Gore Vidal, in a remembrance of Orson Welles published in the New York Review of Books four years after the film director’s death, recalled Welles making the following admission during one of their frequent meals together: “They always ask me, ‘Aren’t you glad, cher maître, that the old studio system is finished, that there are no more vulgar furriers controlling your films?’ And I say, ‘My God, how I miss them! Even Harry Cohn. When you make 52 pictures a year on an assembly-line basis, there is always room for an Orson Welles film. But now there is no room anywhere.’ ”That didn’t stop Welles from making movies, however. He was prolifically productive until he died, sitting at his typewriter, on October 10, 1985, at age 70 (he would have celebrated his 100th birthday this past May). Welles left behind a legacy of scores films—both feature length and shorter, finished and un—and a reputation for squandered talent. In the popular imagination, according to the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Wells remains the “boy wonder” who made “Citizen Kane” at age 25 and spent the rest of his life as “deposed royalty.” But this perception, as Rosenbaum and others have noted, is based on a very incomplete acquaintance with Welles’s oeuvre, only a smattering of which has been seen and then often in versions that are incomplete or unapproved by Welles.Thanks to the diligent efforts of scholars, archivists, and critics, not to mention Oja Kodar, Welles’s partner during the last two decades of his life, the narrative of his career is being redacted. Some of the fruits of their labor will be on display in “The Unknown Orson Welles,” part of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual “To Save and Project” series, which runs November 4 through 25. The works included—sections from “The Deep” (1967), “The Other Side of the Wind” (1970–76), and “The Merchant of Venice” (1969), among them —are from the collection of the Filmmuseum München, whose director and curator, Stefan Drössler, will present them.Drössler has previously toured with some of this footage (I saw a version of this program at the Harvard Film Archive in 2008), and clips have appeared in documentaries, most notably “Orson Welles: The One-Man Band” (1995). But none of the films has had a commercial release, whether theatrical, video, or digital. This is in part because of the legal labyrinth that surrounds not only each project but also Welles’s estate. “The Other Side of the Wind,” a few sequences of which will be shown at MoMA, has been particularly hard to get before an audience. Various attempts over the years — including an agreement with Showtime in 1999 and a crowd-funding campaign this summer—have stalled, most recently because of Kodar’s demands that the deal be revised before she allows the remaining footage to be released from a vault in Paris. Other films have been held up because of legal disputes over Welles’s estate between Kodar and Beatrice Welles, the director’s daughter from his second marriage.As part of the Welles program, “Journey Into Fear” is being shown in its entirety, although few realize the hand he had in making it. After “Citizen Kane,” James Naremore notes in his book “The Magic World of Orson Welles,” the director was interested in several projects but very few that RKO, which had a “growing desire to be rid of Welles,” was interested in producing. In return for the studio’s backing of “The Magnificent Ambersons," he agreed to co-write “Journey Into Fear” with actor Joseph Cotton, although he does not receive a screen credit. Welles and Cotton also play small roles in the film, which was directed by Norman Foster. RKO reedited it, along with “The Ambersons,” without Welles’s approval, leading him to end his relationship with the studio. He later tried to remake “Journey” into something closer to his original vision but never succeeded. The version being shown at MoMA, reconstructed by Drössler, adds several minutes cut from the U.S. theatrical release.Also in the MoMA program are the workprint for “The Deep” (1967), a filmed “proposal” from the 1980s for a television adaptation of “King Lear,” and test scenes for “The Dreamers” (1982). But the biggest surprise is a reconstructed version of “The Merchant of Venice,” which was begun in 1969 as a CBS television special but, after the network pulled its financing, completed in the 1970s as an independent project. Years later, Welles claimed that the negative of the film had been stolen from his production office in Rome, and it was believed that only fragments still existed. The recent discovery of footage by Filmmuseum München und Cinemazero, which two years ago discovered Welles’s first film, “Too Much Johnson,” allowed the two institutions to create, with Drössler’s help, a version based on a script found among the director’s papers housed at the University of Michigan.There are still films by Welles that have not been restored, or even found, and scripts that remain unpublished. He was notoriously unorganized, and the legal squabbles have not helped. But we are inching closer to a more complete picture of Orson Welles, one that moves beyond “Citizen Kane” and encompasses his entire body of work, even the stuff that was left unfinished.Click here for six more films to see at “To Save and Project” at the Museum of Modern Art.
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