Notes
=^cTb Introduction: A Postmodern Auteur? Approaches to the Unfinished Wellesian Works 1. Krin Gabbard, “Cinema and Media Studies: Snapshot of an ‘Emerging’ Discipline ,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2006, B14. 2. Ibid. 3. James Naremore suggests these characters “use language as a hoax, attempting to become colonizers of consciousness.” “Between Works and Texts: Notes from the Welles Archive,” Persistence of Vision: Special Issue on Orson Welles 7 (1989), 14. 4. Catherine Benamou draws an analogy between Thompson’s quest for meaning and that of the cinematic scholar in search of Welles’s vision for his unfinished film It’s All True. It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan American Odyssey (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007). 5. Dudley Andrew, “Echoes of Art: The Distant Sounds of Orson Welles,” in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 174. 6. The griot/auteur paradigm captures the tension between capitalist and communal traditions of storytelling. Whereas the West African griot figure reflects an oral tradition of communal history, the director embodies the concept of individual creativity, key to capitalism. 7. “Negotiates RKO Contract,” New York Times, June 25, 1941, sec. 17: 2. This contrasts truly “griot” filmmakers like West African Sembéne Ousmane, who attempt to reject aspects of the auteurist tradition, even while being self-consciously influenced by it. See Jonathan Peters, “Sembéne Ousmane as Griot: The Money-Order with White Genesis,” in African Literature Today 12 (1982): 88–103. 8. Orson Welles Manuscripts. Material from the collection is reproduced courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. All references to the Orson Welles Manuscripts will be given hereafter simply as “Welles Mss.” accompanied by the date, if available, of the manuscript or typescript cited. 9. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77, for an interesting discussion of the hallmarks of “classic” cinema and its relationship with popular, or vernacular, modernism. 10. The story of Paramount tossing much of the footage for It’s All True into the Pacific Ocean appears in several sources but is best positioned in context of the surviving footage by Catherine L. Benamou in It’s All True: Orson Welles’s PanAmerican Odyssey, 278. 11. Catherine L. Benamou, “It’s All True as Document/Event: Notes towards an Historiographical and Textual Analysis,” Persistence of Vision 7 (1989): 130. 12. For example, he revived his stage adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, charged with references to modern fascism, for his radio show. 13. The Magnificent Ambersons, his unfinished Heart of Darkness, and the unproduced Pickwick Papers all derived from performances during a single year of radio production, 1938. Even the grand first-person singular of Citizen Kane resonates in the title of the 1938 radio series, First Person Singular. Welles’s radio plays had a profound effect on his process of narrative construction in cinema. 1. Origins of the First-Person Singular: Mercurial Theatre on the Air 1. Simon Anholt and Jeremy Hildreth, Brand America: The Mother of All Brands (London: Cyan, 2004), 70. 2. Similarly, Michael Anderegg situates Welles’s work as part of a budding massmarket culture in America focused on selling the intellectual as a commodity, a movement marked by the creation of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1921, Great Books seminars, and the use of radio as a “movement to popularize culture.” Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 11. 3. Martin Lindstrom, Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound (New York: Free Press, 2005), 135. 4. Ibid. 5. Patrick Hanlon, Primal Branding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company , and Your Future. (New York: Free Press, 2006), 26. 6. A later script by Norman Rosten for the 1942 show, at that point named “Ceiling Unlimited,” reinforced the classical artistry association by having Leonardo da Vinci visit the Lockheed Vega airfield in California because he decided to “see what the century is up to in aviation” (Welles Mss.). 7. Unless stated otherwise, all personal correspondence, press releases and draft scripts are taken from the Welles Mss., Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. This letter, dated October 18, 1942, is also quoted in Simon Callow, Orson Welles Volume 2: Hello Americans (New York: Viking, 2006), 157. 8. Dudley Andrew, “Echoes of Art: The Distant Sounds of Orson Welles,” in Perspectives on...
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