The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Online Free PDF Page B

“moral fallibility (that is to say, his narcissism)” becomes identified with the narcissism of the leading characters, “and the implicit nastiness of Welles’s amused, glacial detachment consciously boomerangs” (Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 14–15).
    The influence of “The Fountain of Youth” on Welles’s late work was significant. It opened the way to the narrative technique of
Don Quixote
and partly determined another TV pilot Welles wrote and directed in 1956 for a proposed series of half-hour programs about the lives of historical figures. Now lost, this pilot was titled “Camille, the Naked Lady, and the Musketeer” and concerned the three Dumases, about whom Welles had long wanted to make a movie. Another short film that used a similar technique was “Portrait of Gina,” a 1958 TV pilot intended for a magazine series about “people and places” on ABC. The pilot episode, which failed to interest the network and never aired, centered on Gina Lollobrigida and the movie industry in Rome. Strongly reliant on Welles’s narration and gift for humorous storytelling, it also featured drawings by Saul Steinberg, still-photo montages, and brief interviews with Vittorio De Sica and others in the Italian film industry. Welles described it as a “personal essay . . . in the newspaper tradition . . . it truly is an essay” (Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 101). Indeed in certain ways it anticipates
F for Fake
, which movie historians often describe as the invention of the essay film.
    In the year “Portrait of Gina” was made, Welles discussed TV in an interview with André Bazin for
France Observateur
. “It’s a marvelous form,” he said, “where the spectator is only a few feet away from the screen, but it is not a dramatic form, it’s a narrative form; so much so that television is theideal means of expression for the storyteller. . . . Above all, it is a method of satisfying my own penchant for telling stories, like the Arab storytellers in the marketplaces. I adore that. I never tire of hearing stories told, you know; so I commit the error of believing that everyone shares the same enthusiasm! I prefer stories to plays, to novels: that is an important characteristic of my taste” (Bessy,
Orson Welles
, 113–14).
    Welles’s attitude toward TV in the late 1950s was much like his attitude toward radio in the late 1930s; “television is in fact only illustrated radio,” he told Bazin. In both cases he put stress on the intimacy of the medium and its potential for experiments with narration. If he had lived until now, he would no doubt think differently about the changed forms of TV viewing. I suspect that digital streaming, highly portable digital photography, and digital editing would stir his imagination. He was a lover of old-fashioned storytelling who will always be appreciated for what he contributed to twentieth-century cinema, but he was also an innovator who was excited by the possibility of new forms of expression, especially when they allowed him personal freedom. “I am an experimenter,” he explained to Bazin during their 1958 interview. “Experimenting is the only thing that excites me . . . It is the act that interests me, not the result, and I am not impressed by the result unless the odor of human sweat or thought emanates from it” (Bessy,
Orson Welles
, 114–15). Too bad we are unable to see what magical experiments he might perform today.

1
The Prodigy
    By the age of twenty-six Orson Welles had achieved a success in show business unlikely to be repeated by anyone. He had been the New York Federal Theatre’s most dynamic showman; he had cofounded and directed the most critically acclaimed repertory company in America; he had been chiefly responsible for the most sensational radio broadcast in history; he had