubt he dreamed of being President. But that’s no job for one so easily distracted, and Welles’s gluttony, despair, solipsism and cruelty to others began in the fickle boredom of a genius who had no ordinary life.

So, by his contract, he made another film for RKO, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” based on Booth Tarkington’s novel. It is a story about love and family – and that sturdy Midwest life at the turn of the century, before progress spoiled it. As such, it is about all those strands of real life that Welles had seen – like a traveler on a passing train – without ever really possessing. It was the dark past where he might have been loved, and been able to love others.

Ambersons was an even greater film than Kane, an authentic tragedy – not mere “genius,” but human nature and loss help up to view. By early 1942, the film was shot and pretty well cut. But then, with all the boring chores of post-production waiting for him, Welles took off for Rio, and Carnival. He said he had to; it was for the war effort, to foster good relations with Latin America. He said he’d been asked – or told – to go by Nelson Rockefeller at the Office of Inter-American Affairs.

It wasn’t so. RKO had to pay for the whole thing – the government was no help. Welles went to get away, and for the women. It was a terrible gamble, a way of finding out just how powerful he was and how reckless he could be.

In his absence, the studio tested the film, and there were enough idiots who said it was too long, too sad, too serious, too dark. So, RKO took the film away, and the trusted people Welles had left behind were powerless to resist. RKO cut Ambersons from two plus hours to 88 minutes, ordered a “happy” ending and ensured a ruined- even lost – picture. His people begged Welles to come back, but Orson was having too much fun.

He had shot miles of film at Carnival, then began restaging the event to get more – all for a vague, episodic project called “It’s All True.” He was revealing Rio as a place where blacks and whites danced together – and much more. While at a nightclub to shoot chorus girls, Welles whispered in his manager’s ear, I’ve fucked that one… that one… and that one.” At the same time, there was a plan to re-create a heroic, 1,500 mile raft trip made by poor fisherman from northern Brazil to dramatize their lot. But during filming, the leader of the group drowned. “It’s All True” was never completed – and the footage went into limbo for decades.

As the studio began a campaign to discredit him, Welles’s associates worked to outflank them. Go back to Washington and get acclaim there, they cabled: “If somebody will come out with a thank-you statement, you will return a conquering hero.” But no one in Washington ever did. They regarded the whole Brazilian enterprise a typical Hollywood indulgence.

Welles made an inane tour of Latin America, kicking up stinks in Bolivia and Peru when he wasn’t greeted by U.S. embassy officials of sufficient status. By the time he returned to Hollywood, it was too late. Then, for the rest of his life, he told how RKO had coined the slogan “Showmanship instead of genius” so “they [could sell] their product on the basis that they no longer had me.” It was a grievance that shows how much genius meant to him, and how confused he was about his own showmanship. He took an air of being wronged or misunderstood that ill befit a showman. It may have been the beginning of the great load of flesh he could never lose.

Bit by bit, in the late 40s and 50s, Orson Welles gave up America and let the idea gather that it has dismissed him. There was a touch of retribution and humiliation in the process.

Of his vices, he admitted to melancholy and sloth. Gluttony, too, he had to accept, and with mixed feelings: “It certainly shows on me. But I feel that gluttony must be a good deal less deadly than some of the other sins. Because it’s affirmative, isn’t it? At least it celebrates some of the good things in life. Gluttony may be a sin, but an awful lot of fun goes into committing it. On the other hand, it’s wrong for a man to make a mess of himself. I’m fat, and people shouldn’t be fat.”

Tynan also asked about women. Welles had always had affairs; they tended to be with exotic, dark women, often those he was working with. But nobody ever got the impression they mattered much. Welles liked to seduce, but he seldom had lasting ties. (He had had three daughters, but only Beatrice lived with him very much.) His third marriage to Paola Mori had lasted but was not much more than a formality.

As he worked on “The Survivors,” Peter Viertel learned that Paola herself was having an affair, with an airline pilot. She was anxious whenever this man was away, and Welles saw the strain. She should probably have an affair, he confided to Viertel, they’re so relaxing.

But on and off throughout the 60s, Welles was himself engaged in the most significant love affair of his life. On a trip to Yugoslavia while making “The Trial” in 1962, he met a young woman name Olga Palinkas. She was dark, beautiful, warm, funny, smart – and at least 20 years his junior. She worked on TV in Zagreb, but it was said she was also an actress, a writer and a sculptress. Gradually, something of Welles’s mythmaking was added to the young woman’s considerable personality. She was, he said, half Hungarian, and another name was fashioned for her: Oja Kodar. One observer remarked on the deep impression she made on Welles: “She doesn’t need him to exist. He worships her because it’s the first intelligent woman he has had in his life.”

By the late 60s, Welles and Kodar were seen openly together. In 1967, onboard a yacht off the coast of Yugoslavia, he filmed parts of a movie called “The Deep,” a thriller starring Welles, Kodar, Jeanne Moreau and Laurence Harvey. In the space of two years, with several trips to Eastern Europe, much of the film – or most of a film – was shot. But there were gaps, and when Harvey died in 1973, there was still material involving him left to be done. Those who have seen passages of the film suggest it is conventional at best. There is the possibility that “The Deep” was always a front for the developing affair with Kodar.

Paola made no attempt to interfere. Not that her husband was an easy man to trace. In the late ‘60s Welles’s life was teeming with projects and prospects. He began to be in America more, if only to appear on “The Dean Martin Show” – he debuted there in September 1967, singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” with Dean while doing one of Shylock’s speeches from “The Merchant of Venice.” Twice, he helped novice directors by playing magicians in their first pictures: Brain De Palma’s “Get To Know Your Rabbit” and Henry Jaglom’s “A Safe Place.” He also played General Dreedle in Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22,” one of many films he had wanted to make himself.

While shooting “The Deep,” Welles talked to Kodar about a real collaboration, “The Other Side of the Wind,” an invocation of the ineffable that hints at the elusiveness of the project, which became a rambling, ongoing party as much as film.

It had begun years earlier in Spain, as Welles watched from a distance the progress of the elderly Hemingway following the bulls. The great man was surrounded by his cult and the clutter of lunches that always lasted until dinner. Welles was amused, even touched for he was not entirely averse to that kind of entourage himself. He was also tickled by the notion of the old artist repeating lines of his characters from books he could no longer match.

There was a script, “The Sacred Beasts,” in which the beasts were the bulls, the titans of art and the bullshit brigade. Kodar had then added to the stew – for in her sharp but sympathetic way, she may have had a clearer eye for the subject. Welles elected to make the Hemingway figure a movie director named Jake Hannaford. But Kodar had another slant on him: “[He] is a man who is still potent – it’s not that he is impotent – but gets a real kick from the idea of sleeping with his leading man, sleeping really with the woman of his leading man. So he is not a classic homosexual, but somewhere in his mind he is possessing that man by possessing his woman. And at the same time, he is very rough on open homosexuals.”

With Kodar’s changes, there were now two scripts packed into one. On the other hand, it’s also possible there was never really a script so much as the idea of a film. Welles asked John Huston to play Hannaford, and he agreed. But no script was delivered.

Then one day in July 1970, a young cameraman, Gary Graver, with just a few exploitation movies behind him, heard that Welles was at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He called up but was told the director had left. Graver went home to his apartment, where the phone was ringing. “Get over to the Beverly Hills Hotel right away,” said the familiar voice. “You’re only the second cameraman who has ever called me. The first was Gregg Toland [who shot Kane].”

At the hotel, Graver was required to shoot some tests for “The Other Side of the Wind” – and was hired. Within days, Welles was calling him Rembrandt. Graver would be Welles’s close associate for the rest of his life, a modest talent plucked from nowhere. The cameraman, of course, was devoted, loyal, obliging, self-sacrificing – the kind of slave who let Welles do much of his own lighting. But he was no Gregg Toland.

By 1971, “The Other Side of the Wind” was being shot, much of it in Carefree, Arizona. John Huston arrived and was magnificently unfazed when he found there still was no script, only speeches on pieces of paper. But he did not have to learn these, Welles said, it was enough to read them and come up with talk of his own, approximating the material.

Huston, who had been like a character most of his life, stood there in the light and did his best, assured by Welles he was in no way playing a version of himself for Orson. When Huston had a conversation to do, he was told the other person in the scene would be, or had been, Lilli Palmer. Huston was amazed at this, but, valiantly, did as he was told.

They were in Arizona for several months. There were kids doing elaborate catering, and there was Welles, in a purple robe, either lost in thought amid the turmoil of the set or bellowing that he was to be trusted and obeyed. All manner of talent came and went: Susan Strasberg, who played a spiteful film critic based on Pauline Kael; Welles’s friend Peter Bogdanovich; Rich Little; Edmond O’Brien; Cameron Mitchell; Paul Stewart; Mercedes McCambridge; and Oja Kodar, who managed to have better clothes, make up and scenes than anyone else.

There was filming later on in the San Fernando Valley – McCambridge recalled a scene in a yellow school bus inhabited by herself, O’Brien, Mitchell, Stewart and dummies (the point of which she could never grasp). “I don’t see how [the film] can ever be finished,” she said. “Those of us who began it are either dead or unrecognizably older.”

On another occasion, at sunset, McCambridge and Little were to stand side by side against the brilliant sky. It was a shot of their heads and shoulders, but Welles wanted a response to agitation beneath them.

“Why?” asked Little, striving to be professional.

“Why must I be challenged in such things?” Welles roared to the heavens. “I need your shoulders to be still, your hips to sway ever so slightly, a rocking on your heels that is barely noticeable, all of this will give me effect I need with the midgets that will be milling around your feet.”

“What midgets, Orson?”

Welles was too weary to answer, but a crew member quietly confided to the actor: “Mr. Welles says he’s going to be shooting them in Spain next month.”

It was filmmaking out of any control, subject only to the director’s will and whims. Who knows if there was ever anything like a script? Who knows how much was just the spur of the moment? But much footage was shot, and Welles was even seen editing it. The project acquired a producer. It stretched into the late 70s. welles and Kodar were said to have put $750,000 of their own money into it.

And there were other investors: a Spaniard and a French Iranian group headed by the Shah’s brother-in-law. But the Spaniard would end up pocketing the money, and Welles saw none of it. When he was given the American Film Institute’s Life Achivement Award in 1975, two scenes from the picture were shown, and the director used the occasion to beg for completion money. Then, when the Shah fled Iran, all foreign assets – including the film’s negative – were seized by Khomeini’s regime. Welles would die with the footage, its right and prospects subject to that medieval tyranny. The never ending party had turned into never-ending travesty.

For those who have to believe in Welles beyond a reasonable doubt, and for those would like to, “The Other Side of the Wind” is a paradise of possibility. Kodar thought I had great insight – its “shocking” sexuality was probably her doing. But for Welles, the picture was a terrible fantasy inflicted on reality, an imposition to friends and followers. It was a Xanadu – a place no one could go to but no one should forget.

The American movie was doing very well in the late 60s and early 70s. Maverick directors were making fresh, dangerous pictures that whispered to millions about the true, troubled state of the nation: Arthur Penn, John Boorman, Sam Pechinpah, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola. (Welles wanted to play Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” – “I would have sold my soul to have done it” – but Coppola never considered the possibility.)

All these filmmakers worshiped Welles and took for granted he’d made the status of movie director something to be honored. Nearly all of them remembered the impact of Kane when they were kids. They regarded Welles as a kind of necessary martyr, a Kong who would not perform for the hucksters. They saw that opposition as courage and integrity – it was not yet possible for them to know the helpless rebellion that had taken Welles away.

With so many luminaries aware of his legacy, the Motion Picture Academy in 1970 decided to grant Welles an honorary Oscar for “superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.” He was very touched but chose not to attend. He said he would feel foolish. So John Huston accepted on his behalf and Welles sent a clip “from Madrid.” “Good night, Orson, where ever you are,” said Huston at the Oscars, pretty sure that he was only a few miles away, watching on television.

The glory did not abate. The journal Sight & Sound polled critics and found not just that Kane was still the top film of all time, but that Ambersons now placed eighth in the top 10. Then in 1971, first in the New Yorker and later expanded in a book, Pauline Kael published “Raising Kane”. She was not, evidently, an enemy of Welles. In her review of “Chimes at Midnight,” she pointed out that “the one great creative force in American films in our time, the man who might have redeemed our movies from the general contempt in which they are held, is ironically – an expatriate director whose work thus reaches only the art-house and audience.”

In the years following that review, Kael’s stature had changed. She was now the most dynamic and influential movie critic in America, and “Raising Kane,” it turned out, had a thesis that easily concealed her admiration for Welles: Herman J. Mankiewicz had really written the movie, and Welles had tried over the years to steal credit for it and always been someone who needed writers and other brilliant collaborators. Kael had talked to selected sources; it emerged that she had also resisted talking to Welles, or his other close associates. So the appearance of research behind “Raising Kane” was misleading. Yet it helped give substance to the belligerent tone and the air of exposure.

There was a germ of truth to it all – Mankiewicz was a smart writer, with shrewd insights into Welles and his crafty vanity. But the bias in Kael’s approach blinded her to the ample evidence (later detailed by Bogdanovich and others) of how much Welles had contributed to the scenario. And it did not pay much attention to how modestly Mankiewicz and Toland had fared without Welles. The essay seemed calculated and less than conclusively accurate.

“Raising Kane” was a prolonged controversy. It brought out many defenders and only multiplied the number of times Kane was shown. Welles was injured, but that was good for him: It pierced the somber dignity that was a larger wrap than his cloaks; he was “relevant” again. And glamorous: How much more magic might there be in extra hints of fraud, misanthropy, charlatanism and melancholy?

The best evidence of that is the last picture Orson Welles completed. Backed by a French Company, L’Astrophore, “F for Fake” is flawless and astonishing – unlike anything anyone had ever done. Eighty five minutes of adroitly juggled reportage, fiction and documentary, the film is a reverie on art forgery, scams, practical jokes and the constant possibility of fraud. It involves Picasso; Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes; a great forger of famous paintings, Elmyr de Hory, and that celebrated perpetrator of public outrages. Orson Welles as narrator and on-camera guide. It is the lightest, wittiest film he would ever make. Released in the wake of Watergate, it is also a confession that warns us to trust nothing.

Welles painstakingly edited the film. In his later years, there are stories and tableaux of him in basements and hotel suites surrounded by Moviolas – like a circus maestro with a semicircle of adoring lions. In the windowless gloom of the editing room, he could work forever, talk back to the images, make them the obedient slaves of magic. That pose is evident in “F for Fake,” and it marks a transition in Welles the movie stylist.

In Kane and especially Ambersons, he’s loved extended takes and their unbroken ventures through space and time. But “F for Fake” is driven by montage, fragments (essentially unreliable) put together in the lovely, persuasive rhythms of manipulation. In other words, Welles had taken on a growing awareness of film as fraud.

“F for Fake” was made in 1973 in the immediate aftermath of “Raising Kane,” as was the first attempt at “The Other Side of the Wind.” But if that misbegotten project is helpless proof of all Pauline Kael’s worst suspicions, “F for Fake” is the droll retort. Her attack had freed Welles, and, once exposed, he flowered. That might have been predicted – after all, he was a trickster. He had lied with “War of the Worlds;” he had wondrously confused fact and fiction in Kane.

It comes to this: Welles had read Kael and seen the light at the end of his own tunnel. Nothing else redeemed the futility he had seen and felt since Kane. F for Futility, F for Fate – and F for Fuck Off. The exhilaration of “F for Fake” came from the discovery that there is no higher calling than being a magician, a storyteller, a fraud who passes the time. This is the work in which Welles finally reconciled the European-intellectual aspect of himself and the tent-show demon who sawed cute dames and wild dreams in half. For it can be very hard to live with the belief that nothing matter in life, that nothing is solid or real, that everything is a show in the egotist’s head. It loses friends, trust, children, home, money, security and maybe reason. So it is comforting indeed, late in life, to come upon proof that the emptiness and trickery are in themselves valid and sufficient.

Finally, if “F for Fake” is exhilarating, it is also because of Oja Kodar. She is the naked lady who makes a monkey out of Picasso in its climax. She is more than Welles’s accomplice and model, though – she seems to be his friend. Early on at the railway station, as Welles, in black clock and black Spanish hat, does elementary magic for a little boy, she is there, in furs, to say, “Up to your old tricks again, I see”. It is a sweet, generous moment – a woman in his work was never so natural, so kind or life enhancing. Kodar relaxed Welles, took the edge off his misogyny and made his gazing eyes innocent, sexual and unashamed. We feel happy for him.

“F for Fake” blows Welles’s cover for a world smart enough to see. He knew it was a new kind of film. It could have secured a new future. But the world missed that; “F for Fake” hardly played. No one much noticed the warmth, the fun or the sexiness. He was safe: He was still that famous failure, Orson Welles.

In 1974, he came back to America to be on call for the L.A. talk shows that wanted him. He bought on the edge of Las Vegas, and there parked Paola and Beatrice. But he really lived in the Hollywood Hills, more or less with Oja, though she was definite about maintaining her independence. He became a famous public figure, an inescapable monument to himself. He got into the habit of lunching at Patrick Terrail’s Ma Maison – became, in fact, a reason for going to the place. He had his own table and could be beheld, drooping over a chair, often in the company a small poodle, Kiki. He was on show in a city that prizes leanness above most things. He did his best.

Like anyone weighing 350 pounds, he had back trouble and high blood pressure. There would be diabetes and heart trouble very soon. He stopped drinking – and drink had been energy for him. The laugh became thinner and creakier without booze. The cigars were more and more props instead of pleasure. But he had to stay cheerful and seem robust. He had to laugh at a Burt Reynolds joke about his size and smile on that insecure actor so Burt would not give up on him. Reynolds was big then – even a meal ticket for Welles. A poodle, Las Vegas and Burt Reynolds: Is this hell?

He was a parody of being busy, public performances and private dreams. He was doing commercials for just about any product that asked; he was always on “The Tonight Show” and Merv Griffin; he would narrate documentaries (so long as his contract made clear he never had to look at the picture). He was an actor still, with Pia Zadora in “Butterfly” and in some of the Muppet movies, talking to the animals.

There was another ongoing project, “The Magic Show,” current for at least 12 years of his life. Welles was collecting old tricks, making reflections on the nature of magic and throwing in as many other ideas as he could think of. Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson were, from time to time, participants in the film, pieces of which were shot over the years as money and studio space became available. On one occasion, Welles and Dickinson posed for a photograph that is touchingly comic. Welles, in a dark suit and untucked black shirt, is sitting in what looks like a sort of electric chair. There is a cigar in his right hand. Dickinson is doing her best to stay on his lap, but the stomach is so far-reaching, there in not enough lap. So the slender actress leans back against him, perched on one knee, and throws her arm around his neck to avoid falling over.

Loneliness dominated, no matter that Welles was so often at the head of the table or in the chair on a talk show to which all other were turned. He knew “everyone” yet kept only a very few friends.

Robert Kensinger was a young movie enthusiast who went to work for Welles in 1978. Welles lived then on Wonderland Avenue, off Laurel Canyon, “renting”, according to Kensinger, “a crummy little tract house – such a shabby, unemotional piece of architecture.” The garden was littered with Macanudo cigar butts. The interiors were cramped. His bathtub was full of old books. His closet had maybe 30 identical black silk shirts. The place “felt almost like a hotel room. He didn’t do anything to leave a personal mark.”

Welles often sat in the dark in a lounger watching television – but rarely seeing movies. When out in public, he didn’t drink and ate carefully. But at home there were binges.

Kodar kept a room in the house. They did a lot together, but she wasn’t always there. Kensinger could see their fondness, and he believed there was no other woman in Welles’s life, but he said, “I think his sex life was essentially over.”

There was another young man, a valet whom Welles hated but endured. Once, Kensinger observed Welles asking the kid to get him a pair of scissors.

“Why?” asked the kid insolently.

“So I can stab you,” said Welles.

He had become friends with Jaglom, who had cast him in “A Safe Place.” Jaglom was an independent filmmaker: He made films usually with his own money, then sold them himself – very shrewdly. He adored Welles and treasured his sweetness. They often lunched together, and Jaglom began to keep tapes of those occasions – for use someday in a book. Jaglom did all he could to encourage the older man and help his career. In return, Welles gave Jaglom advice: “Never need Hollywood. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do. And never make a movie for anyone else, or on some idea of what other people will like”. It was Jaglom who facilitated a meeting between Welles and Barbara Leaming, who would become his official and very generous biographer. And it was Jaglom who urged him into a project called “The Big Brass Ring.”

The film has never been made. Four years after Welles’s death, Gore Vidal – a friendly acquaintance who often invited him to dinner only to get some last-minute excuse (an early night before tomorrow’s dog-food commercial) – wrote an appreciation of him for the New York Review of books, which concluded with a tribute to the script for “The Big Brass Ring” (“Plainly [Welles] at the top of his gliterring form”).

The script had been published, modestly, in 1987, as a work by Orson Welles “with Oja Kodar”. It has an afterword that recounts the efforts made by Welles and Jaglom to get the picture made. Allegedly, there was $8 million for it with Arnon Milchan to produce. All that was needed was a big star to play the lead of Sen. Blake Pellarin, a man of presidential timber – or perhaps just made of wood. Six actors were offered the chance for $2 million: Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds. All declined. Jaglom takes that as the last evidence of the crassness of the Hollywood system and a virtual conspiracy to ensure the “failure” of Orson Welles.

On the other hand, decisions not to play Blake Pellarin seem to be evidence that one can be an international icon without losing all reason. “The Big Brass Ring” is as bad as anything Welles ever did or attempted. The script is one more lame try at the thriller genre. Quite swiftly, the action confronts Pellarin and Kim Menaker, a disgraced Roosevelt aide who is homosexual. Welles was to have played Menaker, but Orson was not gay – he couldn’t conceive of loving any other person. So we are left with just the romance he felt for himself, and the pathetic discovery that Menaker had kept a handkerchief, starchy from the ejaculate of his fantasizing over Pellarin. When Pellarin learns of it, the script asks him to utter a “sudden, terrible groan.” That was not what Beatty, Redford, Newman, Nicholson, Eastwood or even Reynolds had been looking for.

The long, doleful dialogues between Menaker and Pellarin are grotesque versions of the great make battles in Welles’s earlier work. “The Big Brass Ring” should never be forgotten – or abandoned – as a vital, illuminating footnote to the real egotistical drama and despair of Kane.

Welles kept on, even if now he needed a wheelchair at airports. He played a significant and charming role as a wise old man at the back of the theater in Jaglom’s “Someone to Love,” which would prove a gracious farewell. There was so much not finished: Ambersons, “The Deep,” “The Other Side of the Wind,” “The Big Brass Ring” – even “It’s All True” (in 1985, it was reported that more than 300 cans of the film had been found).

He was doing more work on “The Magic Show” in early October of that year. Barbara Leaming’s book, “Orson Welles: A Biography,” had just been published. He liked it, and why not? It was broadly accurate and very fond. He and Leaming had enjoyed good times together, and the book benefited enormously from his easy, flowing talk. It would have been meanspirited to check everything he said.

On October 9, he was on “The Merv Griffin Show” with Leaming, doing some light magic and helping promote the book. He did not look well – but he hadn’t ever really looked well. Magnificent, yes. But well?

He went to Ma Maison for dinner and then home. He seems to have done some work on the script for “The Magic Show.” But he was there in the house, alone, with no one to hear or report, when a massive heart attack killed him.

Had he lived, he would have been 81 this year. But the living was no longer much fun for someone who had been one of the great American hedonists. He was wry enough to know he needed to die, or vanish, to be recovered. And now he is everywhere – in biographies, in TV documentaries, in attempts to rescue the lost films. All of a sudden, his own America seems to realize that here once was a genius. Like Kane’s survivors, we can’t stop thinking about him.

It’s as if he is up to his old tricks, even directing our thoughts. Do we regret never really telling him how much he meant? Do we care anymore that he behaved badly? Or is it easier for him to be a dreamer who has us in his sleep, eager again to be seduced by that magical, utterly bogus voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Orson Welles.”

On the ground I spot two sheets of notepaper, lined and folded in half. I reach down, pick them up and unfold them.

The paper is dry, weathered. The top sheet is dated from last year and the name Steven is in the top right corner in a childish blue pen. The words below are spaced like a science experiment.

Hypothesis: Things change when they are buried in the ground.

What we need: 1) Glass bottle, 2) Sponge, 3) Texta, 4) Shiny paper, 5) Hard paper, 6) Plastic, 7) Newspaper, Pear.

What to do: 1) We bury them in the ground, 2) Wait one month, 3) Dig them out, 4) Compare them.

Prediction: After one month, you can only see a little bit of the pear or you can’t see the pear.

The word Conclusion is struck out. Then written again. Then the sentence that follows is scrawled in pencil.

The texta is the same, but the pear was disgusting, the paper is in partly, and the newspaper we can’t find it. The plastic is the same.

There’s more written on the second sheet. It’s all in pencil. It’s even got a title.

“Legocity Zombie Invasion”

The sunshine slowly across the window, a new day has begun. “Ding, Ring, Ring, Ding!” The clock was ringing. Fry turned the clock off. “A nice day!” said from Selena excitedly. Fry got off the bed and took a bath. When he walked to the kitchen, Selena was cooking breakfast for him.

When Fry was walking to the car, he saw Selena was standing next to the door and watching him (so sweet). Fry got in to the car and drive it away. Behind the car, Selena was standing there, watching the car, until the car had disappeared in her eyes.

On the road to Lego City, Fry was driving the car. Meanwhile, he is thinking about what he is going to do in his company. But suddenly, a crash stopped his thinking. A bus crashed into a truck, and then two more cars crashed into the bus. People get out of their cars, some are screaming, some a swearing, a teenager walked to the truck, the shadow and the fire covered his face. And then “AH!” A zombie comes out, running to the people standing there.

Where do stories come from? Sometimes they’re just waiting for you to be pick them up.

I was talking with a friend about the future of retail the other day.

He mentioned how impressed he was with the Dyson store in downtown Tokyo. The billboard down the front of the building was bigger than the entire store below.

Just 60 square meters with Dyson vacuum cleaners and fans displayed in the best possible light. Incredibly insightful videos from the designers and engineers projected onto the wall. Incredibly helpful staff ready to answer any question.

The staff were ready to help you turn on or off any model so you could use it for real. So you could see for yourself what all the fuss was about.

After spending ten minutes in the store, my friend wanted to buy a Dyson vacuum cleaner. That’s right. He wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner, somehow fit it in his luggage and bring it back to Australia.

Let me assure you that is not the Australian or New Zealand retail experience.

Have you been into a white goods retailer like Retravision or Harvey Norman lately? All the fridges lined up against a wall, leaning against each other. Sales assistants with zero product knowledge pushing whatever they get a better commission on. Yellow energy stickers that make no sense. Smell of worn styrofoam.

What about an Apple Store? Have you been in an Apple Store? (Perhaps the Apple Store in Regent Street, London, with annual sales of $90 million a year?)

Like Apple, you need your own stand alone retail stores that can provide a unique and complete Fisher & Paykel experience. The complete Fisher & Paykel story.

Don’t think of them as simply showrooms. Think of them as 3D sensory advertisements. A place where anyone can walk in and see the entire range of Fisher & Paykel products. Real kitchens and real laundries with real Fisher & Paykel appliances.

Fridges with real food and drink inside. So instead of telling me how well it chills wine, you can serve me a glass of Chardonnay at the perfect temperature.

Instead of telling me how it stores cheese so well, you can serve me a slice of brie. Instead of telling me how fresh it keep strawberries, you can actually offer me one to taste.

Then you’d engage all my senses. I can see how they work, I can hear how silently they run, I can smell how clean they are, I can feel how easily their doors opens, I can taste how fresh they keep food.

Oh, coconut gelato? I don’t mind if I do.

Thanks

 
   
   stefano.boscutti@boscutti.com

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