Reportage“Hollywood in Franco’s Spain” (5/6). Fascinated by Spain and bullfighting in 1933, banished from Hollywood at the dawn of the 1950s, the filmmaker of “Citizen Kane” multiplied his often chaotic projects in Madrid. His adaptation of Cervantes’ novel obsesses him all his life, he will leave hundreds of hours of filming without final result.
Once again, Orson Welles (1915-1985) thinks too big and misses the deadline. So, undoubtedly to calm an anger promised to him, knowing his reputation for indecrottable perfectionist, he sends this letter, dated April 13, 1965, to his Spanish producer, Emiliano Piedra, whose first project is: “Dear Emiliano, we have really had no luck in the last few days. Easy scenes took a lot longer than expected. We had to redo them several times, writes the American filmmaker in broken Spanish. Please believe that these extra hours and costs are not the result of a whim or overzealousness on my part. “
Emiliano Piedra discovers what so many others before him already know. Producing an Orson Welles film is complicated, adventurous, risky. Their common project is Falstaff (1965). This jester character invented by Shakespeare, fond of good food, wine and women, boastful too, the filmmaker has worn for almost thirty years – he looks a little like him. It is one of the rare films that he manages to finish after being ostracized from Hollywooad at the end of the 1940s. Always in search of money, superimposing projects, he finds favor with the young Spanish producer enthusiastic about funding to carry out this digest of Shakespearean tragedies.
After the failure of The Lady of Shanghai (1947) and his divorce from Rita Hayworth, the director of Citizen Kane (1941) cut ties with Hollywood and began a long stay in Europe, which lasted about twenty years – except for a brief interlude in 1958 when he was entrusted with the directing of Thirst for evil. Coming out of his movie ruined Macbeth (1948), Welles also flees the American tax authorities and McCarthyism’s witch-hunters, determined to make him pay for his insolence and his support for progressive causes.
On the set of Falstaff, in Spain, with Jeanne Moreau, John Gielguld and Margareth Rutherford, Emiliano Piedra notes that“Orson is not following any plan. It’s all in his head. [Il] born [s’]waited there[t] not “. He will recount his surprise a few years later, in an interview on Spanish television, evoking the consequences: a “Film that lasts five months longer than expected”, between the years 1964 and 1965, for a cost also doubled, that is to say 60 million pesetas. He then tries to avoid bankruptcy, like so many before him, when the first investors of Falstaff, the Spanish star Marujita Diaz, queen of light musicals triumphant under Francoism, and her husband, the Venezuelan impresario Espartaco Santoni, throw in the towel. It is true that the team has something to surprise. Marujita Diaz funding Welles, it’s a bit as if a star of the Folies Bergère was putting money into a film by Jean-Luc Godard.
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