Orson Welles: Hello Americans (13 page)

Tom Pettey
had prepared thoroughly for Welles’s arrival, ensuring that it had maximum coverage and impact: among other things, he made certain there was a large crowd waiting for him at the airport. Welles was duly fêted; and he readily submitted to the adulation that greeted him. It made a pleasant change, no doubt, from the sniping and pettiness of Hollywood, as did the opportunity – always eagerly seized
by Welles – of immersing himself in another culture, another life. He had been thoroughly prepared by his office, with digests of books on Brazilian history, geography, culture and politics; he had begun to learn Portuguese, by no means the easiest of languages. His capacity to absorb essential information rapidly had
never
been more effectively deployed than it was here, and he immediately seduced
his hosts with his well-informed curiosity and his boyish delight in what he discovered.
RECEPTION OF ORSON WELLES RIO NOT ONLY EQUAL TO BUT SURPASSED DISNEY
’
S SUCCESS HERE STOP ORSON CAN QUALIFY FOR MY MONEY AS A GREAT AMBASSADOR
, wired Phil Reismann, who had travelled with Welles, to George Schaefer within a few days of their arrival.
⁸
KNOW THAT IT IS NO SURPRISE TO YOU THAT HIS OUTLOOK AND
UNDERSTANDING ARE INTELLIGENT AND COMPREHENSIVE AND THAT HE HAS A COMPLETE GRASP OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS JOB
. Reismann was convinced, he said, that despite the handicap of a lack of equipment, they were going to get ‘a great and unusual picture’,
THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS US FROM BEING EXTREMELY HAPPY
, he added, in the same flirtatious tone that Welles employed when communicating with Schaefer,
IS THE FACT THAT YOU ARE NOT HERE
.

Welles had arrived five days before Carnival, in the midst of a pre-Lenten debauch, which was if anything more feverish than the event itself. His hedonistic impulses needed little encouragement; he plunged right in. The day after he arrived,
A Noite
published a photograph of him partying at a rehearsal of one of the numbers. He was immediately adopted as an
honorary citizen of Rio, his appetite and his sense of fun warmly approved of:
CARIOCA CITIZEN KANE
, said the headline: ‘this enormously sympathetic big boy who’s being seen around the streets of our metropolis is without doubt an authentic first-rate Carioca’, making him an honorary citizen of Rio.
⁹
Apart from the sheer indulgent joy of it, this immersion in the life of the streets was essential
to discovering the spirit of Carnival, where to be merely a spectator is to miss the point; it is, indeed, scarcely an option. The samba rhythm – insistent, hypnotic – that overtakes the city cannot be resisted.

The daunting task of capturing the true Carnival, as it wended its way across the whole city like a frisky, many-headed dragon, called for a novel strategy. ‘The moment the Producer-Director-Writer
arrived,’ reported Herb Drake a little breathlessly, ‘Technicolor cameras began to turn out test shots among some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.’
¹⁰
Recounting ‘what might be called a day with Orson Welles in Rio’, Drake describes a cycle of filming, eating, drinking, meeting the press, more eating, drinking, clubbing, and out-of-hours location scouting: ‘3 a.m. found Welles inspecting
the photographic possibilities of the Municipal Theatre where one of the biggest balls of the carnival will be held. You can bet there will be some changes made. Doors
will
come down, walls will be opened and there will be entrances where no entrances existed before.’ There is more clubbing: Welles crowns a beauty queen – ‘and that is a story in itself.’ He was in bed by dawn – with or without
the beauty queen, Drake fails to record. In a private memo to his boss, Tom Pettey reported that ‘Welles and Phil Reismann have been playing all the time and I’ve had a hell of a job protecting them.’
¹¹
All his young life (he was now twenty-six) Orson Welles had been instinctively drawn to the underbelly – Harlem, the dives of Chicago – and here it came straight for him. Then as now, Brazil had
a singularly uncomplicated attitude to sex; it had been the country’s good fortune to have been colonised by the lax (not to say lethargic) Portuguese, whose administrators had utterly failed to instil the slightest sense of Catholic guilt in the native population. Welles ate, he drank, he smoked, he blithely shovelled amphetamines down his throat in the belief that they were helping him to lose
weight, and he reached out for all the flesh he could get his hands on, which was a great deal.

For all the frolicking, the immediate pressure on the RKO team was immense: in so far as they knew what they had come to Brazil to do, it was, at the very minimum, to capture the Carnival on film. Carnival lasts exactly four days, during which short period the bulk of the material had to be shot. Despite
Welles’s thorough briefing on the background, neither he nor anyone else on his team was familiar with the city of Rio de Janeiro, or had any experience of a comparable phenomenon – let alone of filming it. Moreover, they were severely limited technically, both in terms of the equipment they had brought with them and the available local back-up. ‘It must be remembered,’ Welles wrote in a memorandum
to RKO a couple of weeks after Carnival, ‘that our group was practically’ pioneering in the motion picture business in Brazil’, which is not strictly true, although it must certainly have felt as if it was.
¹²
They had the cooperation and the commitment of officials (Dr Assis Figuereido, head of the State Propaganda Department – the DIP – was particularly keen to help), but there was nothing even
they could do in the face of national temperament. At least ten days before Carnival, the production had informed the DIP that they wanted to get shots of Rio at Carnival time and were assured that it could be arranged without much difficulty. When it came to the day actually scheduled for the aerial shots, William ‘Duke’ Greene, the chief Technicolor cameraman, went to the airport to inspect the
plane, and was informed they were not allowed to make use
of
it. ‘We were told that perhaps later we would be able to get a plane.’

Everything that makes the Brazilian Carnival extraordinary was inimical to the process of film-making. Welles and his team soon became acquainted with the two quintessential Carioca types:
moleque
, the street urchin, witty and fleet of foot, and
malandro
, the fixer,
avoiding work at all costs, opinionated, pugnacious, lascivious, bibulous, boastful. Welles wrote in his memorandum:

The human element in particular, the people untrained in the industry and ignorant of its problems, were many times quite impossible to control.
¹³
Other headaches included the general Brazilian tempo of business activity, such simple hazards as key people lacking telephone service,
two-hour lunch periods for business establishments, gasoline shortage … things a

Hollywood studio through its equipment and organisation could achieve in a matter of hours required as many weeks. None of the organisations on which we could rely was accustomed to actual production problems, the North American tempo of work, or especially professional motion picture discipline.

Here was the paradox:
their purpose was to catch the exuberance, the anarchy, the formlessness and the sheer foreignness of Carnival, but to do so they needed to be brilliantly organised. The team’s attitude towards the event and the people they were filming – Welles’s, in particular – was by definition affirmative, but from a practical angle it was hard not to see both event and people as simply a problem. Up to
a point, every film shot on location assumes the character of a war fought against the indigenous people; this one was no exception, even though the commander-in-chief was temperamentally inclined to go native. Inevitably they would not be able to capture everything they needed during the Carnival itself; unquestionably there would have to be subsequent reconstructions of sequences or parts of sequences.
‘Even had our information been the most accurate, and our equipment the most effective,’ Welles wrote, ‘we should have been unable to get a thorough coverage of carnival during the actual days that it lasted. To do this,’ he added, ‘would have required us to be everywhere at once, at all hours of every day and night.’ The scale of the thing was vast: there were something like two million
participants involved. Clearly, though, however fraught with difficulties it might be, it was essential to film as much of the live event as was humanly possible.

They duly threw themselves at it. Three years later, on one of his
Orson Welles Almanac
radio programmes, Welles delivered an account of Carnival that vividly expresses his view of what he was about to film:

Carnival isn’t a religious
observance, but it is fundamentally the celebration of a religious people.
¹⁴
Wherever the money changers have taken over, carnival is no more. Wherever work is so hard that a holiday means a rest instead of a good time, carnival is only a word for a tent show. You have to save up for carnival. You have to save something yourself out of the business year. You have to play hard at carnival – not
in contest with anybody, not for points in a score – carnival calls for the aimless exuberance of childhood. And if you never felt like dancing around and making a fool of yourself in a funny hat, you won’t know what I’m talking about and you won’t care. There are some who disapprove of carnival because they think it’s only an excuse for getting drunk. I’m glad to say that I was in Rio three years
ago for the last great carnival in that greatest of carnival cities and I saw with these two eyes a couple of million people dancing and singing in the streets (most of them don’t even go to bed for three days) and nobody anywhere in that enormous jamboree stopped celebrating long enough to take a drink … it’s brighter than a circus, bigger than the world series, and louder than the Fourth of July.
It is all of those times rolled into one. It’s New Year’s Eve, Halloween night and Christmas morning. It’s wild and gay and it’s absolutely sober because in carnival you don’t need liquor to help you forget you’re growing old. You’re too busy remembering what it was like when you were young.

In truth, the booze never stops flowing and the dope never stops being puffed and the coupling is pretty
much non-stop, but though Welles somewhat sanitises it, his point about the youthfulness of the experience is particularly pertinent here. The whole city becomes a child again – a sexy, exuberant child. And so did Welles.

Tom Pettey of the press office was reporting everything to Herb Drake while it was happening; his description of what he saw is a record not only of the young Orson Welles in
action – half teenage delinquent, half inspired artist – but of a Rio Carnival that no longer exists, one that spread everywhere, possessing the city, not confined, as now, to the Sambodromo, the official stadium. Pettey’s
report
also shows not only the degree to which the Carnival affected Welles, but the degree to which he affected it; the filmed event becomes something else, lit, staged, observed.
On the Saturday they kicked off by shooting, under lowering skies, the formal opening of the proceedings, the triumphant entrance of King Momo, the Carnival’s Lord of Misrule. After this, Welles and the crew immediately dashed in their cars to the elegant suburb of Petropolis on the hillside, for the official opening party, colourful but restrained. The following day, they were out shooting
whatever moved. The mood of the 1942 Carnival was particularly explosive: the war hovered over everything. The Rio press insisted: ‘for 1942 the order is
FORGET THE WAR
!
¹⁵
We may have the noisiest carnival of all time,’ though one of the most popular sambas was the defiant
We Know How to Fight
: ‘We will fight in the blue skies that cover South America’; the underlying text was: ‘Eat, drink, and
be merry, for tomorrow we die.’

The RKO convoy, cheered on by the revellers, itself became part of the revelry. For Technicolor night-shooting there were six army searchlights, manned by eighty Brazilian officers and soldiers, and supervised by the RKO technicians. Simply trying to get through the thousands of people ‘who behave abnormally all during carnival’, as Pettey said, with all that equipment
was a major problem for the crew; the soldiers had no experience and little knowledge of what was demanded of them, piling mayhem on chaos. Five huge lights were set up near the Palace Hotel on Avenida Rio Branco. ‘It was difficult to shoot anything except upturned faces and waving arms, as the crowd was so dense there was hardly an inch between the persons.’ None of the crew had the slightest
idea whether what they were shooting was good or bad. For hours the four great Carnival clubs filed past the Technicolor cameras and moved on down the Avenida amidst the applause of the throng. Welles set up cameras to photograph the floats as they turned across the plaza; one float that they focused on closely depicted Pan-American Unity. Somewhere in the midst of all this Welles had spotted
the great black singer-dancer known as Grande Otelo and they followed him whenever they could on his riotous, eccentric path through the throng.

On Monday night, the crew took over the Municipal Theatre where the Grand Ball was to take place, installing lights, strategically placing them all over the theatre to make it possible to obtain shots from every conceivable angle of the dance floor and
interior; the chief colour cameraman, Duke Greene, had worked for two
weeks
in advance to ensure the proper colour combinations. Welles, Pettey notes, had a particular flair for doing three or four things a once. That night he was ‘a director of the movie production, a judge of costumes, a good-will envoy, and last but not least, a participant in virtually every one of the dances’.
¹⁶
The air-conditioning
was primitive: a dance floor packed with a hundred tons of ice. They might just as well have been on the set of
The Magnificent Ambersons
.