The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Online Free PDF

what confuses me andmakes me think I should have been in politics, which is nonsense. What I’m really talking about is a profession in which I talk to people. Which seems to get us back to Orson Welles’ little lessons in how to make movies in some mid-Western university, you know what I mean” (Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 70).
    The dialectic between these extremes—between Welles as conjurer and Welles as narrator/teacher/storyteller—can be seen throughout his career but is nowhere more obvious than in
F for Fake
, a playfully educational film that also puts strong emphasis on Welles as conjurer or trickster. It can be seen as well in certain of Welles’s TV shows, where he adopts a slightly unusual form of address, occasionally turning away from the camera as if reaching for a thought or looking at an audience in an auditorium. The most important case in point is “The Fountain of Youth,” a twenty-five-minute television pilot Welles wrote, directed, designed, narrated, and arranged the music for in 1956. This show, which was shot in only three days, is almost entirely governed by a storytelling narrator who toys with his characters in a style vaguely adumbrated by the opening moments of
The Magnificent Ambersons
. Produced by the Desilu studio (which, ironically, had taken over the old RKO lot where
Citizen Kane
was shot), it never resulted in a series. Welles said the networks didn’t want it, and Desi Arnaz said it was too difficult to get Welles to commit to a long-term deal. Whatever the reasons, “The Fountain of Youth” was aired only once, as part of a summertime miscellany on NBC in 1958. Even though it was buried in the midst of summer reruns, it won the Peabody Award, the highest honor a TV program could receive in those days. Currently it can be seen only in museums or in poor-quality bootleg copies on YouTube.
    Brief and swiftly paced, “The Fountain of Youth” is Welles’s adaptation of a humorous short story by John Collier about a beautiful but narcissistic married couple (Rick Jason and Joi Lansing) who meet the inventor of a youth serum (Dan Tobin) and betray one another in order to gain sole possession of a test tube filled with the stuff. Welles described the show during his 1982 interview with Bill Krohn:
    â€œIt was [the pilot for] an anthology of that kind of comedy. . . . I was going to be the permanent star—not as a host like Ronnie Reagan coming out at the beginning of
Death Valley Days
, or like Hitchcock, but woven all the way through the show. It’s a style I’d like to go back to. I was very fond of it, that way of doing it. It was based entirely on back projection, there was no scenery. . . . We just took props from the prop department and put them behind a screen, and a few little things in front. . . . It was a style that I liked very muchand I’d like to do for a whole movie. And, of course, it’s the only comedy I’ve ever made on film. I used to do a lot of comedy in the theater, and radio. But in film I’ve always been rather solemn” (Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 61).
    The show opens with Welles looking a bit like a well-dressed classroom lecturer who is presenting a slide show to the audience. During the dramatized story he reappears, interrupting the action to discourse briefly on such topics as Narcissus and Ponce de Leon. As a storyteller, he infiltrates the film’s diegesis so thoroughly that he begins to resemble a puppeteer or godlike manipulator—an effect reinforced by the simplicity of the mise-en-scène and the occasional use of freeze frames. Now and then he even breaks into the individual performances and speaks the characters’ lines so that we get the amusing effect of Joi Lansing moving her lips and sounding like Orson Welles. Ultimately, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, the all-controlling narrator’s