The Shadow of Ernest Hemingway: On Crazy Weather, Orson Welles’s Unpublished 1973 Bullfighting Screenplay

The unfinished projects to which Welles devoted his energies began in July 1961. This was exactly twenty-five years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the year in which the director had the opportunity to meet Hemingway. Working on the story between September 1973 and January 1974, Welles probably viewed the screenplay as more of an intellectual exercise, something to help him reflect on his ambiguous and turbulent relationship with the Nobel Prize winner, than as a real film project to be brought to the screen.

* * *

Introduction

Since the 1960s, Orson Welles had devoted himself to a project set in the world of bullfighting. Following the death of Ernest Hemingway on July 2, 1961, the director had thought of writing a screenplay centered on a Hemingwayesque figure. This was The Sacred Monsters, a project centered on a film director with a Hemingway personality. Welles’s hopes to produce this screenplay were half-dashed in 1966, following the commercial failure of an Italian film with a bullfighting theme, Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965), directed by Francesco Rosi.1 Despite the abandonment of this project, the theme of bullfights always remained in the director’s mind. Hope for the project was rekindled at the beginning of the ’70s when Welles received funding from Bert Schneider, the producer of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), to make a new film, entitled The Other Side of the Wind. ((In Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006/2022), 137-138.)) In this new project, the director decided to recycle many of the narrative elements already described in Sacred Monsters, but moved the action from the world of bullfights to the New Hollywood.2 However, the production of the new film put Welles under great strain, since he had to find new financiers for the film. During the making of F for Fake (1973), in fact, the director came into contact with a Spanish producer, Andrés Gómez. The new financier convinced the director to move the production of The Other Side of the Wind to Spain. During a hiatus, while awaiting new funding for the film, Welles was able to stay in Spain for a few months.

Andrés Gómez’s inertia during these months yielded no activity on the film. Still, the lull allowed Welles to get to work with his partner, Oja Kodar, on an unpublished screenplay entitled Crazy Weather. The Australian scholar Matthew Asprey Gear researched this project at the University of Michigan’s archives a few years ago,3 while the National Cinema Museum of Turin also owns some copies of the screenplay.

The unfinished projects to which Welles devoted his energies began in July 1961. This was exactly twenty-five years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the year in which the director had the opportunity to meet Hemingway. Working on the story between September 1973 and January 1974, Welles probably viewed the screenplay as more of an intellectual exercise, something to help him reflect on his ambiguous and turbulent relationship with the Nobel Prize winner, than as a real film project to be brought to the screen.

The Onset of Crazy Weather

Toward the end of 1973, Welles was in Paris editing The Other Side of the Wind. Oja Kodar, who had participated in writing the script and shooting the film, began writing another story set in Spain.4 Intrigued by the project, the director asked to have an active role in the writing and suggested his partner include bullfighting references in the story. According to Oja Kodar, this was how they began writing Crazy Weather5: a late, incomplete screenplay that Welles and his partner wanted to dedicate to Ernest Hemingway.

Candid of Welles, 1960s. Editor’s collection

This unpublished and incomplete work was rediscovered by Matthew Asprey Gear. During an investigation of the Welles archives at the University of Michigan,6 Gear found a 144-page document combining parts of the treatment and the actual script, which he described in a 2016 book.7 For this essay, the author went through the Welles archives at the National Cinema Museum of Turin, which had other copies of the screenplay, including a draft of 150 pages. The inventory, drawn up in 1998 by Carla Ceresa, has ten documents with the caption “Sceneggiatura senza titolo. s.d. personaggi (in English: “Untitled script – undated – characters”): Amparo, Jim Foster, the Conde; Maria Teresa, Mercedes, Don Eduardo, Senora Masterson.”8

As was the case with Jake Hannaford in both The Sacred Monsters and The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s interest was in creating a character capable of displaying the worse and less hagiographic sides of Ernest Hemingway. The male protagonist of Crazy Weather is Jim Foster, an American pseudo-intellectual, who lives with his wife Amparo in Spain. Like an eternal tourist, Jim is childishly in love with Spain’s habits and customs. Despite having lived in Spain for a long time, he knows only a few Spanish idioms and seems completely resistant to learning the local language. He is apparently obsessed with his masculinity, as his inevitable misogyny shows, and is a frequent visitor to bullfights. Welles, as always, is able to outline in prose a profile of his protagonist’s attitudes, noting with caustic sarcasm how he has the worst defects of the typical American:

He lives and works in Spain, and he’s fallen head over heels with everything Spanish. . . . Spain has a very strong appeal for this sort of American; their special vision of the so-called Spanish way of life seems to combine the prestigious dignity of an antique civilization with something of the tense simplicity of a good cowboy movie. Jim Foster never read Mérimée, but he’s well-grounded in Hemingway – a key to his character, he cherishes Spain as a ‘man’s country. […] The corrida has never had so many fans among non-Spaniards. Hundreds of foreigners follow the bulls with studious enthusiasm from the beginning to the end of one temporada after another. Jim, of course, is one of these.9

Although the writing style of this text is commendable, it should be emphasized that this extract provides no information about the reasons why the protagonist moved to Spain. There is, however, another version of Jim’s introduction in a document at Turin. The document has the appearance of a treatment and is very useful because it shows in detail how the plot of the story was constructed by the authors: All the essential components of the story are presented, giving the reader a general but clear picture of the way the screenplay will develop. In a short page, a scene is set for the reader (and would have been for the viewer) showing the geographical context of the story, the areas in which the married couple move, and above all the colonial characteristics of his main character:

This is a summer story. It happens during three summer days and deals with a climactic moment in what might be called the summer of a marriage. The wife is younger than the husband; but both are young and the marriage is six years old. This is one of those moments when the marital partners begin to suspect that each one knows a bit too much about the other and a great deal too little. A normal enough situation and even less surprising since these two have come together from such separate worlds. Jim Foster is a young businessman stationed in Madrid. Americans living abroad can be divided, in general terms, into two separate categories. The majority spend their days and nights hermetically sealed in their own small American colony. Any contacts with the “natives” are limited to waiters, cab-drivers, domestic servants and, of course, to such business communications as may be unavoidable. But a romantic strain lives on in the American character, and this finds expression in that minority among expatriates who do indeed make quite determined (if futile) efforts to participate in the social and cultural life of the country where they find themselves.10

Hemingway, late 1939. Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

These two extracts highlight what was to be shown in the project’s prologue. It also shows how Welles’s goal was to dismantle the myth of Ernest Hemingway once again. In other words, Welles seemed to believe that his previous Hemingwayesque character, Jake Hannaford in The Sacred Monsters and The Other Side of the Wind, did not sufficiently communicate Welles’s complex ideas about Hemingway. This might explain why the filmmaker devoted his energies to writing a new screenplay that would not only once again be about Spain and bullfights, but also tell the story of a character who indirectly resembled Ernest Hemingway, as Matthew Asprey Gear subtly suggested in his monograph.11 Actually, the target of this unpublished screenplay could also have been any generic American citizen, as much in love with Spain for its exoticism as he was ignorant of its culture. It does not seem, however, that the writing of Crazy Weather took place during the editing of The Other Side of the Wind.

After the prologue, the script focuses on the dynamics of the American couple, who are getting ready for the intense period of celebrations linked to the bullfighting season. To make the story more interesting and engaging, Oja Kodar decided to include a third character who bursts in on the boring tranquility of the married couple. During their car trip to the Spanish capital, the couple has an unexpected run-in with a strange young man, a permanent resident in an unspecified village on the outskirts of Madrid, when he is accidentally injured by Amparo’s car. She promptly helps him and offers him a ride. The screenplay focuses mainly on some peculiarities of the boy’s character, described as particularly arrogant and with an aggressive sexuality.12) As Asprey Gear notes, Crazy Weather takes a new narrative turn thanks to the kid, whose behavior manages, without great effort, to endanger the couple’s relationship. In fact, the young man likes to put Jim in trouble. Initially, he taunts Jim by highlighting the latter’s misogyny, but later, he sets his sight on Amparo, whom he flirts with brazenly. As the group heads toward Madrid, the boy cooks up a ruse to empty the car’s gas tank, forcing the group to interrupt the journey and stop the car near a river. Jim decides to leave his wife and the young man to go to the nearest gas station. During his absence, Amparo and the boy drive away from the car waiting for Jim to return. The script suggests without explicitly saying so that Amparo and the young man have sex on the banks of the river. Jim’s return with the petrol can allows the group to leave for Madrid. The journey continues until the young man decides to abandon the car at the end of a violent argument with Jim. At this point, the couple finally manage to reach Madrid.13 Heading toward the Plaza de Toros, Amparo is overwhelmed by the crowd of participants in the fair. After this, the script continues the story by moving the action into a hotel in Madrid, where the spouses have booked a room to watch the bullfight. The couple are shown to be at odds due to jealousies and mutual betrayals. At this point, the story takes a turn that was most likely written by Welles. By chance, the couple encounter a famous bullfighter very well known to Welles. The scene takes place inside the hotel room where the couple are preparing to go out for dinner. Jim, just out of the shower, hears voices coming from outside his bedroom door:

He’s just turning on the shower when he hears, from the other side of the door, a sudden babble of voices– He sticks his head out to see what this is all about. Their bedroom has been occupied by a whole crowd of men. The tooled leather case which carries the matador’s sword gives Jim the clue to what has happened. These people are part of a bullfighter’s entourage. Impressarios, assistants, sword handlers and all the rest [. . .] When Jim sees who he is– (his idol, Dominguín) his reaction to all this changes quickly from that of the frustrated lover to the awestruck aficionado, the invincible charm of Luis Miguel hastening the process. He even goes so far as to offer to try and find some other place for himself. But this, of course, is not a really serious suggestion. For today, the maestro’s welfare must take precedence over everything else, as Jim is quick to realize. “If you’ll just give us a minute,” Jim says, “we’ll be dressed and out of your way.”14

Poster. Editor’s collection

Welles’s scene takes a turn for the surreal with the sudden arrival of a swarm of characters who help the bullfighter dress for his entry into the arena. This small detail of the scene has clear analogies with one of the final sequences of Rosi’s Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965), set in the world of the corrida. In fact, Welles’s description is almost identical to the scene that Rosi had visually created in the final part of his film. The connection with the Italian film, however, does not end with a simple reference to one of the highlights of Il momento della verità. The bullfighter Jim addresses is Luis Miguel Dominguín, who was the link that allowed Francesco Rosi to meet Orson Welles in Spain in the early 1960s:

Lucia Bosè, che conoscevo, abitava a Madrid con Dominguín, avevano la casa che era come la mia qui a Roma, sempre piena di gente. Il fratello di Luis, Domingo Dominguín, faceva il procuratore di tori. Era comunista, in gioventù aveva fatto il torero ed era amico intimo di Orson Welles, impegnato anche lui nella preparazione di un film sulle corride. Una sera andammo a cena io, Dominguín e Welles, a cui erano piaciuti moltissimo Le mani sulla città e Salvatore Giuliano. Parlammo a lungo. Quando cominciai il film, so che disse a Dominguín: “Ma come? lo sono qui da mesi e mesi per sapere tutto della corrida, dei tori, dei toreri e non sono ancora pronto. Questo Rosi invece arriva e in quattro e quattr’otto comincia a girare il film?”15

It seems Welles wanted to realize his dream of a film set in the bullfighting world, as he was unable to do either in The Sacred Monsters, due to Rosi’s film, or in The Other Side of the Wind, which he had decided to set in the world of Hollywood cinema. The script, which does not have a definitive conclusion, is interrupted with a last scene where the boy is gored by a bull and once again lashes out against Jim and his uncritical, childish, almost fetishistic attitude toward Spain. Crazy Weather ends with these sarcastic words:

He’s got these picturesque notions, and a mind like a postcard. For good old Jim, Spain is granddaddy’s land. The clock stopped here somewhere in the middle of a Victorian novel.16

Even if Oja Kodar and Orson Welles failed to complete the Crazy Weather project, the suspicion remains that perhaps this script represents yet another attempt by the American filmmaker to take up the themes of The Sacred Monsters, focusing the story on an American man fascinated by Spain and the world of bullfighting. There is no objective evidence that Welles’s interest was in staging the dark side of Ernest Hemingway, but it seems just a bit curious that the director had decided to dedicate yet another story to the bullfighting environment. The line between admiration and envy for the narrative talent and the reckless life of the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) has always been blurred with Welles, who had mixed feelings about Hemingway since the days of the Popular Front and the Spanish Earth project (1938). It is clear that Hemingway inspired the creation of the characters in many of Welles’s works set in Spain and was the model for the main protagonist of The Other Side of the Wind.

 * * *

The author is grateful to Carla Ceresa and Mauro Genovese of the Welles Archive at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin, Welles scholar and paisan Nicolas Ciccone, and Gary Morris for all their helpful advice.