Mysteries of The Deep: The Making and Unmaking of Orson Welles’s Dead Reckoning

For all his flaws, Welles was not a man with a fear of completion, but rather one who would hold on to finishing his work to the absolute breaking point.

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Introduction: The Main Mystery

Orson Welles’s The Deep, called Dead Reckoning during production, was left unfinished during the filmmaker’s lifetime, along with several other works. However, while the abandonment of It’s All True, Don Quixote, and the recently released The Other Side of the Wind have been explored in great detail, the stranding of The Deep and the story of its troubled production have been left largely unexplored.

Charles Williams’s 1963 novel Dead Calm was almost tailor-made to be adapted as a low-budget, commercially viable movie. A sequel to Williams’s 1960 thriller Aground, Dead Calm begins with the newly wedded protagonist of the first book, John Ingram, spending a honeymoon with his wife Rae on his yacht Saracen in the middle of the Pacific ocean. True to the title, they are becalmed. They encounter a drifter named Hughie Warriner who has just left his boat, the Orpheus, now a speck on the horizon. He tells a somewhat inconsistent story about how the other members of the boat all died of food poisoning. John goes to investigate while Hughie sleeps on his boat. To his shock, John finds two survivors – Hughie’s wife Lillian and the boat’s captain Russ Bellew – in a locked cabin on the Orpheus, which is sinking. Hughie, realizing he’s been found a liar, speeds off on John’s boat with Rae. John tries to make the sinking Orpheus workable while Rae tries to reason with the moody man-child Hughie.

The disturbed Rae puts together a shotgun on-board the Saracen, but can’t bring herself to shoot Hughie. As the sun goes down, John’s only hope is to get him and the two bickering passengers into a lifeboat and light the sinking Orpheus on fire. Rae finally subdues Hughie with codeine and sails the ship to John’s fire, firing flares as a signal to him. Once everyone reunites on the Saracen, it is revealed that Russ is the true psychopath of the drifters: he tried to rape Lillian. Russ and Hughie fight, with Hughie imagining Russ as his abusive father, and the two go overboard, sinking into the deep.

The novel barely needed any modification, and so Welles’s adaptation remained faithful to the source material’s characters and plot. Indeed, the complete script, prior to filming, was basically a copy-paste adaptation of the book, with 95% of the script’s setting, dialogue, and action coming right out of Williams’s pages.1 Welles’s adaptation was initially titled Dead Reckoning (after the error-prone navigation method used by John on the Orpheus), though he eventually changed it to The Deep around 1970 after realizing this was also the name of a Humphrey Bogart film.2

So why wasn’t Welles’s adaptation finished? What prevented such a straightforward, low-budget thriller from being completed? Where did the film go?

Two key witnesses to this film’s history are Oja Kodar, Welles’s partner for whom this film was to be her breakout role, and Welles’s London-based accountant, William Cronshaw. Cronshaw died in 2005, but his papers on the making of The Deep were recently purchased by the University of Michigan: a boxful of scripts, letters, transcripts and originals of telegrams, clipped frames of printed footage from the film’s protracted editing, and Cronshaw’s own production notes that shed new light on the troubled shooting. These are stored at the University along with script drafts, photographs, and correspondence from The Deep within the Welles-Kodar collections.

As gathered from the two collections, the film’s demise seems to ultimately rest on two factors:

1. Various legal obstacles Bosna Film placed in Welles’s team’s way during and after the shooting;
2. The other major project that occupied Welles between 1970 and 1976 – The Other Side of the Wind.

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October-November 1967: Principal Photography, Yugoslavia

By the late 1960s, Orson Welles’s career was an itinerant one. His projects as an actor were largely based in Europe, and so were his ventures as an independent filmmaker. Ropama Film A.G. was created in 1966, under the trusteeship of a Swiss bank, to handle whatever directing projects Welles would start up wherever his Europe-based career took him.3 An adaptation of Dead Calm was just one of the films Welles planned to make under Ropama’s banner, since he purchased the rights to Williams’s novel in mid-19664 for $35,000.5 Welles’s adaptation was to feature himself as the Russ Bellew character, renamed Brewer, and his creative and romantic partner Oja Kodar, then Olga Palinkas, as Rae Ingram.

Vanessa Redgrave was contacted for the role of Hughie’s long-suffering wife, whom Welles renamed Ruth, in August 1966.6 (Her renowned father Michael memorably played the cat-cradling junk collector Burgomil Trebitsch in Mr. Arkadin.) She turned down the offer because of her role in the musical Camelot, but her agent Robin Fox wrote Welles on August 31, 1966, that “if the plan could wait, she’d love to see a script.”7 However, the plan could not wait, because Welles had to take directing projects as the opportunity arose.

One of Welles’s other projects was The Immortal Story. As François Thomas noted in his Criterion interview for the film, Story’s production went 50% over budget, only for Welles to pay for the remaining costs out of his own pocket.8 Deadlines were missed, not only because of Welles’s complex editing process, but also because Welles tried to start up another Isak Dinesen-based film, The Heroine, with Oja Kodar. Welles and Willy Kurant shot for one day in Hungary, but the endeavor was aborted after the film’s crew overcharged him for their work.9 Kurant said in 2013 that “on s’est fait entuber par les Hongrois” (“we got screwed by the Hungarians”)10 and Welles escaped the country without paying his hotel bill.11 Nevertheless, the project proved a welcome distraction for the filmmaker, allowing him to get back to the editing of The Immortal Story with fresh eyes.12

The producer of Story was Micheline Rozan, who started up its production company to make the film as a vehicle for Jeanne Moreau.13 As notoriously poor as he was with finances, Welles always needed a capable partner to handle funding, and Rozan seemed to fulfill this role at first. The experience proved to be a harrowing one for Rozan, as the inflating budget nearly forced her company into bankruptcy. Welles would blame Story’s financial struggles on Rozan in correspondence with his lawyers,14 though he was otherwise cordial with her.15 Rozan, for her part, would continue to seek a distributor for Story and collaborate with Welles again on Dead Reckoning when it finally entered production. In fact, the Paris-based Rozan would handle the purchase of all French film stock, lenses, and equipment to be used during production of Dead Reckoning.16

Welles finally found an opportunity to start shooting the sea-bound thriller when he was close to the Croatian Kodar’s home, broadly speaking. Bosna Film, the state-run film board of Bosnia and Herzegovina, wanted Welles to act in their partisan film The Battle of Neretva, to be directed by Veljko Bulajic. In compensation for his work, Bosna Film would supply Welles with a crew for the price of the expenses he would have been paid for Neretva.17 Eager to start, Welles sought a cast before any contracts were signed. Jeanne Moreau was to come aboard from The Immortal Story to play Ruth, having been initially promised $75,000 as her salary. However, Welles informed her that he was financing the project with his own money and could only afford an under-the-line cost. So, being Welles’s friend, Moreau agreed to defer her salary until the picture began distribution.18

Welles considered several possible leading men for the role of John. These included Colin Bell, Lawrence Douglas, and Phillippe Monnet.19 Another potential leading man was Steve McQueen, as can be gleaned from a September 19, 1967, note to Welles from Ann Rogers, his secretary.20 Ultimately, stage actor Michael Bryant was recruited for John Ingram. He was paid £900 for three weeks’ shooting (ending on October 27) in advance.2122

Bryant and his family joined Welles and the rest of the cast at the Hotel Adriatik at the island of Hvar, off whose coast Welles would shoot the film. Michael and Josephine Bryant treated it more or less as part of a vacation,23 and surviving photographs show Welles and Jeanne Moreau having fun with their kids in the Hotel lobby.24 All the evidence suggests that Welles and everyone else wanted this project to be an on-the-fly affair, a collaboration between friends and kindred artists in a place the director’s European travels happened to take him. Sadly, the making of Dead Reckoning did not turn out to be such a walk in the park.

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The year 1967 had several setbacks for Welles. For one, the producers of the anthology film Histoires Extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead) turned him down. A French-Italian co-production, Histoires was a collection of three Edgar Allan Poe stories adapted and directed by Louis Malle (the “William Wilson” segment), Roger Vadim (“Metzengerstein”), and Federico Fellini (“Toby Dammit” based on “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”). Welles was attached to the project in June 196725 with the segment “The Masque of Red Death,” an original story by him and Oja Kodar (both were to star) inspired by Poe’s own “Masque” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”26 However, Fellini replaced Welles by September of that year.27 Welles’s assistant director on The Immortal Story, Marc Maurette, recalled that Welles said he was not offered enough money, so he withdrew.28 However, this explanation is not persuasive as Welles was accustomed to doing work for less;29 one can also reject Jean-Pierre Berthomé’s proposed “supposition la plus simple et la plus vraisemblable” that Welles withdrew to start The Deep during the summer,30 as pre-production on the Bosnian shoot of Dead Reckoning began in September. The fact that Welles wrote a complete screenplay shows a strong level of commitment to the project.

So what happened? The solution seems to lie in how another director viewed Welles during pre-production: Louis Malle confessed in 1993 that he did not appreciate sharing a film with Orson Welles.31 In fact, he and Vadim, along with Fellini, had a decent reputation while Welles did not. It would seem that Welles was let go and only invented the story he told Maurette to save face.

By now, Welles had a reputation of being an uneasy cross between a genius and a self-destructive man-child brat – in both America and Europe. This was driven by Hollywood propaganda and IRS scrutiny dating back to the days of Citizen Kane and the racism-driven cancellation of It’s All True,32 those seeking relevance within and toward Hollywood, and Welles’s understandably agitated emotional state on the production of films he acted in. Famously among his acting projects were the 1958 films The Long Hot Summer33 and Compulsion,34 made after the recuts of Touch of Evil and Oscar Dancigers’s cancellation of Don Quixote. Not helping his reputation in Europe were the years spent working on Othello due to issues with producer Michele Scalera35 and his disastrous working relationship with political mentor and inexperienced producer Louis Dolivet.36 This reputation not only prevented Welles from having his projects greenlit but also made for publicity fodder on both sides of the Atlantic as he pursued acting roles.37

Bosna Film seemed to be eyeing this when it began a tug-of-war for control over Dead Reckoning even before the cast and crew were brought to Hvar. The representative of Bosna Film in Rome, Nikola Subota, promised Welles that a fully authorized production manager would meet him at the airport in Split, Croatia, when Welles returned from one of his many trips.38 Apparently said representative did not show up with the promised “Dinars,”39 so Welles fired off a letter to Subota on September 30th, asserting that he had “signed contracts with Moreau and all other members of my cast” and crew.40 With Subota’s promise not being kept, “I have therefore no choice but to stop their coming to Yugoslavia, and move immediately to Spain where I have made alternative arrangements for the production of ‘DEAD RECKONING,’ where living expenses are cheaper and the boats already chosen and available.”41

As Jeanne Moreau had yet to sign a contract and Hughie was yet to be cast, Welles was partially bluffing. However, there is evidence that Spain was a viable alternative at this point. One of the notes in Bill Cronshaw’s files is an undated list of yacht experts drawn up for the project; most of them are England-based, one is listed as being based in Sicily, and yet another of the options is David Morgan of Club Nautico in Ibiza, Spain.42 Morgan’s fluency in Spanish is listed as a perk.43

Furthermore, Welles had made plans to adapt Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in Spain the year before, as part of a two-picture deal that included Chimes at Midnight. This project also fell through when producer Emiliano Piedra’s money dried up.44 According to Juan Cobos (translation mine):

The filming plan – 1966 – in Spain now included six more days with the boats in Alicante, another six days at sea or filming with models in a swamp, two days in Madrid, fourteen days for the palisades, and some filming in northern Spain for the exteriors and interiors of the two taverns, “The Spyglass” and “The Admiral Benbow.”45

Perhaps Welles was trying to use these location commitments for a different film?

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Even if the Spanish alternative was only a bluff (the available information is unclear), Welles’s urging finally worked. Through Ropama, Welles and Bosna Film entered into an agreement of sorts on October 6, 1967, with Oja Kodar acting as interpreter.46 However, this document is obviously a temporary one, as it is hastily typed and includes several passages Welles and others have crossed out by hand. The contract also contained some loopholes that Bosna Film would use to snag Welles’s production as shooting went on. Welles later wrote to his Italian lawyer Massimo Ferrara: “The contract itself, as you know, was an extremely long and verbose document and by their own later admission clearly unfair to me. The Jugoslav producers, one and all, stated that this contract was only presented as the basis for argument.”47

As of its signing, this document said that for Welles’s role as the leader of the Chetniks in Neretva, Welles was to receive $70,000;48 $61,000 of this sum would be used to pay the Bosna Film-supplied technical personnel49 who were to be housed at the Hotel Marjan in Split.50 Filming was to last four weeks in Yugoslavia, and as such would need to accord with Yugoslavian laws.51 The negative for Welles’s film was to be deposited at LTC Laboratories in Paris, where it would be mortgaged until the profits for the film came in.52

Bosna Film’s cold feet ultimately meant that shooting began on scenes between Welles, Moreau, and Bryant immediately after the contract was signed. The cast was to stay with Welles at the Hotel Adriatik in Hvar, the coast of which would be used for filming. Michael Bryant, his wife Josephine, and his children arrived in Hvar sometime after the seventh.53 Willy Kurant, the cinematographer on The Immortal Story and The Heroine, was brought over to be cinematographer on these first few weeks of production for $600 a week.54 Filming with a shoulder-rig in natural light, Kurant used Welles’s preferred camera, the portable but noisy Caméflex. Berthomé and Thomas note that the whir of the camera and the consistently noisy audio recorded at sea made it impossible to use any direct sound, so ultimately, all sound was to be post-synchronized (as were most European productions of the time), with any audio recorded on location to be used as a guide track.55 Indeed, the shifting fall weather conditions on the Adriatic would affect Welles and Kurant to find creative ways to capture the actors.56 Welles set up the shots himself before handing the camera over to his director of photography for actual filming; he hoped to get everything done right the first time, as the negative was to be shipped to Paris, rushes unseen.57

Welles made several changes to the script during shooting, often out of necessity. The visibility of the island of Hvar on the horizon, for example, meant the location could not possibly be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, Welles relocated the action from the Pacific to the Atlantic, specifically Africa’s deserted Skeleton Coast.58 This change added an extra layer of dread to the thriller: John, Ruth, and Russ are left to choose between staying on the boat to drown in the Atlantic or going to shore to die of thirst. Welles wrote new dialogue to reflect this change, both to the Orpheus sequences and to the scenes aboard the Saracen, shot weeks later.59 (The script, annotated by script supervisor Ljuba Gamulin, was updated to reflect such changes.60)

However, Welles still had to find a Hughie before he shot anything aboard the other boat. He considered Keith Baxter for the role, but although Baxter praised the script,61 Welles chose Laurence Harvey for the part, apparently without Baxter’s knowledge.62 Welles put in a cable to Harvey’s London agent Sanford Lieberson on October 3 that he needed a certain “star” actor to play Hughie, alongside Bryant, Moreau, and a “great new girl.”63 Lieberson no doubt knew which star actor Welles was referring to, as the script had been sent to Harvey in early September.64

Though older than the character in the book, Harvey was known for playing unstable, complex, emotionally tortured characters in films like Room at the Top and The Manchurian Candidate with a uniquely unnerving edge. Moreover, having Harvey in the role would ensure greater distribution, as noted in a telegram from Peter Rawley to Bill Cronshaw (and transcribed in one of Cronshaw’s notes written to Welles65). One could also argue that Welles thought an older Hughie would make the character’s childish mood swings more unnerving, thus adding to the building tension.

Looking forward to working with Welles, Harvey canceled his arrangements to supervise titles on one of his pictures in America to get to Hvar.66 Welles sent a cable to Harvey’s agents on October 24 that confirmed the terms of their verbal agreement: According to Cronshaw’s transcriptions of this correspondence, Harvey had agreed to do the film for no salary but was promised to receive $10,000 in advance,67 which he did.68 Welles also promised Harvey star billing above the title, as well as the first $150,000 the film made in English-speaking markets against 10% of the worldwide gross.69 This was in contrast to what Bryant was to receive from the gross, which was £2,500 ($6,000).70 Welles clearly thought of Harvey as the star. He also thought that Harvey could have a say in the film’s distribution, as the October 24th cable specified that if Harvey were to have approval over any English-speaking market distribution deal, the “absolute stop date [would be] November twentieth.”71

After Harvey arrived on the 26th,72 Welles began shooting the Saracen sequences. Further small changes were made to the script for atmosphere: The book’s moment where Rae knocks out Hughie with codeine-spiked lemonade73 was changed to her putting codeine into a fish stew Hughie whips up.74 Sexual themes were also added. A scene in the book where Hughie strangles Rae was altered so that Hughie pulls her down by her hair and kisses her, turning Hughie from an asexual man-child to an unstable older man with conflicted sexual desires.75 In the finale, Brewer would have referred to Hughie as a “fag.”76

Welles also featured Oja Kodar’s character skinny-dipping in a bit of cheese-cakey eroticism missing from his earlier work. Indeed, both hetero- and homoerotic power dynamics, wielded by powerful men over others, are one of the distinguishing features of Welles’s post-1965 “Oja” period.

Willy Kurant had returned to Paris on the 22nd,77 so Welles needed a new D.P. Though he had been in contact with various London-based TV executives and agents to furnish him a photographer in Kurant’s place,78 Welles ultimately brought aboard Ivica Rajkovic, assistant to the great Bosnian cinematographer Tomislav Pinter (who would shoot Neretva), to shoot the sequences aboard the Saracen. As Berthomé and Thomas note, Welles had by now sacrificed the better definition of a fixed-focus lens for the speed of a zoom lens, and would occasionally use zoom-ins and zoom-outs in some sequences.79 Rajkovic did not always shoot against the light as Kurant did, resulting in striking moments where the sun can be seen blaring in frame and bearing down on Rae and Hughie.80 In fact, the combination of natural light, zoom lenses, and shoulder-rig camerawork might have resulted in the same pseudo-documentary style that Welles would use in films such as F For Fake and The Other Side of the Wind.

Despite occasional flashes of joy, the shoot made Welles wary of ever filming at sea again. The fall rain and other poor weather conditions constantly interfered with the open-air production, resulting in some weeks with only a few days’ worth of filming. (Welles asked Rozan in an undated telegram: “because of weather change please ask [photographer Nicolas] Tikhomiroff come immediately.”81 The late Willy Kurant recalled years later at the Cinémathèque Française that Welles would bark at the yacht owner to keep steering one of the boats out of the sun, reminding the owner that it was the only job he had been hired for.8283

Furthermore, actress Jeanne Moreau was jealous of Oja Kodar. According to Welles’s daughter, Chris Welles-Feder, Moreau was offended that the main role went to the inexperienced Kodar and voiced her opinions to Welles: “Please forgive me, Jeanne,” Welles said to Moreau, “but you are no longer twenty.”84

Moreau seemed to take issue with Harvey as well. Rozan and Harvey’s agents had agreed before Harvey’s arrival that Harvey would have star billing except in France, Germany, and Italy, where Jeanne Moreau would be billed above both the title and Harvey’s credit. Welles gave his OK to this in a cable on October 22nd, as transcribed by Cronshaw on his copy of a cable from the 23rd.85 However, in a letter also written on the 23rd, Moreau’s agent (and Welles’s Paris contact) Micheline Rozan argued to Welles that Moreau should have star billing.86 Rozan expressed a desire for Moreau to be a distribution partner in the project, much as Welles promised Harvey around the same time: “I am certain that you will agree to the fact that Jeanne should somewhat be a partner, should the film have, as we all hope, a huge financial success.”87 In such a role, Rozan thought Moreau would be paid 20% of the producer’s share of the film’s profits above $750,000.88

Two days later, Welles wrote to Rozan from Hvar. He reminded her that in The Immortal Story, Moreau played a leading role, whereas in Dead Reckoning, she had only a supporting part, much as she did in Chimes at Midnight. “Without any question,” Welles wrote, “HUGHIE is the most important role in this picture, and if a star is engaged in this part, he has the right to expect first billing for it.”89 Welles concluded by saying that although “Your letter places me in the position of some embarrassment, since it obliges me to take a negative position in an area where I have always liked to be generous to you both,”90 he found it fair for Moreau to receive $75,000 from the grosses, especially since this was for four weeks’ work which he and Moreau finished in three.91

Welles wrote Rozan a telegram on the 30th, referring to the letter written on the 25th: “letter hastily dictated and now anxious explain tone not intended in the least unfriendly only ask you trust my generosity rather than make last minute demands on it.”92 The day after, Welles sent a telegram to Moreau via Rozan: “Dearest Darling Jeanne after a poor days shooting with rain and bad luck we managed two hours work which we interrupted to come into port to salute you stop coming further and stopping to talk would have cost us our only good scene . . . heartsick that I seemed to sleight [sic] you when our intention was so much the opposite.”93

Tensions were high due to actors’ egos and bad weather, and though Welles tried defusing the situation, he was becoming increasingly frustrated in private. In a letter to his lawyer Arnold Weissberger in New York, Welles vented his problems with Rozan, referring to her toward the end as “deeply irrational and in her moods of melancholy and rage quite dangerous.”94 According to him, her business management on The Immortal Story, titled Five Guineas at the time of the letter’s writing, “was so bad that I was forced to cover many overages which had not been foreseen by her or the production chief. . . . I once again foolishly put up my own money to complete the work and to cover for Micheline when she fell to pieces at the crucial moment, as is her wont.”95 She had not replied to his letter of the 25th about Jeanne Moreau’s role in the project, and on the fourth week, she did not run an errand for him; Welles writes, “I date her ceasing to provide services for me in Paris from this time.”96 Welles assured Weissberger that her equipment purchases were not expensive; nevertheless, they would need to be reimbursed before Rozan made any deals over Five Guineas or Dead Reckoning.97

Distressingly, Rozan was in talks with United Artists to finish Dead Reckoning at the time,98 but Welles’s misgivings about her led to him imploring her, “Please no United Artists or other talks until we meet.”99 Even so, Rozan worked as closely as possible with LTC all through October, being Welles’s Paris-based contact. She was frequently supplied with money from Ropama, but as the shoot went on, the money would often run out.

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The worst of Welles’s worries lay with Bosna Film. Welles’s lawyer in Rome, Massimo Ferrara, had reason to believe Bosna Film were inflating the costs during the entire production, and so set the absolute maximum for the LTC mortgage sum at $100,000.100 (Jadran Film, the company Ivica Rajkovic had made several films for, was considered as an alternative during this kerfuffle.101) In a serious loophole, the “force majeure” clause (Clause 9) of Welles’s early October contract with Bosna Film covered “war, public rebellion, force of law, [and] exceptional natural phenomena” as forces that would render Welles unable to meet production deadlines, but the clause explicitly excludes “rain and poor weather,” the very conditions that were weighing down the open-air production.102 Clause 18 of the same contract offered Welles and Bosna Film the opportunity to amend the contract in writing,103 so, on October 21st, during production, Welles sent a letter to Bosna Film’s director Nedjo Parežanin. Though this letter has not survived, it apparently implored the company to reconsider the contract and the crew’s fees in light of how much the weather had affected production.104 Welles’s contract had called for four weeks of filming, and a completion deadline of August 30, 1968105, but there was no realistic way he could finish the film in such a time due to the weather.

Welles realized the film would need to be completed elsewhere, in other waters than Yugoslavia’s. So, on November 1st, he sent a telegram at 9 a.m. to an old friend of his, now living in retirement in the state of Florida: “to finish DEAD RECKONING now starting too late season Dalmatian Coast urgently need fortnight with small cameraunit [sic] where waters blue fairly untroubled stop your part of world best if you can do this job repeat professional job for me.”106 Welles further asked his friend to find an approximation of one of the boats: “exact duplication unnecessary but fair overall match required . . . hope fly to you with actors in two weeks.”107

This old friend was the former head of the Todd School for Boys, Roger “Skipper” Hill, who was now living in retirement. Not a bit disturbed, Hill wrote back to Welles in an undated letter, “Dearest Orson, Is your project in these waters off? Much as we were counting on getting you over here at long last, I rather hope so. At least I would be badly handicapped in trying to help this month or next. Our winter chores from next week on will be frightening.”108 Hill noted that he was having family members over, giving Welles updates on their health in the process, and that he didn’t “know where to address this [letter] but will try both Madrid and London.”109 Hill seemed willing to help Welles finish shooting somewhere down the line if not right away.

This was a good sign, because on the other side of the world, the situation with Bosna Film became even more desperate. Miso Finci, Paražanin’s Deputy, wrote a Bosnian-language reply to Welles’s October 21st letter on November 3rd, two weeks later. Having considered the matter carefully with other Bosna Film representatives, Finci placed special emphasis on the contract. “De jure,” Welles was right that the weekly invoices should consider the actual amount of work done, but “de facto,” it did not matter; the contract still stood.110

In evident panic, Welles hastily dashed off two telegrams on the 4th. One was sent to Roger Hill: “absolutely must come with cast must find something somewhere this is wild cry for help love orson.”111 A cable marked “urgent” was sent to Christopher Grimes in London asking him to draw up a contract between Ropama and Harvey’s agency embodying the terms agreed to on October 24th.112 Welles’s London agent Ann Rogers, meanwhile, cabled Michael Bryant’s agent Ronnie Waters that Bryant’s contract needed another week’s extension – and possibly a further two.113

A half-relieved Welles wired his mentor on the 11th, stating that he only needed a rough approximation of the Saracen, as he was finishing scenes aboard the Orpheus over the next two days.114 Sometime after that, in mid-November, Hill sent out 47 copies of a letter to “all” yacht brokers in the South as well as some in the north: “A movie producer friend of mine has been shooting, in the Adriatic, out of Yugoslavia, a yachting melodrama. . . . The producer has run out of good weather and wants to come over here to finish some shots.”115 Hill then goes on to describe what was needed to various brokers, based on a photo of the ketch Welles had sent him: “I am not too clear on many things myself. Phone conversation has proven impossible with Yugoslavia.”116 Hill eventually found a boat to approximate Welles’s, one whose skipper would also serve as the second-unit director of photography.117 This was Richard Winer, a professional documentary and underwater cameraman based in Fort Lauderdale. He would later become a ghost hunter and a famous debunker of myths about the Bermuda Triangle.118

Unfortunately, the reshoots in the Bahamas could not realistically be done as quickly as Welles wanted. Bill Cronshaw wrote to Welles on the 19th that Hill had called back: The boat he found more or less approximated the photograph Welles sent him, “but he must have pictures of the capstan, the binnacle, the wheel, etc.”119 If the cabin of the boat does not work, those of other boats would need to be used to intercut with the boat Hill found, and if there are any fights to be filmed, the two would need to recruit some choreographer.120 Hill wrote that they might also need camera and transport boats, though Bimini or Miami charges would inevitably rise as the tourist season approached Christmas.121

* * *

Principal photography on Dead Reckoning wrapped around November 15th, with the price of Welles’s Bosna Film-supplied crew being increased to $66,000.122 An agreement dated November 6th, 1967 between Bosna and Ropama Film states that “the cost of one week’s filming beginning Monday, 7th November 1967 . . . shall be $5000.”123 Welles and Mihailic signed this, but not a drafted agreement to extend the project the subsequent week starting November 13th (this would have brought an additional cost of $5,851.68).124 Welles wired Hill on the 11th to confirm that he was “finishing Orpheus here next two days.”125 A letter from November 15th notes that a Colortran unit was offered to Bosna Film by Ropama due to a shortage of cash.126

The available correspondence shows that this experience took a toll on Welles’s health. Welles cabled his doctor in London for diuretic pills and tranquilizers for himself, as well as vitamins for Oja, on October 30th.127 Furthermore, a note from Cronshaw indicates that Welles was diagnosed with “inflammation of the bladder”128 (interstitial cystitis) in early November, when he received the Finci letter.

Despite these setbacks, Welles tried to get his cast ready for the trip to the Bahamas for second-unit shooting. He had to work without Jeanne Moreau, partially because of his dispute with Rozan but also because of Moreau’s other commitments. Nevertheless, Welles attempted to bring Laurence Harvey and Michael Bryant back on board. Harvey’s widow Paulene Stone wrote in 1975 that Harvey had traveled from Hvar to Hollywood for other projects when he received a call from Welles. He needed Harvey to come back to Hvar to film an additional scene, promising the actor to “refund the [air] fare when you get here.”129

So Harvey flew over to Zagreb. But, as Stone recounted:

We were in the process of changing planes to fly on to Hvar when we met the English actor, Michael Bryant. He was just returning from the Orson Welles location. He looked bemused, the way I would imagine a shell-shocked victim to look. “There’s really no point in you going down there,” he said to Larry straight out. “Orson has had a row with his girl-friend and locked himself in succumbed room.”

Larry, who was good-naturedly paying his own expenses and airfares as well as providing his own wardrobe (as a personal favour to Welles, who’d had a hard time financing the picture), decided to put in a call to Welles. Welles wouldn’t take the call.130

After waiting for Welles’s mood to calm overnight, her account narrates that the couple left for Paris.131

The account shows how dedicated Harvey was to the project despite Paulene Stone’s reservations. A scrap of Cronshaw’s notes confirms both Bryant’s and Harvey’s travels, showing that reservations were made for the actors at the Hotel Adriatik at the time.132 Harvey was set to arrive on November 11th and leave Dubrovnik for Rome on the 25th.133 In the end, the two actors would not follow Welles to the Bahamas. Michael Bryant had a play to act in, The Duel in the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, and Laurence Harvey had to move on with projects of his own.

However, the account is wrong in asserting that Welles’s main issue was with Oja.

* * *

November 1967: Bosna Film Takes the Negative

The making and unmaking of Dead Reckoning cannot be disentangled from the other projects Welles was trying to get off the ground at the same time.

In July 1967, Welles had discussed the possibility of making Dead Reckoning with Romaniafilm, to whom he was also going to send a synopsis for a film adaptation of Julius Caesar.134 He later clarified to agent Sanford Lieberson in a “night letter” (i.e., cable) from the Hotel Marjan that the production on Caesar would need to be delayed due to “casting troubles.”135 Welles was in talks for a film called The Private Life of Henry VIII and an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder through CMA’s agent Peter Rawley.136 When Faye Dunaway joined the cast as Hilde Wrengel, Welles immediately withdrew from the latter project, much to Cronshaw’s and Rawley’s shock.137

Welles also wanted CMA to produce his own film adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, which Welles had intended to adapt to film since 1955.138 Even after withdrawing from Builder, he and Harvey, an aspiring director on his own, discussed making the project together. Peter Wood was in talks to produce such a project before he withdrew; Columbia was interested, but with the studio’s other commitments, the project would need to be postponed until spring 1968.139 (When Cronshaw asked who would direct the project, Harvey replied, “Orson or I will or both of us together.”140)

Yet another project was a co-writing/directing gig with Bosna Film: the unmade epic Sarajevo, the story of the 1878 battle.141 Welles had written a four-page outline of this proposed film’s script based on the book by (and thus in collaboration with) Yugoslav Partisan historian Vladimir Dedijer.142143 However, Welles was not paid the $10,000 he was owed for the outline by the end of 1967.144 The material on this project is currently unavailable, but a telex by Ann Rogers from late March 1968 notes, among other things, that “sarajevo material sent ferrara.”145 Massimo Ferrara, Welles’s Italy-based lawyer, tried to create ties between Bosna Film and Dino De Laurentiis, but this did not pan out because Bosna Film thought that the De Laurentiis connection was Welles’s own.146

Bosna Film was still trying to capitalize on Welles’s less-than-stellar public image as much as possible. A clipping from the Zagreb magazine TV Studio told things the following way:

For the writing of the [SARAJEVO] scenario he [Paražanin] engaged the celebrated Orson Welles, who also accepted to be the director, on condition that Bosna Film lent him the money for his thriller DEAD RECKONING. When he finished his work, Orson vanished. The executives of Bosna Film state that Orson Welles told them he would not return. By the way, the popular artist is being chases [sic] by certain members of the troupe to whom he owes money. […] This little joke has cost our film industry many millions [sic!] of Dinars. Once again, we are forced to pay for our naivety in our dealings with foreigners.147

This is all, of course, a lie, but it shows the studio politics that put Welles and Co. in a bind over the film and prevented it from being finished or released.

These politics extended to the ownership of the Dead Reckoning negative itself. As per article 12 of his contract, Welles needed to send a letter to LTC laboratories in Paris ceding ownership of the negative to Bosna Film; LTC labs would then send a letter to Bosna Film confirming that this had been done.148 However, on November 4th, Cronshaw wrote to Welles that Rozan had no money left and that LTC had placed a large “Collect on Delivery” charge on the film at Dubrovnik.149 “The Lab has not been paid for the second lot,” Cronshaw wrote: “They may not be able to go ahead. She has gone as far as she can to help. She must know if she can expect any more money; how much, and when.”150 As Rozan is going on holiday soon, “She does not want to get into a state where she can’t sleep. . . .”151

Apparently, LTC received from Welles two contradictory letters about the negative,152 apparently the product of the rushed production. Rozan dictated a letter the Lab should write Bosna Film noting Welles’s approval,153 a letter that Welles gave his OK to in a cable to Rozan on November 11th – the same cable asking her to not pursue any deals with United Artists.154 The same day, Welles sent another cable to Bosna Film director Nedjo Paražanin that “not only is it not true that I have stopped Paris Laboratories confirmation but I have cabled fresh instructions for them to confirm to you.”155

On the morning of the 18th, Bosna Film stopped air shipments of the negative. Bosna Film representative Ljuba Grujic wrote to Welles the same day that they had passed him an invoice for his approval on the 16th.156 Welles’s letter of approval for said invoice was not sent at the time, and so, wrote Grujic, “the Direction of Bosna Film and the Bank of Sarajevo have given an order to stop automatically any further shipment of the negative.”157 Bill Cronshaw, however, wrote to Welles on the same day that the Bosna Film telegrams ceasing shipment of the negative were sent before Welles’s letter was handed over.158 “Accounts must be settled within three days of the end of the contract,” Cronshaw explained, but “This weeks’ [sic] contract does not end until tonight. . . . The exposed film is, or should be, lodged with LTC subject to a mortgage of $66,000, conditional only on the reasonable request that accounts are approved. Is this seizure a way to gain approval?”159

Welles iterated these points in a memorandum on the film’s sequestration: “in most countries, the weekend would have been taken into account,” but Bosna Film “seized the negative” on Saturday morning, “many hours before the expiration of even their own estimate of the deadline,” and before Raf Vilotejevic (whom Welles paid to expedite the negative) sent the film to Paris via plane.160 He further added that Bosna Film’s action had now delayed his arrival in the Bahamas for second-unit shooting.161 However, this reply did not faze the film board, whose production director on Dead Reckoning, Joca Rajcevic, doubled down in a French-language letter written to Welles on the 23rd. The letter stated that Welles had not sent anything to LTC as required by Clause 12 of his contract,162 despite all the correspondence of November 11th indicating this was not the case.

Eventually, this was cleared up and the negative was sent over to LTC, but the tension between Welles and the film board continued. On December 4th, Bosna Film director Nedjo Paražanin wrote Welles, apologizing for the mishaps and hoping to continue work on Sarajevo.163

* * *

“Why aren’t we there [in the Bahamas] now?” Welles rhetorically asked Hill on December 5th:

Well, if I hadn’t started to listen to your telephonic worries, we would be. But as it happens, I’m lucky I did listen, because in the meantime other problems here have come up, which would have made a precipitate trip to your blue waters a bad economic mistake. As it is, I will study all the footage of the practically complete picture before coming to you (which is obviously the only smart way to go about it) and if I’m right that the leading man is not needed or can be doubled, I’ll just bring his costume, cap, and a wig for the back of somebody’s pro-union head. . . . You ask me for an exact script of what is needed and you express strong fears that I may find the boat too different to be usable. I don’t know whether the word is pragmatic or downright fatalistic, but anyway I’ve learned through the years . . . that if something can’t be shot, I don’t shoot it, but find a way of avoiding it or hinting at it.164

In the same letter, Welles wrote that Winer’s “suggestions about the sharks are very exciting. Would you ask him, please, to detail how much can actually be done. How far we can go. In other words, I can imagine photographing a professional sharkslayer, but that of course isn’t what we want.”165

In the script, the only deviation from the book’s ending is that Russ kills Ruth/Lillian during a fight between him and Hughie. In a new scene Welles wanted, Hughie would slash Russ’s neck with a knife in the water, only for the blood to draw sharks, who devour them. Oja Kodar was aware of this idea Welles had, though she seems to be unaware of the circumstances of the Bahamian reshoots: “Orson accepted the invitation to the Bahamas because he hoped to be able to shoot some scenes with me in the sea and something with sharks.”166

Can one really blame Welles for keeping folks in the dark about his struggles for independence?

Welles noted in his December letter that he would also send color film clips (these are also in Cronshaw’s files), so that Hill would have more to work with:

And now about you. You really must accept payment for this, since it’s a proper professional job. Besides you already saved my life in doing all this organizing. I literally wouldn’t have known where to turn if there hadn’t been you. You must also let me tell you how grateful I am for all the tiresome man-hours I know you’ve put in.167

Before moving shooting over to the Bahamas, Welles needed to look over the footage with an editor in Munich. Editing was complicated by the production’s delays and by Welles’s being a general “enemy of production paperwork,” in Berthomé and Thomas’s words.168 During these early stages of editing, reports were missing for half the material shot,169 resulting in some of the material not being labeled correctly.170

Welles began extensive correspondence with editor Gerd Brenner, possibly to smoothen this out. In the process, he outlined his editing method, a systematic one despite its complexity:

The first stage, of course, is one of choosing takes. I will go through all the material and mark the sections of film which I want to use. In this first stage there will sometimes be two or three choices for the same take or, at least, the same section of dialogue. But the attempt will be made to get rid of as much surplus film as possible. With this in mind, I will cut out slates wherever there is too long a pause between the slate and the action.

The next stage is assembly. This means putting all the material together in sequence, scene by scene, and in the correct order of dialogue. In this picture we shot sections of as many as four or five different scenes in a single day, depending on the conditions of the sea and light, so that this job of assembly is considerably more difficult than it would normally be where the director completes one sequence before moving on to another.

After assembly, the next stage is to start actually cutting the scenes and it is only here that we will require the second moviola. The material will have been assembled in reels, not, as is often done, in separate sections of film, so that all material for a scene can be run on one moviola and the sections removed from it put on another moviola as the scene is built up. The film which is not used in the preliminary editing and which is left on the reel on the first moviola is then called SOURCE. (For example, “SOURCE FOR SCENE 10”) This means, when we run our first version of a scene, we can constantly refer to the other moviola. In this way the cuts can be changed and alterations substituted without guesswork.

All during this work I make it a habit to keep running material, including the increasing amount of material labelled SOURCE, constantly cutting down what I consider to be useless. These cuts are put in cans labelled TRIMS, in the traditional manner, so that the SOURCE is constantly reduced to those elements which may really be usable.171

On December 20th, Welles clarified for Brenner that some scenes were shot in alternate versions, that is, “versions where the ORPHEUS is quite distant when JOHN leaves in his dinghy to visit it, and also versions where the boat is closer.”172 Scenes like this would be assembled in different versions, with Welles deciding on one or the other in editing. Each scene, moreover, would be labeled by a certain name: “I like to work by name rather than number. Eventually we’ll have more and more names. Then, as the editing progresses, we’ll have less and less.”173

“On no account,” Welles emphasized in his December 20th letter, “is any film to be trimmed away (except where I have indicated this with the white crayon). The temptation may be strong in some cases, but please resist this temptation until my return.”174

Such a system as Welles outlined was time-consuming, complex, and involved, with plenty of room for trial and error, but it was fruitful. After all, it would produce the editing marvel F For Fake. As his 1970s/80s photographer Gary Graver pointed out in his memoirs, Welles enjoyed editing The Orson Welles Show on videotape, and probably would have been enamored with digital editing programs like Final Cut Pro.175

Brenner received annotated script material and notes from Welles throughout this process.176 In fact, Welles’s scattered notes, sketches illustrating the desired sequence of shots, and color-coded script material from throughout the editing can be found in both the Welles-Kodar and the Cronshaw papers. Meanwhile, all the tapes containing the on-location audio (referred to as “Premierton”) were to be transferred to film, with Brenner suggesting 17.5mm film rather than 35mm to save money on what was, essentially, a guide track.177

The assembly was finished by January 1968, by which point Welles had an idea of what remained to be filmed. He wrote to Roger Hill on January 30th, “I’m glad now that I hearkened to your words of caution, because editing the picture shows me precisely what is still needed and, indeed, even reveals some few items I wouldn’t have thought of back there before Christmas.”178

* * *

As will be discussed below, most of the reshoots involved Oja Kodar’s character Rae. Welles loved Oja as a sculptor and artist and believed she had the talent to transition to acting. However, as with most of his novice actors, Welles had to walk her through her part. This could not easily be done during principal photography, plagued as it was with financial problems and poor weather, so it would have to wait for the reshoots.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of Welles’s love is what he did for Oja’s sister, Nina Palinkas. An electro-engineer and physicist, Nina had left Yugoslavia during her divorce from her abusive husband. “I kidnapped her son Sasha from him,” Kodar recalled. “It was an incredible adventure, through ex-Yugoslavia. . . . Orson was waiting for us in a taxi across the border. That’s how we and the little boy came to Italy.”179 Uncertain as to how the custody battle would pan out, Nina and Sasha stayed with Welles and Oja, helping them edit The Deep first in Germany, then in France and Italy. Kodar clarified, “We were one big family where everybody did everything.”180

When Welles eventually moved the shoot to the Bahamas, his secretary Ann Rogers cabled him to let him know “nina happy in good digs at nice.”181

Nina makes a cameo doubling for Oja in the girl-watching segment of F For Fake, while Sasha co-stars as a captivated young magic admirer in the same film. In fact, this segment of F For Fake was originally shot for yet another abandoned project – an unreleased TV special called Orson’s Bag.

* * *

February-March 1968: Bahamas Reshoots and The Battle of Neretva

Though the Bahamas reshoots would go on without him, Welles still planned on reshoots with Michael Bryant, writing to him in January that “The whole thing has turned out extremely well . . . But for purposes of the television sale we are going to need – as I had earlier feared – to re-make the nude scenes with Oya [sic]. This will mean a few days’ work for you some time in the early spring . . . ”182

Hill’s later recollections compress the amount of time between Welles contacting him in 1967 and the actual Bahamas shooting in 1968 to make for a better story. Nor do his 1977 memoirs give any indication of the hindrances Welles’s team had in Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the story of what happened once Welles arrived in the Bahamas is essentially accurate: “He arrived with Oja only, plus costumes for the others. These we would fill with local flesh. More accurately, I would fill them.”183 Cronshaw’s budget list from these 1968 Bahamas shoots include work done by Winer as well as “2 Cameramen from Italy,” who came with two assistants, various pieces of equipment, living expenses, and airfares, all for “Undersea Work.”184 Kodar recalled in a 2004 interview with Stefan Drößler that she and Welles “hired the two best Italian underwater-cameramen. One of them was the son of the famous Cesare Balbao, one of Mussolini’s high-ranking officers who was a well-known pilot.”185186

Despite the professionals involved, the project took on a “made-at-home” experimental air. Illustrations of Kodar’s interview in The Unknown Orson Welles include photos of Welles and Kodar using as slates pieces of paper on a clipboard, seemingly from this stage of the shooting.187 Sequences were shot of John searching underwater for the bodies of Hughie and Russ and inspecting the Orpheus – all with a body double for Michael Bryant. Second-unit shooting was far from easy, but Hill threw himself into the details of the project Welles had in mind. For example, he later wrote in a letter to Welles that there was more “moss and crud” on the bottom of the ship than he would expect for something in the middle of the ocean, but the effect would probably work for an average viewer.188

Welles would eventually leave (via Nassau) to handle matters back in the Adriatic, so Hill would continue shooting scenes on his own. These sequences, noted in correspondence as being shot on 16mm and 35mm film, included scenes with body doubles for both Welles and Kodar.189 At times, Hill would wire Welles for more money, for example, “need 5000 more at once southmiami bank hopefully this will finish.”190 Hill wrote in a May 1968 letter: “The sinking we accomplished but damn near drowned the clutched pair after one shot when they couldn’t untangle the 30 pounds of pocketed lead uded [sic] to sink them.”191 Nevertheless, he would try to make it work with red show-card paste, which he had been experimenting with: “At least this looks good in a goldfish bowl.”192 Hill’s later memoirs recalled that this mixture turned green in the water.193

Richard Winer also continued to work on the project in Welles’s absence. Writing to Welles on October 15th of that year, Winer estimated that whatever additional filming needed to be done amounted to $3782.44, taking into account everything from airfare to underwater cameras to doubles.194 The last time they talked, Welles had an idea to add a scene, seemingly at the beginning of the film, involving Rae swimming with a shark. Hence, Winer writes:

If you want the blonde long haired girl swimming with a shark it will be approximately five hundred to a thousand dollars. . . . I am figuring, if at all possible, to get the girl and shark together in the same scene rather than use cutaways. If you want this, what must the girl be wearing, must she be blond, and can she be wearing a face mask? The latter would be for her own safety with the shark. . . .195

Welles would not return to the Bahamas due to legal issues described below. He would also abandon the shark bookend for a simpler one, a bookend involving John and Rae the morning after the film’s events.

The dockmaster Hill had finally gone with was the Nassau-based Grand Bahama Hotel. They had received from Welles and Co. a total of $12,285.40 for the shoot by February 1969, with around $300 remaining to be sent.196 Hill personally took care of this remaining fee for the Bahamas shoot, but did not mind at all.197 For at least a year, Welles insisted on paying Hill, but the retired schoolmaster assured Welles in 1969 not to worry about payments of any kind: “I owe you thanks for the chance to stumblingly return to my own middle age madness. But I’m far too old (and otherwise committed) to be worth a damn to this picture or to be figured into your future plans.”198

Though glad the situation was not worse, Hill also noted, “You have learned the hard way that Bahamian waters leave much to be desired as a winter location.”199 Presumably this lesson extended to the Yugoslavian shoot itself.

According to Oja Kodar, Welles wrote the screenplay Santo Spirito, now part of the UofM’s Welles-Kodar archives, during this stage of shooting.200 The screenplay is about two old friends who run into trouble on Santo Spirito in the 19th century, when they are swindled at a casino. Escaping from the pursuing mob, they are thrown into a series of wild misadventures. These involve an heiress with a dead homosexual millionaire husband to bury, a sinking ship the heiress winds up navigating while the two men are out cold (much as Rae winds up navigating the Saracen in Dead Reckoning), an apparently deserted island they wash up on, a horde of lesbian pirates being infiltrated by a naval captain in drag, and a final sequence where the two unfortunate main characters are drafted into the army as a reward, just in time for the Battle of Waterloo.201

Ideas came easy for Welles. Filming them was another story.

* * *

While Welles and Kodar prepared for the trip to the Bahamas, his legal team looked for another country as their center of production, thus buying the film a different nationality. As described in a note from Cronshaw to Welles on February 7th, Ferrara and others discussed a potential Swiss nationality, but high Swiss taxes, a lack of a central film registry, and studios that were “not very good” seemed to put a damper on the plan.202 Cronshaw elaborated: “film could be Swiss right now, if it can be shown as having been paid for by a Swiss company. What would have to be made clear first, is whether the film is actually the property of Ropama.”203 Ann Rogers, the day before, had sent a letter to the National Council of Tourism of Lebanon for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, for a Lebanese nationality.204 However, as a later letter from Ferrara noted (over a stab at a Spanish nationality!), “The certificate of origin is always that of the majority country.”205

Ferrara’s negotiations with Bosna Film ultimately led to Welles pursuing a Yugoslavian nationality, the one with the fewest legal obstacles. This is partially why, around February and March, the situation with Bosna Film became more manageable. Welles kept in touch with the Neretva’s director Bulajic from Bavariafilm in Munich, urging a “prompt settlement” after a number of delays,206 and eventually wrote Bosna Film “On advice of Avv. Ferrara”:207 Since Bosna Film expected reimbursement on the mortgage for Dead Reckoning, “you are therefore no longer entitled to claim any monies which are payable to me by the BITKA NI NERETVI production company.”208 According to a March 6th note from Cronshaw to Welles, Massimo Ferrara reminded Bosna Film of the amount they owed Welles for his work on Sarajevo: $10,000 for delivering the four-page treatment sent to De Laurentiis and a further $20,000 for finishing the first draft by August.209 After negotiations with Ferrara, Paražanin, along with Subota and Bulajic’s representative MN Mihailic, proposed cutting the mortgage on Dead Reckoning’s negative down to $35,000 in return for Welles’s work on the historical epic.210 This was finalized two days later with a letter representing a written agreement, signed by Welles, Paražanin, and Mihailic.211 Another letter signed by Welles and Mihailic agreed to Welles’s transportation means (first-class flight, chauffeur-driven car) and a shooting time frame on Neretva of March 26-April 7.212

At this point, the mortgage was lightened in a way that compensated for the poor way the board treated Welles’s team in 1967. However, Bosna Film would use other obstacles to hit Welles’s production. Moreover, the newly negotiated Yugoslavian nationality for the film meant that any additional shooting would need to be done in eastern Europe, despite Welles’s inevitable commitments on both sides of the Atlantic.

* * *

October-November 1968: The “New” Yugoslav Shooting

The sections of film Bryant was to loop had been on standby at London’s Delane Lea studios, complete with a guide track and “virgin” 35mm sound film, since at least March.213 However, Bryant was prevented from post-synching because of his role in the MGM musical remake Goodbye Mr. Chips. Though Bryant had a break from this project for 12 days in May 1968,214 he and Welles did not manage to get together. After several failed attempts, Bryant’s agent Ronnie Waters finally obtained a clearance from MGM allowing Bryant to do post-sync work on October 14th and 15th.215 However, this would also be canceled due to the reshoots Welles scheduled in Yugoslavia in October and November of that year. The year would come and go without Harvey, Moreau, or Bryant doing post-synching.

As a matter of fact, Laurence Harvey’s contract had yet to be signed and Moreau’s yet to even be drafted. This was because Welles’s own busy schedule prevented him and his lawyers from actively looking over points raised about Harvey’s contract until June 1968,216 when Welles was thinking about a potential television sale for Dead Reckoning to maximize viewership. The very writing of Jeanne Moreau’s contract was prevented when Welles realized Rozan was no longer her agent. Micheline Rozan wrote to him in February 1968 that Moreau had parted ways with her; the finalization of Moreau’s Dead Reckoning agreement would be up to her new agent, Gerard Lebovici.217

After Neretva wrapped, Welles sent Rozan a consolation letter from Senegal218 while acting in The Southern Star. Later that May in a reply to his Senegal letter, Rozan let him know that The Immortal Story (Five Guineas’ new title) had cost $90,000 “unforeseen” (even considering the $20,000 of Welles’s “Spanish money”).219 Nevertheless, she had found the film a distributor in Carol Hellman, whose deal would recoup the costs.220 She also sent Welles an invitation to the film’s French theatrical release on the 24th, which would be preceded by the Fredéric Rossif-François Reichenbach documentary Portrait: Orson Welles.221

Welles and Laurence Harvey met each other again during the year. Their meeting was not for Dead Reckoning, but was an acting gig in a late installment of the sword-and-sandal genre, the ill-received German epic Kampf Um Rom. Studded with American, British, and German stars, Kampf would be the last film of American director Robert Siodmak, who vented his frustrations at the poorly written script to producer Artur Brauner.222

Stretching his schedule a bit further, Welles was also working on a strange CBS television special throughout 1968. Welles explained in a 1970 interview, “Mike Dann (CBS Head of programming), who with the courage of the world, has sent me away and said, ‘Make it and when it’s finished, show it.’ I don’t have to tell him what it is. I’ve never met anybody like that! And if it’s no good there isn’t anybody to blame except me. Which is a kind of nice limb to be out on. It’s going to be called Orson’s Bag.”223 The variety theatre-esque, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink project would consist of comedy segments in Vienna, London, and Rome before closing with a dramatic condensation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice centered on Shylock. Parts of the project would be shot on their respective locations, but production notes indicate that other parts were shot on the Dalmatian coast, where Welles had to do more shooting on Dead Reckoning.224 One can only assume Welles filmed both projects here because of Dead Reckoning’s nationality issue.

Welles would find himself back in Yugoslavia reshooting parts of the thriller in late October and November 1968 for four weeks. Shooting apparently went on without Harvey. A “list of clips” from the “New Jugo” stage of shooting lists scenes and parts of scenes that are mostly centered on Rae.225 With Welles having shot Harvey’s parts of the scenes in 1967, the reshoots focused on reverse shots of Oja Kodar refining her character.226

The earliest “clips” have Rae interacting with “JOHN’s DOUBLE,”227 but later clips designed for the finale would have required Michael Bryant to be in the shot.228 Indeed, Bryant’s involvement in this stage of filming can be confirmed. Cronshaw’s files preserve a detailed, handwritten plan from Monday, October 21st, describing Bryant’s itinerary en route to Yugoslavia.229 Bryant was to leave London for Rome, arrive on October 22nd, and then go from Rome to Split.230 On the way, the actor was to collect a new typewriter for Welles as well as a large envelope with the old script and a list of the “Bahamas takes.”231 He was to leave on November 2nd and “must loop on return” to London.232 Welles seems to have designed the reshoots around Bryant’s arrival.

The director wanted to use every opportunity this reshoot allowed to tie up loose ends. As recounted in Cronshaw’s thorough budget sheets for the October-November 1968 shoot, Welles bought scale models at a special effects studio including a water tank and model ships, pyrotechnics to be set off, a ship to be sunk, and a Czechoslovakian underwater crew to film said sinking boat.233 As Welles described in his 18 January letter to Bryant, the opening scenes with Oja skinny-dipping nude at the film’s beginning were reshot in what Welles called a “versione Cattolica” with Rae in a bathing suit.234235

Welles also had some new ideas for opening and closing the film, having written a brand-new prologue, opening scene, and ending. The prologue features an off-screen coastal news reporter’s interview with John and Rae, where they express their desire to escape the violence of the modern world.236 Moreover, since the book opened with Rae awakening from a dream, Welles decided to make this a narrative device to bookend the main story after the prologue played out.

It is unclear if Welles shot the prologue, but he at least managed to shoot some parts of the new opening and ending. The opening dream, as inferred from the dialogue in the scene described below, would show Rae being shoved into the sea by John. Recovering, she swims back to the Saracen and boards it, only to find it empty. She then goes into the cabin, where she sees Hughie pounding on her window.

Here begins the script material for the new opening sequence.

INT. CABIN

As the dream finishes, HUGHIE, pounding on the window, changes to JOHN.

JOHN

(looking down through the bars of the hatch window)

Hi, beautiful.

RAE

(in her berth. She wakes – or rather, half-wakes)

You said that . . .

(slight pause)

When? . . . . When did you say that?

JOHN

Beautiful? A million times –

RAE

The last time . . . . . .

JOHN

You were awake, if you heard me.

RAE

You woke me. Yes. And then I said . . . .

I told you I’d had a dream. I said the dream

was beautiful –

(she shudders)

. . . God!

JOHN

(grimly, half to himself)

Yeah . . . . Last night’s dream wasn’t so beautiful,

I guess . . . .237

Rae goes up on deck, which John has been washing. She asks what he did with “the body” only to realize, “The ocean. . . . That’s where the body is. That’s where you put it. . . . ”238 Rae continues to recall the dream, worried that John will shove her in again, but John urges her to put whatever is troubling her out of mind.239

“It’s the shock,” he says under his breath, “And that damned sleeping pill. . . . ”240

But she keeps wondering: “What really happened? – -All the things like this, that you want me to wash away and forget? . . . I’ve got to sort them out, Johnny. . . . When was it? Yesterday morning? . . . I mean, when we first found out that we weren’t alone out here? . . . Was it just yesterday morning? . . . .”241

The scene then transitions to the original beginning where Rae swims nude and the couple discovers Hughie. At this point, the film as already shot would play out. Then, in a new finale, the film would transition back to Rae remembering the events. She asks about “Hughie’s wife” and John replies, “What else was there to do? . . . . I wrapped her in some canvas.”242 He then adds some words for Ruth’s burial at sea: “We therefore commit her body to the deep . . . ”243

Rae notices the blood on her hands from the previous day, and disturbed, goes for another swim. After a moment, she looks back up at the ship to find that John has vanished. Panicking, she calls for him and she begins to think she’s still dreaming, but he emerges from below deck with coffee. Rae swims back to John as the camera pulls back on the boat: “The SARACEN is a tiny speck in the sea . . . FADE OUT.”244

These new sequences were at least partially shot and are currently included in Stefan Drößler’s edit of The Deep, but there seems to be some confusion as to their purpose. According to Joseph McBride, the dream sequence “casts doubt on the rest of the plot, suggesting that the complex power struggles among the various characters might be a projection of psychosexual problems between Kodar’s Rae and her new husband, John Ingram (Bryant).”245 This analysis does not account for the bookends’ dialogue, which makes it all too clear that what happened with Hughie was no nightmare.

These new scenes are in line with Welles’s long-running theme about the blurred line between reality and fantasy, without tipping the line into cliché. They reflect a human tendency to block out events that are incredibly violent or traumatic. In the scripted “TV Interview” scene, it is escapism that drives John and Rae out onto the sea, while in the dream sequences designed to bookend the film, Rae confronts the reality of what occurred to her in order to deal with the trauma.

Dead Reckoning, by this stage, had become a tale about a couple’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

Unfortunately, like the characters, Welles and company kept having to relive the experience again and again, and the cycle showed no signs of stopping at this point. For one, he never managed to get Michael Bryant to post-sync his dialogue. In June 1969, presumably at Welles’s request, Ann Rogers made an attempt to get Cronshaw to set up a post-synching appointment for Bryant at Delane studios.246 On June 24th, she sent a telegram asking Cronshaw to reschedule the appointment yet again.247 Later the same day, Rogers sent Cronshaw an “Urgent” follow-up telegram: “cancel all postsynching please.”248

These delays to post-synching were partially caused by even more conflict with Bosna Film, as will be discussed. However, the project was also delayed because another, more pressing project was on the horizon.

* * *

1969-1972: Final Shooting and Postproduction Delays

A short time after the “New” Yugoslav shooting, Welles received a letter from Don Congdon, Charles Williams’s representative, in January 1969. The letter noted that Jeanne Moreau had told Congdon in New York City that Welles was the purchaser of the novel’s rights and that shooting was nearly complete: “Since both Mr. Williams and I are admirers of your work, however, we were not displeased when the information was eventually divulged.”249 In light of Moreau’s and Welles’s previous disagreements about star status and distribution control, this announcement might not have pleased Welles. Another letter from Congdon to Arnold Weissberger in April 1969 notes that Welles is “consistent in never answering letters”; the letter is ripped in two pieces, taped down the middle.250

Despite this rocky start, 1969 was the year Welles found some hope to start a project back in Hollywood. Early in the year, Welles travelled to Guaymas, Mexico, to film his scenes for Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Catch-22, another novel Welles wanted to adapt but never found the time to do so.251 On set was a young filmmaker and historian named Peter Bogdanovich with whom Welles had struck up a friendship. The two had wanted to do a Hitchcock/Truffaut-esque interview book, with Welles being the interviewed filmmaker.

One of the driving figures in the “New Hollywood,” Bogdanovich adored Welles as a director, like many other young directors breaking free from the predominant studio tastes. In fact, the meeting gave Welles some hope that he could start up yet another project, an original story of his that at that time was called The Sacred Beasts. This was a tale about the film industry, the 1960s art house crowd, bullfighting, and the interplay between machismo and film directing.252 It reflected current cultural trends and revolutions for which it was unclear how long they would last.

A portion of their later recorded interviews from 1970 is featured in the documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, where Welles describes a story he has “worked on for many years” and is “crazy enough to do . . . in preference to anything else.”253

Bogdanovich enthusiastically responds, “You ought to make it right away!”254

In the audio, Welles agrees, “Right away.”255

The project originating as The Sacred Beasts was an important one. But despite recognizing this, Welles still had to tie up loose ends on Dead Reckoning and Orson’s Bag.

* * *

Filming on Dead Reckoning finally wrapped in October-November 1969 in Yugoslavia. According to camera reports, these reshoots were done between reshoots of Orson’s Bag.256 New footage was shot of Oja at the Hotel Marjan, Trogir, and Primosten on October 27th-31st and November 3rd-5th.257 These included whatever reverse shots needed to be finished featuring Oja as Rae, long shots of “fireworks” coming from a boat standing in for the Saracen,258 and shots of the sinking of yet another boat purchased for the Orpheus, shot day-for-night with a Cameflex and an Arriflex. Sadly, editing notes from November 1969 specify that when this was shot on October 31st, the “Underwater cameramen were unable to take any shots.”259260 Additional Rae-centric shots were made for the dreamy “Early Morning” bookend Welles wrote in 1968.261262

Interestingly enough, the schedules refer to “LARRY” as participating in the shoot, and do not explicitly say that this is a double for Laurence Harvey. “LARRY” is not only mentioned as being part of a new shot where Kodar’s Rae tucks Hughie into bed,263 but also a new shot for the “Early Morning” bookends to the film, where it is noted that “Larry crosses”264 behind Rae as she remembers her dream, not a double for “Larry.” No double for Bryant (or even a “Michael”) is noted either, which might be because no more shots showing his character’s face needed to be made.

The other project Welles was shooting in Yugoslavia – Orson’s Bag – might provide indirect evidence that Laurence Harvey was involved. The reports describe a segment called “Girl Watching” (or “Ipanema”265 in script material) as being shot on the streets of Split on October 26th.266 This is a segment that wound up in F For Fake (as to why, see below). In this segment of Fake, Oja Kodar is watched in Rome by horny Italian men (who are all watched by Welles) before heading to an airport, where Laurence Harvey, described by Welles’s narration as “another leading man from yet another movie,” is waiting for her.267 Having missed her flight, she is squeezed into a suitcase by one of the (beardless!) magician Welles’s contraptions.268 As narrator, Welles remarks, “I grew another beard, made another movie.”269

Did Harvey participate in the filming of both Orson’s Bag and Dead Reckoning in 1969?

Whatever the case, Welles contacted both Harvey and Moreau to post-sync their parts during 1969 and was unsuccessful with both. He wrote to Harvey in June, “It’s wonderful to hear you’re in town. I’m going to London, but will return immediately if you can find the time to do your post-synching. . . . I have been waiting for a year and a half to do your post-synching, but we’ve never been on the right continents at the right time, so let’s know [sic] for God’s sake get this thing on the road. It’s reallygood [sic], and you’re great. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it in the theatres before they cart me off to the Old Folks’ Home?”270 When asked by the author in 2019, Harvey’s London agent Sanford Lieberson did not recall Harvey ever doing post-synching or any of the reshoots.271

Jeanne Moreau’s dialogue would never be looped, by her or anyone else. She was ready by November to post-sync her part,272 but Welles had to delay the session again.273

* * *

Even at this late stage, Welles still found himself haggling with Bosna Film. They were now making the certificate of origin difficult to obtain. In a May 1970 letter to Welles, Massimo Ferrara explained that he had to remind Bosna Film of their debt to Welles of $30,000 for the script of Sarajevo, which had not been deposited in Ropama’s Swiss bank account.274 Zdravko Mihalic of Jadran Film had now entered the picture as an intermediary between Bosna Film and Welles,275 and as of 22 May 1970, Mihalic was to come to Rome in June with the certificate of origin.276

“Mihalic added,” wrote Ferrara, “that the Sarajevo production project is still in motion, and they hope to make you an acceptable offer very soon. This last part of the conversation seems to me just ‘talk.’ Regardless of my impressions, I will inquire as to their real intentions and thusly keep you informed.”277

* * *

Though Bosna Film put off The Deep’s completion and release from 1967 to 1970, what ultimately derailed the project was The Other Side of the Wind, a far more involved work.

Having moved the editing of The Deep to Italy, Welles was staying in Rome’s Hilton Hotel when, according to Oja Kodar, he started talking with New Hollywood pioneers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson about the project Midnight Plus One:

Orson talked to Bert about some projects and mentioned [an adaptation of the novel] Midnight Plus One. Bert invited us to Hollywood. Our trip was paid for, we stayed in a wonderful bungalow in Beverly Hills to prepare the film. Orson was planning to play a character in the film himself, Yves Montand or Robert Mitchum as male lead and me as female lead. But the rights for the novel were to be $300,000, which was definitely too much, neither Bert Schneider nor anybody else could afford that.278

Staying in Beverly Hills after the funding fell through, Welles rewrote The Sacred Beasts with Oja Kodar into the project that became Other Wind. In 1970, Welles shot the bulk of the film-within-the-film and improvised a few scenes for the main story at the director character Jake Hannaford’s birthday party. Among these were scenes with Dennis Hopper, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, and Curtis Harrington.279 By 1971, he had a script based on the scenes he had shot for the party and framed around the film-within-the-film.280

The project was about the passing of the old generation of Hollywood filmmakers during the rise of new cinematic waves around the world. As such, it was rooted thematically and stylistically on the success and bold experimentation of the French New Wave, the New Hollywood, and similar movements. This brief period saw a reverence for “auteur” directors like Welles, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, and John Ford, and would pass away almost as quickly as it came. By 1977, with the release of Star Wars, the New Hollywood was effectively dead. The Other Side of the Wind was dated by the time the 1980s rolled in. The project effectively became for Welles what the film-within-Welles’s-film is to the fictional Jake Hannaford.

In hindsight, it was understandable for Welles to start filming The Other Side of the Wind as soon as possible, thus forgetting about The Deep. There was simply no telling how long such an important period in film history would last.

One could also argue that Welles could not have predicted all that hindered the completion of The Other Side of the Wind. Indeed, Other Wind turned out to be the most consuming project for Welles in the last fifteen years of his life. A culturally and historically significant work packed with subtext, content, and boundary-pushing storytelling, Other Wind would soon eat up so much time, investment, and money that it made the completion of The Deep almost impossible.

* * *

In 1970, Orson’s Bag was canceled by CBS due to the IRS’s increased scrutiny of Welles’s Ropama Film A.G. as a holding company.281 This might have been fueled by Welles recording The Begatting of the President, a novelty album satirizing Richard Nixon.282 This snag not only affected Orson’s Bag and The Deep, but also the newest project, Other Wind. Still, Welles did not lose hope to make use of the footage shot for Orson’s Bag, whose comedy segments were to be recycled for his other projects, including F For Fake. Compounding problems was the theft of the work print and audio from reels 2 and 3 of Orson’s Bag’s “Merchant of Venice” segment,283 though Welles claimed in 1982 that it was the negatives that went missing.284 Welles would shoot footage of himself reciting the Shylock monologue, out of costume and in a trench coat, in the early 1970s.285

Welles decided that the segments of Orson’s Bag would be incorporated into other projects. The segments in London, for example, had new wraparound footage shot by Welles and Gary Graver in 1971.286 This could have possibly been woven into Orson Welles – Solo, a low-budget, autobiographical essay film (Kodar thought it would be four to six hours in length!287) that would include magic tricks, comedy segments performed with any friend willing to lend their time, one-man performances of Moby Dick and other tales Welles never had the budget or resources to film completely, and other bits. This film would become Welles’s most elaborate home movie at the time of his death in 1985.

This was similar to the fate of Don Quixote after Oscar Dancigers pulled out of the project in 1957. Production on Don Quixote went into the mid-1960s, largely on Welles’s own money,288 and as such, Welles could do anything he wanted with the footage as he saw fit. Welles planned to weave the footage of the cheaply completed (and, in his eyes, dated) Don Quixote into a personal essay film about Spain289 alongside material from Prosper Merimée and Cunninghame Graham.290 Calling it “my home movie,” Welles half-jokingly gave it the title When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?291

The Deep and Other Wind, by contrast, were projects of considerable monetary and artistic investment, not ones to be left behind. When Welles went back to Europe in 1971, he began editing the latter, but also kept on with the just-nearly finished The Deep. A 1971 letter from Welles to Jeanne Moreau reflected his still-strong desire to finish the thriller. According to that letter, Welles had written Moreau several times, but never seemed to reach her.292 It is unclear if this is true or not, although some revisions of Other Wind’s script from 1971 feature Jeanne Moreau as the host of Jake’s party.293. From Film: Box 4, Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers. University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).)) It wouldn’t seem implausible for Welles to try contacting Moreau about both Other Wind and The Deep. In either case, Moreau never signed a contract for The Deep, though she had apparently requested Welles that she do so. Welles writes that he did not realize this was the case and that this mere “oversight” would be “immediately corrected.”294

Welles’s letter to Moreau says that “the Yugoslavs calculated that they had me over a barrel” over obtaining the certificate of origin, and also mentions in the letter that he is “back on this side of the Atlantic.”295 However, he does not mention that he had been making Other Wind since 1970 in the U.S. Perhaps Welles was disheartened by his prospects for finishing that project at the time. In any case, Moreau was in no position to understand how deeply involved Welles was in Other Wind by the time he wrote her.

A draft of Moreau’s contract was subsequently prepared and sent over from Bill Cronshaw to Gerard Lebovici on November 19, 1971. A copy of this draft in the Cronshaw files shows that the contract essentially embodied the terms discussed with Rozan when she was still Moreau’s agent.296 In 1972, Gerard Lebovici wrote to Cronshaw that he was discussing the contract for the film with Moreau and had asked his London representative Dick Blodjet to get in touch with him.297

Meanwhile, Welles spent all of 1972 trying to court various investors for his projects, the main priority being The Other Side of the Wind. Welles’s screenplay for Treasure Island was heavily rewritten by Wolf Mankowitz and directed by John Hough in 1972, with Welles contractually tied to the project. Though he wanted to direct, Welles was told by producer Harry Alan Towers that “If he were to direct, I would have real difficulty getting a Completion Guarantor,”298 so Welles played Long John Silver and took the pseudonym “O.W. Jeeves” for the script.299

Said Towers: “Orson had originally planned to direct the same subject, back to back with Chimes at Midnight, but, as I have mentioned before, often, life does not work out the way we planned it. Man proposes – God disposes.”300

Nevertheless, as Josh Karp’s Orson Welles’s Last Movie reports, Welles received $150,000 for his work, which he would promptly use to start editing Other Wind in Paris.301 He also received $200,000 from Janus Films’ Klaus and Jürgen Hellwig.302 One of the producers of this 1972 adaptation of the Stevenson book was Andres Vicente Gómez, who had courted the Hellwigs and himself agreed to put $150,000 into the project.303

Bill Cronshaw’s final surviving budget sheet for Dead Reckoning, prepared November 28, 1972, lists the money spent on the project up to that point. The total cost came to $247,991, with $71,322 paid to Bosna Film.304 Harvey was to receive $150,000 on the first 10% of the profits while Bryant had been deferred $6,000.305 Moreau’s provisions were listed as “unsettled.”306 Her contract remained unsigned, her part silent, the film unfinished.

The surviving work print material for The Deep has Welles voicing all the male roles, including Bryant and Harvey.307 There is no obvious artistic reason for this. Welles’s voice is so distinctive that listeners can immediately tell that it’s him and not Laurence Harvey or Michael Bryant, so it detracts from one’s enjoyment of the film considerably. The chaotic production indicates that this move was purely based on budget and circumstance, fueled by a desire to finish the film no matter what happened. Barring any further discoveries, it seems that Bryant, Harvey, and Moreau never did post-sync work.

* * *

1973-1976: The Sinking of The Deep

Welles continued to enter preproduction on other projects wherever he went. An adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Victory, relocated to and retitled Surinam, was written for the newly established (and to be ill-fated) Director’s Company.308 F for Fake, Welles’s experimental documentary on fakery, was finished with editor Marie-Sophie Dubus in 1973, taking two or three editing rooms and moviolas to do so.309 The last major feature to be completed by Welles in his lifetime, Fake features intricate, fast-paced, proto-MTV-style editing that would have been put to greater use in The Other Side of the Wind had he completed it. Oja Kodar stated in her Drößler interview that around this time the loops of The Deep, the sections of the film to be dubbed, “were lying on the editing room of F For Fake. Yes, we made them at this point in order for Jeanne Moreau to dub her part.”310 Welles, as far as can be gathered, canceled whatever looping session had been scheduled with Moreau at this time.311 Other projects had simply become more important than a few dubbing sessions for a small-scale thriller that was nearly finished.

Welles eventually hired Dominique Antoine as his main producer on The Other Side of the Wind. Antoine told author Josh Karp that when she met Welles via his “cutter” Yves Deschamps, Welles started talking about other projects (like The Deep) in addition to the less-than-half-finished Other Wind.312 Antoine interrupted him: “No. No. No. Orson, we should finish The Other Side of the Wind first, then we can see what to do next.”313 The fraught six-year production of The Other Side of the Wind, discussed in Gary Graver’s Making Movies with Orson Welles and Karp’s Orson Welles’s Last Movie, meant that whatever finishing touches remained on The Deep had to be put off indefinitely.

Nevertheless, even after the Other Wind debacle, even after Laurence Harvey succumbed to stomach cancer on November 25, 1973, Welles did not want to abandon the film. As late as 1975, he was showing a trailer for the project to producer Michael Selsman in the hopes of reviving it.314

Still, as Arnold Weissberger informed Welles in 1974, completion would be more difficult than Welles anticipated. Moreau’s agents had now requested $50,000 plus a percentage of the profits from the film’s release.315 Welles had wanted to send a firm reply to them, but Weissberger reminded Welles in the letter that he had best not do that, as he had “been obliged to cancel” two separate appointments with Moreau for dubbing.316 Instead, Weissberger suggested Welles schedule the looping for two days sometime a month away, working off his and Moreau’s “perfectly firm verbal understanding.”317

But by November 1974, Moreau had still not dubbed her part. Most likely this was because Welles was tied up in the U.S. and Orvillers, still trying to finish The Other Side of the Wind. Even so, Welles had not given up on The Deep, and even possessed a nearly complete copy. That month, Welles sent to Marie-Sophie Dubus from Antegor “what we believe to be all of the relevant material for THE DEEP (formerly titled DEAD RECKONING). This film, with the exception of the prologue, which has only partially been filmed, and the very end of the picture, has all been edited in its final form. All the post-synchronization has been completed with the exception of a few lines from Michael Bryant” that are inaudible on the soundtrack.318 Welles would decide what his character will say in these few moments.319

The scenes to be post-synchronized by Moreau had been cut out of the picture “and are ready” for dubbing at Paris facilities, wrote Welles: “I do not expect to be able to do this myself until the 15th December, but it must be completed before the holidays begin. If Jeanne Moreau should not be available, I am going to bring an English actress over to do a temporary version, so that we can get an idea of the whole picture” as it exists.320 The copy as a whole, which “has been worked on very heavily and is quite old,” would need to either have new splice tape put on each cut or else be duped entirely, but Welles would leave this to Dubus’s judgment.321

Welles closed the letter by saying that Dubus’s payment “Does not come under the authority of Miss Dominique Antoine or Astrophore Films, and that Avenel and Oja will be financially responsible.”322 Welles apparently had his misgivings with Astrophore, but even so, the company was involved in helping him finish The Deep.

By the end of 1974, Welles wanted Astrophore to take up a worldwide distribution deal for The Deep. Welles’s London agent at the time, Claude Fielding, drew up a contract but left blank the owners of the project – either Cine Productions and Avenel (the company Welles started up in Liechtenstein in 1973) or Ropama and Avenel.323 As Fielding wrote to Welles in November 1974: “This could be described as a little bit like doing a conjuring trick without knowing whether there are any actual rabbits in the hat or even up the sleeve.”324 Regarding the involvement of Mehdi Boushehri and Dominique Antoine, Astrophore’s owners, “Boucherie [sic] made a specific point of telling me that he would want to be satisfied, possibly with an undertaking from me, that you are in fact in a position to complete and deliver the film, and by this he means that you have agreed with Lebovici the terms for Jeanne Moreau’s dubbing and that we have in fact brought in Laurence Harvey’s share. I cannot approach Paulene Harvey until I know from sight of the contract which organization it was that loaned you the services of Laurence Harvey.”325

Paulene Harvey, née Stone, was likely not in the mood to help Welles complete the project. Her memory of Welles was a negative one, though Harvey’s was not. In her 1975 memoirs, Stone recounts a conversation she had with Harvey 25 days before his death about “that thing in Yugoslavia.”326

Stone remarked how furious she was with Welles, saying how “cruel” and “shitty” his behavior was, like many others in the film business.327 Harvey replied: “No. You don’t understand. I love it. I love all that. And that’s the reason I love Orson – because he knows the business is all a joke, a giant con trick. He sends it all up better than I do.”328

She replied, “I think you’re confused,” and Harvey smiled before changing the subject.329

* * *

Welles’s tax situation was heating up in 1975, partly because of inflation but also because of his prolonged filmmaking activities in the U.S. and Europe. This especially affected productions produced by Ropama, Welles’s company under which The Deep was produced. “I think the prime advantage in the past,” wrote Cronshaw in May 1975, “was that I could prove to the IRS that it [Ropama] was not a holding Company and did have a value as an international Company in production. I do not know if such conditions would be applicable if it was recorded that all expenses were just for Orson. . . . What Bruschwig was saying for a tax reserve was if it was decided to disband Ropama tomorrow, the Dividend Tax due on 1973 and for 1974 would become payable immediately and therefore they would have to keep that reserve.”330

The director’s long-standing friendships were also on the line. Though Cronshaw was paid in part between 1972 and 1974, Welles et al. still owed him upwards of $31,500,331 not counting 10,510 Swiss francs Cronshaw paid on Welles’s Other Wind company Avenel’s behalf.332 He wrote in November 1975:

This means for me to keep adding another year to my life at the end of which I will be left without a career and the possibility of being in a Bankruptcy Court simply to be left on the hook for Orson’s convenience. I hope you can appreciate that it is not just a question of working things out with Oya and Orson. It is a question of my future and also re-starting all over a career at an age where not many people want a 41 year old executive. It is going from a point of compassion and kindness to a point of survival.333

Things eventually recovered for all parties involved. In 1984, Welles made a short film for an ill Cronshaw where he recited the recollections of Charles Lindbergh and praised Cronshaw for being a fellow maverick. (Indeed, said maverick collected most of the material on this crazy production!)

However, this recovery meant that Ropama – and The Deep – had to go.

* * *

The Welles-Kodar documents reveal that Welles was determined to show at his 1975 AFI tribute not only scenes from The Other Side of the Wind, but also extracts from The Deep. This contradicts the anecdote that Peter Bogdanovich and the AFI wanted to show scenes from The Deep, only for Welles to refuse, accusing them of conspiring against him.334

Bosna Film had, by 1975, sold the rights to another company, Yugoslavia Film, and in January, Welles wrote a letter from Astrophore’s Paris office to the company’s Beograd representative, Mico Savkovic, saying this created difficulty getting The Deep’s footage from LTC labs.335 It seems that duping the work print would not do after all, as Welles noted in the letter that his working “positive copy” was apparently so scratched and torn by this point that new work print material was required.336 Welles notes how it would be in the interest of all parties involved to finish the film; however, his tax situation in America is so dire that, “according to my lawyers and tax experts . . . the writing-off of the film as a tax loss [would be] a good solution for my company. As an artist and film director, however, I am profoundly opposed to this attractive financial solution. I have been struggling all of this time to get the film finished because I believe in it artistically and commercially. To take the tax write-off and, in effect, to throw it in the dust bin, would be tragic.”337

A few days later, Welles wrote to Savkovic again, specifying that “In about three weeks, there is a very important television show being transmitted in the United States of America covering a special tribute which the Film Institute of America [sic] is making to my works in general.”338 They will show “the picture which I am completing now, and I would very much like to show a few interesting scenes from THE DEEP as well.”339

Welles specified that he would be editing with cutters in Paris within his letters.

A few days after writing to Savkovic, he sent a letter to Roman editor Gabrio Astori that he was dumping the AFI tribute material onto him, telling Astori that this was due to “technical mischances which I won’t bore you with.”340 Still, Welles tried making the foley work Astori was to do as easy as possible.

Welles’s letter included instructions on how to edit Other Wind’s film-within-the-film segments (the car sex scene and the scene of John Dale on the bed being harassed by an off-screen Hannaford) as well as the projection room scene.341 The sound effects to be laid in for the film were to be temporary and impressionistic, without regard for details, “in the interest of SPEED.”342

For The Deep, Welles wanted similar sound effects: “I do need very much to have enough general atmosphere and specific effects so that when we lay in the dubbed dialogue (which has already been looped) to show in America, this part of the picture will not seem dead and empty.”343

The letter continues: “we should hear the gurgle of water etc. [as JOHN pumps water out of the boat.] These pumps are old, rusty, and comic.”344 All the scenes with Harvey should have the sound of an engine . . . “Except at the time when the girl takes out the carburetor (or whatever it is!) and throws it overboard. (I am marking the beginning of this section with red crayon. And also the point where the engine starts up again.)”345

Welles closed the letter by saying, “I expect to be returning from America towards the end of the second week in February and very much hope that it will be possible for us to start the proper final editing job in Rome together right after this. . . . Please accept my warmest thanks for the great help you have already given me and also for the hoped-for miracle which I am hereby throwing into your lap.”346

Despite this work, no scenes from The Deep would be shown at the AFI celebration, but even that did not matter.

Everyone applauded Welles’s genius but no one gave him money for the film he did show, The Other Side of the Wind. He was served with a subpoena for violating California tax law immediately after he exited the stage.347 This was in part caused by his repeated inability to sign any contract to complete Other Wind with Dominique Antoine, whom he had several conflicts with, but also his tax situation going back to his ill-fated 1946 musical Around the World. Stefan Drößler noted in his Oja Kodar interview that “It seems as if the material [for The Deep] hasn’t been touched since 1975,”348 which seems to coincide with the events following the AFI Tribute.

According to Matthew Asprey Gear, the trailer Welles wanted to show at the AFI tribute wound up being shown to Michael Selsman a few months later. This was when Selsman wanted Welles for the project Sirhan, Sirhan, to be rewritten by Welles as Assassin: “Welles told Selsman the film [The Deep] was ‘in Europe in final cut – except for a sort of prologue I would like to shoot before the main titles,’ some ‘underwater second unit shots,’ and some post-syncing by Jeanne Moreau. The trailer may have simply bolstered Selsman’s belief that Welles didn’t finish his films.”349 Selsman, of course, passed on The Deep. More frustratingly, though Welles increased his involvement in Assassin, Selsman didn’t even have the money to film that project. As Asprey Gear writes, “there is little chance Assassin could have been made even if Welles hadn’t increased his financial demands.”350351

Welles likely went through with destroying The Deep in a tax write-off. Hence, as Joseph McBride reports, all two hundred reels of the negative were seized by French customs and destroyed.352

* * *

1977-Present: Aftermath

The Deep fell by the wayside when Welles’s other projects took on a greater priority. The most pressing of these was The Other Side of the Wind, both artistically and financially. Bosna Film made the film’s production a stormy sail, but it was The Other Side of the Wind that finally sunk The Deep.

In a 1982 interview with Bill Krohn, Welles spoke ruefully of The Deep: “The picture actually had a beginning and an end, but it’s too poor. It shows its poverty, and it looks like a TV movie, I think, but it’s terribly well acted. By Jeanne Moreau and by everybody. And I think I’m very funny in it, I think it’s the funniest part I’ve ever played. Sean Connery owns the rights [to the book] at this moment. He bought them from me, but his time will be pretty soon, and I’ll try to sell ’em to somebody else.”353 An unsigned copy of the contract selling the rights to Connery, dated 1 June 1979, still exists in the Welles-Kodar collection at the University of Michigan. However, the owner of the rights to Dead Calm listed is Olga Palinkas (Oja Kodar’s real name), not Welles.354 An attached contract shows that she inherited the rights from Welles on October 9, 1969, an obvious means for Welles and Kodar to avoid legal troubles.355

It would only be after Welles’s death that Kodar would sell the rights to somebody else. In January 1986, after Welles’s death, she was coaxed into selling the Dead Calm rights to the Australia-based Kennedy Miller company.356 Though she attempted to back out of the deal in late February, the lawyers for Kennedy Miller “put Kodar on notice that they will hold her accountable for their damages in the event of any breach of that agreement.”357 So, the Kennedy Miller adaptation of Dead Calm, with screenplay by Terry Hayes and direction by Philip Noyce, had a smooth-sailing production and docked in theaters in 1989.

The film reduced the main cast to three, with Sam Neill as John, Nicole Kidman as Rae, and Billy Zane as Hughie. In a strange move, Hughie is rewritten as a multiple-murdering, conventional slasher film psychopath, with John finding a locked room full of corpses instead of Russ and Lillian. Russ pushing Hughie toward a nervous breakdown now occurs before the film as opposed to the climax and is told via video footage rather conveniently found on the Orpheus. In Noyce’s version, Russ was a John Huston-esque war film photographer and sadist who wanted to capture real “faces of death” by putting Hughie and a bunch of female models into a sinking boat. However, Noyce’s decision to constantly cut away from the video footage only reinforces how much more interesting (and underdeveloped) these events are than the rest of the film. The 1989 movie’s mangling of the nuanced source material into a toned-down slasher flick has been discussed elsewhere.358

The film’s wonderful actors and use of half the source material often makes up for these changes, and it is these aspects that audiences and critics enjoy. Moreover, the film occasionally adds an inspiring tender moment like John and Rae trying to communicate via the Orpheus’s broken radio, where John can only communicate in clicks of “Yes” or “No.” However, these are ruined by emotionally manipulative moments the film needlessly throws in. For one, the film has the Ingrams go on a cruise because their baby is accidentally flung through their car window; the emotional depth of this change is never dramatically mined and is only used to explain why there is codeine on the boat (to help Rae sleep). For another, the Ingrams are given a dog whose purpose is to be killed in gory fashion during a fight between Rae and generic-psycho Hughie. The film’s ridiculous ending, tacked on after preview audiences balked at the original, consists of John shooting a flare into Hughie’s mouth, causing his head to explode.359

At least with this, the 1989 film embraces its own schlockiness within the literal last minute.

But not all is lost. There is hope that Welles’s more faithful take on the book might still be seen.

The Deep didn’t suffer the same fate as Chaplin’s and Von Sternberg’s A Woman of the Sea, which was also destroyed in a tax write-off. A decade after selling the rights, Kodar deposited all her Welles-related material at the Filmmuseum München, including two work prints for The Deep.360 The mostly black-and-white, contrasty work print material lacks most of its soundtrack and uses as musical accompaniment a live jazz recording by bassist François Rabbath. Along with Welles’s and Kodar’s voices, portions of the on-set audio can be heard on the soundtrack, including Jeanne Moreau’s and Michael Bryant’s voices. Unfortunately, the open-air noise and the rattle of the Caméflex ruin the scene and make one yearn for a completed track for such a dialogue-heavy film. Though the film will likely never be completed as Welles wanted it to be (unless a complete, mixed color work print miraculously turns up somewhere), the Munich work print material provides at least a glimpse at the now-lost thriller.

* * *

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Welles in F For Fake, “nothing is ever simple, least of all the larceny.”

If nothing else can be taken away from this whole saga, it is that Charles Higham’s malicious idea that Welles was “above all, flawed with a fear of completion”361 is complete nonsense. Unlike Orson Welles – Solo and Don Quixote, The Deep and The Other Side of the Wind were projects of considerable monetary and artistic investment (as would have been The Dreamers), and thus films whose completion Welles obviously placed great priority on. Anyone who was not a maverick would have given up on such a troubled production as The Deep by the time its star died in 1973, but not Welles. For all his flaws, Welles was not a man with a fear of completion, but rather one who would hold on to finishing his work to the absolute breaking point. At the same time, the demise of The Deep shows that Welles had limits. He knew when a project was absolutely beyond recovery, and by 1975, with all his other troubles, The Deep almost certainly was.

But perhaps there’s another moral, a practical one for independent or low-budget filmmakers to remember: Never, ever shoot a movie at sea.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

Anderson, Ariston. “Venice Film Festival: Lost Orson Welles Film to Get Pre-Opening Showcase.” The Hollywood Reporter. 7 August 2015. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/venice-film-festival-2015-lost-813819/.

Aniballi, Alessandro. “Intervista a Mauro Bonanni.” Quinlan: Rivista di Critica Cinematografica. 12 June 2015. http://quinlan.it/2015/06/12/intervista-a-mauro-bonanni/.

Ciccone, Nicolas “‘Sacred Beasts’ fragments – Lost first version of ‘The Other Side of the Wind.’” Wellesnet. 16 October 2019. https://www.wellesnet.com/sacred-beasts-lost-other-side-wind/.

French, Lawrence. “Orson Welles as a special guest on The David Frost Show, May 12, 1970.” Wellesnet. 14 January 2013. https://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-as-a-special-guest-on-the-david-frost-show-may-12-1970/.

Gear, Matthew Asprey. “At Sea, In Port, Up the River: Orson Welles’s Conrad Adaptations.” Bright Lights Film Journal. 27 December 2019. https://brightlightsfilm.com/at-sea-in-port-up-the-river-orson-welless-conrad-adaptations/.

Gear, Matthew Asprey. “Orson Welles and the Death of Sirhan Sirhan: Part I: The Conspirators.” Bright Lights Film Journal. 20 February 2015. https://brightlightsfilm.com/orson-welles-and-the-death-of-sirhan-sirhan-part-i-the-conspirators/#.YRLq1R17knU.

Gear, Matthew Asprey. “Orson Welles and The Death of Sirhan Sirhan: Part II: The Safe House.” Bright Lights Film Journal. 26 February 2015, https://brightlightsfilm.com/orson-welles-and-the-death-of-sirhan-sirhan-part-ii-the-safe-house/.

Kelly, Ray. “Dark voyages: ‘The Deep’ and ‘Dead Calm’.” Wellesnet. 11 November 2015. http://www.wellesnet.com/dark-voyages-the-deep-and-dead-calm/.

Kelly, Ray. “‘Don Quixote’ Dispute Ends: Negative Handed Over to Oja Kodar.” Wellesnet. 2 February 2018. https://www.wellesnet.com/don-quixote-oja-kodar/.

Kelly, Ray. “Lost Treasure: Orson Welles’s Aborted Treasure Island.” Wellesnet. 6 September 2016. https://www.wellesnet.com/lost-treasure-orson-welles-aborted-treasure-island/.

Patton, Carolyn. “Adventure Story.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel. 4 June 1995. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1995-06-04-9506010481-story.html.

Books

Anile, Alberto. Orson Welles in Italy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Benamou, Catherine. It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Berthomé, Jean-Pierre, and François Thomas. Orson Welles at Work. New York: Phaidon Press, 2008.

Bogdanovich, Peter, and Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles. Edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Hello Americans. New York: Viking, 2006.

Cobos, Juan. Orson Welles: España Como Obsesión. Valencia, Spain: Ediciones Documentas Filmoteca, 1993.

Dillmann-Kühn, Claudia. Artur Brauner und die CCC. Frankfurt: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1990.

Fraser, John. Thrillers. Self-published, 2002.

Graver, Gary, and Andrew J. Rausch. Making Movies with Orson Welles. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Higham, Charles. Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Hill, Roger. One Man’s Time and Chance: A Memoir of Eighty Years, 1895-1975. Self-published, 1977.

Jackson, Carlton. Picking Up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt. Popular Press, 1994.

Karp, Josh. Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of “The Other Side of the Wind.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

Leaming, Barbara. Orson Welles. New York: Viking, 1985.

McBride, Joseph. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts. Edited by James Naremore and Sidney Gottlieb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018.

Stone, Paulene. One Tear is Enough. London: Michael Joseph, 1975.

Towers, Harry Alan. Mr. Towers of London: A Life in Show Business. Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2013. Kindle.

The Unknown Orson Welles. Edited by Stefan Drößler. Munich: Filmmuseum München & belleville Verlag, 2005.

Williams, Charles. Dead Calm. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2012. Kindle edition.

Correspondence and Production Materials

Astrophore and Avenel (1973-1977): Loose pre-production, production, and post-production materials (1972-1979). Box 8. Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Films

Kodar, Oja, and Vassili Silovic, dirs. Orson Welles: The One-Man Band. 1995; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD.

Neville, Morgan, dir. They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Los Angeles: Netflix, 2018. Streaming.

Noyce, Phillip, dir. Dead Calm. Sydney: Kennedy Miller, 1989.

Welles, Orson, dir. F For Fake. 1973; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD.

Welles, Orson, dir. Filming “The Trial.” Unfinished and unreleased film, footage shot in 1981. Currently found on YouTube channel “Akash Chandra” as of 25 July 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbUe-bM6bXg.

Welles, Orson, dir. The Immortal Story. 1968; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2016. DVD.

Legal Materials

Contract (Ugovor) Between Ropama Film A.G. and Bosna Film, 6 October 1967. Miscellaneous: Battle on the Neretva River (1967-1968). Box 1. Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

The Deep/Dead Reckoning: Legal Rights Materials “Conversations with Sean Connery.” 1979. Box 3, Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Draft of Contract between Ropama Film A.G. and Jeanne Moreau “of care” Gerard Lebovici, undated. Business and Financial: Contracts – Jeanne Moreau (1967 [sic] and undated). Box 1. Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Other

Kurant, Willy, Bernard Payen, Agnès Godard, and Philippe Garrel. “Willy Kurant Par Willy Kurant, Une Leçon de Cinéma.” Discussion. Cinémathèque Française, 4 May 2013. https://www.cinematheque.fr/video/1605.html.

Lieberson, Sanford. Email to the author, 23 April 2019.

Tikhomiroff, Nicolas. Contact Prints of Nicolas Tikhomiroff Film, 1967-1970. The Deep/Dead Reckoning (1967-1970). Box 3. Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. “Here follow some general notes about the system I like to use for editing a film,” 11 December 1967. Production and Post-Production: Notes and correspondence (1967-1969 and undated, folder 1 of 2). Box 1. Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. “Memorandum re Sequestration of Film by BOSNA FILM,” 21 November 1967. Miscellaneous: Battle on the Neretva River (1967-1968). Box 1. Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. Recommendation Note for Vlado Balvanovic, 18 December 1967. From Correspondence (1967-1971): Others (1967-1969 and Undated). Box 1. Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. “Statement on Ropama Film,” undated but probably late ’60s. Ropama Film A.G. Box 41, Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Screenplays

Welles, Orson. The Deep/Dead Reckoning Scripts/Drafts. Box 29. Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. “Dialogue Changes for 1969 [Dead Reckoning] Re-Shoot,” undated but presumably 1969-1970. Scripts. Box 1. Orson Welles Dead Reckoning/The Deep Papers (1966-1975, bulk 1967-1971). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. Orson’s Bag (1968-1970) Scripts: Draft Pages, various scenes (April 10 – September 11, 1969). Box 17. Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. The Other Side of the Wind: Draft “First Version” (March 15, 1971-March 17, 1971) and Draft “2nd Version” (March 22, 1971-April 12, 1971), unpublished screenplay drafts [2 documents]. Film. Box 3. Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. The Other Side of the Wind: Draft [1971?]. Film. Box 4. Orson Welles-Oja Kodar Papers. University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

Welles, Orson. Santo Spirito [Final?] Draft, unpublished screenplay. Box 3. Orson Welles – Oja Kodar Papers (1910-2000, bulk 1965-1985). University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library).

 * * *

The author is grateful to Kate Hutchens and Phil Hallmann of the special collections at the University of Michigan, Welles scholar and paisan Massimiliano Studer, and Wellesnet for all their helpful advice.