The author and screenwriter talks to Nicholas Wroe about emotional openness, storytelling and how Hollywood critiques help you focus as a novelist
'If you are a screenwriter and you write a novel, then you are still a screenwriter," explains William Nicholson. "With two novels you become a screenwriter who writes novels, and with three you are a novelist and screenwriter. But write seven or eight novels …? At the moment the people in my different worlds don't have much idea of the other things I do. The film world especially has no clue that I've written children's books, adult novels and plays. What I'd really like is to be up for a film award and literary award in the same year. That would confuse them."
A bold ambition, and looking at Nicholson's track record, not an entirely fanciful one. As a screenwriter he has been Oscar-nominated for adapting his own play about Cs Lewis,...
'If you are a screenwriter and you write a novel, then you are still a screenwriter," explains William Nicholson. "With two novels you become a screenwriter who writes novels, and with three you are a novelist and screenwriter. But write seven or eight novels …? At the moment the people in my different worlds don't have much idea of the other things I do. The film world especially has no clue that I've written children's books, adult novels and plays. What I'd really like is to be up for a film award and literary award in the same year. That would confuse them."
A bold ambition, and looking at Nicholson's track record, not an entirely fanciful one. As a screenwriter he has been Oscar-nominated for adapting his own play about Cs Lewis,...
- 1/10/2014
- by Nicholas Wroe
- The Guardian - Film News
Orson Welles' Too Much Johnson, screened for the first time to a full house at Pordenone Festival of Silent Cinema, comes trailing clouds of mystery like so much else in the life and work of its maker.
We know Welles shot the film in 1938 with a newsreel cameraman, intending it as a series of insert sequence within a play he was producing with the Mercury Theater. For various reasons, the three sequences, intended to carry the exposition in William Gillette's 1894 farce, were not ready or could not be projected when the play opened, and as a result the show was not a success.
Now George Eastman House has restored what it describes as Welles' cutting copy, apparently discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone itself. It consists of several reels of loosely ordered material with multiple takes, and was presented without any alteration apart from the preservation necessary to make the material projectable.
We know Welles shot the film in 1938 with a newsreel cameraman, intending it as a series of insert sequence within a play he was producing with the Mercury Theater. For various reasons, the three sequences, intended to carry the exposition in William Gillette's 1894 farce, were not ready or could not be projected when the play opened, and as a result the show was not a success.
Now George Eastman House has restored what it describes as Welles' cutting copy, apparently discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone itself. It consists of several reels of loosely ordered material with multiple takes, and was presented without any alteration apart from the preservation necessary to make the material projectable.
- 10/30/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
Too Much Johnson – which was intended for inclusion in a theatre show – forms an 'intellectual bridge' between the director's theatrical and cinematic careers, says its restorer
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It's hugely exciting discovery – and a bizarre, unexpected one too. An early Orson Welles film, previously thought lost, has been found in a warehouse in northern Italy. Too Much Johnson, the second film Welles ever created, is a silent movie, a slapstick comedy that has never been shown and was thought to have been destroyed in a fire.
"We may never fully understand the mystery of why it was abandoned. What matters now is that it is safe, and that it will be seen," says Dr Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator of motion pictures at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which restored the footage.
The film, says Cherchi Usai, is the "intellectual bridge" between Welles's theatrical and cinematic careers.
Reading this on mobile? Click to view
It's hugely exciting discovery – and a bizarre, unexpected one too. An early Orson Welles film, previously thought lost, has been found in a warehouse in northern Italy. Too Much Johnson, the second film Welles ever created, is a silent movie, a slapstick comedy that has never been shown and was thought to have been destroyed in a fire.
"We may never fully understand the mystery of why it was abandoned. What matters now is that it is safe, and that it will be seen," says Dr Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator of motion pictures at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which restored the footage.
The film, says Cherchi Usai, is the "intellectual bridge" between Welles's theatrical and cinematic careers.
- 8/8/2013
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
Silent short Too Much Johnson features Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles.
A 1938 Orson Welles film has been discovered in a warehouse in Italy.
Silent film Too Much Johnson, starring Joseph Cotten in the lead role, was found in a warehouse by the staff of Cinemazero, an art house in Pordenone, Italy.
The silent film was originally intended to be used in conjunction with Welles’ stage adaptation of an 1894 play by William Gillette. The Mercury Theatre planned to show the three short films as prologues to each act of the play.
The nitrate print of the film - left unfinished by the Mercury Theatre and never shown in public - was given by Cinemazero to one of Italy’s major film archives, the Cineteca del Friuli in nearby Gemona, and transferred from there to George Eastman House in order to be preserved.
According to published sources, until now the only known print of Too Much Johnson had burnt...
A 1938 Orson Welles film has been discovered in a warehouse in Italy.
Silent film Too Much Johnson, starring Joseph Cotten in the lead role, was found in a warehouse by the staff of Cinemazero, an art house in Pordenone, Italy.
The silent film was originally intended to be used in conjunction with Welles’ stage adaptation of an 1894 play by William Gillette. The Mercury Theatre planned to show the three short films as prologues to each act of the play.
The nitrate print of the film - left unfinished by the Mercury Theatre and never shown in public - was given by Cinemazero to one of Italy’s major film archives, the Cineteca del Friuli in nearby Gemona, and transferred from there to George Eastman House in order to be preserved.
According to published sources, until now the only known print of Too Much Johnson had burnt...
- 8/8/2013
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
As the New York Times' Dave Kehr points out in a recent highlight piece, Orson Welles' filmmaking debut came seven years before 1941's "Citizen Kane," with an eight-minute short titled "The Hearts of Age." Teenager Welles made the film with a friend from school, William Vance. In this early endeavor, Welles dons old-age makeup -- a sign of disguises to come in "Kane." Watch below. The main gist of Kehr's article, however, focuses on forty minutes of footage filmed by Welles in 1938, made to be shown with theatrical production "Too Much Johnson," a revival of an 1894 comedy the director planned for the 1938 season of the Mercury Theatre. When the show closed following a negatively received preview in Stony Creek, Connecticut, Welles put the footage aside. Mercury Theatre members, including eventual screen star Joseph Cotten and Welles' wife at the time, Virginia Nicholson, were part of the abandoned film. Recently...
- 8/7/2013
- by Beth Hanna
- Thompson on Hollywood
Orson Welles made his feature film debut as a director with Citizen Kane and before that he directed the eight-minute short film Hearts of Age, which you can watch at the bottom of this post. However, Welles worked on another film between those two efforts, which was believed lost forever... until now. Dave Kehr at the New York Times has posted a feature article on Welles' Too Much Johnson, a 1938 film he wrote, directed and never finished based on the play by William Gillette, which has recently resurfaced "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." Classic film organization Cinemazero is working with George Eastman House and the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve and transfer the nitrate film to safety stock, after which the 40 minutes of surviving footage will be screened...
- 8/7/2013
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
London, July 19: Orson Welles, who was a known womaniser, lived a life that was dotted with affairs with various women.
The legendary actor/director's first love was actress Virginia Nicolson and the couple eloped in 1934 when they were 19, the Daily Express revealed.
While Nicolson was pregnant with the couple's child, Welles began affairs with actresses Geraldine Fitzgerald and Dolores del Rio.
After divorce from Nicolson in 1940, Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943; that marriage resulted in divorce in 1948 after his extra-marital affairs plagued the relationship.
Soon after, Welles impregnated Italian.
The legendary actor/director's first love was actress Virginia Nicolson and the couple eloped in 1934 when they were 19, the Daily Express revealed.
While Nicolson was pregnant with the couple's child, Welles began affairs with actresses Geraldine Fitzgerald and Dolores del Rio.
After divorce from Nicolson in 1940, Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943; that marriage resulted in divorce in 1948 after his extra-marital affairs plagued the relationship.
Soon after, Welles impregnated Italian.
- 7/19/2013
- by Abhijeet Sen
- RealBollywood.com
I was saddened to learn this morning that Betty Garrett, the great star of stage, screen, and TV, passed away yesterday at the age of 94 after suffering an aortic aneurysm.
Garrett was one of those rare people — like, say, Jack Valenti — who happened to be a witness to and/or participant in a remarkably high number of historic events of the 20th century. She was a member of Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Theatre company, and was with him on the night that he shook up America with his infamous radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” (1938); she was Frank Sinatra’s leading lady in two of the earliest great M-g-m musical-comedies, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1949) and “On the Town” (1949); her career was greatly hurt by the Hollywood Red Scare after her husband, the Oscar nominated actor Larry Parks, refused to name names before the House Committee...
Garrett was one of those rare people — like, say, Jack Valenti — who happened to be a witness to and/or participant in a remarkably high number of historic events of the 20th century. She was a member of Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Theatre company, and was with him on the night that he shook up America with his infamous radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” (1938); she was Frank Sinatra’s leading lady in two of the earliest great M-g-m musical-comedies, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1949) and “On the Town” (1949); her career was greatly hurt by the Hollywood Red Scare after her husband, the Oscar nominated actor Larry Parks, refused to name names before the House Committee...
- 2/13/2011
- by Scott Feinberg
- Scott Feinberg
The memoirs of Orson Welles's daughter expose his multiple complexities, says Simon Callow
Orson Welles was, to put it mildly, multifaceted; to the degree, indeed, that his personality almost fails to cohere. The result is that there are many Orsons; everyone who came across him adds another, and each insists that theirs is the real one. To the swelling genre of what might be called "My Orson" books, In My Father's Shadow, by Welles's daughter from his first marriage, is a new and uncommonly valuable addition. When I interviewed her in 1989, only four years after her father's death, Welles Feder spoke to me almost apologetically about the fact that he was more of an absence than a presence in her life. Her book makes it clear that she was then just beginning to come to terms with the degree to which he had in fact dominated her life.
Her...
Orson Welles was, to put it mildly, multifaceted; to the degree, indeed, that his personality almost fails to cohere. The result is that there are many Orsons; everyone who came across him adds another, and each insists that theirs is the real one. To the swelling genre of what might be called "My Orson" books, In My Father's Shadow, by Welles's daughter from his first marriage, is a new and uncommonly valuable addition. When I interviewed her in 1989, only four years after her father's death, Welles Feder spoke to me almost apologetically about the fact that he was more of an absence than a presence in her life. Her book makes it clear that she was then just beginning to come to terms with the degree to which he had in fact dominated her life.
Her...
- 3/13/2010
- by Simon Callow
- The Guardian - Film News
British film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg will check paternity after years of rumours that giant of cinema was his father
The British film and theatre director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, best known for making films for the Beatles and for co-directing Brideshead Revisited for Granada television in 1981, is to settle the question of whether he is the son of Orson Welles in a planned autobiography.
Lindsay-Hogg, 59, has often brushed away a persistent rumour that he is Welles's only son, a rumour fuelled by his strong resemblance to the director.
Now the identity of the baronet's real father has been queried once again by Welles's first child, the writer Chris Welles Feder. As a childhood friend of Lindsay-Hogg, Welles Feder has said she has always known he might well be her brother.
Writing in her new autobiography, In My Father's Shadow, Welles Feder remembers knowing him when they lived next to each other in beachside homes.
The British film and theatre director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, best known for making films for the Beatles and for co-directing Brideshead Revisited for Granada television in 1981, is to settle the question of whether he is the son of Orson Welles in a planned autobiography.
Lindsay-Hogg, 59, has often brushed away a persistent rumour that he is Welles's only son, a rumour fuelled by his strong resemblance to the director.
Now the identity of the baronet's real father has been queried once again by Welles's first child, the writer Chris Welles Feder. As a childhood friend of Lindsay-Hogg, Welles Feder has said she has always known he might well be her brother.
Writing in her new autobiography, In My Father's Shadow, Welles Feder remembers knowing him when they lived next to each other in beachside homes.
- 1/31/2010
- by Vanessa Thorpe
- The Guardian - Film News
Orson Welles's daughter gives touching insights on her father, says Caroline Boucher
It can be tough being the child of a star, and being the eldest of Orson Welles's three daughters was no exception. She got off to a pretty poor start when he elected to call her Christopher. "Wait and see, darling girl," he said. "The day will come when you'll love your name and thank your old father for having christened you while you were still in your mother's womb." As she chose to write the book under the name of Chris Welles Feder, it's safe to assume Welles Sr was wrong on that one.
It should have been a wonderful childhood, and much of the early part was. Born in 1938, Chris grew up in the golden years of Hollywood. Her adoring and fun father was around, even after he divorced her mother, actress Virginia Nicolson,...
It can be tough being the child of a star, and being the eldest of Orson Welles's three daughters was no exception. She got off to a pretty poor start when he elected to call her Christopher. "Wait and see, darling girl," he said. "The day will come when you'll love your name and thank your old father for having christened you while you were still in your mother's womb." As she chose to write the book under the name of Chris Welles Feder, it's safe to assume Welles Sr was wrong on that one.
It should have been a wonderful childhood, and much of the early part was. Born in 1938, Chris grew up in the golden years of Hollywood. Her adoring and fun father was around, even after he divorced her mother, actress Virginia Nicolson,...
- 1/31/2010
- by Caroline Boucher
- The Guardian - Film News
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