Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (93 page)

King Vidor, whom Welles came to know through Dolores Del Rio, became a particular friend. Orson would attend the Hollywood premiere of
Citizen Kane
with Del Rio, Vidor, and John Barrymore, afterward attending a small dinner party at the Vidors’ home. Orson would write most of the script for
The Magnificent Ambersons
aboard Vidor’s yacht, sailing to Catalina Island. Vidor told him, “A good director is a fellow who doesn’t go on trying to get everything right, who knows when to walk away from something and when to stay with something.”

“I think that’s a wonderful definition and I never forgot it,” Welles recalled years later. “I leave some things rough, and I stay on other things because I think he’s absolutely right. If you paint a picture, you’re not going to spend the rest of your life on the lower left-hand corner. And there are so many directors of the [William] Wyler and [Fred] Zinnemann school, who paint the lower left-hand corner with so much intensity and good taste that they’re left with shlock.”

It was as though the old-time directors (“they weren’t all of them so old then, of course—but at that epoch they looked a bit old-time to me”) were rooting for the new kid on the block. “I took a lot of trouble getting to know them, and it was worth it—sort of rubbing movies into my pores,” Welles told Bogdanovich. Besides Van Dyke and Vidor, Welles’s other friendly mentors included Lewis Milestone, Victor Fleming, Frank Capra, and John Ford.

While they could have felt the most resentful, the RKO directors seemed the kindest of all. Orson could be amusing on the subject of how
unedifying
it was to actually observe some of them at work, as when he visited George Stevens, Ashton’s nephew, on the set of
Vigil in the Night.
When he arrived one morning, Stevens was in one of his notorious trances, completely motionless, his head in his hand, no one speaking, everyone tiptoeing around him, waiting for something to happen—what, Welles had no clue. Maybe Stevens had gone batty. Orson waited “fifteen minutes. Nothing. Stevens didn’t move. I waited half an hour, forty-five minutes; eventually I realized he was sleeping! Finally, after an hour I left the set. He was still asleep.”

When Stevens dined privately with Welles, however, the veteran director talked expansively about directing, and the two developed a rapport based on their shared love for Ashton. Orson also enjoyed long talks with former Broadway actor and director Garson Kanin, with whom he had many New York ties in common. Kanin, only a few years older than Welles, had just made the leap from scenarist to RKO director. Kanin was “as sweet as ever,” Orson wrote to his wife, and brought “a really fine enthusiasm and discrimination to his work. He was very helpful and generous, as indeed is nearly everybody else.”

The best way for Orson to rub movies into his pores was at the screenings he conducted constantly, day and night, at the studio. Sometimes, Orson watched pictures looking for possible actors (he spotted the capable Englishman Robert Coote in rushes for George Stevens’s
Vigil in the Night
, for example, and promptly engaged him for
Heart of Darkness
). Sometimes he watched pictures for specific technical reasons, with a department head or specialist sitting close to him and answering his questions about techniques unfolding on the screen. Sometimes, Orson watched pictures for African atmosphere, or possible stock shots.

To a degree, Orson wanted an ethnographically realistic
Heart of Darkness
, befitting his appreciation for the documentary style of filmmaking represented by Robert Flaherty (not to mention the South Seas films made by the cameraman on
Too Much Johnson
, Harry Dunham).

Frank Brady’s book offers the most comprehensive list of the films Welles watched. Orson sat through
Chang
from 1927, a silent documentary by the
King Kong
team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack exploring the jungles of Siam. He also saw the 1929 silent
Four Feathers
, directed by Cooper, from which Orson thought he might use footage of the hippo stampede. He watched Belgian documentarist Armand Denis’s
Kriss
from 1932, shot in Bali, and
Magie Africaine
(a.k.a.
Dark Rapture
) from 1938. Orson took a look at
Wings over Africa
from 1934, an African travelogue using aerial photography by an American couple, Martin and Osa Johnson. He also screened W. S. Van Dyke’s
Trader Horn
(1931), F. W. Murnau’s
Tabu
(1931), Victor Fleming’s
Red Dust
(1932), and Zoltan Korda’s
Sanders of the River
(1935). When he asked to see Robert Wiene’s German expressionist masterpiece of 1919,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, the Museum of Modern Art in New York sent its deluxe print to RKO.

Sometimes, Orson took a break and watched a picture just for the sheer delight he took in its craftsmanship. Over the weeks and months he watched many pictures directed by John Ford, even if they had little to do with
Heart of Darkness
or any other project Orson might be considering. He knew Ford’s greatness from boyhood. “
The Iron Horse
,” Welles told Bogdanovich, recalling Ford’s 1924 railroad epic; “I’ll never forget the effect that had on me as a child.” He ordered up screenings of
Arrowsmith
(1931), set partly in the Caribbean jungle; and
The Lost Patrol
(1934), about British solders stranded in the desert during World War I. He sat through
The Informer
(1935), Ford’s Oscar-winning drama about violence in sectarian Ireland in the early 1920s. “What a sense [Ford] always has for
texture
,” Welles said, “for the physical existence of things.” But Orson also screened less relevant Ford pictures, such as the mistaken-identity comedy
The Whole Town’s Talking
(1935), which was light years from
Heart of Darkness.
“He’s such a fine comedy director,” Welles told Bogdanovich. “People tend to forget that.”

The single film he watched most often in the run-up to
Citizen Kane
was Ford’s landmark Western
Stagecoach
, which had launched John Wayne as a bankable star earlier in 1939. (It would eventually receive seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.) He watched this film “as many as forty times,” Welles estimated. Perhaps the journey of stagecoach passengers through embattled Apache lands overlapped with his project encompassing a dangerous Congo River trip, but Welles valued it not for its script pointers but as a textbook of visual vernacular. “After dinner every night for about a month I’d run
Stagecoach
,” Welles recalled, “often with some different technician or department head from the studio, and ask questions, ‘How was this done?’ ‘Why was this done?’ It was like going to school.”

In 1967, when an interviewer for
Playboy
asked his opinion of the current crop of American directors, Welles scrounged for contemporary names and ended up genuflecting to Ford. “Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester are the only ones that appeal to me—except for the old masters,” Welles said. “By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford. . . . With Ford at his best, you feel that the movie has lived and breathed in a real world—even though it may have been written by Mother Machree.” Ford was the director he tried hardest to rub into his pores.

Despite the indignity of being called a bearded nonconformist, Orson half-enjoyed the notoriety and fitted in well with the studio regimen throughout the fall. Again and again, he proved equal to the personal and professional hurdles strewn before him. He pushed
Heart of Darkness
ahead of the agreed-on timetable, solving numerous problems as they arose, dealing shrewdly with concerns that were standard for every Hollywood project.

After Orson tossed out Houseman’s draft of the script, he started in on the rewrite himself. Writing in late September to Leonard Lyons at the
New York Post
, Herbert Drake described Welles’s progress. Borrowing from the methodology that had served him well in creating his radio adaptations, Welles had taken a copy of Joseph Conrad’s novella and pasted every page of it into a large portfolio, Drake said. Then he went through the novella page by page, scratching notes in the margins, crossing out unnecessary scenes, inserting others he concocted, delineating those that would be preserved or modified. By the end of September, Orson had executed a 254-page scene-by-scene breakdown of the new scenario, incorporating his preliminary camera movement and shot notes.

“Supplementing this was a discussion of each character in which he not only described the physical appearance of the actor or actress but went into details about their past life and their future,” Drake informed Lyons. “Supplementing the whole thing was a sketchbook which consisted of alternate pages of description of each scene and a line drawing.”

After the breakdown, according to Drake, Welles produced a rough script of between seven hundred and eight hundred double-spaced typed pages. These had to be reduced to somewhere between 100 and 120 pages (film running times were estimated at a rate of one minute of screen time per page). Constant interruptions, including his weekly trip to New York, slowed the script work, but progress was steady nevertheless. George Schaefer, whose opinion Orson valued, pointed out the “excess of dialogue” in some scenes, and felt the parallels with contemporary politics were too explicit. “When Kurtz begins to talk of dictators in Europe, you are tying in one world with another world,” Schaefer wrote. “At that point it loses something.”

HONESTLY AGREE WITH ALL POINTS IN YOUR LETTER
, Orson wired the RKO studio chief.
URGE YOU TO BURN THAT SCRIPT, AND BELIEVE THAT REWRITES AND REVISIONS UNDERWAY WILL ACCOMPLISH EVERYTHING AND MORE.

One budget item that worried studio officials was Welles’s initial demand for three thousand black extras for a spectacular scene in the jungle, in which the natives would be seen bowing down to the evil Kurtz. The day costs were one concern, but so was the challenge of rounding up so many black extras when the studios had only several hundred local black performers on its books. Moreover, Orson insisted he wanted native extras with “very black skin,” in his words. If the extras were too light-skinned, he said, he would have to coat their bodies with black greasepaint. Under pressure from the studio, Welles kept reducing the number of extras, finally dropping it to eight hundred—a financial as well as a creative compromise.

To properly convey the jungle atmosphere, Welles argued for shooting parts of
Heart of Darkness
in a tropical climate. RKO was reluctant. In those days, location filming was restricted to rural studio ranches; anything farther afield was frowned on because of the vicissitudes of weather, and the enormous expense entailed in flying a professional cast and crew into distant territories. But the studio did agree to dispatch a second unit to the Florida Everglades, operating on Welles’s instructions, for test photography of the wilds in late September. If the studio ultimately rejected extensive location filming (which it did), the second unit footage would at least assist the design and effects departments (which it did).

Before long, Orson’s Mercury players from radio and stage started arriving at RKO for testing and contract rituals. Some, like John Emery, who was touring through Los Angeles with the Lunts in
Taming of the Shrew
, just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everyone was anxious for Welles to direct something besides a camera audition—a scene with setups, lighting—“really just seeing what would happen with me in a movie studio with a camera,” in his words. Orson was every bit as anxious.

Several days of preliminary photography were set—probably beginning on October 18—for the first motion picture sequences Welles would direct in Hollywood. According to Frank Brady, Welles planned footage of a few available actors “in costume and makeup, with himself marvelously disguised as Kurtz.” There would also be “actorless rehearsals involving only the moving vision of Marlow-camera, such as a pan shot across a process screen, registering the hill and settlement.” Orson had talked RKO officials into letting him try shots with a makeshift handheld camera, “which was unheard of then,” in Welles’s words.

Linwood Dunn, who was RKO’s expert on the optical printer and a special effects wizard (he had helped to create King Kong and the illusion of a leopard frolicking with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in
Bringing Up Baby
), was on hand to supervise the visual tricks. One scene showed “the boat and wharf in miniature, combined with rear-screen projection,” in Frank Brady’s words, while the actor Everett Sloane, Orson’s longtime radio colleague, spoke directly into the camera as though he were speaking to Marlow. The recently signed Robert Coote was among the players in another “big scene,” Welles recalled, “Coote and two or three other people.” (Coote would be left behind by the time of
Citizen Kane
, but Welles remembered him for Roderigo in his 1952 film of
Othello.
)

“How did it look?” Peter Bogdanovich asked about the preliminary footage.

“I don’t know,” Welles replied. “I guess it looked all right.”

Orson sounded dissatisfied—then, and at the time. He thought the experimental filming was a “dud,” according to Brady, and called “for more precision on everyone’s part: the camera operators, the miniature technicians, the actors and himself.”

While the test footage fell short of Orson’s highest expectations, the experience of taking charge on a Hollywood set and commanding the actors and camera was exhilarating. “Had my first night with the movie cameras a few hours ago,” Welles wrote in a memo of October 18, 1939, that he dashed off to publicist Herbert Drake, “and I am wildly enthusiastic about this business.”

His dreams of returning to Broadway with
Five Kings
were quickly fading away.