Poor Mr. Welles, the suits still won’t leave you alone.

 

Jeffrey St. Clair >>

Back in 2004, Alexander Cockburn and I had a long, martini-fueled lunch at Musso and Franks with the prolific, Hollywood-based British writer, Charles Higham, who was eager to have us write something on his latest book, Murdering Mr. Lincoln: a New Detection of the 19th Century’s Most Famous Crime. Higham’s zestily-written book depicted a vast conspiracy behind the assassination of Lincoln that involved the British government, southern racists, bankers and American industrialists. Wild stuff, that he had unearthed enough documentation for in order to provide evidentiary weight to his grandiose speculations. Higham had written several shelves of highly unauthorized biographies, the one outing Errol Flynn as a Nazi, probably being the  most famous/infamous. His scandalous biography of Howard Hughes became the basis for Scorsese’s film The Aviator, although Martin left out the best parts, including that Hughes had an affair with Cary Grant and that he probably died of AIDS. Higham had also written a gossipy biography of Orson Welles.  I asked Higham about Welles’s almost pathological impulse for self-destruction that led him to leave Hollywood for Brazil before he finished the final edits to what was probably his greatest film, The Magnificent Ambersons, which the studio execs proceeded to cut the heart out of in his absence and destroy the footage so that the Enfant terrible of American directors could never resemble it and then, more than a decade later, nearly repeat the episode by allowing the money people to chop up his border noir masterpiece  Touch of Evil. Higham blew off my psychologizing and put the blame entirely on the studio heads, who wanted to crush Welles as an example to other directors who thought their artistic judgment should outweigh the bottom-line demands of the studios. Higham told the story of tracking down the fishing boat operator who was hired by the studios to dump the cut reels from Ambersons into the Pacific off Catalina Island, so that it could never be pieced back together. “I can even give you the coordinates,” he boasted. I still have an image of those amputated reels, “scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Now, an Amazon-backed enterprise run by Edward Saatchi has announced plans to use AI to “recreate” the missing 43 minutes from Ambersons, which would be like pouring acid on a burn victim. Poor Mr. Welles, the suits still won’t leave you alone.