Movie Junk Archive

Joanna Kerns on "Aliens in the Family"

2007-09-09T16:18:00.000-05:00

I really only put this here for my friend Allison to see... but it's amusing, so I think I'll leave it up. In a quickly canceled 1996 sitcom called "Aliens in the Family," Joanna Kerns (TV's "Growing Pains") poked fun at her role as one of the reigning queens of bad TV movies... Sadly, we don't see the commercial, she only has a voice-over (but yes, it's really her, she's cited in the credits). Here's the clip:

Return to Oz: "I Have the Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore"

2007-07-04T01:14:00.000-05:00

American Film

May 1985

Dorothy meets a new cast of characters and state-of-the-art special effects in Return to Oz.
By Jean Callahan

The Emerald City is in ruins, partly because the evil Princess Mombi and the Nome King have taken over Oz and turned all of its inhabitants to stone, and partly because shooting is practically completed on the set at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood near London. The plaster cliffs are still standing near the lunch-pail trees where tin boxes hang from branches like ripening apples, but the faces are gone from the rocks where they'd come to life weeks earlier. The twenty thousand gallons of water used to produce churning white-water rapids for the scene in which Dorothy escapes Kansas and returns to Oz lie murky still.

In the Animatronics Workshop, feathered lycra chicken parts are scattered about, a headless hen exposes the network of wires that move her mechanical eyes in a dozen directions, and the Cowardly Lion's body is stored in a crate next to another containing his royal visage, fully equipped with moving latex jaws, blinking azure eyes, and a baby-blue satin bow in his blonde mane.

One one sound stage, Princess Mombi's Throne Room is in disarray as carpenters pull apart the elaborately mirrored panels that form the floor and walls and ceiling. Just next door, Fairuza Balk, the ten-year-old Canadian playing Dorothy, rides with the robot Tik Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead aboard an extraordinary creature called a Gump -- part sofa, part camel, flapping huge palm fronds torn from a Victorian parlor plant for its wings. Five crew members operate levers controlling the facial expressions of the Gump, which twists and turns on hydraulic lifts as it flies through the sky carrying its precious cargo.

Late last summer, the hum and hammering of deconstruction provided background noise on the set of Return to Oz as the $25 million Disney project went into post-production. Disney's visit to the Emerald City has no intention of competing with MGM's classic Wizard of Oz; Return to Oz is neither a remake nor a musical. It is a fantasy adventure film full of special effects; set for release in late June, it is the first half of Disney's summer one-two punch, to be followed by the animated feature The Black Cauldron.

Return to Oz begins with Dorothy back in Kansas, the victim of recurring dreams about a magical land so vivid in her mind that she swears she has actually been there, which worries Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) and Aunt Em (Piper Laurie). They take their niece to a clinic for experimental electrical treatments to cure her delusions, and, needless to say, Dorothy hates it there. She escapes through a raging storm across a river that delivers her to (surprise!) Oz. But she finds the Emerald City under the control of sinister forces, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion turned to stone, and the Scarecrow vanished entirely. With the assistance of some newfound friends, she sets out to restore Oz to its rightful ruler.

The film introduces several fresh characters, such as the Nome King (Nichol Williamson); Princess Mombi (Jean Marsh), the evil sorceress who has thirty-one interchangeable heads; the Wheelers, a nasty gang of fast-moving punks with wheels for arms and legs; and Billina, a talkative hen who takes the place of Toto.

"The film is about Dorothy going back to Oz, having questioned whether the place ever existed," explains Walter Murch, making his directorial debut with this film. "Was it a dream or was it real? And can you go back to a place that had been such a tremendous adventure for you?" As Dorothy returns to Oz, Murch, when he wrote the screenplay with Gill Dennis, returned to the series of L. Frank Baum books he loved as a child. "My mother's family were medical missionaries serving in Ceylon around the turn of the century," he says, "and they pounced on the Baum books that arrived in the mail from relatives in the United States. Those books made a tremendous impression on my mother as she grew up. The United States was the land of the Emerald City to her, living so far away, and as soon as I was able to read or be read to, she pulled out the books and made sure I got infested with the Oz strain."

Baum wrote fourteen Oz books in all (Disney owns the rights to thirteen of them), and Murch combined two of them, Return to Oz and Ozma, for the story he pitched to Disney three years ago. "Because I love the stories so much," Murch says, "I want to do them the best service. Because of a twist of history, they've been locked away in Disney's vaults for thirty years, and on the simplest level, my job is to let them out into the world where they would have been much earlier but for the way the world turns."

Murch's world almost went into turnaround last spring when the Oz project came close to being abandoned. Considered a "renaissance man" by his fellow Bay Area filmmakers, Murch won an Oscar for his sound work on Apocalypse Now and reportedly saved The Conversation with his deft editing. But as a first-time director, he developed what Oz producer Paul Maslansky calls "chemistry problems" with first assistant director Ray Corbett and with director of photography Freddie Francis three weeks into production. The AD was laid off, Francis quit and was replaced by David Watkin (Yentl, Chariots of Fire), but by the end of the fifth week, the shooting schedule was running almost a week behind and budget overruns were climbing. Maslansky says he was prepared to fire Murch by the beginning of the sixth week. "For a director, a movie is relentless" he explains. "It's like the ocean -- it doesn't stop coming when you get hit by the waves. Walter had lost a lot of his confidence."

But the Force was with him. To the rescue came Murch's good buddy George Lucas, with whom he'd studied at USC and worked at Zoetrope on THX-1138 and American Graffiti. When Lucas heard Murch was in trouble, he hopped a plane from Tokyo, where he'd been visiting Paul Shrader on the set of Mishima. By early April, the Bay Area Mafia had rallied around one of its own. Lucas's pal, Steven Spielberg also dropped by the Oz set for a day and Francis Ford Coppola spent five days there. A little moral support and Murch was on the job again. With the help of Malansky, the producer of Police Academy, who is known for his ability to bring in a picture on budget, the movie was back on schedule by mid-May. After all, Murch's problems paled in comparison with the troubles MGM experienced on the 1939 Oz, a film that had to contend with ten different scripts; four different directors; 124 midgets, many of whom had never acted before; and one very difficult child star.

The new Dorothy seems far from a problem child. Perched atop the mechanical Gump heaving back and forth on hydraulic lifts, Fairuza good-naturedly tosses herself around and generally seems to be having fun. "I wish I were," says her mother, Cathryn Balk. "It's kind of frightening watching her up there." Fairuza has done all her own stunts, including landing on a ledge of Nome Mountain after being dropped out of the crashing Gump, hanging from a wire harness. "She did eleven takes of that jump," her mother says. And twice she hurled herself into the rampaging five-foot-deep "river" built into an Elstree sound stage while rain and wind effects created a stormy night. "It was pretty nerve-wracking," says Cathryn Balk. "All you'd see were these two little feet for what seemed like whole minutes before she'd resurface."

Disney's Dorothy has no ruby slippers for those little feet, but the Yellow Brick Road is still there -- only this time it's paved with special effects. Ian Wingrove, who created much of the wizardry for Never Say Never Again and Return of the Jedi, supervised mechanical special effects, including the Gump and the river set. For the Gump, Wingrove collaborated with Lyle Conway, whose Animatronics Department fashioned the Gump's head; Wingrove's crew designed the flying-machine body. Conway worked with Jim Henson on The Great Muppet Caper and helped develop the characters for The Dark Crystal. For Return to Oz, he also produced twenty-five electronically controlled hens to stand in for the real Plymouth Rock chicken who plays Dorothy's pet Billina.

Will Vinton headed up the Claymation Department, creating effects such as the sequence in which the King materializes out of Nome Mountain. "Originally, in the Baum books, the Nome King was a funny little round elf, a sort of Santa Claus character," Vinton says. "But we wanted to make him bigger, more threatening -- he is the chief antagonist of the story, the biggest threat to Dorothy and her companions. So we came up with a concept whereby the King actually lives in the rocks and moves about in them. As the story progresses, he becomes more human -- evolving from rock to an animated creature to Nicol Williamson."

Norman Reynolds, who has won Academy Awards for his work as production designer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and as art director on Star Wars, rounds out Return to Oz's production team as designer of its elaborate sets, including the petrified Emerald City, Princess Mombi's ostentatious palace, and the Nome King's evil empire.

Return to Oz premieres in New York City when Disney takes over Radio City Music Hall for the summer. Last winter, there was a fuss when the Rockettes vowed to picket Disney's runs of Return to Oz and The Black Cauldron if they were not allowed to be part of the summer stage show. The production of Oz had weathered worse -- the near-firing of its director, the ouster of Ron Miller as Disney's head, an attempted stockholder takeover -- and managed to stay on track through the transition period following the appointments of Michael Eisner as chairman of the board and Frank Wells as president. The movie seemed to have a life of its own.

Inevitably, Return to Oz will be compared with what Maslansky and Murch refer to as "the '39 film." The disastrous Wiz will be recalled, as will sundry other efforts to mine The Emerald City. "Disney was going to make one of the Oz stories in the fifties," says Murch. "They were going to cast the Mouseketeers, and it was going to be a musical. They actually went as far as a pilot program for television, and then they decided not to do the film. Then they revived the project again in the sixties, not with the Mouseketeers, but with the idea of making an Oz picture. But then Walt Disney died in '66 and there were no more attempts after that until us."

Grounded in a faithful adaptation of the Baum books and jazzed up with eighties-style effects, Return to Oz, Murch hopes, will be the fantasy for which we've all been waiting.

Make sure to check out the wonderful fan site Walt Disney's Return to Oz for a wealth of information about the film!

The Lost Film of Orson Welles

2007-06-17T21:10:00.000-05:00

I discovered this article in a 1978 issue of "American Film" magazine, and after a search, I can't seem to find much detailed information about it anywhere online. I thought that this one truly warrants being typed out, just to make the information a little more readily available...

American Film Magazine
November 1978
By Frank Brady

Three years before Citizen Kane, Welles turned out a fast-moving silent comedy filled with chases and double-takes. "A lovely little film," Welles remembers. It has never been shown.

When Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939 and turned to directing his first feature film, Citizen Kane, he wasn't entirely a stranger to filmmaking. Five years earlier, when he was nineteen, he made a four-minute home movie called "The Hearts of Age." A print is at the Library of Congress. One year earlier, he made his first commercial film, Too Much Johnson. It was never released, and no print of the film is known to be extant.

The early work of any director is important in order to understand his development. With Welles, whose first feature is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece, the early work is particularly fascinating. "The Hearts of Age" shows hints of the director-to-be. But Too Much Johnson, a work Welles remembers as "a lovely little film," is one of the great enigmas of Welles's career. Stories of the circumstances surrounding its production have been vague and filled with inconsistencies. What experience and ideas it gave Welles for Citizen Kane and his later work have remained a mystery.

Here, finally, is an account of the making of Too Much Johnson, pieced together from interviews with participants; from digging through archives, recalling Thatcher's in Citizen Kane, in order to unearth fragments of the script, pertinent to the documents, and stills; and from revealing talks with Welles himself.

In the summer of 1938, Orson Welles, a chronic sufferer of hay fever and asthma, temporarily moved from his house at Sneden's Landing in upstate New York to the air-conditioned safety of Manhattan. At twenty-three, he was already a national celebrity as an innovative stage director and actor. Settled at the St. Regis Hotel, Welles presided over his diverse activities with small legions of assistants and messengers. He was working on a weekly radio show, and rehearsals for his Mercury Theatre's fall schedule were to start soon.

Because of his previous success with a comedy, Horse Eats Hat, Welles announced at the beginning of July that Too Much Johnson, a nineteenth-century farce by William Gillette, would open the Mercury's fall season. It would run in repertory with George Büchner's Danton's Death. Welles wrote at the time: "The first production of Too Much Johnson, at the turn of the century, revolutionized American comedy because of its fast-paced performance, its irreverence, and its absolutely delightful zaniness."

Gillette's play, in the style of many farces, involves romance, mistaken identities, switched documents and endless complications. It deals with a busy roué who, pursued by a cuckolded husband, flees New York by ship and heads for Cuba. There he takes on the identity of a plantation owner named Johnson, who happens to be expecting a mail-order bride.

Each of Welles's previous stage productions had been marked by bold originality: an all-black Macbeth performed in Harlem; a modern-dress Julius Caesar done on a bare stage; a politically controversial The Cradle Will Rock played from the orchestra instead of the stage to circumvent government restrictions.

For Too Much Johnson, Welles had an idea which had been tried before on stage, but had never been totally successful. He would interweave a forty-minute silent film into the play. The film would consist of a twenty-minute prologue to the play (although Welles remembers it being as long as thirty-five minutes -- "in effect, the whole first act") and two ten-minute introductions for the second and third acts. As in the silent film days, a small orchestra and a sound effects man were to sit behind the screen to accompany the film. Although there were money problems, John Houseman, the Mercury's producer, gathered about $10,000 from a group of friendly investors to launch the production. Welles immediately began to simultaneously conduct stage rehearsals and shoot the film.

Welles had pared down the play to its barest essentials -- about an hour of stage time. The film was to serve as exposition and would consist of a good deal of exaggerated action : the cuckold chasing the roué, a cruel father dragging the mail-order bride-to-be away from her original suitor, the roué's wife trying to catch her errant husband. In silent movie tradition, the chases would be interspersed with slapstick comedy routines like double-takes and slow-burns.

Welles, intrigued with the spontaneity of slapstick, decided to use no scenario but to work only with a rough outline of intent. Sequences of events would be filmed until a chase began, and the comic scenes would evolve on their own.

Though Welles was a constant moviegoer -- he knew the works of Chaplin intimately -- his experience with filmmaking, besides "The Hearts of Age," was limited to a short visit to the set of Man of Aran, directed by Robert Flaherty, when Welles was in Ireland in 1932. In addition, he had narrated a filmed excerpt from Twelfth Night for the Chicago Drama Festival Competition. He also had a working knowledge of V.I. Pudovkin's Film Acting. But Eisenstein, Welles insists, was not an influence.

"It's untrue that I was influenced by or ever read Eisenstein," Welles says, "although it has been reported in the past that I was and did. I was never one of those who tokened to Eisenstein, and I even wrote a critical review of Ivan the Terrible, Part I when I first saw it in 1945. The film was too propagandistic, too oversentimentalized, although I praised it for its courageous and radical style. Eisenstein read the review and wrote me a long letter, and we established a correspondence."

To learn how to make a comedy, Welles viewed as many great comic films as he could. In a screening room in midtown Manhattan, he and his associates viewed a large number of Mack Sennett shorts, including "Love, Honor and Behave!" and the "The Lion and the Girl." (Although always popular, Sennett had received a special Academy Award in 1937, and his films were enjoying a revival.) They also studied Chaplin's features and shorts. Harold Lloyd's comedy Professor Beware had just opened at Paramount, and most of Welles's staff saw and discussed it.

"One direct influence on me and on Too Much Johnson," Welles recalls, "was Harold Lloyd's Safety Last. I loved that film and think it was one of the greatest, simplest comedies ever made."

Welles quickly assembled a cast and crew. Most of the crew had never worked in film. "We were assistant apprentices," recalls Richard Wilson, who was Welles's partner. "Only our innocence propelled us onward." One exception was the cameraman, Paul Dunbar, who worked for Pathé News, To get the antic appearance of silent film action, Welles instructed Dunbar to under-crank the camera so that chases would appear exaggerated and jerky when the film was projected at normal speed.

For the cast, Welles turned to his regular Mercury players -- Howard Smith, Joseph Cotten, Eustace Wyatt, Edgar Barrier, Arlene Francis, Mary Wickes -- and gave his wife, Virginia Nicholson (under the name Anna Stafford), one of the leading roles. Bit parts went to composer Marc Blitzstein (Welles told him to think of himself as a "French barber") and to New York Herald Tribune drama critic Herbert Drake as a Keystone Kop. John Houseman was pressed into service to fight a duel -- photographed in a long shot -- on the edge of the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson. An attractive teenage actress, Judith Tuvim, who was interesting in breaking into comedy, was also cast as an extra. Later she changed her name to Judy Holliday. Even Welles stood in as a Kop during a short scene.

The actors wore gay nineties' clothing, and the mens' faces were covered with clown-white greasepaint, powdered profusely, and adorned with dark red lipstick that appeared startlingly black on the screen. Welles included a corps of twelve bungling Keystone Kops dressed in long, blue Edwardian topcoats and sugarloaf helmets. In some of the scenes, for added atmosphere, an organ-grinder stood on the side.

As a film director, Welles immediately developed a highly personal style on the set. He constantly used his own acting talents to show his actors what he wanted. During many of the action scenes, however, he would bellow his instructions from camera to set, urging his actors in the chase scenes through New York streets, for example, to more daring attempts. At one moment Welles was behind the camera establishing a shot, and the next he was gathering extras together like chess pieces and placing them where he wanted them. He was marvelously patient with the actors, smoothing and cajoling them into a style that would look spontaneous.

Welles recalled with amusement his direction of the overly serious ex-vaudevillian actor Howard Smith. "Howard, I'd like you to sit in that chair as we roll camera," he told him. "Certainly, Mr Welles," said Smith, practically bowing, "but would you prefer the Fast Sit or the Slow Sit?"

Welles began the film in mid-July and, typically, allowed himself only a month to plan, shoot, edit, and process the film. The preview showing of the play was scheduled to start August 16 at a summer theatre outside New Haven, Connecticut. During those four incredibly hectic weeks, Welles not only directed the film sequences of Too Much Johnson, but also conducted rehearsals for the stage productions of that play and of Danton's Death. He also continued his busy radio schedule -- editing, directing and starring in the broadcasts of "Treasure Island," "A Tale of Two Cities," "The Thirty-Nine Steps," and "I'm a Fool."

The first film segment of Too Much Johnson opened with Joseph Cotten, as the roué, en route to an assignation with Arlene Francis. The lovers are interrupted by the entrance of her husband (Edgar Barrier), who pursues Cotten down a fire escape, across the rooftops, and through the streets of New York to the pier, where Cotten leaps aboard the boat. Barrier barely makes the jump, catches the railing, and is hanging precariously on the side of the ship as it steams away toward Cuba. As he drops on the lower deck, the film was to stop, and a live Barrier was to land on the stage of the theatre, designed to look like a ship's deck.

In order to film the ship scene, Welles borrowed a Hudson River Day Line excursion boat while it was docked at the Battery taking on passengers for a trip to Bear Mountain. Much to the delight of the vacationers, he spent an hour or so filming Cotten ad Barrier and Virginia Nicholson and Eustace Wyatt chasing each other around the boat.

Most of the scenes of Barrier chasing Cotten were filmed on location in Battery Park or Central Park. Other New York scenes were set in historic locales. "In order to get the feeling of 'little old New York,'" Welles remembers, "we shot the film, for the most part, in those sections of the city that still retained a nineteenth-century look, such as the Fulton Fish Market and other downtown locations."

During one scene near the old aquarium, where the principals were to ride in three rented horse-drawn Victorian cabs, a huge downpour began. Welles welcomed it, believing it would add dimension and excitement to the chase, and insisted that the filming continue during the rain. But the hackmen refused to move their horses, and shooting for that day was canceled.

On one particularly sweltering day, Welles directed a scene on top of a five-story building on Albany Street in lower Manhattan. Cotten was to "jump" from the roof to evade Barrier. Just days before, a man had sat on a ledge of the Gotham Hotel and threatened to jump, attracting thousands of bystanders and a group of newsreel camermen. Now a worried crowd gathered below where Cotten was perched, thinking another suicide was in progress. "Don't jump!" people yelled, and the police were summoned. Squad cars, fire engines, and newspapermen sped to the scene.

Filming stopped, and Welles climbed down from the top of the building. Drenched with perspiration, he explained, "All we're trying to do is make a movie." Filming resumed, and Cotten jumped to a ledge six feet below the top of the roof, followed by Barrier. The camera stopped for another setup; then Cotten jumped from a second-floor window into a moving horse-drawn wagon of cabbages, again followed by Barrier. The edited film would make it appear that they had both jumped from the top of the roof into the wagon. Next day a headline blared: "ORSON WELLES CASHES IN ON LEDGE LEAP SUICIDES."

One of the funniest scenes in the chase showed Barrier and Cotten caught in a parade of suffragettes, both marching to time, with Barrier slowly advancing rank by rank on Cotten. Both men stopped to salute the American flag and then resumed their chase.

The next filmed sequence, introducing the second act of the play, hints at the opening pan shot of the brooding Xanadu in Citizen Kane. Like the Xanadu scene, it was a special effects sequence using a model set representing a plantation in Cuba. The papier-mâché volcano loomed in the background, surrounded by "jungle flora" (plants purchased at a local florist). The house itself was a model constructed by James Morcom, who designed the sets for the play. Details of the outside of the house were kept consistent with the stage set of the interior, so the audience could easily make the transition from the filmed exterior shots to the staged interior scenes. The model was swathed in fog to lend mystery to the scene and to disguise how clearly bogus it was. In front of the diminutive plantation was a large plate of glass, painted black, and on the other side of the glass was a tank of water, in which floated a miniature steamship.

The first image on the screen was of the boat sailing to the Caribbean. Then came a dissolve as the hand-held camera moved around the black glass to the side of the island where, from the boat's perspective, one could see a jungle. The camera continued moving slowly along the coast of the island, reached the edge of the model, and then turned up a roadway until, from a distance, through the mist, an imposing Georgia plantation house came into view. Here the film was to stop, stage lights would come up to reveal the interior of the house, and the stage action would resume.

"You can compare that shot in Too Much Johnson to the opener in Kane," Welles told me, "only in the following sense: Although I've been criticized for the kitsch appearance of the scene in Kane, that was, in fact, exactly what I was trying to achieve in the shot. I didn't expect anything like a belly laugh from the audience, but I wanted to produce an amused attitude on the part of the viewer. So it was with the volcano and mansion shots of Johnson. But remember, it was a comedy. In retrospect, the problem with that opening of Kane was that the music was too solemn. The audience expected something funereal as soon as the initial bars were heard, but that total somberness was not at all what I intended."

To save costs and take advantage of available light, all the other "studio" scenes for the film were shot in an empty lot in Yonkers, not far from the Bronx River Parkway. Sets, furniture, and props were borrowed from the nearby Sherwood Little Theater. A bedroom, with three walls, no ceiling, several windows, and a large brass bed, was constructed in the gleaming sunlight. The local residents formed an inquisitive audience for much of the filming. To their surprise, they saw Arlene Francis appear in a lacy black corset ("She looked very sexy," Welles recalls) and flirt provocatively with Joseph Cotten, who seemed at any moment about to undress.

In one scene, Arlene Francis was to clutch a photograph of Cotten to her bosom and hide it there when her husband arrived unexpectedly. After a few takes, Welles had secured what he wanted, with one exception. He felt that Francis, then only in her early twenties, should have a more ample bosom, befitting the matronly character she was playing. Since Welles wanted to shoot a close-up of the photograph being hidden in her cleavage, and padding would be easily detected, an inserted shot of another bosom had to be arranged.

A frantic talent hunt ensued, ad finally Welles's secretary, Augusta Weissberger, was prevailed upon to stand in. She was ensconced in the same corset, and close-ups of her ample bosom, heaving emotionally on cue, were photographed one afternoon on the roof of the Mercury Theatre, amid catcalls from the cast and crew. Arlene Francis, it was said, was furious.

One of the Cuban scenes, for the latter filmed segments, was shot in an abandoned rock quarry in Haverstraw, New York, near Welles's home at Sneden Landing. To add to the tropical ambiance, rented palm trees were planted or propped up around the area or sometimes just held up by a crewman who was instructed to keep his hand out of the camera's sight. Black "natives" in straw hats and bandannas milled about. Pith helmets were plentiful. Cotten was filmed riding a white horse (the stock theatrical horse, once ridden by Valentino and rented to all filmmakers, stage directors and opera impresarios in the New York area). At one point, Cotten complained petulantly about having to wade through a ditch of brackish water to evade his pursuer.

After ten days of shooting, Welles had approximately twenty-five thousand feet of film, which was edited in rough cut down to six reels. Wit the play only days away from opening, editing the prologue was completed, but Welles had yet to finish editing the other two parts of the film.

Much of the editing had been done at Pathé studios. But now that the budget was almost totally depleted, Welles had a Moviola and splicing and cutting equipment moved into his suite at the St. Regis and began editing the balance of the film himself. He rarely left the room except for a final "dress" rehearsal before each broadcast of his radio show, "First Person Singular," or to take occasional trips to Stony Creek to conduct rehearsals of the play. Bits and pieces of the film were spread all over the room. Houseman recalls that Welles's assistants had to "wade knee-deep through a crackling sea of inflammable film." Filled with fear that a crucial frame or scene might end up in a wastebasket, Welles forced a large tip on the maid, with strict instructions that absolutely nothing was to be taken from the room.

In addition to the practical problems of editing the footage down to a sensible length and doing it in time for the opening, Welles was plagued by other annoyances. An attorney formally notified him that Paramount Pictures owned the film rights for Too Much Johnson -- Welles had leased the stage rights, but had overlooked the motion picture legalities. When the play reached Broadway with the film, a payment, perhaps substantial, would have to be made to the studio.

Many in the cast had not been paid in a month. In settling their back wages, Welles tried to conserve what little money was left, so he attempted to treat any acting in the film as a stage rehearsal, to be reimbursed at the lower rehearsal rates. Most of the cast agreed, happy to have a part in a film, but a few actors complained to Actors Equity. It was finally decreed that a film is a performance, even if it's part of a play, so the cast and crew had to be paid full union rates, plunging the Mercury's bank account deeper into the red.

To save the expense of an orchestra, the composer Marc Blitzstein offered to play a piano behind the screen. But there was also the cost of printing and cutting the intertitles to the film (written by Welles), and many other small costs that added up to insurmountable bills.

To add to his woes, it was discovered at that extraordinarily late date that the Stony Creek auditorium, with its low ceiling, was not a suitable theater in which to project a film. Furthermore, in those days before the existence of a safety film, a fireproof projection booth would have to be constructed in order to show the movie.

But time and money ran out. If the film had been complete, the play might have been moved to a more suitable theater for a two-week tryout. Why Houseman didn't arrange for these contingencies in advance, or why, as a highly experienced entrepreneur, he could not secure a new theatre, even at the last minute, is not known. It may be relevant to note, however, that Houseman has stated that he didn't believe in either the play or the film and had recommended that the project be abandoned.

On August 16, 1938, as scheduled, Too Much Johnson opened at Stony Creek -- but without the film. The material that had originally been taken out of the play, to be replaced by the film, was hastily written back in. But the cast scarcely had time to learn its lines, let alone rehearse the complicated comedy routines. The critical reaction was poor, although not devastating. "It was, after all, a tryout," says Welles, "not a full-scale production."

Shortly afterward, the Mercury Theatre opened its fall season with the complicated Danton's Death, which was to run along with Too Much Johnson. The reviews were generally poor. "I liked it," Welles recalls ruefully, "but nobody else did, and so we closed it down and decided not to open Too Much Johnson. It's for that reason I never finished editing the film. There was no point to it." Welles adds, "It was at this point that I decided to have a go to Hollywood in order to make enough money to go on directing plays."

Some thirty years later, a print of Too Much Johnson turned up in Welles's villa outside Madrid. Welles states: "I can't remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was. I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it, as though it had only been through a projector once or twice before. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present. I then went off to act in a picture, possibly The Kremlin Letter, and rented my house to Robert Shaw. Unfortunately, while I was gone, there was a fire, and almost everything I had was lost. Supposedly there are some of my belongings still intact, so it is possible, although highly unlikely, that the film still exists."

From directing Too Much Johnson, Welles may well have learned many of his own renowned techniques for working quickly and economically, techniques he used in Macbeth, The Trial, The Immortal Story, and F is For Fake. Most important, he learned how to apply his imagination to the discipline of the frame while working toward a spontaneity of acting and shooting, a method of filmmaking he would use for the rest of his career.

Today, Orson Welles remains wistful and just a shade bitter that Too Much Johnson never got to the screen. "The play and the film were too surreal for the audience," Welles declares. "They couldn't accept it. It was like Hellzapoppin, years ahead of its time.

Vintage Walt Disney Home Video Ads

2007-06-13T12:48:00.000-05:00

Here's some ads from the early '80s for Disney videos. Seems sort of odd to use the term "vintage" when referring to 1981, but in the case of home video, the term fits. Note the price on the MARY POPPINS video!

The Langoliers Photos

2007-05-28T05:52:00.000-05:00

Taken from the same source as the pics from the miniseries version of "The Shining," here's a collection of photos of the cast of "The Langoliers," which is generally regarded as the worst of Stephen King's miniseries (due in no small part to the horrible CGI effects). I'm certain that I have some more photos to add, I just don't know where they are at the moment.

Stephen King's The Shining

2007-05-22T02:24:00.000-05:00

Stephen King has always voiced his unhappiness with the results of the Stanley Kubrick version of THE SHINING. "Kubrick didn't really do the book, he did a Stanley Kubrick film," King said in an interview in Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide (a highly recommended book for fans of King's films). In Stephen King at the Movies, King likened it to "a great big beautiful car with no engine inside it. It's a film that has all kinds of style, and it's gorgeous" but he felt that while the visuals were beautiful, the story was rather lacking. And many of us who've read the novel are inclined to agree.

In 1997, King finally got around to making his own version of the film, a mini-series for ABC starring Steven Weber, Rebecca DeMornay, and Melvin Van Peebles. Although highly publicized and critically praised, the film failed to garner ratings that were expected and, unlike the rest of the King ABC miniseries, it never even got a VHS release in the USA. Kubrick's version is considered the be-all, end-all classic, and most people weren't quick to embrace King's vision -- the miniseries still routinely takes a beating for not being the Nicholson version, which is a shame since there's so much good in it. But at least it finally made it to DVD. For those interested, some of the promos from the original airing of the film are available to watch at Creepshows: Stephen King Movies.

To promote the miniseries, TV Guide ran an extensive spread on it, including the lost prologue from the novel, "Before the Play," which had previously only been published in a 1982 issue of Whispers Magazine. Sadly, even TV Guide wasn't totally on-board with the miniseries... I received my subscription issue of the magazine with the King cover, but when I went to buy another copy, I discovered that all of the local stores only stocked a cover of Tom Hanks (who had a TV special on ABC the same week). I guess they figured Hanks would sell more issues. I feel the need to say this because I could've gotten better scans here, but with only two copies of the issue (one with each cover), I wasn't going to mutilate my copies to scan them. The center of the digest is a little bowed where it's bound, and the later pages of "Before the Play" are tilted because of a stupid cardboard ad opposite. But I figure for those interested in the miniseries and the missing prologue, this post has a treasure-trove of information despite whatever anomalies.... Also, blogger has a tendency to skewer the position of photos when you post a lot of them, but they're all numbered sequentially.

These wonderful photos appeared on ABC's now-long-defunct exclusive AOL website when the miniseries aired... and I haven't seen them resurface anywhere, so I'm happy to get them back online... And there are a few additional photos from the film here.

Anjelica Huston 1991 Addams Family Interview

2007-05-21T08:14:00.000-05:00

They used to give away "Movies" magazine in a local theatre, but this November 1991 issue with an Angelica Huston cover story is one of the few that I still have. In the article, Huston discusses her early life and career, and her views on Morticia Addams. It's sort of interesting that they also have a page to showcase some of the lesser-seen party guests from the Addams' shindig...

77 Sunset Strip Postcard

2007-05-21T07:54:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I know the title of the site says Movie Junk, but there's room for TV Junk too! This is a promotional photo postcard from the early 1960s, sent out by Warner Bros, featuring pics of the cast of "77 Sunset Strip."

1981 MCA Home Video ad

2007-05-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

Although I think this is a cool ad from 1981, it was sort of a stretch for them to categorize SGT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (among others) as "a hit!" Other titles showcased in this 2-page ad are: BEDTIME FOR BONZO, FLASH GORDON, THE KILLERS, SOMEWHERE IN TIME, and THE ISLAND.

On the set of GREASE

2007-05-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

This article comes from the July-August 1978 issue of "Film Comment." Director Randal Kleiser gave this interview on the set of GREASE, during the "Beauty School Drop Out" scene. It's a fluff piece, but there's an interesting description of the on-set workings and a few cast members (Didi Conn, Stockard Channing) are quoted on their views of the director.

Terry Gilliam: Finding comedy on 'the dark side of the coin'

2007-05-09T13:35:00.000-05:00

This interview with Terry Gilliam is from the May 1982 issue of "Twilight Zone Magazine." In it, he discusses his then-newest release, TIME BANDITS, his previous films/association with Monty Python, his work on "Help! Magazine," plans for BRAZIL and BARON MUNCHHAUSEN, and much more.

Rock Stars Go Hollywood for ROADIE

2007-05-09T12:34:00.000-05:00

Aside from the press kit (and lobby cards) available at the Blondie site Rip Her to Shreds, there's not a helluva lot of info available online for the grossly overlooked, insipidly goofy classic ROADIE. With actors like Art Carney and Kaki Hunter (PORKY'S), music legends like Meat Loaf, Alice Cooper (the film was loosely based on his song "Road Rats"), Blondie/Debbie Harry, Hank Williams Jr, Roy Orbison, Asleep at the Wheel, Don Cornelius, etc, you'd think the film would've recieved more fanfare.

The October 1980 issue of Hit Parader had a three page spread about the film (that focused more attention on Alice Cooper's increasingly strange alcoholic behavior at the time than the movie itself), but as you can see, it's not even mentioned on the cover...

Paul Bartel's "Evening with David Carradine"

2007-05-08T14:47:00.000-05:00

The July 1978 issue of "Take One" magazine featured this article written by writer/director/actor Paul Bartel (DEATH RACE 2000, ROCK N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, EATING RAOUL, etc) about his friend David Carradine (DEATH RACE 2000, DEATH SPORT, "Kung Fu," KILL BILL, etc). I also uploaded an interview with Ivan Reitman, who was fresh off of directing ANIMAL HOUSE, from the same issue of "Take One."

Further Adventures of Ivan Reitman

2007-05-08T14:42:00.000-05:00

From the same issue of "Take One" magazine as the Paul Bartel/David Carradine article, here's a vintage interview with Ivan Reitman, who had just finishing ANIMAL HOUSE and was prepping it for release. Since ANIMAL HOUSE is now a monumental classic, I figured I'd get this online too....