Tag: Orson Welles

On Idle Gossip

Is there anything more delicious or more dangerous that gossip? A rumor that takes wings and soars over our ears, passing from one throat to the other, each telling of the tale making the story only slightly more luscious and salacious and opprobrious. We’ve all played the whisper game in school, where a simple sentence is told to the person next to you, who passes it on to the next, and so on, so that at the end, the sentence rarely bares any resemblance to the original message.

Rose Oettinger found a way to make idle gossip pay, and pay well. But she didn’t start out that way. Rose was born in Illinois in 1881, and she wanted to be a serious journalist at a time when most middle class women rarely worked outside the home. She wrote for her local newspaper for a time after her schooling, given stories by the editor about weddings and societal events. From there, she learned how to write scenarios for silent films in the ‘teens and early ’20s. She also published a book detailing how to write for the movies. It was a modest success. Ruth then got a plumb job writing about film for a Chicago paper. She loved that work. But then, the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, bought the paper and fired Rose because he didn’t think film warranted news coverage.

Out of a job, Rose moved to New York and continued writing about film for a paper there. Part of her job included conducting interviews of up-and-coming movie starlets and young stars, as film journalists today have to do as well. And Rose was good at ferreting out those interesting tidbits of information that the public wanted to know about their new favorite film actors. She said it helped that she was from a small town, and that gave her an advantage over her city-raised competitors. She knew what small-town America was wanting to know, and she gave it to them.

One of those starlets Rose interviewed was a lovely girl named Marion. Like Rose, Marion came from fairly humble origins. She had been a chorus girl on Broadway for a time before her big break came and she was able to star in a feature film. Sadly, most film critics panned Marion’s performance, a mark that could have been a career killer for a new starlet. But Rose liked Marion from the get-go, and the two became good friends as a result of the interview Rose conducted. When she wrote her article about Marion’s film, Rose told people to give the girl a chance, that she saw great things for Marion’s future. Because of that glowing interview, the film producer who had backed Marion’s film became a cheerleader for Rose’s writing career. That patronage led to Rose being given a job writing about film for a newspaper in Hollywood at the rate of almost $2000 per week in today’s money.

Then, in 1924, Rose was invited on a short trip down the southern California coast on a private yacht, the Oneida. Onboard that boat on that trip were some famous people, including the legendary Charlie Chaplin, famous (at the time) producer/director Thomas Ince, and Rose’s actress friend, Marion. Something happened on that boat, but we aren’t sure what it was exactly. The result was that Thomas Ince was dead. What many people believe is that the owner of the boat, a wealthy businessman and Rose’s boss, shot Ince in a jealous rage. You see, what we know for sure is that the boat’s owner was in love with the much younger Marion. It has been speculated that the wealthy older man flew into a jealous rage when he thought Chaplin was flirting with Marion, and he shot at the silent film star but hit Ince instead. The inquest that followed said that Ince died from heart failure, but his body was cremated before a full inquiry could be made.

Whatever happened, Rose and the others on board never said. What resulted is that shortly after the trip, Rose was given a hefty raise and a life-time unbreakable contract if she would write gossipy stories about Hollywood’s stars. Rose agreed. Of course, you don’t know her as Rose Oettinger (if you know her at all). No, she wrote under her first name and her married name.

Oh, and that wealthy man who was in love with Marion? He was the same newspaper tycoon (and one of America’s most powerful men), William Randolph Hearst, who had fired Rose years before. He and Marion stayed together for the next three decades.

And, until she died, gossip columnist Louella Parsons never disclosed what really happened aboard the Oneida during that trip.

On a Risky Director

The guy had zero experience behind the camera. None. Zilch. Nada. It was as if the studio who hired him for this project seemed to want the film–and therefore the studio itself–to fail. In fact, if you wished for a film to fail, you would choose to allow someone like this guy, someone with no ties to Hollywood, to be in complete charge of a film production.

You see, this was 1941, and the Hollywood Studio System was in full swing. That system produced incredible films in the year 1939 alone such as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Even 1941 itself saw The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, and How Green Was My Valley produced. The Studio System was a complex web of producers, directors, the screenwriters, and the various artistic craftspeople (lighting technicians, wardrobe and makeup artists, musicians, etc.) who combined to provide safeguards from one person breaking a project and causing it to fail.

The choice of this man to head this film went against that system, spectacularly. There was no head of production who would act as a safeguard or pump the brakes if the project started going off the rails. There were no voices who spoke up to warn that this neophyte was in over his head and should be yanked from the director’s chair before the expense of the film doomed the studio (and, by extension, all the jobs associated with it) to bankruptcy. This man had complete autonomy over the film. He even co-wrote the script.

Now, this particular studio was RKO. It was seen by many as having lost a step in recent years compared to the other big boys on the Hollywood block like MGM and Paramount and Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox. Moves like giving this man carte blanche spoke of a hint of desperation from the studio that desperately wished to recapture its old glory and stature.

On his first day at the set for the film, the new guy climbed one of the ladders and began adjusting the lighting above the set below. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” asked one of the long-term lighting techs on the set. The man shrugged and said he wanted to see what a change in the light would achieve on the sound stage below. “Lookit, mac; you tell me what you want, and I’ll adjust the lights.” The man sheepishly climbed back down the ladder.

And, to top it all off, this new man was only 25 years old.

And the film bombed at the box office. The story was confusing to some. There was no real romance to it. The film seemed preachy in its message. The odd angles and lighting that this rookie directed insisted on detracted from the story, some critics said. And, what’s more, the start of the film was criticized as having a wooden performance.

Oh, did I mention that this 25 year old man who co-wrote and directed the film was also its star?

Yeah.

And his projects with RKO ended up costing the studio over $2,000,000 when it was all said and done. The studio head who took a chance on this young guy saw his career almost ended by his poor choice, and he had to resign from RKO the next year. Oh, RKO would make a comeback eventually, but its reputation was damaged for some years.

And what happened to the young director?

Well, today, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is often hailed as the greatest film ever made.