review of TOO MUCH JOHNSON at LACMA May 3, 2014

[Richard M Roberts]

You know, as an aging, jaded film historian, I can wearily attest these days to the few who still give a rats ass that over the years there have indeed been a number of “lost” films that I have had the pleasure and privilege of checking off my “to see” list, partially due to so many “lost” films being more “temporarily missing” and then happily rediscovered to the point where the modern-day hyper-whiny film nerd can look down their nose at them as “common” titles today. I can also roll my eyes and chuckle at many more recent and over-hyped “rediscoveries”, “restorations”, and “re-premieres” of films that had never been anywhere near the definition of “lost” in the first place, or now have scenes “restored” to their general release versions that were never intended to be there by their creators in the first place. Yet once in awhile, even cynical old me can get truly exited about something turning up that even cynical ol’ me never thought he would get a chance to view.

Also oddly enough, a number of these in recent years have been films involving Orson Welles, that favorite of the film fanatics, easy to endlessly discuss, dissect, or dismiss, who gives either side of the aisle the opportunity to paint as tragic, misunderstood “genius” screwed by the Hollywood Studios, or the wad-shot wunderkind who didn’t really do much after CITIZEN KANE, except get fat and hock Paul Masson wine. After all, Orson Welles only directed thirteen films in his lifetime, he must be a failure (hmmm, Stanley Kubrick only directed thirteen films in his lifetime, I don’t see anyone accusing him of slacking-off).

Despite this alleged low directorial batting average, Welles, who celebrated his 99th Birthday this last week and will celebrate his Centennial next year, seems to be delivering all sorts of new movies from the grave in these last few decades since his passing in 1985. Scattered within his legend and the life he left behind are many unseen and unfinished motion pictures, films that this viewer was pretty convinced he would never see, tantalizing titles that seemed to far away and long gone, scattered indeed is the word to describe the bits and incomplete pieces that Welles socked away. Yet, as each of these partial canvasses reappear, no matter how patchwork or badly patched by others, each one shows us flashes of the undeniable Welles brilliance, self-proclaimed or bestowed by others, it is beyond doubt there. Welles was one of the few who justified his own ego.


Every new scrap, from the rediscovered footage from the notorious IT’S ALL TRUE (1943), the film that indeed busted Welles streak of good fortune, to the mess of a made-up movie that even Jess Franco couldn’t completely ruin in DON QUIXOTE, contains more than enough Wellesian originality to make them films one would rather see than read about. Each time the film “intelligencia” (like the word “auteur”, always needs to be in quotes) begins to tire of the old Welles toys, and begin to take him for granted, even to falling so low as to finally placing a mediocre paen to nerdian self-absorption and silliness like Hitchcock’s VERTIGO in rating above CITIZEN KANE as the “Greatest film of All Time”, Welles sends us another letter from the past, just to drive home once again the undeniable proof of his talent.

This time it really was one I thought was irretrievable from the void, the 1938 filmed prologues for Welles Mercury Theater Production of William Gillette’s stage farce, TOO MUCH JOHNSON was, apart from Orson’s early amateur spoof on the avant-garde, HEARTS OF AGE (1934), his first real taste of movie-making, by accounts never completely shot, never completely edited, and never shown. How many prints of this material, rough cuts or dailies, would have ever been printed? Welles himself believed the footage lost in the fire at his house in Spain that claimed much of his memorabilia in the early 70’s, but Welles the eternal man-on-the-move had truly and fortunately lost track of the material years before that conflagration, so much that the rediscovery of the nitrate footage in an Italian warehouse happened only a year or so ago. The earliness of the work and the slightness of the material on which it was based did not hold promise of being anyone’s idea of a major discovery. Nevertheless, it was on the “never thought I’d get to see that” list, which was enough to send me out as far as Los Angeles to get a gander at the footage face-to-face, so when the LA County Museum of Art advertised an early May showing sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, across the Desert we went to see it.

First Disturbing Trend: a Saturday Evening Hollywood Premiere of a previously lost und unseen Orson Welles film with an admission price of $5.00 doesn’t sell out, in fact, nowhere near sells out, things are indeed dire in our little film world area of interest. The house was approximately ¾’s full, with a good number of Academy members (in other words, comps) in attendance. Second Disturbing (well, more annoying) Trend: before the film begins, we see five chairs being set up in front of the screen, meaning we are going to have to listen to an hour of talk before a single frame of film of this rediscovery rolls by. This hour unfortunately consists of about 40 minutes of Archivist back-patting, both self and otherwise, in which the Archivists still don’t bother to mention the name of Mario Catto, the man who actually discovered the footage in the Pordenone Warehouse and brought it to the attention of the back-patters, then sadly didn’t live to see the finished film (he does get mentioned as a near-footnote in the narration during the film).


Forty-one minutes in, we finally get about 20 worthwhile minutes of near-century-old Norman Lloyd, certainly one of if not the last living person to have been an original member of Welles and John Houseman’s Mercury Theater, still sharp as a tack and a terrific raconteur.

Finally, we’ve paid our dues to the Archives and are finally allowed to see the mostly un-edited (save for preliminary editing by Welles of the early sequences) rough footage from TOO MUCH JOHNSON, though the footage will be unfortunately and endlessly narrated by yet another Archivist in a sometimes informative, but frequently distracting manner, (making one sadly begin to agree with those who cannot abide live film showings in theaters, the mute and fast-forward buttons do not seem to work there.), made more distracting by the decision to place said-Archivist directly left of the screen at a spotlighted podium ( once again kids, repeat after me, “It’s the films that matter!”), a microphone and a front-row theater seat would have been more appropriate.

However, none of the Archivist ego-boosting nonsense can truly deter from what we now see, which is, in a word, sublime. What we have in the TOO MUCH JOHNSON footage is perhaps the best Silent Film/Silent Film Comedy recreation ever perpetrated. What Orson Welles was doing in his Mercury Theater production of William Gillette’s 1894 farce was much the same thing he had been doing with Shakespeare, cutting the text down to the barest essentials, getting rid of all the fat and foofarah, and presenting a lean and lightning-paced version of the play. Eliminating much of the typical farce set-up in the comedy (and allowing the actual live performance sections to run approximately forty minutes), Welles wanted each of JOHNSON’s three acts to begin with these filmed prologues, introducing the characters, establishing the comic situations, and letting the actors get to the meat of the show live.

To establish the period (1910, moved up to from the 1890’s), Welles gives us a perfect recreation of a 1910 photoplay; long shots, open-air and extra-tall sets, you’re looking for the Biograph logo on the walls), yet Welles is also subtle enough to move this into his more personal style of shooting and editing once that period is established, and that style is already in place, the right-angle tripod-tilts in the close and two-shots, fast-cut close-ups juxtaposed to heighten emotional moods, already Welles the Director is helping Welles the Editor in his shots.


After the opening bedroom scenes in this early bedroom farce, Welles establishes the character of the ingénue, played by Virginia Nicolson Welles, his first wife, and her maid, played by a young as we’ll ever see her Mary Wickes. Having been introduced to Joseph Cotten, the “Johnson” in which there is too much of, and too many aliased, we carry on with his liaison with the wife of another (an also young and saucy Arlene Francis), the antagonist Edgar Barrier, who arrives in time to send Cotton out the window and down the fire escape to begin the rooftop chase that is the masterpiece of the footage.

A wonderful rooftop chase it is too, an expert silent comedy recreation in which both Cotton and Barrier prove themselves athletic and agile, as well as unafraid of heights, in a beautifully conceived tribute to the works of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Welles once again gets the grace notes, period, and the whole feeling just right, down to very Keatonesque long shots and gags, he always said that these were the films he had watched as a child, not the German Expressionist Auteurist favorites the critics claimed as his inspirations, he didn’t see those until he was on the Festival circuits of the 1950’s. Orson Welles was raised on American Silent Cinema and here he plays it perfect tribute, also managing to preserve on film parts of Little Old New York, then even barely before they went under the wrecking ball, but priceless glimpses of the old West Washington Market, the Battery Park Aquarium, and soon-to-be-raised tenement buildings. As in all of Welles work, he gets the period just right, in ways that make it almost an afterthought.

One must compliment the performances, especially those of Joseph Cotton and Edgar Barrier. Cotton, never thought of as much of a comedian (though he would soon find his first great success touring and on Broadway with Katherine Hepburn in Phillip Barry’s comedy THE PHILADEPHIA STORY), here shows himself perfectly capable of slapstick comedy, yet Edgar Barrier is the real delight, a total chameleon as an actor who ended up specializing in ethnic supporting parts through most of his career (see my Cinevent notes on SECRETS OF SCOTLAND YARD (1944), one of his few leading man film roles). Here he gives a nicely silly comic performance as the Cuckold Husband, with a perfectly realized silent comedy makeup (looking nothing like Snub Pollard as at least one uninformed internet opinion has surmised), harking back perhaps more towards Monty Banks or a post-Chaplin impersonation Billy West, Barrier shows great visual comedy chops as Welles also allows him way more reactive flourishes than the more conventional leading man Cotton is saddled with (though Cotton is also funnier playing it deadpan). What is obvious is that both actors are having a very good time, playing up the silent comedy conventions, even as you can almost hear Welles off-camera shouting at them, “Go on, climb over that roof railing with the ladder! You don’t need a mattress down here, it’s not that far!”. In the true spirit of Silent Comedy, lives were risked for laughs that day.


Everything is right, from the costumes and makeup to the performances, even to the undercranked camera speeds, which droning Archivist had to explain to us is why the film looks “unnaturally fast” at sound speed, lest our virgin eyes and brains have difficulty processing why it wasn’t moving like molasses as silent films are supposed to be seen. With Silent Film barely a decade dead, all involved knew how the film should really look and move. TOO MUCH JOHNSON’s film footage is both a fine look at a talented young Orson Welles discovering filmmaking while paying tribute to the film he saw and loved, and a taste of the exhilaration of those heady days of the Mercury Theater of which Norman Lloyd waxed so eloquently before the showing, giving us perhaps a little better understanding of what all the fuss was about.

Sadly, after the showing’s intermission, more than half the audience bailed, perhaps their ears over-assaulted by too much Archivist chatter and trying to make sense of the hour’s worth of rough footage, in any event it was a mistake they made, for the real revelations were yet to come. Intermission over, first up was three or so minutes of home-movie footage covering the shooting of TOO MUCH JOHNSON, where we finally get a look at the 23 year old Welles, a kid in a candy store as he bosses around his actors with obvious energy, he really was a kid, no matter the voice and the braggadocio. I do hope his oldest daughter Chris Feder Welles has seen this footage, showing us both her Father and Mother together when they really were together in hopefully happier times, though even this short footage captures Welles flirting with the other actresses, seeds of that marriage down the drain already planted.

Following this, we were treated to the first time ever public showing of a roughly edited together version of the TOO MUCH JOHNSON footage, un-narrated, Michael Mortilla’s fine piano accompaniment finally coming to the fore, this should have been shown before the rough dailies, because it does indeed show us how the footage hangs together, though seeing it afterwards is a good lesson and example of seeing how Orson Welles edited in the camera. It also calls the lie to at least one legend regarding the footage and that is that Welles was supposed to have shot (as Houseman claimed) some 25,000 feet of film, as most of what Welles planned to show in the prologues is in the surviving dailies, sans whatever subtitles would have been added to introduce the characters and carry the narrative. Welles as a Director was never prone to over-shooting, he seldom ever had the luxury financially to do so, and he certainly did not have either the luxury of time or money here. Most of the film was shot quickly on the New York streets without permits, on a budget of $10,000, it is a safe bet that most of what was shot is in the footage found here.


It’s also total nonsense, as one internet cretin recently indicated, that the film was perhaps scrapped due to Welles already developing his alleged “fear of completion” and getting lost in his love of editing. The production of TOO MUCH JOHNSON was basically a shambles from the get-go, the first pulled thread in what became the final unraveling of the Mercury Theater at the end of that second season, after shooting the footage, it did indeed become technically obvious that they could not run it in the Stony Creek Theater where the production played due to it’s not having either a nitrate projection booth nor being a Projectionist Union-sanctioned house, forcing Welles to return to and quickly rehearse the set-ups to the acts which he had deleted from the script. TOO MUCH JOHNSON closed in Connecticut after two weeks, a total flop, and never opened in New York. The recovered footage, which shows preliminary editing by Welles in the early sequences, so we can assume that this was Welles’ workprint material, soon returns to being the untouched rough footage that Welles, then ever-busy working in Theater, Radio, and living his tumultuous lifestyle, never returned to.

It is pathetic that, after being nearly thirty years gone, Welles still has to suffer the fools who want to believe and spread the Charles Higham bullshit, which is as dumb and dead as that Author and his writings are now. The way most of Orson Welles films were made and financed, mostly outside the Hollywood System (and when made inside the Hollywood system, the Studios usually took the films away from him and “improved” them), it was a miracle that any of them were completed at all, much less thirteen of them. Through the decades, the pendulum continues to swing back and forth on Orson Welles, first he is abused genius, then profligate wastrel who blew his talent and got fat, as if that is a crime unto itself. Those pinheads who dismiss him as a failure show only their ignorance of the rest of his career and the years in which he lived. Orson Welles changed the face of nearly every American Media of the 20th Century; Theater, Radio, Motion Pictures, and even had a hand in changing the American Political landscape of the 1940’s, at least until it changed back severely and went after him itself. Ever the maverick, Welles fought to create independently the rest of his life, and even when he was old, ill, overweight and nearly immobile, was capable of mesmerizing an audience in 90 minutes conversation with Dick Cavett, perform baffling magic tricks on THE TONIGHT SHOW with Johnny Carson, sell gallons of Paul Masson wine in television commercials one would actually want to look at, and then take the earnings from those wastes of his talents and spend it shooting little pieces of film magic in his backyard that surface now years later to make the naysayers look like the fools they are.


There were good reasons for all of his unfinished projects, all of them different, some due to studio interference and retaliation, others to the labyrinths of financial tomfoolery and ownership questions in the PRODUCERS-like chicanery that produced the work in the first place. Some were just personal projects, paid from Welles pockets and, like an Author’s unfinished or stillborn novels hidden away in a filing cabinet, he felt no responsibility to release to a public and a critical establishment waiting to pounce and proclaim “it’s no CITIZEN KANE!”, just as we’ve already heard decried of the TOO MUCH JOHNSON footage. What bright little boys and girls you are, TOO MUCH JOHNSON is indeed not CITIZEN KANE, CITIZEN KANE is CITIZEN KANE, TOO MUCH JOHNSON is TOO MUCH JOHNSON, once again you need the lesson, pay attention now, this is Shit, this is Shinola………

Orson Welles was far from perfect, but he was one hell of a talent, and to hear people who on the best day of their entire multigenerational families lives couldn’t create anything that could touch a single atom of a single frame of anything Welles ever shot call his career a “failure” makes one realize why we are living in an era where they would consider VERTIGO the greatest film of all time. Welles led an incredible life, created a lot of lasting work in many media, did it his way as much as he could, fought for his freedom to his dying day, and lived life to it’s fullest, even managing along the way to get his mitts in the biblical fashion on the likes of some incredible babes like Dolores Del Rio, Rita Hayworth, Lena Horne, Paola Mori, and then ended up with the breathtaking Oja Kodar when he was well past his sell-by date, pretty damn good for a fat guy.

So we welcome back this year’s undiscovered Orson Welles work, it’s becoming pretty clear from the net-nattering that the film “intelligencia” as usual isn’t going to get it, but we of the Silent Comedy Mafia of all folk can truly appreciate TOO MUCH JOHNSON for what it is, a loving tribute to the things we love and pay tribute to here, our era, our comedians, and a nice look at the Mercury Players when they and the World was still young, and, at least in Orson’s case, his oyster, and finally Joe Cotten and Edgar Barrier’s day of risk takings so long ago are no longer for naught………



RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Richard M Roberts]

Now even Gary Johnson can have TOO MUCH JOHNSON:


http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserv ... ater-films


And they even got the speeds right!


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Gary Johnson]

Thanks Pal. I've already been catching up with these files.

I can't add much more to Richard's resounding praise except to add that this is a fun and witty homage to the era of the Nickelodeon. And there is no contempt or mocking derision displayed over the style of those early films. It is clear that Welles has nothing but affection towards the pioneer filmmakers.

And now back to Welles on radio.........
(When are they going to re-discover more of his appearances from that medium?)

[Richard M Roberts]

Thanks Pal. I've already been catching up with these files.

I can't add much more to Richard's resounding praise except to add that this is a fun and witty homage to the era of the Nickelodeon. And there is no contempt or mocking derision displayed over the style of those early films. It is clear that Welles has nothing but affection towards the pioneer filmmakers.

And now back to Welles on radio.........
(When are they going to re-discover more of his appearances from that medium?)

What is there left to discover that doesn't already survive? Those extra syndicated Shadow Programs Welles did that nobody knew about until they turned up a few years ago was the last interesting discoveries in that area of his career. Most of Welles radio appearances pretty much do exist, even if not generally available on the Internet.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Gary Johnson]

I was thinking of his numerous guest appearances on various comedy/variety programs and AFSR.
Whenever there is a gap in the sequential broadcasting order of a particular program, more often than not it will be an episode that Welles was due to appear on. I do enjoy his appearances on those lighter programs. He never has any problem with aping his 'child genius - egotistical monster' image.
I particularly get a kick out of his own attempt at that genre, ORSON WELLES ALMANAC. It gets a bad rep among many (especially from his many biographers) but many aspects of that show work just fine. It just needed a little more tweaking. Their biggest mistake was drifting away from the actual almanac theme in favor of much more comedy. Welles was the perfect personality to constantly give out bits of information and rare knowledge in a casual, non-academic setting.

[Richard M Roberts]

I was thinking of his numerous guest appearances on various comedy/variety programs and AFSR.
Whenever there is a gap in the sequential broadcasting order of a particular program, more often than not it will be an episode that Welles was due to appear on. I do enjoy his appearances on those lighter programs. He never has any problem with aping his 'child genius - egotistical monster' image.
I particularly get a kick out of his own attempt at that genre, ORSON WELLES ALMANAC. It gets a bad rep among many (especially from his many biographers) but many aspects of that show work just fine. It just needed a little more tweaking. Their biggest mistake was drifting away from the actual almanac theme in favor of much more comedy. Welles was the perfect personality to constantly give out bits of information and rare knowledge in a casual, non-academic setting.

No, most of his guest appearances on various Variety Shows survive as well, I've been collecting Welles Radio Shows for decades and I have quite a few. Email me privately and let me know which ones you are looking for.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Richard M Roberts]

I have to take issue with several of Scott Simmon’s surmises of doubt regarding why the footage for TOO MUCH JOHNSON was never used in the Mercury Theater Production of the play, which you can read here:

http://www.filmpreservation.org/userfil ... -essay.pdf


But this passage is definitely in need of a bit more research:

“It has also been said that everyone discovered late that the Stony Creek Theater did not have a fireproof projection booth able to show the flammable nitrate film, but there are at least two problems with this explanation. The theater was built as a nickelodeon (in 1903, as the Lyric Theater), so would have had such a booth, and even had it been removed, it would have been easy enough to strike a film print on nonflammable diacetate stock, as was regularly done to show films in schools, churches and other such venues”


Hmmm, well, to begin with, if the Stony Creek Theater had been built as a Nickelodeon in 1903, it most likely began life with no projection booth whatsoever, much less a fireproof one. Early Nickelodeons frequently had the projector simply set up in the back of the hall, and booths didn’t even become standard practice until nearer the 1910’s, and state fire codes didn’t really come into existence or practice until the early-mid teens, so, depending exactly when it became a live theater venue, it may never have had a true nitrate booth or it would have indeed been dismantled once it became a full-time live theater house.

The other factor Simmons does not take into account is that the Stony Creek Theater would have had to have had a Union Projection booth as well as a Nitrate Booth, and it also would most likely have not been so quick and easy to have a 35mm Safety Film print struck of the material for projection on the spur of the moment. While most smaller-gauge stocks like 16mm and 8mm were manufactured regularly on Diacetate or Acetate film stocks, there was much less call for 35mm safety stock, which any New York Lab would have probably not had on hand in quantities and it would have had to have been special ordered. All in all, the time element is indeed a major factor in all of the decisions Welles and Houseman made regarding the use of the film footage, and any one of the above issues would have scuttled their plans with such a short deadline to opening night.

Another problem paragraph:

“Still, the reputation of the stage performance as an unmitigated calamity must be exaggerated. Among the audience for the Connecticut previews was Katharine Hepburn, who thought enough of Joseph Cotten’s performance to have him cast in The Philadelphia Story as her character’s former and future husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (the part played by Cary Grant in the film version).”


There is no question that the Mercury Production of TOO MUCH JOHNSON was an unmitigated disaster, all those actually involved in the show recalled it as being so, and the fact that it was planned as the opener for the second Mercury Season and it never came to New York at all is really all the evidence one needs to realize the truth. The fact that Joseph Cotton was lucky enough to get another gig due to Katherine Hepburn attending a performance of TOO MUCH JOHNSON may have been a lucky break for him, but has absolutely nothing to do with the success or failure of TOO MUCH JOHNSON. This was merely the beginning of what would be basically a disastrous second season for the Mercury Theater that led to its also being its final season and the beginning of the end of Welles and Houseman’s partnership. None of this is either speculation or exaggeration.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Gary Johnson]

I never considered the stage debacle of TOO MUCH JOHNSON to be that big of a mystery. Welles set out to create a multi-media production and when it came time for opening night he only had a one-media production.

The lesson he could had taken from this experience is that sometimes it takes longer to edit a film than it does to film it.

[Richard M Roberts]

I never considered the stage debacle of TOO MUCH JOHNSON to be that big of a mystery. Welles set out to create a multi-media production and when it came time for opening night he only had a one-media production.

The lesson he could had taken from this experience is that sometimes it takes longer to edit a film than it does to film it.

It certainly took Welles longer to edit a film than to shoot it, he always said he shot fast, then could spend a year in the editing room where the real power for a Director was.

But indeed, the history of TOO MUCH JOHNSON was pretty straightforward, which is why it is silly to be second-guessing it now. It was a hurried production, Welles had bitten off more than he could chew, and time ran out to fix it. Ironically, now the best part of it is all that survives and can now be seen by one and all when no one saw it at the time.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Gary Johnson]

As John McElwee likes to keep reiterating over at Greenbriar, we seem to be living in a special renaissance where it comes to classic film. Never before has so much been available to the average public.