HarryCarter Posted August 7, 2013 Report Share Posted August 7, 2013 The long lost 1938 short film "Too Much Johnson" directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, Joseph Cotten, Mary Wickes, and Arlene Francis has been found! August 7, 2013 Early Film by Orson Welles Is Rediscovered By DAVE KEHR In 1941, Orson Welles made his debut as a feature film director with “Citizen Kane,” a fact well known to everyone who has ever taken Film 101. Less well known is that “Kane” wasn’t Welles’s debut as a filmmaker. That distinction belongs to “Hearts of Age,” an eight-minute parody of an avant-garde allegory that Welles, as the world’s most precocious teenager, codirected with a friend, William Vance, at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill. Amazingly, that 1934 effort, in which Welles wears old-age makeup that anticipates the elderly Kane, has survived, and can even be seen on YouTube. But neither was “Kane” Welles’s first professional encounter with the cinema. That happened three years before his Hollywood debut, in the form of about 40 minutes of footage intended to be shown with “Too Much Johnson,” a revival of an 1894 farce that Welles intended to bring to Broadway for the 1938 season of his Mercury Theater. The cast of “Too Much Johnson” included several members of his Mercury troupe: Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Howard Smith, Edgar Barrier, Mary Wickes and Welles’s wife at the time, Virginia Nicholson, billed under her stage name, Anna Stafford. The music was composed by Paul Bowles (who later wrote “The Sheltering Sky”); legend has it that an aspiring comedian named Judith Tuvim, later Judy Holliday, was one of the extras. For generations, Welles scholars have been intrigued by “Too Much Johnson,” which would seem to represent Welles’s first real experience composing a film to be seen by a paying public, with the support of a professional cast and a professional crew. But for over 50 years, no print had been known to exist. Welles never quite finished editing the large amount of footage he shot for “Too Much Johnson,” and when the show folded out of town, after a disastrous preview in Stony Creek, Conn., he set the film aside and forgot about it. Sometime in the 1960s, as Welles told Frank Brady for an article in the November 1978 issue of American Film, he came across the material again, in his villa in Spain. “I can’t remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was,” Welles recalled. “I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present.” Regrettably, while Welles was away for an acting job, a fire destroyed the villa and most of its contents. “Too Much Johnson,” which had been shot on highly inflammable nitrate stock, had apparently been lost to the ages. But things have turned out otherwise. “Too Much Johnson” has reappeared — discovered not in Spain but in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s. Old films turn up with some regularity under similar circumstances — independent filmmakers aren’t always known for promptly paying their storage bills — but because nitrate becomes even more dangerously unstable as it ages, the usual practice is to junk it as quickly as possible. This time, though, the movie gods were smiling. Pordenone happens to be home to Cinemazero, a cultural organization that regularly screens classic films, and which each fall partners with the Cineteca del Friuli to present Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, a gathering of scholars and cinephiles with a special dedication to the shadowy corners of film history. The Cinemazero staff realized what they’d found and turned the footage over to George Eastman House in Rochester, where the work of stabilizing the film and transferring it to modern safety stock is proceeding with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. “Too Much Johnson” is scheduled to have its premiere in Pordenone during this year’s festival, which begins on Oct. 5, and will be screened at Eastman House on Oct. 16. If the financing can be found, the foundation will offer the film over the Internet later in the year. In the meantime, the frame enlargements from “Too Much Johnson” that have been released suggest a young filmmaker — Welles was all of 23 at the time — with a striking command of his medium. The images are unmistakably his, with their strong, close-cropped compositions, powerful diagonals and insistent, ironic use of the “heroic angle” — the positioning of the camera to look up at the actor as if he were a statue posed on a pedestal. There are no heroes in “Too Much Johnson” — only a frantic womanizer from Yonkers named Augustus Billings (played by Cotten). Billings has been carrying on an extramarital indiscretion under the invented identity of the owner of a plantation in Cuba named Johnson — a figure who, inconveniently enough, actually exists, as Billings discovers when he arrives in Santiago, Chile, in the company of his wife (Nicholson), his mother-in-law (Wickes) and a jealous husband (Barrier). Each act of the play — written by the celebrated actor William Gillette as a vehicle for himself — was to begin with a film segment. The first (and most nearly completed in the rediscovered print) was a chase across Lower Manhattan shot in the style of a silent comedy, complete with Keystone Kop-like pursuers, a suffragist parade to barrel through and Cotten tottering on the edge of a skyscraper like Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last.” Working with Paul Dunbar, a cameraman with Pathé News, Welles shot a large amount of footage for “Too Much Johnson” — some 25,000 feet, nearly four hours’ worth — and apparently had a good time doing it. Home movies of the shoot, taken by a Mercury Theater investor and preserved in the Pacific Film Archive, show Welles wearing a battered straw hat and bellowing orders to his actors, who are splashing around in a flooded Hudson Valley rock quarry meant to represent the Caribbean. Laughing and animated, the slim, young Welles is clearly already under the spell of the apparatus he would call, at the time of “Kane,” “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.” For Simon Callow, the British actor, director and Welles biographer (“The Road to Xanadu”), the most important development came next, as Welles sequestered himself with an editing machine in his suite at the St. Regis in Manhattan in a frantic attempt to assemble the film in time for the play’s out-of-town tryout. “The great thing that happened to him on ‘Too Much Johnson’ was that he discovered editing, and began to see the possibilities,” Mr. Callow wrote in an e-mail from London. “I suspect that at that point he suddenly lost interest in the production altogether and would have loved to have continued his celluloid self-education.” The education ended abruptly. For reasons that remain unclear — perhaps because a few cast members complained to Actors Equity that they weren’t being paid enough to appear in a film; perhaps because the Connecticut theater couldn’t accommodate a movie projector — the prologue footage was scrapped. The play didn’t make much sense without it, and the decision was made not to take it to Broadway, much to Welles’s disappointment. “He was a complete tyro,” Mr. Callow wrote, “discovering a new medium and unsure how it would work.” Come October, we’ll at last be in a position to know if it did. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/movies/early-film-by-orson-welles-is-rediscovered.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor Posted August 7, 2013 Report Share Posted August 7, 2013 Okay, that title.... Wait, is this an old-timey porno? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brock Posted August 7, 2013 Report Share Posted August 7, 2013 The long lost 1938 short film "Too Much Johnson" directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, Joseph Cotten, Mary Wickes, and Arlene Francis has been found! http://www.nytimes.c...discovered.html Very exciting news! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeySanJoaquin Posted August 8, 2013 Report Share Posted August 8, 2013 Inspired perhaps by "Too Much Weiner" (Anthony that is!) in the news of late?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brock Posted August 9, 2013 Report Share Posted August 9, 2013 Very interesting featurette on the restoration of Too Much Johnson; unfortunately there isn't any footage in here of La Wickes (unless she is the statuesque one on glamourous shipboard at 1.40), but there is a good shot of the lovely star of stage and television, Miss Arlene Francis: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C L A U D E Posted August 9, 2013 Report Share Posted August 9, 2013 Okay, that title.... Wait, is this an old-timey porno? Nah, just the story of MY life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor Posted August 9, 2013 Report Share Posted August 9, 2013 Nah, just the story of MY life. Exact opposite of mine. There's Not Enough Johnson. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeySanJoaquin Posted August 9, 2013 Report Share Posted August 9, 2013 Exact opposite of mine. There's Not Enough Johnson. Let's start a club! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brock Posted May 8, 2014 Report Share Posted May 8, 2014 I was thrilled to discover "Too Much Johnson" is having its Canadian premiere in Toronto on Saturday afternoon! Has anyone else had the chance to see this yet? It sounds so unusual. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HarryCarter Posted May 8, 2014 Author Report Share Posted May 8, 2014 Very groovy! Are you going? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brock Posted May 8, 2014 Report Share Posted May 8, 2014 Very groovy! Are you going? You bet your bippy! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HarryCarter Posted February 12, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 12, 2015 TCM will be airing Too Much Johnson on May 1! http://www.wellesnet.com/chimes-at-midnight-too-much-johnson-to-air-on-turner-classic-movies-salute-to-orson-welles/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C L A U D E Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 One can never have TOO MUCH JOHNSON! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luvsbway Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 Well there went the soda out my nose. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C L A U D E Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 Well there went the soda out my nose. Thanks. I meant enough copies of the movie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeySanJoaquin Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 Well there went the soda out my nose. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brock Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 TCM will be airing Too Much Johnson on May 1! http://www.wellesnet.com/chimes-at-midnight-too-much-johnson-to-air-on-turner-classic-movies-salute-to-orson-welles/ This is such a fascinating piece -- and the delightful star of stage and television, Arlene Francis, is a knockout in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeySanJoaquin Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 This is such a fascinating piece -- and the delightful star of stage and television, Arlene Francis, is a knockout in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brock Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 Trust me on this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leenorman Posted March 5, 2015 Report Share Posted March 5, 2015 Joey!!!!! You can say SO MUCH with no verbiage!!!! I love it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C L A U D E Posted March 6, 2015 Report Share Posted March 6, 2015 Joey!!!!! You can say SO MUCH with no verbiage!!!! I love it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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