At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 12
Welles’s radically simpatico reading of the Good Neighbor Policy did not prove entirely palatable to all the participating authorities. Officials in the Brazilian government’s Departamento do Imprensa e Propaganda, who had originally proposed filming the Carnaval to attract tourists to Brazil, objected to aspects of Welles’s approach as it developed, as did commentators in the local press.4 Elements within RKO were completely at odds with Welles. Production Manager Lynn Shores’s reports to the home office damned Welles’s footage as “just carnival nigger singing and dancing”.5 On 11 April, Shores secretly informed the Brazilian Department of Propaganda that Welles had filmed in the city’s favelas, and a few days later complained to RKO, “[Welles] ordered day and night shots in some very dirty and disreputable nigger neighborhoods throughout the city.” The local press complained that Welles was filming “no good half-breeds … and the filthy huts of the favelas which infest the lovely edge of the Lake, where there is so much beauty and many marvelous angles for filming”.6 It is a sad fact that even during the brief window when US political pragmatism allowed Welles’s cosmopolitanism an official platform, a fifth column of racist provincialism helped crush the project.
Of course, there were many other reasons for the film’s incompletion, most to do with executive politics at RKO, of which Welles’s long version of The Magnificent Ambersons was another casualty.
Despite his occasional pastoral evocations – the Colorado frontier, sleigh rides outside Indianapolis, the fishing community in Fortaleza – Welles projected an essentially urban sensibility. He defined civilisation as ‘city culture’. Aside from the implicitly critical contrast between the racially segregated spaces of Rio de Janeiro, the surviving traces of the Carnaval film gesture towards a utopian vision of cosmopolitan city living: the population united by an inclusive Pan-American identity, its public spaces open to the people, and socially progressive urban planning.
The unusual challenges of filming It’s All True in Brazil also seem to have been pivotal for Welles’s development as an urban filmmaker. Barely two weeks after he’d finished filming The Magnificent Ambersons at RKO in Hollywood, he was in South America trying to film a wild, uncontrollable, and uncontainable real-life event: “shooting a storm”, he called it. The unorthodox process forced him to grapple with new challenges of representing a city on screen.
The trajectory of Welles’s Brazilian filmmaking in 1942, from Rio de Janeiro to Fortaleza, was a little like that of Welles’s film career in miniature: it began with a 27-person Hollywood crew and a plane’s worth of movie equipment, as well as anti-aircraft searchlights seconded from the Brazilian military;7 it ended with non-professional actors and a skeleton crew shooting with a single silent film camera.
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It’s All True was intended to be a multi-part anthology of stories based on actual events. In its pre-Good Neighbor Policy phase, the focus was North America: stories about Canada, the United States, and Mexico. After Pearl Harbor it expanded to include South American narratives. But Welles never finalised a definitive structure, and at least seven segments were developed. Three were fully or partially shot but never edited: ‘My Friend Bonito’, ‘Carnaval’, and ‘Jangadeiros’.
During the early development of It’s All True, Welles assigned preliminary scripting duties to writers including John Fante, Norman Foster, and Elliot Paul. Welles’s own revisions would come at a later date, his method for radio dramas. But some of these scripts were never pursued further, and the extent of Welles’s involvement in their development is unclear. Some of the segments used urban settings, and there was a recurring interest in architects, but it can only be speculated how Welles might have pursued these aspects on film.8
‘The Story of Jazz’ was to have dramatised the life of Louis Armstrong, playing himself – “except in knee pants”, Welles noted.9 Duke Ellington was contracted to write the music and participate in the development of the story. An early treatment from July 1941, written by Elliot Paul, was titled ‘Jazz Sequence’. Welles appended a page of comments which clarified his conception of the segment as “a dramatised concert of hot jazz with narrative interludes by real people”.10 The treatment follows Armstrong’s career from New Orleans to Chicago to New York. It is remarkably observant of the growth of jazz within specific urban spaces. It uses a New Orleans railway track as a recurring motif; Louis, first as a five-year-old boy, collects “usable pieces of coal which have fallen from the train”.11 Louis meets his mentor King Oliver in a New Orleans funeral band. There are marching band battles, ‘cutting contests’, and legendary New Orleans locations such as Mahogany Hall and the Frenchman’s.
One passage in this early treatment, which surely shows the guidance of Welles, outlines another incarnation of his Heart of Darkness sound scheme: diegetic music to spatially orientate the viewer outside Mahogany Hall in Storyville. Paul’s treatment notes:
As we go from one fanlight to another we hear band music to match: that is to say, Oliver’s music fades out under somebody else’s; then somebody else’s is taken over by still somebody else’s. Sometimes the music is fast – sometimes slow – sometimes its just piano music. Always it representative New Orleans jazz.12
Later in Paul’s treatment there is crosscutting between two Chicago nightclubs: the banal performance of the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band – “with all the stunts and gags” – and the exciting black Armstrong and Oliver band.13 This kind of juxtaposition occurs in Welles’s later sketches for the Rio Carnaval material, an emphatic contrast between the black originators of authentically American music and the white musicians who create a commercially acceptable version for white listeners in segregated spaces.14
Further continuity draft screenplays were written by Paul in August and September 1941.15 Duke Ellington formally signed his contract with Mercury as composer in May 1942 while Welles was in Brazil, but the segment was never shot.16
Nevertheless, Welles’s concept had an afterlife. New Orleans (1947), a later RKO jazz film made entirely without Welles’s participation, seems to have evolved from Elliot Paul’s material (he was co-credited for ‘original story’). The film featured Louis Armstrong in a small role and its plot mirrored the “geographic trajectory” of ‘The Story of Jazz’. Following the film’s release, Welles’s associate producer Richard Wilson sought legal advice on its similarities with Welles’s project.17 Later, Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s CBS television special and album A Drum Is a Woman (1957) used a jungle-to-nightclub narrative to tell the history of jazz. At the time of the broadcast Ellington recalled Welles’s invitation to participate in It’s All True: “Then there never was a movie,” Ellington told Newsweek, “but I never forgot the theme.” One Ellington critic notes that A Drum Is a Woman “implicitly portrayed music as a historical and cultural link between African, African American, and Latin American peoples, and implicitly argued for a Pan-African unity”.18
Another untitled and uncredited script about jazz partially survives in typescript in Welles’s archives. It is undated but was probably written around 1945.19 This fictional story also follows the origins of the music from the jungles of Africa, across the Atlantic by slave ship, to New Orleans, and then to Chicago and New York. The story properly begins at the turn of the century and involves Kit, a white foundling in New Orleans, and Reggie, the son of her adoptive father’s black housekeeper. Despite the lack of a credit, there is enough Welles-style humour to suggest he had a strong role in its writing. A courtroom sequence, in which the grown-up Kit, a jazz pianist, defends jazz as an art form against the ‘Pure in Heart League’, has a humorous quality which anticipates the farcical courtroom in The Lady from Shanghai. One racist commentator, who believes jazz is “the ignorant clamor of savage black men”, is called as an “expert” witness for the prosecution. The “expert” works backwards through his professional experience – six years as a critic with the Evening Telegram, eight years with the New York Opera House, twelve with the Paris Symphony,
fourteen with the Milan Opera Company, eighteen years with the Budapest choir, and so on. When he finishes, Kit’s attorney cross-examines the witness: “Just one question, Mr. Travers. For how many years now have you been dead?”20 It’s difficult not to imagine a flustered Erskine Sanford smashing down his gavel to silence the uproarious laughter of the court.
Even more so than ‘The Story of Jazz’, the script seems to gesture towards connecting the development of jazz to the development of cities; Kit’s father, Latimer, is a New Orleans architect conveniently involved in designing “cheap bungalows” and “modern housing”.21 But little evidence about this project survives in the Welles archive.
‘Love Story’ was to have focused on a romance between Italian immigrants in the United States. It was supposedly based on the parents of its writer, John Fante, author of the novel Ask the Dust (1939). In Fante’s ‘1st Draft Continuity’ script, finished in the summer of 1941, Rocco is a hod carrier who wants to be an architect, and pretends to have achieved material success to impress an Italian girl and her family. The setting is the San Francisco Bay Area in 1909. The script takes in the city’s cable cars, a vaudeville theatre, a skating rink, a beach, a ballroom, a ferry, and a suburb at the end of the street car line in Sausalito, a “block of scattered, cheap homes, treeless and lonely” where Rocco has a “box-like, two-story, weather beaten frame house”.22 The variety of historical urban settings suggests that the film could have become another part of Welles’s U.S.A. alongside Kane and Ambersons. Catherine Benamou, the dean of It’s All True research, notes that the world depicted in ‘Love Story’ is modernising, and its characters interact with a built cityscape and mixed population representative of these changes.23 But the settings show more promise than Fante’s weak melodramatic romance and its ethnic stereotypes. It does not seem that Welles revised Fante’s work.24
Beyond the San Francisco setting, there are other hints at what would later become The Lady from Shanghai. The early scenes move between a penny arcade, a scenic railway, a ‘Foolish House’, a midway, and a crystal maze inside an amusement park.25 The hall-of-mirrors concept would also feature in the unproduced Don’t Catch Me.26
Another part of It’s All True, ‘My Friend Bonito’, was based on a story by the filmmaker Robert Flaherty about the friendship between a Mexican boy and a bull raised to die in the corrida de toros. The bull would escape death after exhibiting exceptional bravery. Its screenplay was written by Fante and director Norman Foster, who began production in Mexico in September 1941. After he recalled Foster to Hollywood to direct Journey into Fear, Welles intended to himself film the missing scenes in Mexico on his way back from South America. This proved impossible after RKO’s cancellation of It’s All True.27 ‘Bonito’ was never finished, but some of the black-and-white negative survived and several minutes were presented in the posthumous documentary It’s All True: Based on a Film by Orson Welles (1993). In this assembly the boy and Bonito are seen playing together in material shot at the La Punta hacienda in Jalisco. There is another sequence showing the blessing of animals by a village priest. This part was shot at the Zacatepec ranch in Tlaxcala.28
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They’re closing down Praça Onze
There will be no more samba schools
The tamborim cries, the shanty towns cry…
put away your instruments,
the samba schools won’t be parading today.
– ‘Adeus, Praça Onze’ by Herivelto Martins and Grande Otello29
Amid the maelstrom of his daily activities in Rio, Welles commissioned detailed research reports to help him understand Brazilian culture. The research helped him find a meaningful structure for the documentary film material he had shot during the four tumultuous days of Carnaval and guided the re-staging of the festivities. Welles’s assistant Richard Wilson said: “As we learned more down there, the structure of the Carnaval subject altered. As Orson filmed more, it altered. There were several structures conceived for this subject, and several structures for the whole film.”30
Many of these reports survive in the Mercury archives. Welles read about Brazil’s ‘macumba’ ceremonies (“a kind of fetish lethargy”), the history of the rubber business, “Primitive Inhabitants of Rio Grade do Sol”, the “History of Rio Grande do Norte and Legends, Customs and Traditions of the Northeast”, “The Origin of the Word Gaucho”, “Brazilian Independence and Jefferson”, and “Holy Week in Ouro Preto”. There is a long report on how Rio had developed from its beginnings to the imminent razing of the city’s Praça Onze (Square Eleven) to make way for Avenida Getúlio Vargas, “an 80 meter wide avenue constituting an important longitudinal axis of the city”. The “colossal” Avenida, already in progress, would require the destruction of entire blocks, four churches, and many other tall buildings.31
The city’s samba schools, which researcher Robert Meltzer reported had replaced the banned cordãos (local gangs), traditionally fought in Praça Onze.32
A research paper by future Brazilian director Alex Viany explains:
At first, Praça Onze was – as it was … with all new public places in Rio and other world capitals – almost a privilege of the rich or the whitemen. When the city grew and life in the center began to get more and more expensive, the negroes and the poor went to the suburbs and the hills. They get back to town in Carnaval. Praca Onze is like the African embassy in Rio during Carnaval … [its] feasts are like Harlem jam-and-swing sessions elevated to the highest degree. […] The white workers also go to Praça Onze during Carnaval. There, among their negro brothers they are happier and more free than in the middle-class Carnaval hangout, Avenida Rio Branco, or than in beautiful but snobbish Copacabana. Praca Onze can be taken as a democratic symbol, as a center of irradiation… there you’ll find the most genuine freedom in thinking and speaking. […]
The reaction of the negroes to the demolition of Praca Onze was one of resignation. They know that someday their hills shall be demolished too. But they also know that they must have better houses in better conditions by then. They believe in progress and want to cooperate. But they want to see progress working – not in promises. That’s why they are building an obelisk to President Getúlio Vargas near Praca Onze. They (the workers of Brazil) believe in his promise but want to see them working. The obelisk is something of a reminder.33
Viany adds that the obelisk was actually the initiative of government-controlled workers’ syndicates, not a spontaneous move by the workers themselves.
These commissioned papers, many by Brazilian scholars, indicate Welles’s serious intent to film more than a colourful background for a propagandistic travelogue. He would reimagine Rio de Janeiro on screen with a grounding in its history, culture, economy, flows of communication, racial politics, and power relations, all in aid of Pan-American unity against fascism.
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Through to the end of May, Welles and his crew filmed re-stagings of the festivities at Cinédia Studio, at the Teatro Municipal, and in the Quintino neighbourhood. He also entered the city’s favelas to film with both a handheld camera and his Technicolor crew.34 He later said the crew was attacked in one place by mysterious thugs who threw rocks and empty bottles.35
Welles had by now conceived an additional Brazilian segment for It’s All True, a re-enactment of the recent ocean journey of four peasant fisherman by jangada raft some 1,650 miles from Fortaleza on the north-eastern Brazilian coast to Rio de Janeiro to appeal to dictator Getúlio Vargas for basic social benefits.36 In March Welles temporarily left Rio to scout locations in Fortaleza. He intended to return in the winter to film the rituals of the fishing community and the commencement of the jangadeiros’ journey. But before that Welles brought the four original jangadeiros to Rio to film the conclusion, a re-staging of their arrival in the city – which, contrary to history, would now coincide with the Carnaval festivities. However, during preparations for filming on 19 May, the jangadeiro leader, Jacaré, drowned in an accident off the coast of Rio.
Surviving frames from Welles’s Technicolor footage from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, 1942 (Source: It’s All True: Based on a Film by Orson Welles, 1993)
In the memo Welles defined It’s All True as “neither a play, nor a novel in movie form” but instead a “magazine”, with the Carnaval sequence “a feature story” within that format. He added with enthusiasm that “the sheer immensity of Rio’s Carnival is hopelessly beyond the scope of any Hollywood spectacle”. There was only one possible approach considering the little preparation he’d been afforded:
We often had no choice but to set up our camera and grind away until we got something usable. We shot without a script. We were forced to… I as director, was always the one to be informed rather than the people working under me.