Orson Welles on Woody Allen.

Tuesday Weld in 'A Safe Place' (Henry Jaglom - 1971) Photo : Richard C. Kratina.

Orson Welles claims in conversation with Henry Jaglom that Carole Lombard’s plane was shot down in 1942 by Nazi agents:

O.W.: Gable’s wife. I adored her. She was a very close friend of mine. And I don’t mean to imply that we were ever louvers. Do you know why her plane went down?

H.J.: Why?

O.W.: It was full of big-time American physicists, shot down by the Nazis. She was one of the only civilians on the plane. The plane was filled with bullet holes.

H.J.: It was shot down by who?

O.W.: Nazi agents in America. It’s a real thriller story.

H.J.: That’s preposterous.

O.W.: The people who know it, know it. It was greatly hushed up. The official story was that it ran into the mountain.

H.J.: The agents had anti-aircraft guns?

O.W.: No. In those days, the planes couldn’t get up that high. They’d just clear the mountains. The bad guys knew the exact route that the plane had to take. They were standing on a ridge, which was the toughest thing for the plane to get over. One person can shoot a plane down, and if they had five or six people there, they couldn’t miss. Now, I cannot swear it’s true. I’ve been told this by people who swear it’s true, who I happen to believe. But that’s the closest you can get, without having some kind of security clearance. No one wanted to admit that we had people in the middle of America who could shoot down a plane for the Nazis. Because then everybody would start denouncing anybody with a German grandmother. Which Roosevelt was very worried about. The First World War had only happened some twenty-odd years before. He’d seen the riots against ­Germans. And he was very anxious for nothing like that to be repeated. He was really scared about what would happen to the Japanese if all the rednecks got started.

H.J.: So his idea was to protect them? That’s why he rounded them up and put them in camps?

O.W.: Yes.

H.J.: You knew Roosevelt, right?

O.W.: Yes, I kept him up too late. He liked to stay up and talk, you see. He was free with me. I didn’t need to be ­manipulated. He didn’t need my vote. He used to say, “You and I are the two best actors in America.”

Tracks (1976, Henry Jaglom)

5/2/23

Currently Watching [Never Actually Seen Before Edition]

DRIVE, HE SAID Jack Nicholson USA, 1970

A Safe Place (1971)

Happy 85th, Henry Jaglom.

I don’t pretend to be a martyr, no. Not even a victim of society? I am a member of society.

Anthony Perkins in The Trial (1962) dir. Orson Welles

"Orson thought it was important to use whatever a famous actor brings with him to a role. The closetedness of Perkins' homosexuality [...] - he thought that brought a whole wonderful subtext. I remember him saying that they never talked about it, but he felt that Perkins definitely knew what he was doing." -Henry Jaglom, a friend of Orson Welles

More deranged orson behavior from an interview with henry jaglom

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018) Cast: John Huston, Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Robert Random, Lilli Palmer, Edmond O'Brien, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Gregory Sierra, Tonio Selwart, Geoffrey Land, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, George Jessel. Screenplay: Oja Kodar, Orson Welles. Cinematography: Gary Graver. Art direction: Polly Platt. Film editing: Bob Murawski, Orson Welles. Music: Michel Legrand. Inevitably (and intentionally), Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind is going to remind us of other films, including movies about making movies like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) and such garish post-Code counterculture movies as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Zabriskie Point *(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970). But what it doesn't remind me of very much are the movies made by Orson Welles. In his most troubled and inchoate films, like Mr. Arkadin (1955), Welles always gave us something to look and marvel at, even if it was only Michael Redgrave in a hairnet. The long-posthumously assembled Other Side doesn't give us much we haven't seen before, aside from a naked Oja Kodar wandering around the ruins of old Hollywood studio sets. Welles's intention is to spoof those counterculture movies while telling a story about how hard it is to make one. I think perhaps the chief problem lies in Welles's casting John Huston as the ill-fated Jake Hannaford, the aging and put-upon director, when he should of course have cast himself. Hannaford's young leading man, John Dale (Robert Random), has left the film in a huff, and what forward drive the narrative part of the film has consists of the director's response to that defection. Huston's predatory grin feels all wrong -- I never sense that his Hannaford has lost control of anything, except perhaps his libido. We need the vast imperturbable presence of Welles in the role, if only to make the point that this is the most personal, the most autobiographical of all his films. It's lamentable that it took almost half a century to bring The Other Side of the Wind to the screen, but the truth is, the story about why it took so long -- which Morgan Neville tells in his 2018 documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead -- is more interesting than the film itself.

*Some of The Other Side of the Wind was shot in a house across the street from the Arizona house featured (and blown up, at least in miniature) in Antonioni's movie.

Natalie with Henry Jaglom

Watching the entirety of David Duchovny's filmography. I just suffered through the two Henry Jaglom movies he was in (New Year's Day and Venice/Venice) and hooooooly shit were they stinkers, though certainly not David's fault.

Jaglom is one of those vain writer/directors who self-inserts as the main character and doesn't even have the decency to make himself seem likable. He's a narcissist at best and a self-obsessed egomaniac who thinks his pontificating about life provides invaluable insight (it doesn't) at worst. I feel bad for any woman who's ever agreed to be in his movies, because it seems you can't exist as a woman in his universe without being madly in love with him. Like, attractive 20-something year olds being obsessed with a crusty-ass, creepy-ass 60 year old.

I need a palate cleanser, stat.

Henry Jaglom, Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995)