“Obscure and arty…”
Peter Bogdanovich: How about Ro.Go.Pa.G.?
Orson Welles: Can’t believe that. I was never in a picture with a name like that.
PB: In one episode directed by Pasolini. You played a movie director.
OW: Oh yes… Censored, in Italy at least, after one single screening in Venice.
PB: I didn’t think it was very good.
OW: No? Why?
PB: It was sort of obscure and arty—
OW [laughs]: “Obscure and arty.” Simply because it didn’t happen on the banks of the Mississippi, it’s obscure and arty… You mustn’t be asked about anything that isn’t, you know, Judge Shit on the Range or something—
PB [laughing]: Well, among other things wrong with it, they dubbed you in Italian.
OW: I played it in Italian! The exhibitors must have thought the Italian public couldn’t stand my accent. They have a terrible snobbism about accents in Italy. So much so that a lot of their leading actors — the girls especially — have never been heard in Italy speaking their own language in their own voices; they’re dubbed by radio actors.
PB: I didn’t know that.
OW: Yes. If your accent is vaguely of the north, let’s say, then everybody in the south hoots with laughter. So of course my own little touch of Kenosha [Wisconsin] would have been fatal. I read a poem in that one, and Pasolini told everybody that he’d never heard an Italian actor read Italian poetry with such simplicity and directness. He tried to get me to play a pig a couple of years ago when I was in Vienna.
PB [laughing]: Really a pig?
OW: A German pig. Something really obscene.
PB: You like Pasolini?
OW: Terribly bright and gifted. Crazy mixed-up kid, maybe — but on a very superior level. I mean Pasolini the poet, spoiled Christian, and Marxist ideologue. There’s nothing mixed up about him on a movie set. Real authority and a wonderfully free way with the machinery.
— from This is Orson Welles.
posted by Ray Young at
9:05 PM
10 Comments:
You know why I love both Orson Welles and the book, This is Orson Welles? Because Orson was just so full of shit. I really love that about him for some reason. You know when he says all Italians are dubbed he's just pulling that out of his ass. That's the kind of "full of shit" I can get behind!
Would you say that, in terms of pulling *facts* from his ass, Orson could have been the Bill O'Reilly of his generation? Are you willing to go out on that limb?
That's actually what I was alluding to with my last line, "That's the kind of 'full of shit' I can get behind!" I can get behind Orson's brand of bullshit where it's all personal and innocuous. Tales of doing this or that with this director or actor and you just know he probably didn't or some "fact" about a country's dubbing policy, etc. It's the 21st Century political bullshit that I decidedly cannot get behind. And Orson, bless him, never engaged in that stuff (I think he stumped for FDR but I know of no further political involvement).
Orson once claimed that, through FDR, he'd contemplated running for Senator from Wisconsin and, had he done so and won, would've defeated Joe McCarthy!
Actually, at that time, most Italian movies were dubbed. This was back when there were international coproductions, usually French-Italian. Orson Welles was speaking the truth here about filmmaking, Italian style.
As for Ugo Gregoretti, he's the forgotten G of RoGoPaG. I saw, by chance, his hilarious science fiction comedy, Omicron at the New Yorker theater, many years ago. An excerpt is available on Youtube.
Well, he may have been speaking the truth, Peter, but a good raconteur, and Welles was a great one, mixing generous amounts of bullshit with fact so that, even if they're telling the truth it becomes kind of a fun game to play "I wonder if he's making that up" with everything he says.
Greg, ever read David Thomson's book, Rosebud? Most cinephiles dismissed it, but I found it at the very least entertaining, and refreshing in that Thomson refused to blow smoke up Welles's ass.
No, I never have, probably for the reason that you say (about it being dismissed) but, what the hell, I think Welles' reputation is secure enough that we shouldn't have to worry about someone playing hardball with him occasionally.
I love whatever Orson says because the guy KNOWS THINGS.
Peter Bogdanovich is such a big nerd. Good quip at him from Welles. I can't believe Welles liked him. I guess he needed someone to bully around...
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