Orson Welles A One Man Band

What I most remember about meeting Orson Welles was that he was big and also smiling. I managed to go up to him after a talk he gave at the Director's Guild of America in Hollywood sometime in the very early 80's. He showed some black and white excerpts from "The Other Side of the Wind," and I remember that he said something to the effect that if you took the boxoffice grosses of all of his movies including Citizen Kane and added them together the total would barely come up to the budget of a modern film. That was 15 years ago. And he was right.

In 1975, I was working on a documentary about American Comic Book and Comic Strip artists and I wanted to include an interview with Orson Welles. According to Jerry Siegel, the original delineator of The Joker in Batman comic books and a neighbor of mine, the guys around the comic book offices back in the early 1940's were big comic book fans! This included people you've probably never heard of, but should have, like Will Eisner, and some you have heard of, who you probably should ignore, like Bob Kane. Anyway, these guys liked to go to the movies. And they especially liked real moody black and white cinematography of what came to be thought of as the Gregg Toland school of perhaps even "noir" later on. They'd go see a movie, then come back to the office and draw it into their comic books. If you want to bother to look at the very early Batman and Detective Comics, you'll see it all there: shadows, dutch angles, silhouettes, you name it.One day somebody came back from a certain movie and told everybody else and they all went to see it and they came back and verbally slavered over it and drew it into their comic books. It was Citizen Kane of course and you can see the influence of that, too, especially in Wil Eisner's work up to the present day: both graphic style and story-telling style. Check out Dropsey Avenue or A Message From God.

So, now. Somebody actually talked to Orson Welles around about that time and found out that he (and apparently Gregg Toland) loved comic books. That he had been an avid reader of Detective Comics and Batman and had deliberately made Citizen Kane look like that. !!!!

Peter Bogdanovich was nice enough to give me Orson's home phone number in Los Angeles, and said "Call him up. Either he'll answer the phone or he won't." So I did. And Orson never answered the phone.

This evening I watched a lovely documentary about Orson's "declining" years down at the Film Forum, and thankfully there were more than the 5 people there that a friend reported a few days ago. Most of the audience was young. They laughed at the jokes though, and they were attentive. Not as many as I laughed at. That's because I'm older and more jaded and have more tire marks from Hollywood across my back than they do, but perhaps I'm putting on airs.

When I went up to him 15 years ago, I think I wanted something to rub off. I didn't know just what to say, and I believe I shook hands with him. Maybe not, but I think I did. I was awed, and in retrospect I felt a little like the guy in the color excerpt from "Wind" who goes up to John Houston and says "I'm Joe Blow." And Houston replies, "Of course you are." I'm sure I identified with Welles. Maverick. So did all umpty hundred people in the audience at the interview shown in the film. Oddly, they all probably wanted to be him. I know I did. I haven't gotten close, but I've suffered some of the same indignities. It's just that the detritus of my life isn't quite as interesting as the detritius of his. And the biggest thing I ever did, is awful tiny compared to the smallest thing Welles pulled off.

New York City, December 23, 1996