#Romeo and Juliet I have suffered through so many versions of it has ruined the play a bit for me
Will be interesting to be going into some of Shakespeare’s plays with more knowledge of the earlier versions of these tales than the plays themselves
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You know, since that lovely anon brought Cape May up again (btw, anon, I agree with you completely — there's no way that Lizzington and Agnesgate aren't real, not after what was said in CM), I thought I'd share my thoughts, too.
Well, not so much thoughts as a question to you and all the other fans.
I just can't help but wonder — ever since I watched this episode — what would happen if Red didn't get high (though evidences show that he does that when the pain he feels is so overwhelming he can't cope with it on his own/while sober) and, therefore, didn't get the chance to see his possible actions play out from a distance as he did with halluci!Katarina? Would he really try to commit suicide? Or would the rational, levelheaded part of him win still, despite all the pain and the heartbreak?
What do you think?
Hello there, fantastic anon!! 😄 Thank you for dropping in to share your thoughts!! (I'm loving all these asks re: Cape May, it's giving me the itch to watch it again 😬) And oh my, what a great, angsty question!! I think it's definitely a tough call... Especially since we know Red has a history of coping with substance abuse (wandering naked in the desert anyone? around the time of Liz's wedding to T*m, wasn't it?? hmmm??? 🤔) but pondering what he would do in the situation of Lizzie's "death" while completely sober is super interesting!! I think, while he wouldn't "see" the repercussions per halluci!Kat - as you say - he still seemed to have very strong feelings about the act itself. His whole speech & parallel about the effects on so many different, extended people were very touching & grief-filled, it really sounded like he was drawing on personal experience.
[Speaking of, I actually always kind of got the feeling he wasn't seeing his own possible actions playing out through halluci!Kat - as you suggest, anon, - but rather his mind was dredging up his own personal experience with the action (he did, after all, think Kat walked into the ocean & killed herself so as not to endanger infant!Liz) and used the drugs & emotional spiraling & perhaps contemplation of committing the act himself as a way to confront his version of Kat, asking her why should would do such a thing, abandon her child, ruin countless lives, etc. (and it also acted as a bit of a "reveal" on the part of the writers to show what happened to Kat, back in season 4 or whenever it was, but that's besides the point.) There seemed to be a fair bit of anger & frustration when he addressed her the way he did... But that was just my interpretation & your take on it is, of course, entirely possible as well!]
ANYWAY, back to the POINT, Red did seem to have negative feelings about the act itself, but then again, Lizzie - his life, his heart - has just "died" giving birth to their her child & his last connection to that child has been rudely snatched away by T*m exactly when he probably needed it most, hence his lamenting speech about never seeing her again, never getting to watch her grow, etc. So, I think it's safe to say he wasn't really seeing a reason for living at that point. BUT, idk... I just find it hard to picture Red actually doing it for some reason... Perhaps it's just bc I wouldn't want him to (even though I am attracted to the Romeo & Juliet Lizzington angst of it, ngl) but he does have a very logical, tactical mind & he has experienced great loss multiple times before (his wife & daughter, Josephine, countless friends like Luli, etc.) So, while you could consider Lizzie's "death" & his estrangement from Agnes the proverbial last straw, I tend to think he would instead spend a few days at Cape May, contemplating & suffering, but then he would think of Dembe & Isabelle & the few people he has left, the few people that would be the most affected by his action - the way he seemingly resented Kat for NOT doing - and he would call Dembe to come get him. At least... that's what I would hope 🥺 At any rate, this was a fabulous question, anon, thank you for being interested in my opinion!! It really got me thinking & I'm curious what our Lizzington fam thinks as well, so anyone feel free to jump in!! Thank you for this ask, anon, & much love to you, of course!! ❤️
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harry/draco (m/m)
“Mutatum” series by Vichan
-evitative (222,452 words) complete
harry/draco
“In the summer before his fifth year at Hogwarts, Harry is drawn to a room in Grimmauld Place. Like the Gryffindor he is, he enters the room without fear. The room is a library, and Harry is surprised to find that he’s eager to learn.”
“Then he gets the bad news: he’s been accidentally expelled from Hogwarts, and he needs to be sorted again. Everyone is confident that he’ll go straight back to Gryffindor, but with what he's been learning, Harry’s not so sure.”
Mutatum - Vichan - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“On the Precipice” by Jayel
(103,736 words) in progress
harry goes to azkaban
harry/draco
“Under criticism from the public, the ministry wants to show they’re cracking down on crime. So, they send Harry to Azkaban for casting an unforgivable on Bellatrix in their entryway. In a cell surrounded by Death Eaters, dementors stopping by to watch him for far too long, and one guard in particular showing a little too much interest in Harry, Harry’s bound to come out of the situation very changed.”
On the Precipice - Chapter 1 - Jayel - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Tea and No Sympathy” by who_la_hoop
(70,045 words) complete
harry/draco
“It's Potter's fault, of course, that Draco finds himself trapped in the same twenty-four-hour period, repeating itself over and over again. It's been nearly a year since the unpleasant business at Hogwarts, and Draco's getting on with his life quite nicely, thank you, until Harry sodding Potter steps in and ruins it all, just like always. At first, though, the time loop seems liberating. For the first time in his life, he can do anything, say anything, be anything, without consequence. But the more Draco repeats the day, the more he realises the uncomfortable truth: he's falling head over heels for the speccy git. And suddenly, the time loop feels like a trap. For how can he ever get Harry to love him back when time is, quite literally, against him?”
Tea and No Sympathy - Chapter 1 - who_la_hoop - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Beginnings” by magicweb
(60,723 words)
harry/draco
“Follow Harry Potter as he finds his true calling in the Wizarding World. Follow him as he carves his own path and proves that he is the most powerful wizard that will ever live. This is a Dark Harry Story. This is a SLASH fiction. If you are not into that sort of story, that is fine but you might not like later parts of this story.”
Beginnings - Chapter 1 - magicweb - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Stages of Friendship, Love, and Kisses” by babyvfan
(322,346 wods)
harry/draco
“Every story begins with a stage. Every stage begins with a moment. For two young boys, their story began with a snake and a kiss. A kiss that would act as a ripple in the water, sinking deeper and deeper as the years go by and the boys go through moments and stages that strength and test their friendship.”
Stages of Friendship, Love, and Kisses - Chapter 1 - babyvfan - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Memories of a Nobody” by RukiaKiryu
(49,648 words)
harry/draco
“‘I don't want your help Potter and I don't need your pity! Stay out of it!’ But there was a sadness in those silver eyes… An emptiness that betrayed the blond's words, and Harry understood now what he should have known all along. ‘You want to go Azkaban…’ Harry muttered. ‘You mean to die... don't you?’”
Fanfic: Memories of a Nobody Ch 1, Harry Potter
“A day Unlike Any Other” by HerLoyalShipper
(51,944 words)
harry/draco
“Harry is left broken after the war and finds that maybe the only things that can save him is the very boy who despised him. Draco is more so and finds he needs Harry's strength to guide him from the darkness.”
A Day Unlike Any Other - Chapter 1 - HerLoyalShipper - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Black Wings” by Harpy Wings
(111,915 words)
harry/draco
“as the clock struck midnight Harry Potter came into his inheritance, with this new development came a life mate, but if Harry doesn't find and bond with his mate by his 17th birthday...they'll both die..”
Fanfic: Black Wings Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Cute as a Kitten” by xXRon-luverXx
(54k words)
harry/draco
“Harry Potter, locked up at the Dursleys, finds Draco Malfoy as a cat. Utterly confused and wanting information, he decides to help him.”
Fanfic: Cute as a Kitten Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“Not Romeo and Juliet” by silverblondhairedlover
(88,271 words)
mpreg
harry/draco
“Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, tried to fight for their love between their Houses' heavy rivalry and their Inheritance.”
Fanfic: Not Romeo and Juliet Ch 1, Harry Potter
“All The World’s Treasures” by ArtEnchanter
(45k words)
harry/draco
“The Horcruxes were destroyed before the attack on Godric's Hollow - leaving Voldemort dead for good. Harry still became the Boy-Who-Lived, although he was blessed with his parents staying alive. What difference did having his parents with him make as he grew up? Well, he refused to go to Hogwarts for a start…”
Fanfic: All The World's Treasures Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“Black Wings” by amsuter34
(107k words)
harry/draco
“as the clock struck midnight Harry Potter came into his inheritance, with this new development came a life mate, but if Harry doesn't find and bond with his mate by his 17th birthday...they'll both die..”
Fanfic: Black Wings Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“It Was All Just a Game (OLD VERSION)” by write_me227
(364, 435 words)
harry/draco
“When Draco comes up with an idea to mess with Harry during the Triwizard Tournament, will he be the one who will get burned in the end?”
It Was All Just a Game (OLD VERSION) - Chapter 1 - write_me227 - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Harry Potter and Life” by aspiringSatan
(72,046 words) complete
harry/draco
“After the war Harry deals with nightmares and shit. he goes back to finish his schooling as an 8th year. Hogwarts has been restored, but not the mindset of students. Harry is still the Gryffindor we know him to be and doesn't even notice the impact he has.”
https://archiveofourown.org/works/8003191/chapters/18322543
“Harry Malfoy’s Trials” by Madriddler
(109,301 words) complete
harry/draco
harry/blaise
“At 4 years old Harry Potter runs away from the Dursleys to find himself at Malfoy Manor. Adopted by the Malfoys, Harry now grows up as Draco's brother surrounded by pureblood society and dark arts. Easily befriending Draco and Blaise Zabini, Harry grows to be a completely different boy than Dumbledore planned, embracing his Slytherin roots and isn't afraid to show his green colors.”
Harry Malfoy's Trials - Chapter 1 - Madriddler - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Harry Riddle: Son of Voldemort” by Madriddler
(71,955 words) complete
harry/draco
“Instead of trying to kill Harry on that fateful night, Lord Voldemort has decided to steal the child away and raise him as his own. With plans to turn the boy into Dumbledore's downfall, the Dark Lord soon finds out that raising Harry and not developing a bond with the boy is impossible. Especially when the boy consistently calls him Daddy, and proves to be more loyal than any Death Eater. Will Voldemort keep to his plan? Or will raising Harry awaken something in Voldemort that both he and Dumbledore thought long since dead?”
Harry Riddle: Son of Voldemort - Chapter 1 - Madriddler - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“A Summer of Refuge” by xForeversEndx
(41k words)
harry/draco
“It's the summer between 5th and 6th year. Rather than accept the task set to him by Voldemort, Draco rejects the Dark Lord. In an effort to keep him safe, Dumbledore sends him to stay with the Dursley's. During Harry and Draco's forced time together, secrets come out that will change their lives forever.”
Fanfic: A Summer of Refuge Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“A Year’s Temptation: by Lomonaaeren
(118,117 words) complete
harry/draco
“Draco isn't best pleased to discover he's a Veela at twenty-four...especially since both he and his mate, Harry Potter, are married. Harry suggests a compromise that might work, if everyone agrees. But the compromise is fragile, and stands the chance of only making everything monumentally worse than before.”
A Year's Temptation - Chapter 1 - Lomonaaeren - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Til Death Do Us Part” by Kitty Smith
(44k words)
harry/draco
“Harry and Draco have an odd affliction... They must remain in contact or suffer fates worse than death! And now they have to survive the Triwizard Tournament?”
Fanfic: Til Death Do Us Part Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“His Own Man” by Crunchysunrises
(147,481 words)
master of death
harry/draco
“In the station between Life and Death Harry makes a different choice. Now he is eleven again, nothing is going the same as before, and people are starting to ask questions, especially the Malfoys, the Hogwarts professors and, most worryingly, Mad-Eye Moody. Harry is beginning to suspect that he might not be up to this Master of Death business and everything that goes along with it.”
Fanfic: His Own Man Ch 1, Harry Potter
“A Change in Plans” by GoldberryGal
(101,623 words) complete
harry/draco
“When an eleven year old Harry Potter is left alone in Madam Malkin's shop, the Malfoy family are the first ones to step in and take care of him. It doesn't take long for Harry, an orphan with little affection in his life, to begin to love them. But will they love Harry?”
“Follow Harry & Draco through Hogwarts to see how many plans their initial meeting can change.”
Fanfic: A Change in Plans Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Sense of Doubt” by Reginalivesagain
(240,657 words) complete
harry/draco
“Normalcy is driving Harry insane, and just when he thinks it can't get any worse, he's invited to Draco Malfoy's hearing as a witness.”
Sense of Doubt - Chapter 1 - Reginalivesagain - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Greater Inheritance” by EverWinter
(68,712 words) complete
harry/draco
“Over the last summer holidays, Harry discovers his heritage. He's Rich, Powerful, and now a Slytherin. But will people still trust him to vanquish the Dark Lord?”
Fanfic: Greater Inheritance Ch 1, Harry Potter
“But, He’s Mine” by CompleteGeek
(44,838 words)
harry/draco
“My attempt at a Draco is a veela storyline. Kind of slow to start, but I think it gets better!”
Fanfic: But, He's Mine Ch 1, Harry Potter
“The gift of the shadows” by Blue Lycan
(73,698 words)
harry/draco
“Harry's great grandfather wasn't human, and although it skipped two generations Harry changes the second he reaches 16. Harry's a shadow veela, and there is only one person that can withstand his charm.”
Fanfic: The gift of the shadows Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Saving Harry” by Morpheus9
(75,378 words) complete
harry/draco
“The war is over. Harry is now a hero. But some people don't handle being a hero well.”
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2787604/1/Saving-Harry
“A Panther's Heart” by Copper Vixen
(80,552 words)
harry/draco
“Harry gets caught while in his animagus form and is purchased to be a familiar to his worst enemy.”
Fanfic: A Panther's Heart Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Refuge” by LRWrites
(90,951 words)
harry/draco
“After failing to complete his task, Draco Malfoy cannot return to the Dark Lord. Instead, he seeks refuge from the one person he least wants to see.”
Fanfic: Refuge Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Dragon Inheritance” by Dragon Ruler 06
(45,933 words)
mpreg
harry/draco
“Inheritance was usually a time when young witches and wizards get a massive power boost and an enhancement to their abilities on their sweet sixteenth birthday. Of course, Harry Potter wasn't a normal wizard.”
Fanfic: Dragon Inheritance Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“Saving Harry” by Voldyismoldy
(44,741 words)
harry/draco
“Harry is the only hope to save the wizarding world from Voldemort but who is going to save him?”
Fanfic: Saving Harry Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Lines of Misery” by xXForeversEndx
(37,642 words) complete
harry/draco
“Draco is alone, and somewhat lost. He stumbles across a boggart one day and someone saves him. Draco's life will never be the same.”
“Rise of the Dark Angel” by mykkila09
(386,315 words)
harry/draco
“When Sirius dies in the battle in the DOM, Harry decides to drop the act of being the naive Golden Boy. What happens to the Light when their Saviour is now on the Dark side?”
Rise of the Dark Angel - Chapter 1 - mykkila09, Tonks_is_cool - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Face Down” by nekluvshp
(44,147 words) complete
harry/draco
“For two years, Harry has endured the abuse of someone he trusted, loved. With the help of someone new and unexpected, can he overcome the trauma and learn to trust again?”
Face Down - Chapter 1 - nekluvshp - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Mind’s Eye” by Galadriell
(57,978 words) complete
harry/draco
“After five years of silence in a mental institution, Harry speaks. "Malfoy," he murmurs. Why would he speak the name of his Slytherin counterpart? So begins the treatment with Draco in the forefront of it all.”
Fanfic: Mind's Eye Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Denial and its Side Effects” by AmberMX
(50,691 words)
harry/draco
“Shortly after returning to Hogwarts to complete his education, Harry begins to suffer from nightmares. At the same time, he begins to form some sort of friendship with Draco Malfoy, the disgraced heir of the Malfoy family. His friends don't approve of this, but Harry insists that everyone deserves a second chance.”
Fanfic: Denial and its Side Effects Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Growing Pains” by SensiblyTainted
(190,497 words) complete
harry/draco
“The summer after Sirius' death: the abuse at the Dursley's leaves him broken. Snape is asked to try and help, and discovers that the key to saving Harry may be Draco, who has returned after his own difficult summer.”
Fanfic: Growing Pains Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Unconditionally” by TheSiner
(82k word)
harry/draco
“Harry secretly keeps Draco locked in his attic and hates himself for that, but can't help it and Draco hates Harry. Complications ensue. A somewhat disturbing love story.”
Fanfic: Unconditionally Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“Life Renovations” by Windseeker2305
(288,592 words) complete
mpreg
harry/draco
“At times people are forced to evolve in order to survive. Sometimes people must be free in order to thrive. After a summer of torture with the Dursleys, Harry falls into a self induced magical coma. Draco-who holds a hidden torch for him-jumps in to help. There they meet and decide many things that could very well change the Wizarding World forever.”
Life Renovations - Chapter 1 - windseeker2305 - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“A Vampire and his Veela” by puffin
(45,126 words)
harry/draco
“What would happen if Harry had to live under lies and hide his true self. What if Harry Potter wasn't the golden boy everyone thought him to be? Come and read to find out.”
Fanfic: A Vampire and his Veela Ch 1, Harry Potter
“There’s a Pure-Blood Custom For That” by Lomonaaeren
(105,549 words) complete
harry/draco
“The day that Harry stops Draco Malfoy and his son from being bothered in the middle of Diagon Alley starts a strange series of interactions between him and Malfoy. Who knew there was a pure-blood custom for every situation?”
There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That - Chapter 1 - Lomonaaeren - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Bond” by Anna Fugazzi
(173,499) complete
harry/draco
“So this starts around the end of September of an AU seventh year. I was also assuming that Lucius Malfoy wouldn't be in prison very long, what with his various connections with influential people, so he's here too.”
Bond - Chapter 1 - AnnaFugazzi - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Draco’s Boy” by empathic siren
(186,063 words) complete
alternative universe, no magic
harry/draco
“A mysterious little boy named Harry moves in next door to Draco Malfoy, and he's determined to make him his friend and learn all of his secrets. Years later, he's determined to make Harry more than a friend.”
Fanfic: Draco's Boy Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Desperate Measures” by vvc
(196,164 words)
harry/draco
“Harry may be a half-Veela, but there was no such thing as a destined mate. If somebody wanted him, they would have to prove their worthiness. And Draco’s chances don't look so good when Harry guts him at the welcoming feast…”
Fanfic: Desperate Measures Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Uncertain” by unicornball
(136,364 words) complete
harry/draco
“Harry and Draco meet again years after a rough breakup. Draco is in for a big surprise…”
Uncertain - Chapter 1 - unicornball - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Pure” by sweetrosey
(48,569 words)
harry/draco
“Harry Potter has always been the Golden Boy. But is he as pure as they all think? Or is there something that lies deeper?”
Fanfic: Pure Ch 1, Harry Potter
“The Challenge of being a Veela’s Mate” by Triola
(44,066 words) complete
harry/draco
“Harry wakes up looking like a girl, Draco is possessive, yet oddly sweet, Hermione squeals like the girl she is, and Pansy is rather likeable. A tale of a Veela and his mate. Or was it a mate and his Veela?”
Fanfic: The Challenge of being a Veela's Mate Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Midnight Sun” by Herald-MageAnduli
(64,303 words) complete
harry/draco
“The 'Boy Who Lived' is Harry's older twin. Neglected by his family, intelligence constantly underestimated, his placement in Slytherin house is a shock. Disowning him was their worst possible mistake. Along with his friend Draco Malfoy he faces the challenges of the Triwizard Tournament.”
Fanfic: Midnight Sun Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Through the Fire” by Song Angel
(201,186 words) in progress
harry/draco
“Minerva McGonagall checks up on little Harry Potter and finds that not all is as it should be. She makes a decision that will change everything for the Boy Who Lives”
Through The Fire - Chapter 1 - SongAngel - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Tough Act” by The 1224
(21,243 words)
harry/draco
“At the age of six, Harry runs away from his abusive family and is considered dead to the Wizarding World. Suddenly, at the age of 13, he reappears.”
Fanfic: Tough Act Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Harry Potter and the Voice of the Obscurial” by anonwriter64
(46,665 words) complete
harry/draco
“Harry arrives at Hogwarts and is proven to be a capable and intelligent young wizard, but what will happen as things get worse at the Dursleys? Will Vernon fulfill the promise he made to Harry on his 11th birthday?”
Fanfic: Harry Potter and the Voice of the Obscurial Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Turning the Tide” by DanniCat
(105,720 words) complete
harry/tom
harry/draco
“Harry becomes doubtful of Dumbledore's side of the war. Things are no longer how he remembers them. When he listens to Draco's side of the story how will his own path change?”
Fanfic: Turning the Tide Ch 1, Harry Potter
“the Price to Pay” by doyou000me
(31,486 words) complete
harry/draco
“Voldemort is gone and the war is over. Harry has returned from the dead. But when making a deal with Death, there is always a price to pay.”
Fanfic: the Price to Pay Ch 1, Harry Potter | FanFiction
“Sanguis Vita Est” by Shigure-san
(312,888 words) complete
harry/draco
“Whilst Voldemort’s prisoner, Draco is made a vampire and forced to take Harry as his first meal. With Draco managing to resist the temptation to drain him, just barely, in a moment of blind rage at what he has been forced to become, he aids Harry in the destruction of Voldemort. But even with that threat vanquished, once back at Hogwarts, Draco finds himself disturbingly addicted to Harry’s blood. And amongst all this, a dark shadow looms ominously on the outline of the forest, watching them closely.”
Sanguis Vita Est - Chapter 1 - HyperLittleNori (Shiguresan) - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Slip” by Khashana
(24,833 words) complete
harry/draco
“In an alternate universe, Draco's fingers slipped on his wand that day in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, and everything changed.”
Slip - Chapter 1 - Khashana - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“For Love of a Slytherin” by StormyFireDragon
(107,678 words) complete
harry/draco
“The battle in the Department of Mysteries is over. Harry receives his inheritance and things change rapidly for him. Love appears to him with the most unlikely of person. The forces of light must prove love conquers all.”
Fanfic: For Love of a Slytherin Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Shake My Hand” by Kitty Smith
(88k words) abandoned
harry/draco
“What would have happened if Harry had accepted Draco's overtures of friendship? How one relationship changes a world's fate.”
Fanfic: Shake My Hand Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Not While I’m Around” by thilia87
(24k words)
harry/draco
“On his first day as a Healer at St. Mungo's, Draco is introduced to Harry, who has been a patient at the hospital his entire life, and he forms an unexpected attachment…”
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/4729741/1/Not-While-I-m-Around
“For The Life of Our Hero” by iridescentcloud
(27,984 words)
harry/draco
“All the causes Harry has been fighting for are all a lie, Dumbledore has been the cause of this since Harry was a baby. What will Harry do now that he's in control?”
Fanfic: For The Life of Our Hero Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Background Secrets” by Calai’di
(172,733 words) complete
harry/draco
“What if Harry and Draco were really friends behind all the insults and fights with each other? When would it have started and where would it end?”
Fanfic: Background Secrets Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Dear Rival” by Bittersweet Revenge
(84,115 words)
harry/draco
“Bored, Harry and Draco start a correspondence which brings them to spend time together and get to know each other without forgetting they are rivals. But, against their own will, their feelings start growing into something more…”
Fanfic: Dear Rival Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Like Glass” by Penguin
(24,018 words) complete
harry/draco
“War is over and Voldemort has been defeated; Harry has been used and thrown away. He lives in Muggle London, lost, confused and destroyed. But Lupin and others want him to return to the wizarding world, and Draco Malfoy is sent out to find him.”
Like Glass - Chapter 1 - Penguin - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
“Black Truth” by InferiorBeing
(104,304 words) complete
harry/draco
“And, with bated breath, Draco traced the silver line down one more step in the family tree. Draco Lucius Malfoy... the third full blooded Veriae in the Malfoy family... and future life mate of Harry Potter.”
Fanfic: Black Truth Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Life From the Start” by LunaParvulus
(74,080 words) complete
harry/draco
“A botched up de-aging potion and Harry suffers from the results. Now, Draco is hands full of one adorable Harry. What if Draco came to like Harry in his baby-state? Can both pretend nothing happened when Harry is back to normal?”
Fanfic: Life From the Start Ch 1, Harry Potter
“DragonKin” by Fyreheart
(157,154 words) complete
harry/draco
“During the summer between Harry's 5th and 6th year, an ancestor of Harry's discovers the last of the line has been mistreated and decides it's time to intercede.”
Fanfic: DragonKin Ch 1, Harry Potter
“Two Sides of the Same Coin” by noiselessheart
(117,277 words) complete
harry/draco
“Harry and Draco find out the hard way that the line between hate and love is a fine one, and that somewhere between the Battle of Hogwarts and being thrust back together as Hogwarts eighth years, they may have just crossed it.”
Fanfic: Two Sides of the Same Coin Ch 1, Harry Potter
“White Lies” by Cassis Luna
(171,013 words) complete
harry/draco
“Draco drinks a potion that makes him know if a person is lying, and Harry, apparently at fault that Draco is this way, is forced to 'help' him with the effects of the potion. For the first time, they deal with each other with no lies to hide behind.”
White Lies - Chapter 1 - cassisluna - Harry Potter - JK Rowling
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An Introduction to Orson Welles - The (Belated) 2018 Director’s Marathon
Authors Note: The following novella-length essay on the history of Orson Welles was written to be the December 2018 Directors Marathon as is a tradition for this blog. It was submitted to Geeks Under Grace wherein it was rejected for its excessive length. After several months of consideration as to how to rework the piece into something publishable within the website’s requirements, it is being published now as was initially intended at the AntiSocialCritic Blog.
"I started at the top and I've been working my way down ever since."
- Orson Welles F for Fake
In the early morning of October 10, 1985, Orson Welles suffered a heart attack and died at his desk. He departed the world he had left such a massive impact upon as quietly and mundanely as a great man could. Just hours before the once superstar artist made his final public appearance on The Merv Griffon Show where he talked about his life. Prior to that in the weeks before he had starred in his final cinematic role while providing the voice of Unicron for Transformers: The Movie. His funeral was a quiet affair at a local hotel, surrounded by his surviving close friends and estranged family members from multiple marriages. You might view this humble affair and fail to understand that the man being eulogized was, in fact, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Across his massive career, Orson Welles became a pioneer of theater, radio, and film that pushed forward and challenged those art forms radically. He was intelligent, charismatic, well-read and alluring with an ability to command an audience through his words and presence. He was a showman, an actor as well as a magician but also a creative mind with a unique understanding and love for art.
Yet for all of his creativity across a half-century of output he's almost entirely remembered solely for two major events early in his career. In 1938, he performed a radio rendition of H.G. Welles' War of the Worlds that supposedly ginned up a massive panic on the East Coast of the United States. Then in 1941, he directed Citizen Kane for RKO Radio Productions which would eventually go on to become the most acclaimed film in the history of cinema. As a result, his public image rapidly declined. He became recognized as a washed up, unreliable filmmaker with obesity problems and a bombastic personality. This version of Welles would become the stereotype so brutally mocked by comedians on television shows like The Simpsons, The Critic and Pinky and the Brain. Despite being pigeon-holed and written off within a decade of the peak of his career he continued to work as a filmmaker and an actor across North America and Europe for decades until his death. As excellent as his inaugural effort was his career has dozens of excellent films and performances that are well worth revisiting. Thankfully there has never been a better time to go back and review the works of Orson Welles than right now.
On November 2nd, 2018, Netflix published what will likely be the last of his posthumous works with The Other Side of the Wind. I reviewed the film for Geeks Under Grace at the time it released and have spent the last month reflecting on the experience of seeing such a culturally significant film. It's not every day that a lost piece of art is drudged up and rebuilt from the ground up. Beyond that, the film carries with it so many beautiful reflections, moments of brilliant and visual poetry. Knowing that it's the inheritor of such a vital legacy adds a great deal of weight to the film.
When I started writing publicly one of the first major article series I worked on was a project I called the Director Marathons. From 2014-2017 I did a yearly dive every December into the full filmography of a famous acclaimed director. Over the first four marathons, I dug through the collective works of Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo Del Toro, and The Coen Brothers. I also did an additional six-month breakdown on the entire filmography of Steven Spielberg. Now that Geeks Under Grace is my home for writing I want to continue that tradition here. I considered several major filmmakers including Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, George Romero, and Martin Scorsese but with the release of The Other Side of the Wind, it became clear to me that no director more deserve the attention afforded by a total viewing of their body of work than Orson Welles.
What follows are a series of brief historical retrospectives and film analysis's meant to offer a brief look into the seventy-year life of the man of the hour. For every analysis I offer there is a greater and deeper discussion that every subject of his life I bring up can be made. In the name of brevity, I want this series to be largely introductory (12.5 thousand words of introduction...). The secret of great art is that there are always depths to be plumed within it, nuances to observe and details to be discussed. With Welles part of the appeal beyond his incredible eye for detail is his desire to push the boundaries of the art forms he tackled. Every project and chapter of his life could fill a thick book with all the details that go into them. Film improved as an art form because of his embrace of expressionism and innovative use of technology. Filmmakers as vital as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese regularly host his works among the most influential and beloved of the movies that inspired theirs. There is so much immense history and artistry that can be delved into across the full career of Orson Welles.
That being said, as we learn in his inaugural film Citizen Kane, this can be something of a fruitless endeavor. You can never fully know the full life of a man based on what he leaves behind. Much like Charles Foster Kane's home Xanadu, his works stand as an eternal memorial to Welles' incredible creativity. Lost in the ruins of his career is the man that can only be remembered. These works aren't him. They're all we have left of him. There will never be a Rosebud moment where we understand the inner life of Orson Welles. Even so, the life of Welles is a grand one of ups and downs. In spite of the challenges, we shall do our best to look through the art to see the man.
1. The Young Orson Welles
Orson Welles's early life was faced with much splendor and difficulty. Born to Richard and Beatrice Welles in Kenosha, Wisconsin on May 6, 1915, his family was at one point very affluent and wealthy as his father invented a bicycle lamp that allowed the family to move to Chicago. He eventually stopped working and subsumed to alcoholism. Richard and Beatrice would separate in 1919. Orson's mother found work at the Art Institute of Chicago as a pianist performing for lectures. On May 10, 1924, Beatrice would die of Hepatitis, leaving the nine-year-old Welles without a proper family.
Welles lived with his alcoholic father for three years, traveling the world and attending multiple schools. He would eventually settle himself at the Todd Seminary School for Boys in Woodstock, IL where he would set his roots. Later in this life, Welles revealed that Woodstock was the closest thing he had to a home. "Where is home?" Welles replied, "I suppose it's Woodstock, Illinois if it's anywhere. I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it's that."
The Todd School for Boys ended up being the catalyst for much of Welles intellectual development. His teachers fostered his fascination with acting and the arts and gave the incredibly intelligent young man free rein to expand himself. At age 15, Orson's father passed away from heart and kidney failure. Following High School, the young man found himself awash with opportunities including a scholarship to Harvard University which he declined. After a brief multi-week flirtation with the Art Institute of Chicago, the adventurous young Welles sought a life of travel.
2. Man of the Stage
Welles gallivanted across Europe using the remains of his inheritance. During a stay in Dublin, Ireland the young man approached the manager of the Gate Theater claiming he was a famous Broadway actor that ought to have a position on the stage. The manager didn't believe him yet gave him the job anyway based on his charisma and bravery. His stage debut was on October 13, 1931, in the role of Duke Karl Alexander of Wurttemberg in the play Jew Suss. He would act in several more Dublin productions including an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle at the Abbey Theater. He would try and seek further work in London but failed to acquire a work permit and thus returned to the United States.
Upon his return, Welles made his American debut as a man of the stage at the Woodstock Operahouse in Woodstock, IL. Welles immediately sought out his Irish compatriots from the Gate Theater to stage a drama festival in Woodstock consisting of Trilby, Hamlet, The Drunkard, and Tsar Paul. During this time he also got his first radio gig working on The American School of the Air and shot his first short film.
After marrying Chicago socialite Virginia Nicholas in 1934, Welles moved to New York City where he performed the role of Tybalt in an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. On March 22, 1935, Orson made his radio premiere on the CBS Radio series The March of Time doing a scene from the 1935 Archibald MacLeish play Panic. Radio would become his primary income as the money he immediately started making with CBS was significant. Welles had moved to New York at the height of the Great Depression and ended up being in exactly the right place to benefit. The Federal Theater Project had been crafted by the Works Progress Administration as a method of helping to bring economic relief to struggling artists. Welles jumped on the opportunity and began funneling money from his incredibly lucrative $1,500/week Radio work into the theater project. President Roosevelt would quip that Orson Welles was the only person in history to illegally siphon money into a government project. The arrangement suited most everyone however and was looked the other way on. Famously Welles became so busy during this time in his life that he hired an ambulance to transport him back and forth across New York City at full speed between his radio performances and his theater directing jobs.
His first work became the incredibly famous and then wildly transgressive production of Voodoo Macbeth. The all-black production recast the traditionally Scottish play and set in against the backdrop of Haiti's court of King Henri Christophe. The production became a nationally recognized and hailed play that toured the country and skyrocketed Welles' name into the spotlight at the ripe age of twenty. The next several years of Welles life became dedicated to this grind of different theatrical productions and radio gigs, culminating his 1937 departure from the Federal Theater Project to create his own theatrical troupe. What would become known as the Mercury Theater opened on November 11, 1937, with an acclaimed restaging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar set against the background of fascist Europe with himself in the role of Brutus. Here Welles would create many of the lasting relationships and raise multiple actors would follow him through his journey in Hollywood including Joseph Cotton, Everett Sloane and Vincent Price.
3. Voice on the Radio
Though famously a devotee of the Baird, Welles' recognition was earned by his incredible command of the airwaves. Welles' famous baritone voice became a regular mainstay across America as he became the regular voice for many of the country's most popular radio dramas of the time.
At the age of 21, Welles produced an acclaimed and often criticized version of Hamlet he did for the Colombia Workshop that shaved the four-hour play into a two-part 59-minute audio drama that cut the story of the Shakespearean tragedy to the bone. His presentation was noticeably more emotive than most presentations of Shakespeare at the time which set him apart.
The bread and butter of his work throughout the 1930s was his work on pulps and radio dramas. Throughout 1937 over the course of a year, Welles provided the voice for the pulp icon The Shadow. At that point, the vigilante pulp hero in question was one of the largest entertainment properties of the time with novellas and regular radio dramas dedicated to him every week. Having Welles take up the mantle for a time put the fledgling star in the seat of a pop icon.
The moment that shot Welles into the spotlight came on October 30th, 1938 when Orson performed what would become the greatest media scandal of his career with the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. The adaptation he conceived was fascinating. He took the broad events of H.G. Welles famous science fiction novel and interpreted them in the form of a series News broadcasts as though the events of the book were happening in rural New Jersey and New York City. The following events aren't clear. Welles himself inflated the reaction to the broadcast as though hundreds of screaming civilians scurried across New York City and attempted to flee head first into the Hudson River. More than likely the reaction caused nothing more than a minor stir compared to the massive nationwide reaction that the broadcast was implied to have caused. The broadcast itself did advertise itself on the pretense that it was a radio drama so any disturbed civilians would've tuned in later into the broadcast without the knowledge that it was a radio play. The incident was taken seriously by the United States government and Welles was forced to own up to the brief chaos. Next to his first film, this incident would become the most widely remembered moment of his career and one he took a perverse pride in. Beyond the angry government officials, it caught many an important eye of the day. Among the people who took interest in Welles were the producers at RKO Radio Productions in Hollywood.
4. Sought by Hollywood
Welles initially had no interest in film or Hollywood. Hollywood wanted Welles because he was an exploding star with exactly the sort of talents and celebrity that could transition into a film career. RKO Radio Pictures approached him with enormous monetary offers but the disinterested Welles was already wealthy. Money was no object to him. If he was going to be dragged into the film industry he was going to do it on his own terms. Thus he sent RKO an over the top ridiculous offer demanding full creative control over whatever he produced with them. To his surprise and the surprise of the enter Hollywood establishment, RKO accepted. He was offered a multi-picture deal with full creative control, upto and including hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on each film and the right to reserve showing the picture to the studio executives until it was completed.
This has to understood in context. The late 1930s was the height of the studio system in Hollywood. Filmmakers worked at the behest of cutthroat corporate masters who had the right and gumption to control every facet of a film. They frequently re-shot segments from acclaimed films before they're released on a whim based on what they thought worked/didn't work/was marketable by their standards. Even industry greats like John Ford and Frank Capra didn't get to control this much of their films. Given that creatives had so many restrictions the results were stunning. This was the moment in cinematic history when films like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind were emerging and defining the Golden Age of Hollywood as a time when storytelling and craft were at their creative peaks. For Welles to gallivant into Hollywood and take over the town single-handedly was unheard of. To paraphrase Welles, he had been given the greatest train set a kid ever received and he was looking to use it.
Without knowledge of what he was even doing Welles immediately turned to the greats of the industry of the time to start building his team. His two most important collaborators would be screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and cinematography Gregg Toland. Mankiewicz was a veteran screenwriter who had had his hand in writing and producing dozens of films since 1926. Toland was fresh off of working on multiple critically acclaimed films like The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath, both of which he shot with John Ford.
Welles had the best talent Hollywood had to offer at his fingertips and near infinite power to do as he pleased and began working on different pitches for ideas for his first film. The first idea he conceived was ultimately too ambitious to achieve. He considered shooting an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness done in the first person perspective. The project ultimately fell apart as Welles eventually couldn't make his vision work on RKO's budget. Decades later there was a proper if highly altered adaptation of the book with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
Heart of Darkness would be the first of three pitches Welles initially made to RKO to fill his two film contract. His second idea was a political thriller/comedy called The Smiler With a Knife based on a novel by Cecil Day-Lewis. This project stalled by December of 1939. Welles was uncertain of a plan and didn't want to drag starting production on something indefinitely. He was already behind schedule. Welles and Mankiewicz began brainstorming and eventually, the two started on an idea for a film titled American. Welles approached Mankiewicz during the writing to find that the script he'd written out was hundreds of pages of messy but serviceable ideas. Taking his excellent ability to cut down stories to the bone that he had used on Hamlet, Orson crafted what would come to be known as his first masterpiece Citizen Kane.
5. Citizen Kane (1941)
I recently did a full-length breakdown of Citizen Kane for Geeks Under Grace and don't wish to relitigate much of what I produced for that article here. What I do think is necessary is understanding how the world reacted to and would ultimately go onto understand the film.
The reaction to the film was both immediate and faltering. The film was met initially by mixed reviews that sited the film's awkward structure as a fault. It wouldn't be years before the film would be released after it's initial run that the film would be subsequently analyzed and relitigated as one of the greatest films of all time.
Well before it's release, the film's satirical target William Randolph Hearst heard the wind that the film was a rather overt critique of his person and attempted to buy the film outright from RKO Radio Pictures to prevent it from seeing the light of day. When that didn't work, he turned to his newspaper network which proceeded to lambast the film in the public eye. The film's release was delayed and by the time it released to the public the reaction was nothing more than a whimper. Citizen Kane bombed in the box office.
The half-century of after it's release brought much rabid discussion and reevaluation of the film into mainstream discussion. In a famed piece of now hotly disregarded film criticism, New Yorker Film Critic Paeline Kael wrote Raising Kane. The essay lambasted Orson Welles, the film in question and called into question the very authorship of the film, claiming that screenwriter Herman Manchowitz deserved more credit for his role in writing the film.
Mind you Pauline Kael's criticism wasn't totally irrational. Kael is one of the most influential critics in history and tends only to be remembered nowadays by her gaffs like her public disdain for Clint Eastwood films like Dirty Harry. Her coming out against Orson Welles is remembered as an enormous artistic mistake on her part but people take the book-length essay she wrote very seriously. As a point, it's worth noting that Welles fundamentally agreed with her on many points. He felt that the director was an overrated position in filmmaking and that film was a collaborative process between the writers, actors and crew that the direct guided and oversaw. Even so, it's not surprising one of the antagonist characters in The Other Side of the Wind was a female film critic.
The most cynical read on Citizen Kane is that it's the film that introduced the concept of ceilings to the cinema. Prior to Citizen Kane, most film productions didn’t film ceilings because they needed open air sets to fit audio equipment. Many proclaimed fans of the film tend to adore it's superficiality more than it's actual storytelling chops as a film. As it stands the most remembered aspect of the film is the Rosebud twist at the end that Welles himself considered as gimmicky. Welles himself had a very conflicted relationship with the film. Welles disliked some of the films minor mistakes and ultimately came to consider the film a curse on his career that he could never live up to. How can anyone build a career off of an instant masterpiece? Even the man who made Citizen Kane couldn't manage to answer that question.
Yet in 1982, Steven Spielberg paid $55,000 for one of the surviving Sled props. Every filmmaker from Martin Scorsese, to Richard Linklater, to Tim Burton, to George Lucas and the aforementioned Steven Spielberg has sited Citizen Kane not only as one of their favorite films but as their inspiration for much of their work. In addition to most every respected film critic from Roger Ebert to Jonathon Rosenbaum has offered their endorsement of the film's strengths. Its legacy is undeniable. Is it overrated? Perhaps. While it's placement in the canon of Orson Welles is certainly hotly debated, there is no denying that Welles began his filmmaking career with a masterpiece for the history books.
6. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
There is a scene in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles where the titular character and his apprenticing young actor Zac Effron that the Welles family was once close to Booth Tarkington. Though not widely remembered today, Tarkington would've been a huge deal to people at the time much how writers like Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace are lionized today. His masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons would go on to be the subject of Welles’ second major film for RKO.
As Welles continued his work after the debacle of Citizen Kane's release he quickly moved on to fulfill the second film in his RKO contract. His team continued to dig through numerous options and ideas. The most notable idea he didn't end up going with was a pitch for an adaptation of the Bible called The Life of Christ which would've been a strictly adhered adaptation that ultimately fell through twice. Instead, Welles turned to the contemporary masterpiece that was close to his heart. Welles' initial cut of The Magnificent Ambersons is said to have been a masterpiece that rivaled Citizen Kane in quality. He translated the sad story of an old American family's decline into poverty and irrelevance to the cinema and delivered the second masterpiece RKO paid him to. Unfortunately for Welles, it wasn't the masterpiece RKO wanted. The studio shuttered at the bleak film Welles had produced and quickly began underhanded plans to change the film.
Welles was shipped off to Brazil as part of a US Government deal with their government. He was to shoot his third feature for RKO called It's All True which would've involved documentary footage from various festivals and events. While he was out of the country, RKO pulled all of the actors and crew back to the studio lot, cut out the third act of the film and reshot it with a happy ending that completely changed the story of The Magnificent Ambersons. Several cast and crew attempted to warn Welles but he didn't find out until it was too late. By the time he was back in Hollywood, he would lose his rights to change the film.
Late in his life, Welles would find himself watching the theatrical cut of The Magnificent Ambersons late one night on television. His then mistress Oja Kodar recalled the experience of nearly walking into the room and catching a reflection of the late 60s Welles sobbing as the movie that clearly meant the most to him was presented on late night television. While the cut we have today is largely excellent, it's far from the vision that Welles had intended for it.
7. Fired from RKO
Welles had already been fired from RKO Radio Productions by the time he returned from Brazil. The studio that had once promised him free reign to produce masterpieces for them didn't like the controversy associated with his films and couldn't figure out how to market what he did film. For them, it was smarter to go into damage control mode and boot out the wunderkind to the streets. The cut of Magnificent Ambersons with the happy ending they did produce didn't do well in theaters and the preferred cut of the film was eventually destroyed. Thus began the air of bad luck that would surround Orson Welles' prolific career. Despite churning out two masterpieces, Hollywood now hated him. As time would go on he would become more and more of a pariah in filmmaking circles.
His last film for RKO which he was producing and directed several scenes for Journey into Fear ultimately saw him being stricken from the credits. His co-director Norman Foster would receive directing credit but later Welles scholars have often retroactively credited Welles as a director too. Welles immediately began damage control for his reputation by prostrating himself over the next several film projects he produced. He started taking acting jobs for films starting with an adaptation of Jane Eyre to try and repair his public image. Interestingly enough the latter film would end up being one of his only romantic performances as that film had been produced to capitalize off of the recent success of historical romances like Gone With The Wind.
8. The Stranger (1946)
Welles needed to jump back into Hollywood and prove that he was capable of producing something normal that he could sell. With that in mind, he conceived of The Stranger. The film would go on to be his least artistic and therefore most financially successful film. It had been four years since he'd been in the directing chair and he was desperate. He was approached by producer Sam Spiegel after director John Huston couldn't take the job. The result is easily the most Hollywoodish film of his filmography and the one that really represents the director at his most obedient. Despite the darker story, that being about a Nazi holocaust perpetuated being hunted by an investigator portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, the movie was a great deal less artistic and revolutionary by the standards of the time. It was merely a conventional noir thriller. To paraphrase Welles, he did the film with much stricter regulations as a means of proving to Hollywood that he wasn't a toxic director and that he could make money. While the film wouldn't succeed in fixing his reputation it at least made him slightly less toxic. Unfortunately, the film wouldn't lead to any additional career help for Orson. He originally signed with International Pictures to do a four-picture deal after the film as complete. The company backed out of the deal the just weeks after the premiere when it looked initially like the film wouldn't make it's money back.
9. The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
The life of Orson Welles has often been described as an illusion, an incestuous juggle between fact and fiction that the ever impressive Welles maintained as a kind false mysticism to increase his legend. While it did give his persona a larger than life appearance it's made tracking the history of Welles into a nightmare. This can be clearly seen in the case of Welles' third masterpiece The Lady from Shanghai. He's told the story of how he pitched the film to Hollywood producer Harry Cohn of Colombia Pictures. After his recent failures Welles turned back to his previous loves of radio and theater and began producing new shows and dramas. His biggest stage production at that point was a play version of Around the World in 80 Days which closed almost immediately within weeks after opening.
Supposedly, as the production was preparing for it's Boston premiere, Welles found himself strapped for cash and in desperate need for $50,000 to move the costumes from the train station to the theater. Desperately he pitched a fake book to the president of Colombia Pictures using the name of a paperback book a young woman was reading next to him, got the money, performed the show and then went back to Hollywood to write and direct the film. It's a great story but it likely isn't true. Whatever truth is in it is questionable as he's told different versions of the same story to different interviewers, each with a different amount of money and circumstance. It's likely that Welles just got called out of the blue by Harry Cohn to direct a thriller and he took the gig. Naturally of course half of the appeal of Orson Welles is the blur of fiction and reality the surrounds the myth of his life. It's fun to speculate but having a historically accurate read of Welles' history is a frustrating knot to untie for scholars.
That film he produced The Lady From Shanghai would become one of his most respected films and widely regarded as one of the weirdest movies. That's not hyperbole either as David Kehr of the Chicago Reader was quoted as saying it was one of the "weirdest great movies ever made". While more conventional by the standards of his previous two masterpieces, The Lady from Shanghai is far from your run of the mill Noir thriller. Welles had initially shot the film in the style of a documentary. That's a strange choice but it grounds the otherwise outlandish story of a sailor being asked to help fake the death of a wealthy man in a kind of distant visual style. Harry Cohn hated the result. Like his previous two films, large segments of the film were reshot to add traditional close-ups and conventional shooting. These shots clashed with the film's already strange visual style and made the film more surrealistic than it already was. The film's most notable contribution to cinema, of course, was the finale in the mirror maze. Without spoiling the story context, the final shootout is mesmerizing and visually bizarre and left an imprint on generations of filmmakers. The trope has returned in numerous forms from action films like Enter the Dragon and John Wick 2 to comics like The Dark Knight Returns. Yet again though, the film flopped in the box office.
As a quick aside, the film also stars his then second wife Rita Haworth with whom he divorced shortly after the film completed production.
10. Macbeth (1948)
It's strange that Welles' first attempt at a Shakespearian film would come about in such a modest fashion yet his selection wasn't surprising. Being that Voodoo Macbeth was the stage play that put his name on the map, a traditional Scottish production on film made sense to be his Shakespeare film.
Republic Pictures at the time was a subpar studio by the standards of the Big Three. It mostly produced B-Pictures and serials. For Herbert Yates, as the president of the studio, Welles' pitch for a Shakespeare adaption gave him high hopes that he might be able to make his fledgling Hollywood operation into a prestige studio with the right success and went all in on the idea. Welles produced the film on cheap sets and finished the film in just 19 days of production with two additional days of pick up shots. Yet despite being rushed and inexpensive, the film managed to produce something qualifying as a definitive vision of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies. That speaks highly of the production given that the play has been adapted dozens of times in cinematic history including versions by Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa and most recently Justin Kurzel. Yet Welles' film was benefitted by Welles' unique expressionist take on filmmaking. The cheap stagey sets were masked in beautiful black and white film stock, lit with precision to highlight it's character's emotional state and performed to perfection with Welles in the central role.
Welles had bet that the film would go a long way to repairing his reputation and unfortunately this wouldn't help it. The film was savaged by American critics who despised the over-the-top Scottish accents in the initial release. Welles rerecorded the dialog with American accents for a 1950 rerelease but that version didn't do well either. Both versions were flops and outside of Europe where the critics appreciated it more, there wasn't much support for it. It didn't help that the film was released in close proximity to Laurence Olivier's acclaimed Hamlet which became one of the most celebrated Shakespeare adaptations of all time. It would take years for critics to start appreciating its strengths.
11. The Third Man (1949)
Of all of the films in the Welles filmography, maybe none is more vital to understanding the Celebrity of Orson Welles than The Third Man. Like Jane Eyre, this wasn't a film that he produced or directed in so much as he is remembered for his excellent performance. At that, he's barely in the film at all. The leading man is his frequent collaborator Joseph Cotton. The film was directed by legendary director Carol Reed, famous for films like Odd Man Out, Night Train to Munich, The Fallen Idol, and Oliver! While somewhat obscure now, the director became famous for being one of the most skilled directors in British history. In addition, the film was produced by legendary golden age producer David O'Selznick (Gone With the Wind, King Kong). Welles was asked to play the role of Harry Lime in the film and was offered one of two options for payment for a small role. He had the option of reviewing a portion of the film's profits down the line or a lump sum of money immediately. In a moment of deprivation, he jumped on the money immediately in a financial decision he would come to regret. The Third Man would go on to become the most financially successful film he was ever associated with. Had he chosen profit sharing he would've become immensely wealthy as the film in question has remained one of the most popular noir thrillers of all time.
Welles would later go on to express his opinion that his performance was the greatest "Star" role an actor could've ever asked for. Harry Lime is mentioned dozens of times in the film prior to his first appearance so when Orson Welles finally makes his surprise splash of an appearance the film there is a great deal of weight to his screen presence. His few scenes in the film and his improvised line are usually sighted as the high points of an otherwise widely regarded film. In some ways, this is sadly prophetic of much of the way culture remembers Orson Welles. People think of him as a flash in the pan and we see this in the way culture idealizes individual moments from his films as opposed to his films overall. Most people don't remember the side characters in Citizen Kane but they remember Rosebud. The same is true of The Third Man. People remember Welles' few scenes but they frequently forget Joseph Cotton and Carol Reed's accomplishments with the film outside of Welles. The mere size of his personality creates expectations. First-time viewers familiar with Welles might be surprised to notice he doesn't appear until well after the first hour of the film. Welles is just one turning gear in a much larger story about post-war corruption and profiteering set against the hurt and ruin of Vienna, Austria. His chemistry with Joseph Cotton adds an air of history two the two characters whose lives were once tied together being torn apart by circumstance. His deep baritone voice exudes an air of malevolence as he stares contemptuously on the small people below him. It's a small but vital performance built up to by one of the greatest thriller stories of all time.
12. Othello (1951)
No film would come to break Orson Welles' reputation more than Othello. Despite earning the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, Othello would become a curse on his reputation that he would never overcome. Welles had conceived of doing an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello prior to Macbeth but ultimately chose to go with that play when the concept seemed unfeasible. Welles was approached by an Italian film production company to star and direct a film version of the famed play based on his recent theatrical work which the production company thought would translate over well into the stage play. Welles quickly got to work assembling a team of European filmmakers and actors that he took to Italy. The production was immediately stymied by the surprise Bankruptcy of the production company meaning that the subsequent three years of production necessary to get the film finished had to be self-financed. Though not Orson's fault as the factors were out of his control, this would prove to be the final nail in the coffin of his public reputation. The fact that the film took three years to finish and went over budget put a stigma on his name that he never escaped.
The result was a convoluted production shot across multiple countries including Spain, Italy, Morocco and Turkey that created a mismatched pan-Mediterranean look to the film. The final cut was an atmospheric masterpiece. Welles scholar Jonathon Rosenbaum described the tone as almost that of a horror film more than anything else. There's is an immense dread hanging over the film as we see the unfolding story of interracial love and racial bigotry play out against the backdrop of war and political strife. While a clean cut is available today thanks to the Criterion Collection, early distribution of the film didn't go well. The film received several cuts in different countries and many of the versions distributed had massive audio problems including audio drops and syncing issues. The film was also distributed with multiple soundtracks. Once again the hard work that went into an Orson Welles film was lost to circumstance and failed to materialize until much later.
13. King Lear (1953)
In the second of Welles' exoduses to Europe, the director fled the United States for England following the McCarthy hearings and as a result put him on bad terms with the IRS. Orson Welles wasn't a communist but he was a Roosevelt Progressive democrat and disliked the air of paranoia in the United States during the Cold War. Welles was asked to perform the titular role in a CBS Omnibus production of King Lear for television in 1953 which he accepted the role of. The television film was a severely truncated 73-minute version of the play with most of the subplots and extraneous stories outside of the main plot cut out to focus on the main character's descent into madness. Though cheaply produced for television, his performance as Lear is the standout of the film. While he was in the United States to film the production, he was escorted every by the IRS who confiscated his earnings from the production to pay off outstanding taxes being sent back to England.
14. Mr. Arkadin (1955)
After the immense success of The Third Man, the movie that had taken Hollywood by storm became a hot ticket item and it's producers wanted to franchise it. Thus in 1951 was born The Lives of Harry Lime. The radio drama starred Welles in his most popular and deplorable character over the course of 52 episodes that represented a prequel to the film. Welles himself was involved in the process of developing the series given that the character was so directly tied to him. This included an episode called The Man of Mystery. This episode would go on to become the primary influence of Welles' newest thriller.
Though lower in budget, Mr. Arkadin was ambitious in its scope. The thriller sought to be a massive thriller set across multiple countries where the stakes of the questions it raised could change the fate of nations. In terms of story, this thriller was one of his most grand and globe-trotting adventures. Mr. Arkadin is a veritable tour de force of settings and European cultures.
Whereas Othello was shot over multiple countries meant to portray the same place, Mr. Arkadin was set across multiple countries in Europe and portrayed the variant beauty of many of it's finest interior sets. Cramped as much of the film looks from a visual standpoint the film did tour Europe across the scope of its production from London, Munich, to multiple places in France and to Switzerland. The story's central mystery involving the investigation of a man with no memory of his past can be difficult to follow but builts to an excellent final race wherein the lead character and the titular Mr. Arkadin must race to Spain to find the same person before the other.
Once again he lost control over the final cut. The postproduction became a trainwreck worthy of Orson Welles' reputation. As scholar Jonathon Rosenbaum discussed in his famous 1991 essay Seven Arkadins, there are no less than seven public cuts of Mr. Arkadin. Welles lost control of the editing process and rights to the film when he missed his deadline and as a result, the producer recut the film multiple times, novelized it, and gave it several releases across Europe in multiple languages. Welles had been reshaping the story and structure during the editing process to improve it and without his guiding hand, the final edits that made theaters were fare from his wishes. Welles would go on to consider the film the greatest disaster of his career. He was a man who suffered many indignities but the utter loss of Mr. Arkadin to multiple cuts was one of his most brutal defeats.
15. Touch of Evil (1958)
Welles had just finished acting in a thriller for Universal Pictures when he was asked by the producers to perform in another film for them as "the heavy" in a crime thriller. Universal was already far underway in developing the story concepts and casting but hadn't settled on a director or a script as of yet. Charlton Heston was already picked to play the lead role in the film. During a cross-country phone call, the film's producers mentioned the casting offer for Orson Welles when Heston made the offhand comment that Welles ought to be the one they sought out to direct the film based on the quality of his previous films. The line went dead for several seconds.
Welles was just getting back to Hollywood after a decade away in Europe. While he hadn't gotten over the pain of his bad breakup with RKO and his previous failures he was eager to direct a Hollywood picture again. Welles signed up to Touch of Evil at Heston's behest on the stipulation that he would get to rewrite the script. Over the course of several weeks of late nights, Welles and his secretary chugged out a new script based on the book Badge of Honor that Universal approved and set to work on.
As with many Welles films, Touch of Evil is rather depressingly remembered primarily for its opening shot. The several minutes long tracking shots at the beginning of the film is legitimately excellent in its pace and scope as we see several minutes of a car with a ticking time bomb in the back seat slowly drive across the US-Mexico border through crowded streets knowing the car could explode at any moment. Naturally of course when I was shown the film in Film School this is where the film was stopped. Many filmmakers worship the tracking shot and then forget to watch the remaining film. What they miss out on is a dark tragedy of corruption and falls from grace. The murder we see play out in real time at the beginning of the film is merely the beginning of a much larger conspiracy as the bombing rouses the attention of a Mexican police officer in the area at the time on his honeymoon and the local police legend Hank Quinlan. The film is one of the starkest examples of contemporary film noir, making the most out of Welles' expressionist love of shadow and darkness. While the opening shot is excellent it's not even the only tracking shot in the film. There are several long tracking shots, several of which we see during the investigation scenes that are just as technically impressive considering how deeply we follow the camera and swing in, out and around the conversations at play.
Universal had loved much of the footage that Welles was sending them at the end of every shooting day. Right up until they saw the rough cut of the film it seemed as though the two parties were on the same page. Alas, Universal Studios did what Hollywood always did to Orson Welles films. The final cut scared Universal with how dark it was. They cut out half an hour of footage and reshot segments of the plot to make it more palatable. By studio contracts, they had to present Welles with a cut of the film before the film went to print and shipped off to theaters. After seeing the new theatrical cut, Welles was distraught. The perturbed Welles skipped out on his daughter's wedding to write a 58-page memo to Universal Studios begging them to make needed changes to the film.
The film was released as the second billing of a double feature and subsequently bombed. In Europe, the film received a surprising level of acclaim, support from major film critics and won two awards at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival but without American success the film as considered dead on arrival. This was the last straw for Orson Welles. Hollywood had betrayed him for the last time. With this last indignity dealt to his creative vision, Welles packed up and moved back to Europe again.
There would thankfully be something of a re-edit of the film. In 1998, acclaimed film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Trilogy, American Graffiti, The Conversation, The English Patient, Jarhead) recreated a special cut of the film based on the Welles memo that represents the closest version of the film to Welles' vision that remains the definitive way to watch the movie today.
16. Exile to Europe
Immediately after the debacle of Touch of Evil, Welles began to work independently on one of his most ambitious and personal projects to date. Don Quixote would go on to become one of the great obsessions and failures of his life, never seeing a proper cut released. He started accruing footage immediately after finishing his work with Universal by doing some shooting in Mexico. He would continue this process over the course of the next two decades, doing what meager shooting he could across multiple countries in Europe. Unfortunately, time dragged on and the loss of actors to death dragged the film's post-production well into the 1980s without having completed principal photography.
As Don Quixote continued to meld and atrophy, Welles began the next stage of his life by beginning something of a new chapter in the history of cinema. Without the backing of Hollywood money or big investors behind him, Welles began a personal journey as what we would be known as the first truly independent filmmaker. His subsequent series of European films, though cheaper looking and rough around the edges, represented some of the only items of his career that he felt truly proud of in their totality. They were totally his films, unedited by intrusive producers seeking a buck and all celebrated across the European arthouse film scene. Of these, in his later years, he was the proudest of.
17. The Trial (1962)
Literature was, of course, the love of Welles' intellectual life. He was well read by anybody's standards by the time he reached New York City in his twenties and started adapting Shakespeare better than Broadway was at the time. He understood these great works of literature greater than almost anyone else that had the bravery to take a straight edge to them and crave new versions of them for viewing audiences. Often that meant that his versions diverged from the ideas inherent in the text while still staying true to the spirit of the literature. In the case of Franz Kafka's book The Trial, the story of an innocent man trapped in a bureaucratic cycle of hellish corruption and repetition becomes a different kind of nightmare. To borrow Welles' quote, "He's guilty as h***!"
Welles' monologue at the beginning of the film refers to the story as having the logic of a dream. Seeing the film one can recognize that immediately. The setting, production design and moment to moment logic of the story shifts with surreal precision from moment to moment as the lead character Joseph K. is dragged through a strange inquisition, blamed for a crime that is never explained to him bursting with fear and guilt the whole way through. The film looks and acts like a nightmare, as the scene to scene flow arbitrarily jumps from scenes of stark visuals, tense chases, and heavy shadows. Never before or after has Welles' overt love of expressionism been put to such beautiful use. Then again it's hard to tell where the movie begins and the budget ends. Much of the film is shot against industrial blight as we see buildings lined with electrical wires and technology. It's a strange look that contrasts with the sleek, fast-paced cinematography at times. It's never clear that Welles isn't just shooting this at the first industrial park he could find that was available or if these flourishes of ugly utilitarian electronics are part of the point. Maybe they're expressions of the bureaucratic machine that is chewing K alive.
Of all his successes, The Trial is the one that Welles has gone on record as saying was the greatest thing he ever created. Beyond the constraints of a low budget, everything we see on screen is Welles' vision. Given the years of hardships that incurred his previous productions, it's not surprising he'd hold a film that represented his own vision in such high esteem. That said, The Trial wasn't the film that he considered his favorite.
18. Chimes at Midnight (1965)
Welles once said in an interview that if he ever had to argue his way into heaven based on his work, he would try to do so with Chimes at Midnight. Originally titled Falstaff in some regions after the central character, Chimes at Midnight represented the most loyally produced and loving adaptation of Welles' own career. It was based primarily on William Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 with elements of Henry V added. For Welles, the book's central character of Falstaff, the jolly, rotund and disgraced nobleman was one of Shakespeare's greatest creations. Naturally, Welles saw a great deal of himself in Falstaff. The character was by his nature a good man, albeit a lusty, cowardly slob and a liar with a heart of gold. He was innocent and naive in the manner of a child. To Welles, he was the representation of Merry Old England and the fictionalized nostalgia for the past that imbibed so much of English literature from Shakespeare to Chaucer. He was an implicit rejection of the notion of modernity. Welles had tried before to stage a version of what would become Chimes at Midnight earlier in his life called Five Kings that ultimately proved too technically complicated and slow-paced to work properly. With Chimes at Midnight, Welles finally achieved a lifelong dream in portraying his favorite Shakespeare character in all of his exhaustive glory.
Much like The Trial, there is much to be desired about Welles' vision for medieval England. The claustrophobia and tension of his previous film gave way to vast open spaces, joyous celebrations in wide open inns and regal grandeur of the Royalty. Henry IVth is the story of the aged father passing down his title to his namesake son and forcing him to grapple with leadership and responsibility. For the young Prince of Wales, King Henry and Falstaff are the literal representatives of his duality between responsibility and youth. It's a kind of tragedy of maturity wherein Henry must put aside Falstaff and grapple with the brutal realities of the real world. Naturally, Welles goes on in on that brutality. Chimes at Midnight comes with one of the most brutal and influential battle scenes in cinematic history. The carefully shot battle scene incorporated dozens of extras, horses, and grime to produce one of the least romantic depictions of battle yet put to film. Welles said the battle scene was meant to be intentionally brutal to emphasize the idea of the death of chivalry in battle. We see that clearly as swords clash and bodies pile up. Visually speaking it's hard to deny that the battle wasn't hugely influential on generations of filmmakers, being referenced in everything from Kenneth Branaugh's adaptation of Henry V to Mel Gibson's Braveheart and even in the Battle of the Bastards in Game of Thrones.
Naturally, a shoot of this size and scope proved to be greatly difficult on Welles' budget. Europe is naturally awash with castles so locations proved to be available for the film's striking scenes set against the Royalty. Most of the shooting in the Inn was done on a sound stage that Welles had built specifically for the production. Unfortunately, the film lacked proper audio recording technology requiring nearly all of the audio to be rerecorded in post-production. Despite the limitations, the final product is staggering to behold. It's a loud, boisterous and joyful tragedy right up until the bitter emotional end. Many critics consider Chimes at Midnight to be Welles' greatest achievement above and beyond Citizen Kane. Welles would be inclined to agree.
19. The Immortal Story (1968)
Of all the films in Welles' filmography, none represents quite as massive of a digression as The Immortal Story. Immediately the viewer notices that the film is his first film up until this point that was shot in color. As Welles discussed with his protege and biographer Peter Bogdonvich, he always preferred to shoot his films in black and white as he felt that the format did more to help present performances better than color did. With The Immortal Story, he seems to have broken his rule for reasons that aren't quite clear. The results offer some hints as to what was going through Welles' decision-making process. The film is bizarrely alluring to look at. Considering his visual style was more receptive to surrealism and stark visual symbolism, a cursory review shows the film to be one of the most luscious and beautifully shot films in his filmography.
With an understanding of the story, the logic of this seems to come into focus. The story follows the life of an ancient European nobleman who in his older years has sought to make a story that he once heard come true. In the story, an old man pays a sailor five guineas to have an affair with his life before sending him off to sea. Fulfilling the story and making it a true story becomes the old man's obsession. Paying an older fellow Noblewoman and a young sailor he meets on the street, the man observes from a distance as the scenario he contrived into reality forms as the Noblewoman and the sailor bond and intimately perform their task before they're forced to part ways.
While sexuality does technically exist in several of Welles' films like Citizen Kane and The Trial as plot points, The Immortal Story holds the bizarre position of being one of the only Welles projects wherein sexuality is a major theme of the story and one rooted in its story's ideas and anxieties. One can almost look through the allure of its technicolor dreamscape and intimacy to see a depiction of Welles' vision for what the very nature of storytelling is. Through the shrouds of more traditional filmmaking, Welles seems to be using this story as a kind of metaphor for the drive and anxiety that forms storytelling itself. At its core, Welles seems to suggest that the core of art is a perverse need to reproduce and express one's innermost anxieties on display. Though unconventional and likely overly sexualized for some viewers, The Immortal Story presents us with a disturbingly honest sort of autobiography of the artist's soul.
20. F for Fake (1974)
Orson Welles' final completed film represents one of the most avente-garde and experimental pieces of filmmaking in his filmography. F for Fake is technically a documentary but it's a very fast paced, tangential and esoteric piece of filmmaking that jumps across multiple boundaries and stories to explore multiple facets of a central theme. That theme is the idea of "fakeness". The central story follows a pair of famous frauds. The first is Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian painter that made his living as an art forger recreating hundreds of the most popular pieces of contemporary artists including Pablo Picasso. The second is Clifford Irving, Elmyr's biographer who was caught forging an interview with the mysterious media mogul and recluse Howard Hughes.
While the story focuses primarily on their accomplishments and controversies the entirety of the piece is extremely tangential and jumps across the lives of dozens of people including Orson Welles himself. Welles takes time in the piece to discuss his history with lies, the War of the Worlds broadcast that he played up the legend of, how he got his first acting job by lying, and what the actual effect of lying means to the art world. Welles muses on the consequences of every one of the personalities he profiles and comes to many fascinating insights about the nature of their dishonesties. While he makes no bones about the fact that they were frauds, plagiarists and charlatans he also finds a great deal of sympathy to be found amongst the tragedies of their lives.
Then at the moment of most brutal honesty, he pulls back and asks what it all means in the scheme of things. Merely by observing a beautiful European church lined with hundreds of year old statues and garments of stone. He calls it a monument to human dignity and to God's grace and power. Yet this monument has no author or name to it. It merely stands the test of time as an expression of humanity's greatest desires and hopes. As essayist Kyle Kalgren noted in his excellent analysis of the film, Welles seems to come to the opposite conclusion of his seminal film Citizen Kane. "We'll always have Xanadu, so who cares about Rosebud?" Maybe the film's final conclusion is that art is greater than the individuals or money involved and that fake art is still art. Maybe a fake painting that matches the quality of the real thing is as valuable as the real thing. Then again maybe it doesn't. Welles ends the film with a beautiful story told by his then-mistress Oja Kodar detailing her family's lineage and the untold history of a great unknown art forger that represents one of the most exciting and beautiful moments of the film before Welles pulls the rug out on the audience with the film's final moments.
21. The Final Years and Unfinished Projects
The final years of Orson Welles' life can reasonably be described as a sad march into oblivion. Welles returned to the United States in 1970 hoping to find a home among the greats of New Hollywood and quickly set about trying to produce new films. What followed was fifteen years of financial breakdowns, gradual periods of acting in films for money and then turning around and investing it in his film productions. After 1978, Welles never completed a project for the final seven years of his life. Yet he still continued to work, taking acting and commercial jobs and desperately attempting to finishing his outstanding projects. His final completed projected was Filming Othello. The film is nothing more than a conversation of Orson Welles discussing the production history of his film Othello that he produced for German television. The film was included with the 2017 Criterion release of Othello and is well worth observation for fans of Orson Welles. If it impresses anything upon its viewer it would be Welles' strange sense of late-period melancholy and modesty. He states early in the film that nothing he's produced is worthy of the art that he's attempting to adapt and that he was merely a filmmaker. He would try to produce a second documentary called Filming The Trial but didn't complete it before his death.
He shot footage for multiple films in this time including an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, a thriller called The Deep, segments of Don Quixote and finally his recently completed film The Other Side of the Wind. The latter of these he started on as early as 1970 and proceeded to shoot and editing throughout the remainder of his life. The film would go on to become the greatest legend of his filmmaking career. Despite six years of on and off production, nearly a decade of legal red tape following the Iranian Revolution (the film's financier was the brother in law of the Shaw of Iran) and years of faltering post-production, the film was never completed in Welles' lifetime. Prior to his death he discussed taking on directing several additional films including The Cradle Will rock, Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle, Saint Jack (which his protégé Peter Bogdanovich would direct) and a full adaptation of King Lear.
There is a great deal of speculation about why many of these films never got done in the final seven years of Welles' life. Some consider Welles' final years to be too self-destructive and purposely unproductive but by all indications, Orson spent these years grappling with crippling financial troubles and red tape between his sparse moments of being able to film.
In a desperate move to try and garner sympathy and attention, Welles used an appearance during the AFI festival meant to offer the aged Welles with a lifetime achievement award for his work as a chance to promote his newest film. During the acceptance speech, he proceeded to show off footage from The Other Side of the Wind which was suffering from a lack of funding and wouldn't be finished and blatantly hinted that the film was short on funding. The incident was interpreted plainly as a moment of panhandling and desperation.
Welles wasn't a religious man and told two conflicting thoughts on his beliefs late in his life. On one occasion he stated that he was an atheist when asked to perform a prayer. On another occasion when asked he said that he believed in God but didn't think God would be interested in his prayers. In any case, Welles was apathetic to faith. His sole drive seemed to be his desire to create and act out the stories that inspired him and no one at this time wanted to respect or enable his talents. Unable to accomplish that which drove his life, his final years were spent in relative despair.
22. Transformers: The Movie (1986)
Orson Welles' final cinematic role was portraying Unicron in Transformers: The Movie. If there were any more of a modest place for the one time giant to descend, I cannot think of one. Granted this probably didn't represent his most serious compromise. During the production of The Other Side of the Wind, he spent several evenings with his cinematography editing softcore adult films so that the two of them could get back to work and keep him financially solvent. He recorded his audio for the film just five days before his death. Regardless of his opinion on working on the animated film, these final years of Orson Welles' life represent him at his lowest point. He was forced to take any gig he could book himself for. Famously he took an enormous amount of commercial work, which included an infamous Champaign commercial in which an inebriated Welles attempted to give an elegant speech about the mystique of Paul Masson wine only to slur his sentences to a depressingly hilarious degree. In his late period speeches, you really sense the desperation and melancholy of his station in life. As Welles performed his final voiceover on Transformers, his aged and decrepit voice proved too rough even to fill the role. The audio designers were forced to augment the voice-over performance to improve it.
Welles perished less than a week after performing his lines for the film from a heart attack at the age of seventy. He died at this desk while typing up stage directions for a project that he and his cinematographer Gary Graver were going to shoot the following day at UCLA. In a sense, he died doing what he loved. His body was cremated and a small funeral was held for him where in his closest friend and three daughters attended. This was the first instance that the three children of different marriages ever met. Two years after his death in 1987, his wishes were respected and his ashes were buried in Spain at the home of a friend and bullfighter Antonio Ordonez.
23. Don Quixote De Orson Welles (1992)
The years after Welles' death brought a great deal of pain and hardship for the people whose lives he most affected. It also brought a great deal of division and indecision. Depending on who you ask the following two decades after his death brought an enormous amount of hostility and contention between the inheritors of the Welles legacy. Multiple people sought claim to Welles' history and tried to make his works available. Since multiple studios owned the rights to his various films, rereleases of his movies became contentious. Universal was sued by Beatrice Welles when it attempted to reconstruct Touch of Evil only for his to settle out of court with the studio. She later claimed her suit was caused by a lack of communication that wouldn't have happened had she understood their plan to follow Welles' famous memo. Beatrice additionally caused a great deal of controversy in 1992 when she attempted to fiancé a restoration of Othello that many Welles scholars have come to scoff at for it's incompetent and sloppy restoration.
Cinematographer Gary Graver spent much of his life following Welles' death mourning the loss of his creative partner. Welles was his primary source of income and one of his closest work associates and friends for fifteen years. Graver would spend many of the final years of his life attempting to build a cut of The Other Side of the Wind that ultimately never came to fruition before his death in 2006.
Orson's mistress and creative partner Oja Kodar inherited the Welles estate and attempted to do everything in her power to preserve the memory and works of her lover. In 1995, she co-wrote/co-directed a documentary called Orson Welles: The One-Man Band. While she has settled into a comfortable life in Croatia working as an artist and an innkeeper, she's stayed notable through her association with her late lover. Depending on who you ask, she's responsible for some of the legal troubles that kept The Other Side of the Wind out of the spotlight, however, her role in preserving the later works of Welles is contentious. By any regards, Oja is a worthy inheritor of the estate and did everything she could to bring his films to the public light.
In 1990, she sold the rights to some of Welles' remaining footage from Don Quixote to Spanish producer Patxi Irigoyen, desiring to see some sort of version of the film come to fruition. Working with director Jesús Franco, the filmmakers stitched the decomposed footage shot across multiple formats into a semi-coherent two-hour film that they showed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival under the title Don Quixote De Orson Welles. Without proper audio, the crew rerecorded dialog from new actors. The result is a rough looking, rough sounding and merely academic exercise that barely registers as a completed film. There was a rough cut that Orson Welles himself had finished that film critics Juan Cobos and Jonathon Rosenbaum have seen that according to them looks nothing like the hodgepodge of a film that Irigoyen and Franco assembled.
24. The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
Like with Citizen Kane, I don't wish to relitigate the entire history of The Other Side of the Wind. Having already reviewed the film and shot a series of interviews with Welles scholars Josh Karp and Jonathon Rosenbaum, I've thoroughly discussed the history of Welles' so-called "final film". What I would like to emphasize is just how the film finally came to fruition after nearly fifty years of litigation, red tape, and creative challenges.
After Welles' death, the footage from his shooting was locked in a French vault awaiting decision making and legal red tape. Under French law, Welles still technically had the rights to the film but the Iranian government had a claim on it as financers. In addition, there was a great deal of contention as to how to move forward. The surviving legacy holders of Welles' work Oja Kodar, Beatrice Welles and Peter Bogdanovich all had differing desires that needed to be respected. In order to get finished the film would need an enormous amount of diplomacy and money.
Following several faltering offers to finance the film, polish filmmaker Filip Jan Rymsza stepped in with a bid to take over the film's post-production. Teaming with producers Jen Koethner Kaul and Frank Marshall, the team began to work on acquiring the film and by fall of 2014, the prep work had begun. By early 2015 the group had gained access to the workprint of the film and had gotten Peter Bogdanovich on board the project. They garnered enough money to get access to the film's workprint by selling distribution rights to the film. Filip began the careful dance of reaching an agreement between Beatrice and Oja and by spring of 2015, the gears were turning with the hope of turning the film around in time for Orson Welles' 100th birthday that year. On May 7th, the team began a forty-day Indiegogo campaign to attempt to raise the necessary funds to finish the film's postproduction. Despite extending the campaign an additional month and lowering the funding goals, the $406 thousand that was accumulated while inspiring wasn't enough to complete the film. Towards the end of 2015, it began clear the film was going to require additional help from a new distributor.
The campaign stayed quiet for nearly two years as behind the scenes discussions went underway until March 2017 when they finally announced that Netflix had purchased the distribution rights. Within weeks, the footage was moved from Paris to Los Angeles and the nearly year-long production process was underway. An enormous amount of work was needed to processing the hundreds of hours of footage into a manageable process. Editor Bob Murawski (The Hurt Locker) worked with a team to transfer the footage shot over multiple formats into digital, painstakingly matched the hours of audio to the footage and started slowly editing the film using Welles' mismatched notes and script. Welles problematically evolved his vision for the final film throughout the process of shooting the film. The result of this was that editing the film became a difficult process of making executive decisions as to what to keep and what to send to the cutting room floor.
By January 2018, a rough cut of the film had been finished. At this point, the producers held the first screening for the film to a group of Hollywood insiders including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Rian Johnson. The screening also included John Huston's son Danny Huston, Crispin Glover, Peter Bogdanovich and the surviving crew of the film. The next several months brought about the final aspects of post-production which included composing the film's original soundtrack. French composer and musician Michel Legrand, who had previously composed the soundtrack for F for Fake, was brought in and started recording the soundtrack in March 2018.
The film's initial premiere had been planned for the Cannes Film Festival however that festival changed the rules arbitrarily in regards to its willingness to premiere digital films from online distributors like Netflix. Subsequently, the premiere was pushed until August 31st at the 75th Venice International Film Festival. Naturally, the premiere that was most important was it's vaunted premiere on Netflix which was eventually announced for release on Friday, November 2nd, 2018. Generations of Welles supporters and fans finally were afforded the opportunity to view Welles' final theatrical premiere that day. Additionally, several movie theaters across the United States premiered the film the same weekend including the Music Box Theater in Chicago where I personally attended the Saturday morning premiere.
25. Conclusion: The Legacy of Orson Welles
We are now living in the greatest time to be an Orson Welles fan. The old truism is that artists are never appreciated until after they die but now in 2018 the full lot of his estranged filmography is finally starting to make its way into the public eye. Welles is beloved as one of the filmmakers in history and his work is regularly mentioned in the same breath as the masters like John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Luc-Godard.
Every year the studios that own the rights to Welles' films go out of their way to restore and re-release more of his films. Just in the past few years The Criterion Collection has gone back and released Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, Othello, Filming Othello and The Magnificent Ambersons on Blu-ray. Chimes at Midnight's release on home video coincided with its first public touring in the United States in decades as the film's restoration was displayed on dozens of movie theaters across the country in 2016. Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Touch of Evil and Macbeth all have excellent Blu-ray transfers. His lesser known and regarded films like The Stranger and The Trial are in the public domain and are available for free online.
It's a shame that the late director's work has for long been relegated to the dustbins of history. Many of his best pieces of film were left to rot for decades in vaults with no public viewing or demand. Now almost all of his work is available to buy on the most up to date home viewing format. Fans of cinema ought to seek these films out. Though obscure and often rough around the edges, Orson Welles produced one of the finest outputs of work in the history of cinema. He persisted against a lifetime of odds and gave the world everything he had in him until there was nothing left to give. In the end, he was a more modest, fragile and melancholy soul than the bombast, ego and strength of his personality let on.
As Jonathon Rosenbaum discussed in during our FVTV interview this November, once he'd met Welles in person he no longer fanaticized the idea of wanting to be him. Even so, Welles was everything he was sold to be. He was kind, intelligent if a bit rude but he was always himself.
Resources/Sources:
Previous GUG Reviews: Citizen Kane, The Other Side of the Wind
Documentaries: Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, Filming Othello
Books: Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey by Harlan Lebo, Orson Welles' Last Film by Josh Karp, The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles by Chuck Berg and Tom Erskine
Video Essays: MovieBob: Citizen Unicron, Kyle Kalgreen: F for Fake, Kyle Kalgreen: Chimes at Midnight, Razorfist: The Third Man, Cinemologists: Mr. Arkadin
Online Researches: Wikipedia, When Radio Was
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