Rejoice, Cinephiles! An Early Orson Welles Film Has Been Rediscovered!
A truly depressing aspect of film history is that it’s grossly incomplete. Roughly eighty to ninety percent of silent films are lost, and a good chunk of the sound pictures from Hollywood’s Golden Age have met the same fate. Preservation and posterity just didn’t–and, in many ways, still don’t–take precedent for the big shots in Hollywood. Saving a buck was more important than saving this art form. (In many cases, these lost movies, made out of cellulose nitrate, were melted down and used again.) Almost all of them are gone forever, never to be found, restored, or recreated. But every once in a while, a wonderful thing happens: One of these movies believed to be lost is rediscovered and, with a little love and care, restored. (For example, a more complete version of Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis was a huge find in 2008). Incredibly, in these unique instances, the cinematic giants of old are given a second chance to move and entertain us. And I am happy to report that today is such an occasion because Orson Welles’ film “Too Much Johnson” has been found. So hit the jump for joy (and more information).
Several years before creating Citizen Kane (and changing the medium in the process), Welles made “Too Much Johnson”, a forty-minute film based on a play of the same name that he was reviving for the theater. Though it was thought to have been destroyed in a fire, it has been recently found in a fortunate milieu in Italy:
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.
This is great news, friends. Along with his early short “The Hearts of Age“, this new find offers us a chance to see what Welles had to offer before he hit Hollywood. Checking out his development as a filmmaker will be fascinating because, Unlike HOA, which Welles described as “Sunday-afternoon fun out on the lawn” (a really interesting Sunday afternoon, if you ask me), “Too Much Johnson” was a more professional venture, employing actors (the wonderful Joseph Cotten being one of them) from the Mercury Theater. No doubt he was honing his craft, working hard to become a better artist in the medium– and to some success in his own estimation. Viewing it again in the 60s, Welles thought it had a “fine quality.” And by the looks of this still (below), it appears that Welles wasn’t kidding. Its composition and lighting are beautiful. I for one cannot wait to check this out in its entirety.
