Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
Who Makes Movies?
By Peter Bogdanovich
In response to Who Makes the Movies?
(November 25, 1976)
To the Editors:
Anybody who takes on Gore Vidal is crazy, and the fact that I'm an admiring friend will do nothing to protect me from the consequences of this letter, but a couple of things he said in his piece [NYR, November 25] about screenwriters vs. directors are outrageous and even he must know better. I assume he was in a bad mood when he wrote it, or at least part of it. The part about Orson Welles.
It's not that I disagree with him about directors often getting too much credit for the quality of pictures, but that credit shouldn't automatically go to writers. Movies are a strange medium and a good film can sometimes be attributed to almost anyone who might have been on the set. Producers have been responsible for good ones, certainly writers, some editors, a lot of actors, here and there a cameraman, occasionally the composer. Good pictures have been made by bad directors, and great scripts have been turned into lousy pictures. Of course there are poor scripts that have become great films thanks to great direction. I know that Gore agrees with me on this because we've discussed it.
Why, therefore, he decided to join ranks with Pauline Kael over Citizen Kane is beyond me—repeating all those tired old ideas about Gregg Toland's stylistic influence and Herman Mankiewicz's primacy in the screenwriting. Miss Kael's book on Kane came out in 1971, and the following year Esquire published "The Kane Mutiny," an article in which I carefully, perhaps exhaustively, disproved most of Miss Kael's essential "facts." This piece has recently been reprinted in Ronald Gottesman's collection, Focus on Orson Welles (Prentice-Hall, 1976). Miss Kael has never responded to this article. Perhaps Mr. V. never read it, but if he hasn't he should now.
In any event, his specific comments on O.W. are pretty silly and not worthy of a fellow as smart as Gore Vidal. For instance, the one that said, "Gregg Toland's camerawork…[links] Citizen Kane to Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives in a way that cannot link Kane to, say, Welles's Confidential Report." Clever of Gore not only to pick an extremely unfamiliar Welles picture but also to use the British release title instead of its (correct) American one, Mr. Arkadin. This way he leaves himself open to few arguments since most of his readers probably haven't heard of, much less seen, that movie under either title. If they had, however—if we could run Kane, Arkadin, and Best Years for an impartial audience right now—I think Mr. V. would be embarrassed. Not only do Arkadin and Kane have identical themes and a similar construction, but their photographic style is the same. If Best Years looks like any Welles film, it does slightly resemble The Magnificent Ambersons, which was made three years before Best Years and wasn't shot by Gregg Toland at all. The obvious truth for anyone who has seen even two or three Welles pictures is that they all have a particularly identifiable photographic personality (and only Kane was shot by Toland). This little idea of Mr. Vidal's was also received from Miss Kael and I addressed myself to it at some length in the old Esquire piece. I do wish he'd read it.
Now I'm getting in a foul mood because I'm reading this sentence again: "The badness of so many of Orson Welles's post-Mankiewicz films ought to be instructive." That's another of those glib, sweeping statements that play right into the reader's lack of information and is written so as to presume a general critical atmosphere, which in this case is not just superficial, it is decidedly untrue, which makes it all the more offensive and irresponsible on Gore's part. Almost everyone with any sense knows that Orson Welles is a great director and that Herman Mankiewicz was a talented hack, but for the record, here is a list of the movies Orson Welles has directed since Citizen Kane:
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Stranger
The Lady from Shanghai
Macbeth
Othello
Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)
Touch of Evil
The Trial
Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff)
The Immortal Story
F for Fake
And these are all of Herman Mankiewicz's post-Welles films:
Rise and Shine
Pride of the Yankees
Stand by for Action
Christmas Holiday
The Enchanted Cottage
The Spanish Main
A Woman's Secret
The Pride of St. Louis
These acerbic comments you dash off, Gore, are actually read by people—and they can hurt people. If we're going to give opinions, let them at least be educated ones.
Peter Bogdanovich
New York City