LM
Now, I've got here what Michael MacLiammoir wrote about you on his autobiography. It's the story when you arrived at the Gate Theater in Dublin.
OW
I know, i know that story.
(reading)
We've found a very tall young man with a very chubby face, full powerful lips, and disconcerting chinese eyes. He moved in leisurely manner from foot to foot, this is our chance to do something beautiful at last and where we're going to take it. He has some ageless, superb inner confidence that no one could blowout. That was his secret.
OW
It's wonderful description, but you can consider that the author is in London at the time thing is happening in Dublin. Michael was in London the first six weeks that I was in Gate Theatre. And I got my job only with Hilton and Michael never saw any of those stuffs that he writes about. But he could have told the story as well, he put himself as an eyewitness, that's perfectly alright.
(clip showing Michael MacmLiammoir interview)
LM
But you are saying, what, 18 years old?
OW
Yeah, it varied from 18 to 20, when I couldn't explain how I got to be that famous. I raised it up a little. That's why I got the cigar. I got cigars, smoke them that day in order to look older and kept the cigar in order to look like an older actor.
There are no part for anybody with such a baby face.
LM
There was one other thing you played about this time, also as an old man, and I think that was your very first film, The Hearts of Age.
OW
It's not a film. It's a little joke one Sunday afternoon.
v.o.
Welles' little joke with a few friends in 1934 has prompted at least one critic to see prophetic references to the images of Citizen Kane. Welles first wife, Virginia Nicholson, appears made-up as an old women. Welles himself is about to appear on film for the very first time.
OW
We all have seen somebody's surrealist film. We say let's make one. From 2 o'clock in the afternoon till 5 we shot some dumb stuffs and put it together just to amuse ourselves.
LM
You ought to write a book about it.
v.o.
When he is barely out of his teen, Orson Welles really had become a star at the New York Stage. And at the age of 23, he received the ultimate achievement, the cover of the Time Magazine.
He joined forces with the producers John Housemen to create one of the legendary theatre company of America, the Mercury theatre. The first production was the modern version of Julius Caesar, with Welles as Brutus. It was a spectacular success. And then Welles astonished New York with the lavish production of Macbeth, that broke all the convention of Broadway stages, and use them all black cast.
OW
I wanted to give the black actors a chance to play classic, without being funny, or even exotic. So there it is. I directed Macbeth without ever giving them a reading and none of them ever seen a Shakespearean play. And it was extraordinary how good Shakespeare is if it is spoken by somebody who's never heard somebody say it before. We had some marvelous effect. And of course it was a big production men. We had almost 200 people on the stage. We had voodoo drummers from West Africa. Real one, yes. By all odds,my greatest success is that play, because at the opening night, there were 5 blocks and all traffics was stopped that you couldn't get near the theater. Everybody is anybody, black or white was there. And at the end of the play, the use a lot of curtain because they find that if they left the curtain open, the audiences will come up on the stage to hug the actors. That was magic.
v.o.
But the vast scale of their ambition landing them in trouble. These are for the design of Julius Caesar. The Mercury Theatre was living from hand-to-mouth. Welles have to begin a hectic double life.
OW
I'd been contributing from my radio salary, I kept putting a thousand dollar or so every week, so we get the show on. And we got all our place on before anybody else because I was doing radio show all day long, soap operas, everything else. I used to go by ambulance from one radio station to another because I discovered there's no law in New York that you had to be sick to travel in an ambulance. So I hurried the ambulance and I'd go from CBS to NBC and they hold the elevator for me and I go up to fifth floor, go into the studio whichever I was set before. Then I say, 'what's the character?' They'd say '80 years old China-man', then I'd go and do the old China-man, and then rush-off somewhere else. I had been, for year and half, auditioning hopelessly as an actor and never get a job on radio station. Suddenly I got one part, and in about a month I was making, in those days tax-free, about $1500 to $1800 a week as an unknown radio actor without my name being mentioned.
(orson welles' radio show is played)
v.o.
Welles played, anonymously, a hugely populer hero called The Shadow for a year until one notorious Halloween 1939 when his cover was blown and his name became a household world.
(orson welles' radio show is played)
v.o.
Faced with a dull script of the War of the World, Welles came up with a brilliant idea. The invasion from Mars would be presented like real-life news flashes.
(orson welles' radio show is played)
v.o.
Not even Welles had anticipated what would happen next. Even before the broadcast was finished, the road was jammed with hundreds of cars heading for the hills. The panic spread. There were report of attempted suicide, even a rape by Martian invaders.
(end interview part2)
No comments:
Post a Comment