Artists often don’t fit into boxes. Though it can seem unfair, many artists, despite whatever shortcomings they may have as people, produce work that speaks to us. It’s a paradox. Orson Welles was one. I have great respect for Welles. Even when his work is uneven, usually due to extreme budget limitations, I like his enthusiasm. He never gave up. When he received his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, he said that he worked to earn money to subsidize his work. He said he was crazy.
This type of insanity is something artists do because of an inner calling, a necessity, which overrides external logic. Welles paid a price. It must’ve been difficult for Welles with the reputation of being one of the, if not the greatest. living filmmakers while surrounded by endless people who wanted to take his place or play director with him and give orders. Consider the Findus Frozen Foods commercials.
Welles knows what’s happening, he does his line perfectly and then the commercial director tells him to do it again. It’s a power game where the little man has a chance to play boss. Compare that to what Mel Brooks says about working with Welles.
Brooks didn’t have ego issues. He, like Welles, knew what he wanted. Once he got it, he was satisfied. No power plays were needed. Only dissatisfied people find it necessary to impose themselves upon others and their work. Welles made the Findus Frozen Foods spot in the late-1960s when he was scurrying around raising money to finish Chimes at Midnight, his film on Shakespeare which is an amalgam of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry the Fourth parts One and Two and Henry the Fifth. It was just one of the films he self-produced beginning in the 1950s. These include Mr. Arkadin, Macbeth, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind. Each of these films is a study in ingenuity in which Welles juggled shoestring budgets to maximum effect. For example, the bath scene in Othello, in which everyone wears towels, was designed to escape costume costs and was shot in at least three different locations over the period of a couple years.
His last feature film, The Other Side of the Wind, made at his own expense to relaunch his career, is symbolic of much of his post-Citizen Kane existence. He shot it over a period of years, doing whatever he had to get the money together and to get material. For the scenes on the backlot, he and his crew snuck into Paramount studios to shoot without permission.
Welles continued to take film roles he wasn’t really interested in, do commercials (such as the surrealistic Paul Masson wine ads), and do TV guest appearances to cobble together the money to finish the film. I find he always plays Orson Welles in these appearances, like self-parody. But despite his efforts, the negatives of The Other Side of the Wind were held for years in a vault over questions of rights. This is how things stood at his death in 1985.
Peter Bogdanovich finally finished the film a few years ago. Despite his past friendship with Welles, his cut of the film is an act of envy-based sabotage. Once again, it’s the story of the lesser man imposing himself upon the greater. Anyone who watches The Other Side of the Wind will see that, in all the scenes left unfinished by Welles, it’s poorly edited and drags. Compare its rhythm to Chimes at Midnight with its constant movement and the situation is clear. Welles never would’ve put it out as it currently stands, it was designed to be his comeback.
I’ve yet to see Welles in any film he didn’t direct himself where his performance is equal to those in his own films. He’s always an actor acting unless he writes the film himself and tailors the role for his personality and talent. Happily, in The Third Man, director Carol Reed, also a man with no personality issues, let Welles make as many suggestions as he felt like and so produced a masterpiece.
In The Spirit of Charles Lindbergh, Welles, reading from the flight log written by Lindbergh when flying The Spirit of St Louis across the Atlantic in 1927, speaks of the journey one makes as superior to the arrival.
In a message for a dying friend and never meant for the public, Welles wrote his own epitaph.