An Evening with Orson Welles
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''An Evening with Orson Welles'' is a series of six short films created in
1970 Events January * January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC. * January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of X (''Extrem ...
by
Orson Welles George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...
, for the exclusive use of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Welles produced the recitations of popular stories for Sears's Avco Cartrivision machines, a pioneering home video system. Graver, Gary, with Andrew J. Rausch, ''Making Movies with Orson Welles; A Memoir''. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2008, Four of the films are regarded as lost; as of 2022, two of the films, ''The Golden Honeymoon'' and ''Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah'', are known to exist.


Production

In 1970, after he had begun filming ''
The Other Side of the Wind ''The Other Side of the Wind'' is a 2018 satirical drama film, directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited by Orson Welles, and posthumously released in 2018 after forty-eight years in development. The film stars John Huston, Bob Random, Pe ...
'', Orson Welles was contacted by Sears and hired to make a series of half-hour short films that would be available for rental by subscription. Welles wrote, directed and acted in six 30-minute recitations including Ring Lardner's ''The Golden Honeymoon'',
Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...
's '' The Happy Prince'', writings by
G. K. Chesterton Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Of his writing style, ''Time'' observed: "Wh ...
and P. G. Wodehouse, and speeches by
Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...
and Clarence Darrow. The films were available exclusively through Sears, on special tapes that could be used only with the retailer's high-end Cartrivision — cartridge television — home video machines. Cinematographer
Gary Graver Gary Foss Graver (July 20, 1938 – November 16, 2006) was an American film director, editor, screenwriter and cinematographer. He was a prolific filmmaker, working in various roles on over 300 films, but is best known as Orson Welles' final ci ...
photographed the half-hour videos beginning August 31, 1970, shortly after he met Welles.Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich, edited by
Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American film critic and author. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for ''The Chicago Reader'' from 1987 to 2008, when he retired. He has published and edited numerous books about cinema and has ...
, ''This is Orson Welles''. New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1992
"We shot them in a little studio inside Orson's house on Lawlen Way," Graver wrote in his posthumously published memoir, ''Making Movies with Orson Welles'' (2008):
Shooting the shorts for Sears was a simple job. We finished them and sent them off. But we never received any feedback and we never heard anything about them again. Now, in hindsight, I wish I'd saved copies of those, since they seem to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth! Only one of those shorts, Ring Lardner's ''The Golden Honeymoon'', is known to exist today. I would love to see those again.
Titles that appeared on Cartrivision cassettes included ''American Heritage, Vol. 1'', ''American Heritage, Vol. II: Clarence Darrow'', ''Noah and Socrates'', and ''My Little Boy''. Welles recorded his six half-hour readings for Avco on 31 August 1970. However, it was not until June 1972 that the Cartrivision system went on release, and poor sales meant that the line was discontinued after only thirteen months, in July 1973.


Preservation status

Two of the six recordings are known to have survived. * ''The Golden Honeymoon'' by Ring Lardner has been held since the 1990s by the
Munich Film Museum The Munich Film Archive, in the Munich Stadtmuseum, is one of eight film museums in Germany. It has no showrooms and is limited to screening the films in a single cinema with 165 seats, as well as collecting, archiving, and restoring film copies. ...
. Its incomplete copy was restored for the 2005
Locarno Film Festival The Locarno Film Festival is an annual film festival, held every August in Locarno, Switzerland. Founded in 1946, the festival screens films in various competitive and non-competitive sections, including feature-length narrative, documentary, s ...
, and still occasionally screens at international film festivals. The surviving footage was supplemented by audio from Welles's reading in his 1946 Mercury Theatre radio play, plugging the gaps in the recording to complete the story. * In 2022, the Estate of Orson Welles announced that it had acquired and digitised another of the Welles tapes—''Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah''—and hopes to make the short film available to the public. The Estate reported that it was one of two surviving Cartivision tapes that had been located; but the other, ''American Heritage, Vol. II: Clarence Darrow'', turned out to have been professionally wiped. It is believed that a number of tapes were mass-wiped over copyright concerns at the time of the Cartrivision company's dissolution in 1973. The Estate, working with Reeder Brand Management, revealed in March 2023 they were looking for a streamer or label interested in releasing the film, along with other Welles television projects.


See also

* List of American films of 1970


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Evening with Orson Welles, An 1970 films 1970s lost films 1970s English-language films American short films Lost American films Short films directed by Orson Welles