This 58-page Orson Welles memo should be every director’s handbook

Fif­teen years after the release of Cit­i­zen Kane, Orson Welles’ Hol­ly­wood career was stalling. A 1948 pro­duc­tion of Mac­beth writ­ten, direct­ed by and star­ring Welles was a com­mer­cial flop. A 1955 film Mr Arkadin, released under two dif­fer­ent names and in sev­en dif­fer­ent ver­sions, was named by Welles as the ​“biggest dis­as­ter” of his life.

Touch of Evil was billed as a come­back. A cop dra­ma set on the Mex­i­can bor­der, with Charl­ton Hes­ton (in black­face, no less) in the lead role and Welles him­self as his foil, the film was sup­posed to sweep Hol­ly­wood off its feet and kick­start Welles-mania all over again.

Instead, it was released as a B‑movie in a dou­ble fea­ture, billed below Hen­ry Keller’s The Female Ani­mal. The rough cut that Welles deliv­ered to Uni­ver­sal was sub­stan­tial­ly changed and re-edit­ed. Addi­tion­al footage was shot under a new direc­tor – Keller, of all peo­ple. If ever you’ve ever felt bad for the David and Goliath plight of today’s block­buster direc­tors, then spare a thought for Welles, who was banned from the edit­ing suite entirely.

The exact rea­sons for the fra­cas are murky, though Welles had a habit of let­ting the edit­ing process drag on – Touch of Evil’s rough cut took over three months, and he told Cahi­er du Cin­e­ma in 1958 that he could ​“work for­ev­er” in the cut­ting room. It’s easy to see how he might pro­voke a studio’s ire.

True to form, Welles came out swing­ing. Five months after first receiv­ing the rough cut, Uni­ver­sal received a 58-page typed memo, addressed to the studio’s Vice Pres­i­dent, that took apart the final prod­uct of Touch of Evil, scene by scene and shot by shot.

The memo is a with­er­ing rebut­tal that attests to both Welles’ per­son­al devo­tion and the scale of atten­tion he gave to every aspect of his work. ​“The orig­i­nal edit­ing of this par­tic­u­lar lit­tle sec­tion was real­ly quite effec­tive and I hon­est­ly can’t see what, from any point of view, has been accom­plished by tear­ing it up and re-build­ing it in this form,” he writes of the deci­sion to add a three-word line back into the open­ing scene. ​“In terms of clar­i­ty, noth­ing is gained; con­sid­er­able excite­ment has been lost and an unpleas­ant line (which I regret hav­ing writ­ten) has been put back in.”

Welles picks up on every­thing from light­ing adjust­ments to changes in the sound die­ge­sis. His sys­tem­at­ic take-down might seem pet­ty and self-impor­tant, were it not for the con­vinc­ing lengths he goes to jus­ti­fy each com­plaint. The height of his knit-pick­ing comes in the face of cor­rupt­ed con­ti­nu­ity. He describes a shot where his own char­ac­ter, Hank Quin­lan, is ​“look­ing in one direc­tion and then almost imme­di­ate­ly in the oth­er.” He also writes that ​“the sec­ond direc­tion is the cor­rect one and pre­pares for his rise from the chair.” And with tongue-bit­ing self-restraint he con­cludes: ​“It should cer­tain­ly be fixed.”

Of one par­tic­u­lar attempt to splice uncon­nect­ed footage, Welles writes ​“the weld­ing of these two parts has been man­aged with as much skill as the resources in actu­al film made pos­si­ble, and I con­grat­u­late who­ev­er made the attempt. It remains, how­ev­er, just that: an attempt.” Not yet sat­ed, he twists the knife by return­ing a crit­i­cism clear­ly lev­elled at him­self in the past: ​“The sort of edit­ing it was nec­es­sary to resort to in the attempt to force these two parts of a sequence into the form of a sin­gle scene can only be described in the same way: it is sim­ply not ​‘com­mer­cial’.”

The memo ends with the earnest plea ​“that you con­sent to this brief visu­al pat­tern to which I gave so many long days of work.”

So detailed and so exas­per­at­ed were his notes that in 1998 a new ver­sion of Touch of Evil was released, re-edit­ed in accor­dance with Welles’ wish­es. The restora­tion was sup­port­ed by Uni­ver­sal and removed as much of the addi­tion­al footage as pos­si­ble. The open­ing sequence was restored to its orig­i­nal glo­ry, with­out track­ing cred­its over­laid. It’s now regard­ed as one of the great­est in all of cinema.

Stu­dio influ­ence is a hall­mark of our times. It’s an inevitable fea­ture of big bud­get film­mak­ing cap­tured so chill­ing­ly and comed­ical­ly in David Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, by the face­less ech­e­lons of Hol­ly­wood who try to crow­bar an unknown actress into Adam Kesher’s pic­ture with­out explanation.

The com­par­isons between Welles’ plight on Touch of Evil and those of var­i­ous con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ers draw them­selves. Though it’s unlike­ly we’ll be treat­ed to a director’s cut of David Ayer’s much-maligned Sui­cide Squad in 2056, Welles’ fan­tas­ti­cal­ly feisty memo, and the time­less mas­ter­piece it even­tu­al­ly spawned, serves as a handy reminder of the virtues of stubbornness.