Saturday, December 18, 2010

Wellesnet.com


The internet has been a godsend to the legacy of Orson Welles, allowing for the accelerated development of the community of fanatics devoted to his work. The leader in all things Welles is Wellesnet.com, a meeting ground for the truly obsessive. It's latest post is a reprint of Andrew Sarris's spot-on criticism of "Raising Kane" Pauline Kael's abominable hatch job on Welles. Read it here.

The site also has a page on Facebook which contains an unbeatable collection of photos, stills, and posters. Recently they posted this scene that Orson Welles cut out of his 1962 masterpiece The Trial. The sound has been lost to us, unfortunately, but some titles have been added to approximate the script. It's a fascinating glimpse of Welles's process. A constant experimenter, he wrote and shot this scene only to cut it out after the film had already premiered. This is evidence, as Welles once told Peter Bogdanovich, that he hated to watch his own films because he always had the urge to tinker with them.

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