(Peter Bogdanovich's interview)
PB
I held a preview card in my hand. And there's a terrible reaction that said that everybody that make the picture ought to be hanged, and the other 5 to 10 to 20 that said that it was only the greatest film ever made, that they've ever seen. I think they were probably closer to the truth. Probably it's among the 5 most important films made in America, ever. And I think it was the greatest tragedy in the movies was that particular film was so mutilated because you're barely get the sense of Welles' work.
Interviewer
Was that kind of cutting, re-ordering, and even remaking a film was taken in granted in those days? Because you wonder Joseph Cotten and Robert Wise was very close to Orson Welles?
PB
Cotten, I know, felt very bad about doing it, and yet he wrote Orson in which he tried to explain why it was the best. You feel sorry when you read it because he was betraying Orson but he doesn't really realize it. It was very sad. Nobody came out of it very good.
(Robert Wise's interview)
RW
I'd have to say this, from purely artistic point of view the film was better film before, I don't think there's any question there. But we face with the other part of reality that (...)
OW
It's gone. The actual plot was changed. In other words it's, about the time Major Ambersons was going to die the picture starts to become another picture.
LM
Do you ever get over something like that?
OW
Not really, you don't. I was sent to South America by Nelson Rockefeller and Jack Whitney. I was told that it was my patriotic duty to go and spent a million dollar shooting the carnival in Rio. I don't like carnival and all that, but they said to me that it'd be a real contribution to inter-American affair and latin-American world and so. Without a salary but with a budget of a million dollar I was sent to Rio to make up a movie about the carnival. But in the mean time comes a new government, RKO is installing a new government. They ask to see the rushes of what I'm doing in South America. And they see a lot of black people, and the reaction was that I was just shooting 'jiggaboo' jumping up and down. They even didn't hear the sound of music because it has not been synced up.
v.o.
The RKO's bosses has been hoping a public relations job, something morally uplifting. What they got was thousand feet of films showing people dancing in the street, black people and white dancing together embracing, dangerous stuff for the American studio in the early 40's. They felt their control over Welles was slipping. And his other role of good will of US government, he had complete freedom in Brazil, filming as he pleases, ignoring their cables and phone calls, but still expecting them to pay the bills.
OW
So I was fired from RKO. They made a great publicity of their point that the fact that I've gone to South America without the script and throwing all their money away. I never recovered from that attack. The fact that they had also promise me when I went to South America that they will sent a moviola and the film to me and I'd finish the cutting of Ambersons there, they never did. They cut them themselves. So they destroyed Ambersons. The picture itself destroyed be. I didn't get a job as director years afterward. So then I did Jane Eyre.
v.o.
Joan Fountaine started with Orson Welles in Robert Stevenson's film, Jane Eyre, in 1944. It was the first time in his Hollywood career that Welles had been forced to work as an actor under someone else' direction.
(Jane Eyre's playing)
LM
Did you look at that stage as if people were breathing a sigh of relief?
OW
Oh yes! RKO had a station that year. And its slogan for that year in every piece of paper that went out from RKO was "Showmanship instead of a genius". In other words, the reason you should buy an RKO pictures was that you didn't get Orson Welles. The Genius came from, I've never said I was a genius. nobody ever calls me a genius seriously, certainly not in those days, but somebody called me 'a would be genius'. She was Hearst columnist. And she called me that so often that this terrible words got stuck to me. So, "Showmanship instead of a genius." That was their biggest selling point that they didn't have me anymore. The next picture I did do was The Stranger, and I did that to show people that I didn't glow in the dark. That I said action and cut just like all the other fellas.
v.o.
The Stranger directed by Welles in 1946 starred Edward G. Robinsons as a Nazi hunter who search an escaped war-criminal leads him to America in a small mid-western town. Welles is the Nazi, Kindler, sheltering under a false identity of a teacher, and Loretta Young played his unsuspecting wife. Robinsons mingles into the social life of the town waiting for Welles break in his impeccable act.
(The Stranger's played)
v.o.
Welles originally told the studio that he wanted a women for Robinsons' part, Agnes Moorehead.
OW
I thought it would have been much more interesting, but they wouldn't agree to it.
LM
And Robinsons was not one of your crony at all?
OW
No, I didn't know him at all. We got into a big sulk in the first week. I couldn't understand what was it about, and he said, "You keep shooting me on my bad side." Now, can you imagine Eddy Robinsons had a bad side? I was shooting him that way because Loretta Young's side was the other side, you see. So I told her that and she said, "Alright, shoot me on my bad side. Keep him happy"(laughing) But he was immensely effective actor and he was very good in the picture.
LM
And that was the first time you kind of came up against that,...
OW
Yes! I was working with two stars, and I had to decide, you see, when you work with stars you have to make love with them. It's the business of the director is to be kind of continuing courtship with the people you stick in front of the lens. And when you deal with stars, real stars, you have to really make love. It seems natural to me to direct by attention to miss Young. So there's a little jealousy there, between Eddy and...and particularly because she allowed me to hold her arm, there's a shot where I hold her arm, and she's five stories above, she really is, and I was holding her arm. And Eddy was too scared just to put his fee over the edge. So there were a lot of unhappiness about that but nothing we could do about the fact that he was scared, except double him.
LM
That was a real clock tower?
OW
Yes, we build the clock tower, where now some sky-scrapper's stand. We were running around on that yard.
(The Stranger's playing)
(End of part6)
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