The Films of Orson Welles
THE FILMS OF ORSON WELLES THE FILMS OF ORSON UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Charles Higham BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES. LONDON University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1970 by The Regents of the University of California First Printing, 1970 Second Printing, 1971 First Paperback Printing, 1971 Second Paperback Printing, 1973 ISBN: 0-520-01567-3 cloth 0-520-02048-0 paper Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-92677 Printed in the United States of America FOR DAVID BRADLEY AND TOM WEBSTER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful, first of all, to the chancellor and faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and to the Regents of the University, whose offer of a Regents' Professorship made the writing of this book possible; to David Bradley, who lent me his guesthouse and, most indispensably, his telephone during much of my stay in Hollywood; to Bill Collins, who provided me with opportunities to examine Welles's films frame by frame; to Richard Wilson, who filled in many fascinating details and gave me access to his incomparable vault of Wellesiana, devotedly preserved for thirty years, including the complete set of Mercury files; to Joseph Cotten, who lent me his marvelous scrapbooks; to Arthur Knight, who showed me The Fountain of Youth; to Nathan Scheinwald for The Trial, Philip Jones for Chimes at Midnight, Max Nosseck and Altura and Pacific Films for The Immortal Story; to Vernon Harbin of RKO-Radio Pictures, for help with musical copyright titles in the Kane newsreel. I also owe a debt of a kind to Bernard Herrmann who, after telling me that any interest in Kane today was an absurdity, reluctantly informed me that the libretto of his fake opera Salammbô sprang from an "obscure work of Racine," thus involving me in days of searching until I found it in Racine's most famous play.
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