Restoration of "Touch Of Evil" (1958) - part 1

I don't think I'd worked with anyone who was an actor and director up until that point, but the first day of filming I worked and he was in his Quinland suit, so I thought because I didn't know. what he was going to do because he wasn't that heavy at the time you know, everyone thinks because then he became heavy when they saw a Touch of Evil they thought it was him and it wasn't at all that's why he was so surprised because suddenly he has a big hit and he got these double chins and bags under his eyes and he was a master at makeup.

There's a really funny story about when he came back to Hollywood, he was back in Hollywood for the first time in 10 years and he was making a movie in Hollywood too and he threw a

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y for all his old friends. , the Goldwins, the Warners, everyone and at home, but he was filming late. so he didn't have time to take off his makeup, so he came in still with his makeup and Hank Quinland padding and he was very padded for the role, anyway he walked in and everyone was like, Hi, Orson, oh, you look great, you know that.

Boy, you've done it. It hasn't changed at all, you look great, hey suie, a good example of the difference in technology from time to time was that they were still doing shots of moving cars on a blue screen, uh, on a soundstage with the one where you can always make out those shots. Because the actors drive so busy but are standing around talking like that all the time, but Orson wanted to do what became the first dialogue scene in a moving car in film history, we still had to get some Pro and We were filming again. in Venice, although it was one day, filmed in an alley, a long alley, Oron said, now we'll take out the windshield, we'll put the camera on a platform in the front and they did all that, but the convertible was so full of equipment that it couldn't be You couldn't get the sound guy in, you couldn't get the camera operator in and the first ad said, "Well, we can take the whole front of the car off and just throw it behind the truck and Orison said no, no, no." ".

He said these guys can handle this, he said it's easy, just show them how to turn on the sound and when you get up to speed and the camera all that, so they showed us how to turn on the sound and Mort was the sound man and I was the operator and the director , it said action and we were driving and doing the scene talking to each other like you do when you have to really drive, so we did three or four takes and finally I said cut print. Thank you very much, my first directing experience.

Well, Hank has done it again. He has caught his man thanks to his

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ner, sir. We had a wonderful cast, Joe Kaa, who was wonderful as Quinland's assistant, Ray Collins and, very significantly, Akim Tarov, who I suppose could. Playing almost any kind of role, of course, Orson was able to summon a whole galaxy of star actors to play parts for him. Z I didn't know her, she only joined the show a few days ago, we literally never knew who was going to do it. be on set an hour ago Rudby liner had this city in his pocket now you can stop him through a stamp Joseph Cotton is the doctor and we didn't know I told you we were clothes I'm Hank Quinland I didn't know I recognize you, you should leave those bars of chocolate.

Dietrix was a very good part. I had been looking forward to the chance to do a scene with Dietrich but I didn't have any scenes with Marlene and Dietrich much to my eternal disappointment, of course Marina was an old friend. I know they date back to entertaining troops in World War II. She was in her magic act. He is half her. You know, she told me that Orson called her to do this movie and she didn't even tell Universal and said. listen you have to play a gypsy woman and she said I know where I can get my wig Paramount Gold Earrings I know how I can get the wig Marina told me she said you know I always liked Orson I always had a little bit I was in love with him, but I never He looked at me again because you know, Orson doesn't like blondes, he prefers brunettes and when I got to the set to do Touch of Evil and I had my brunette Paramount wig, it was the first time Orson looked at me, well, maybe I knew Marinaa, we didn't have any scenes together, but the night she worked, although I didn't have a scene with her, I worked too, so the night she worked there was a champagne pain. in everyone's dressing room, not that you could drink it because you couldn't work, I mean I couldn't anyway, but Orson always did everything big, hey dad, he'd be there.

There's a funny story about when they were in the studio. looking at the newspapers and suddenly they said it's Marina Dietrich and they said yes, that's Marina Dietr, do we have a deal with her? No, I don't know where she came from. I don't know about her interpretation of this character. A few days later, Oron said that I really like the character the way it was developed and that I would like to improvise some scenes with you and I said, well, you know, I only created the character a day or two before and I'm not sure I can do it.

I know the character well enough to improvise at this point if I could see the dailies or if I had seen uh the rushers well maybe I could do it and at that moment without hesitation he turned to the assistant director and said: We're closing the set for an hour or so and Dennis and I will go to the screening room and watch his dailies. That had never happened to me nor, since I remember, did we do the interior. on the Universal set and suddenly this character walks in Hello, what are you doing here? I didn't know it was Dennis Weaver.

I just said: where did he get this character from? Oh my god, we were all stupid, where did he do this? Don't even think that before we even did the scene, I don't even think we had a rehearsal, he just walked in and all of a sudden I saw my friend Wayne Taylor react, you know, the drug addict, and we started laughing because the whole thing started flowing, We were all amazed by this spontaneity, you know what Mari Wana is, right? Yeah, the motel, um, that sequence was pretty risqué at the time, but there are so many subplots going on that, um, I don't.

I didn't know where the sensors knew where to look first because what was being suggested in that scene was lesbianism on drugs. F this only started with a gang rape of older legs, but we did not exceed the limits of the sensors, it was just the suggestion to close the door, we put on a good show to scare her, let's hope that series of scenes was good enough in the hotel room where AE first gets rid of the girls and then gestures for Orson to come in and then they have their scene where he kills them.

I've never seen a handheld camera used for shooting, I mean, you could manipulate it, you had the fluidity, uh, because the camera moved with the action, not just Dolly, but also up and down, sideways. I get it, this is 1957 and Wells had been to France and had seen Camouflage, which was one of the first 35mm cameras really designed to be portable, and here was a studio camera department that wasn't used to anything. like this. I mean, the equipment hadn't changed much in 20 years at the time Wells brought this camera in. Phil LEP, who became a very successful cinematographer, was Russ Med's operator at the time, so the idea was for this studio camera crew to understand what Wells was talking about here: Wells was teaching a lesson to the filmmakers of the world. about what these tools could mean made it very distorted and exciting as if it were really happening and then waking up and seeing this was horrible, just horrible, the shot with Akim Tamarov when, when he was dead on the bed, he had some kind of M attached In his Eye, that went out like that, someone helped me to make matters worse when I went out to the balcony that was outside, which was a real hotel in Venice and in the room behind me on that balcony there was a Derel who was drunk. in bed and I had to walk through that room to get to the balcony, believe me with two or three assistant directors, oh look, why don't you think about your wife at home and let me take care of this?

It's my job, it's my job too. menes filming all night it's difficult filming in the water it's doubly difficult, come on H, how many jokes did you make? I told you that no one, no one who wasn't guilty, we filmed that scene, which is a pretty long scene that lasted at least two nights, it was the end. of the filming of the movie and I was waiting on the other side of the canal and holding this wire recorder, then Gyland's death. It's a wonderful scene. Marina told me that she thought the best moment of any movie she's ever made was the last Moment in Contact with Evil, when she says: what does it matter what you say about people?

Hank was a great detective, all right, and a lousy mug, is that all you have to say about him, he was kind of a man, what does it matter what you say about people, we finished around 6th. :00 in the morning and we finished the company and Orson and I went to have breakfast at a cafe and he brought a bottle of very good champagne that we shared and we had a great time telling each other how wonderful we were. and I said, "You know, Orison, this is a wonderful movie. I think I'm very proud of making it and working with you and it's been a very exciting time.

I think we have a wonderful movie and I said, you just made a mistake." He said what is that my boy he always called me my boy and I said there are three or four short scenes in the picture that are just there to indicate that I have the lead role in the movie I said that's not true, this movie is about the Captain Quinland's fall, but I knew Orson said well then we don't have to worry about that in the cut, when I finished I really felt like we all did, you never know what the audience is going to say. but just for our own point of view, I think we were very excited because we knew that we had done things that hadn't been done before, that we had tried things that hadn't been tried before, the expectation was to see it cut obviously when they finished production , they moved into post-production and Orson was there for the early stages and about halfway through he left to look for his next job, whatever it was during the time he was away, the studio took a look at the cut, they didn't really like it that they saw I got a call from one of the studio executives saying, could you get in

touch

with Orson?

I told him how I can contact Orson. I said that was the last time I saw him. It was before I left. I said he was taking a photo for us. Now William was the big country. I don't know where Orón is and they said, well, he disappeared, you know, and we don't know where he is. We would like to talk to him, of course, what he had done when he finished the first cut of him. Orson left the country and went to Mexico. I think to try to raise money to make Don Kote and that's a big no, no, I should never do it.

After we had done that, my first indication that something was wrong was when they asked us to come back and do some additional scenes. I said it was going to be arson, they said no, no, he's not going to direct and I said, well, I'm not doing it then. doing that and of course my agent and my lawyer said Chuck, as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, you have to do it and I found out, of course, that was true, so sure enough, he was a ball black and you can say, well, that is a terrible loss.

It's horrible, it's true, it's horrible, but Orson was responsible for it. Harry Keller had been hired to write the connection scenes, they said the clarifying scenes, they said, and to direct these additional scenes, well, this kid, who was he? I know and I don't want to know, all I want to do is get out of here. They were shots that included Janet Lee and me. I can't say that doing those shots hurt the movie or particularly helped the movie, but yeah. It was a very sad event, they rewrote sections, reshot, re-edited and ended up with what we call the rough cut.

When they finally showed the rough version to Orson, he looked, he wasn't happy with what he saw and that's when he turned away. and returned the 58-page memo, the memo that Orson Wells wrote on the night of December 4, 1957, was a pleading memo not to dramatically alter the image, but to change it within significant punctuation points so that it would present itself as a better and more commercial film. he felt the story was more confusing in Universal's version of him than his and it's true that they obscured the story unnecessarily and explained certain things and confused you in other areas.

It was a pretty sloppy job. It's a mess, it's a mess of St. Basically, I was trying to argue not just even his own conception of the original ideas about it, but more like this is what we have now and this is how we can improve it even from Your point of view and there were many different points you raised in it, only some of which were followed up by the good study.