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In his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles was often derisive towards television, or at least he was in the 1960s. Back then, television hadn’t reached the levels of sophistication it has today and someone like Welles couldn’t see how leaving film for TV could ever be a viable move. Of course, it should be noted that he and Bogdanovich also have a lengthy discussion about the only aspects of color film they like (how snow photographs being near the top) so it’s fair to say that no matter how inventive and ahead of the curve Welles was most of the time, there was clearly a limit to his vision. In 1968 he adapted Isaak Dineson’s The Immortal Story for French television and, clocking in at just 60 minutes, with an economy and efficiency of an expert old hand, shows that perhaps Welles and TV may have been the best match of all.
If you know the story itself, the immortal one that is, you know it’s more about legend than anything else. A man hears of a legend of a rich man who pays a sailor to impregnate his wife and Welles, in the character of Mr. Clay, a wealthy but old and tired man in 19th century Macau, wants to make the legend come true. Why? No reason outside of the fact that he finds it intriguing. He doesn’t even have a wife. For that, he has to hire someone, specifically the daughter of a former business partner. The daughter, Virginie (Jeanne Moreau) agrees as she hates Clay and feels like she can, I suppose, vicariously humiliate him through the exercise. Or purposely sabotage it.
The production itself is low on funding, as per any late Welles’ work, and thrown together piece by piece. Waiters are borrowed to be extras, scenes are completed over the course of weeks from different locations due to financial troubles and the main set was actually Welles’ house. There was no makeup artist to speak of which may explain why Welles so heavily relies upon himself for applying generous layers of stage makeup which don’t exactly bear the mark of realism when subjected to the eye of a camera. And all of this, all of it, the usual time constraints, lack of resources and financial distress was because Welles loved the cinema and couldn’t understand at the time what a great time he could have had in television.
I’m not trying to say he didn’t do a great job with practically every piece of film he made, though certainly there are exceptions. I’m just saying that I think someone like Welles, had he taken up the mantle of television exclusivity in the 1960s and 1970s, could have transformed the landscape long before cable came along and eventually did the job in the 21st century.
Having consumed every Welles biography I could get my hands on in the eighties, nineties, and beyond, from Frank Brady to Simon Callow, one thing is perfectly clear: Welles loved Shakespeare and combined narratives. He loved a lot of other things, too, but it was his dual love of Shakespeare and combined narratives that brought about his massive work Five Kings, in which he combined elements from almost ten different Shakespearean plays (Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; Richard III) to make one all inclusive production covering the War of the Roses and running nearly six hours long on the stage. Years later, this would be cut down dramatically and condensed into the film we now know as Chimes at Midnight.
Had Welles had the opportunities that television affords today, he could have made series from these works. Let’s face it, if the narrative structure of Citizen Kane doesn’t eerily predate what we now call “limited series” on HBO, Netflix, and Amazon, nothing does. Today, Citizen Kane would be a ten part series as well as The Magnificent Ambersons and Welles, instead of being the ostracized wonder boy that everyone resented, might well be the King of the Small Screen.
Also consider that Welles planned to do a whole series of films based on Dinesen’s stories. And his It’s All True docudrama hybrid from the early forties would surely be transformed today as an in-depth look into the underbelly of life in Brazil using the anthology series form.
Orson Welles, no stranger to serialized story telling from his earliest days in radio, would have been a natural match for the kind of television produced today. You can see it throughout his entire career and films like The Immortal Story and F for Fake are right at home in today’s cultural atmosphere. But the industry couldn’t see it and Welles either couldn’t or, more likely, didn’t want to bother blazing any new trails. He just wanted to keep making the movies he loved, no matter how difficult the process. It’s understandable, but what a great final chapter to his career if he started out in theater, moved to radio, conquered film, and then, finally, reinvented television. He didn’t, but one can dream.
Greg Ferrara