At the end, he was a joke. A mockery of himself, drunkenly slurring through commercial pitches for stupid things like cheap wine and frozen peas. And yet he had been so talented, so brilliant that at the beginning people were ready to pronounce that the very stage and screen themselves would never see anything as magnificent as his work ever again.
I have a pair of links that tell stories about Orson Welles that might help to mitigate the pathetic persona that defines him now, both of which brim with the promise that he might have brought his formidable talents to the medium of television the same way he did to film, radio, and stage.
This one appeared at Gizmodo back in December ’09. In it, the author, Frank Beacham (himself a movie producer, playwright, and writer) recalls a series of encounters with Welles in the mid-1980s, not long before his death in 1985, as Welles became obsessed with producing a film using the then-new half-inch videotape technology developed by Sony — the BetaCam. Beacham talks about Welles pushing the very limits of the technology, presaging many of the advances that would come to video in just a few years. His sudden death ended the project, but gave Beacham the inspiration to complete another unfinished Welles project, a film about Welles’s Broadway musical “The Cradle Will Rock”, on which he was the executive producer.
Also from last December, a much longer and more scholarly piece from media writer Ben Walters posted on Columbia University’s Teacher’s College website that rewinds the clock all the way back to the early days of television itself and looks at his 1953 production of “The Fountain Of Youth”, his involvement with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and their production company, Desilu, and how the business of network television, even in the 1950s, had no place for someone as disruptively creative as Welles.
If you have the time to read Ben Walters’s piece (it’s much longer than most web writing normally is), it is a brilliant bit of biography, history, and media criticism rolled into one. It would be wonderful if the Internet would be more open to revisiting Welles as a genuine artist and let the cheap jokes slide, but that might be asking a bit much of the gnat’s-life attention span of the online world.
