In 1938 Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane, often cited as the greatest movie of all time. As Roger Ebert said, not everyone agrees that Citizen Kane is the best film, but the dissenters can’t agree on a film to replace it.
His subsequent career was a skyrocket, ie, it spent most of its trajectory going down.
His later films were largely financial failures and soon stopped having finances to fail with; 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons grossed $1 million on a $1.1 million budget, and 1948’s Macbeth was made for $800,000 but never saw wide release.
Welles spent the latter part of his life as professional box office poison, self-financing his films through residuals and bit parts. He’d become (vide Scott Walker) a man everyone wanted to know and nobody wanted to write a check to. Critical reaction to his films was also cooling: you can read contemporary critics struggling with his work, giving it shot after shot, but only because the director had made Citizen Kane.
Ebert’s review of Othello reads like a mechanic detailing a car: he explains its ins and outs and production hurdles and obscure details about the set design…and you still have no idea whether he likes it or not. Except that you do: when a critic reviews a Great Director(tm), silence means something.
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
In 1945, Welles was given a column at the Washington Post. For $350 a week he produced freewheeling, unfocused, unreadable scandal columns containing insular Hollywood gossip, some of which were potentially libelous (“the fascist salute was invented by the Hollywood film director C.B. DeMille”). The column lasted one year, and became an early example of how the formula of famous person + massive platform simply cannot fail to fail to fail.
Orson Welles ended his career the way he’d begun it: using his voice to sell things. In 1970, an advertising agency tapped him to record ads for various consumer goods, and in case he thought he still had dignity to lose, they made him audition for the part.
“An ad agency called and asked me to do a voice over. I said I would. Then they said would I please come in and audition. ‘Audition?’ I said. ‘Surely to God there’s someone in your little agency who knows what my voice sounds like?’ Well, they said they knew my voice but it was for the client. So I went in. I wanted the money, I was trying to finish Chimes at Midnight.”
The frozen pea ad is notorious. Even to this day, it has a cringeworthy aura to rival LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE and so on. Orson Welles is visibly irritable and quibbles with his director about his lines and how he’s to say them. It feels like satire. The magisterial, stentorian voice that used to orate Shakespeare is selling frozen goods for money. The peas aren’t the only thing on ice.
In the Youtube era these ads went viral yet again. “We Will Sell No Wine Before Its Time” has probably been viewed more times than any of Welles’ actual films, save Citizen Kane. Welles slurs incomprehensibly. I doubt the vineyard had any wine left: he appears to have drunk their entire stock to numb the pain.
On one level, it’s upsetting to see Welles reduced to this, the bones of a prize horse melted to glue. It’s also jarring to see the reality behind the curtain of the TV ad world. I dunno – on some level, we still believe that Santa is real, that pro wrestling isn’t fake, and that the guys on TV mean what they say.
These are sad tapes, but they’re also happy ones. Welles was washed up at the end of his life…but is that such a bad thing? Being washed up means you were once in the water. Most people spend their lives on the shore.
“Paul, a folk-influenced singer-songwriter with ear-length black hair, forms a writing partnership with another man. They are wildly successful in the early 1970s, although sometimes controversial due to their socially transgressive lyrics. Paul’s ego and micromanaging ways drive a rift between the two, causing a breakup. The guitarist is arrested. However, they reconcile before death.”
(The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter Paul & Mary, KISS)
“A female singer with black hair and acute symbols in her name is born on a cold island in the 1960s. She achieves modest fame as part of a band and greater worldwide success as a solo act. She is noted for overdubbing lots of vocal tracks, often not in English. A psychotic stalker from a Latin country falls in love with her. Events culminate in a suicide attempt.”
(Björk, Enya, Sinead O’Connor, Beyoncé aside from one detail)
“A punk-influenced band with ties to New York features a blonde female bassist and a dark-haired male singer-songwriter. Their relationship fails, and the band splits acrimoniously.”
(White Zombie, the Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, the Smashing Pumpkins)
“A biracial guitar player in a platinum-selling heavy metal band from California is involved in a fatal automobile accident. Nobody involved was wearing a seatbelt. The respective bands have all released a self-titled album, as well as an album cover that’s all-black except for the image of an animal.”
(Metallica, Motley Crue, Deftones)
“A UK rock frontman named after a disciple of Jesus forgets to delete his internet search history. Legal problems ensue.”
(Pete Townshend, Ian Watkins, Gary Glitter, nearly Massive Attack, partially Jimmy Savile)
“A songwriter/producer is renowned for his innovative use of sound. His records thunder with Wagnerian pomposity, and could be likened to a solid wall. The producer is a troubled man, however, and is haunted by demons. As the years pass he is blown like a paper bag into paranoia, mania, and eventually murder.”
(Phil Spector, Joe Meek, Varg Vikernes)
[minor cheats: Art Garfunkel didn’t write songs until the 1990s, Peter Paul & Mary had their final #1 hit three months before 1970, a guitarist in KISS was arrested but he was not the same one that the rest applies to, I don’t think D’Arcy Wretzky and Billy Corgan dated, Vince Neil and Chi Cheng played guitar but not in their respective bands, Chi Cheng died years after his accident, it’s a stretch to call Varg Vikernes a producer dot dot dot or a songwriter el oh el]
“As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kitts.
Kitts, cats, sacks, wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?”
This riddle is as old as the hills (though some hills were formed yesterday), and tests the reader’s memory, multiplication, reading comprehension, and lateral thinking skills. There are several “correct” solutions, and your preferred solution often changes the longer you think about it.
1. The classic answer is “one”. If the narrator met the others on the road, then they must have been going in the other direction, away from St Ives.
2. But what if the narrator is on horseback, and the others are on foot? Then he could have easily overtaken them on the road.
3. The wording is crafty. The man has seven wives; we’re not told that they’re on the road with him. Maybe they’re at home, fanning themselves in a couch while exclaiming “lack a day!” or whatever women in the 18th century did. Same for sacks, cats, and kitts. “With” is a preposition that can either mean “accompanied by” or “characterized by”, and its usage here is unclear.
4. And all the narrator knows is that these people are on the road to St Ives. They needn’t be going there: maybe they’ll stop halfway, have a picnic, and then go back home. I don’t think there’s anything worth seeing at St Ives.
5. Even as a straightforward multiplication problem, the riddle is confusing. Is the answer 2,802 (the geometric series of wives, sacks, cats, kitts, plus the narrator and the husband?). But surely the 49 sacks don’t add to the count – they’re storage for the cats and kitts – so the answer is 2,753. Except line six explicitly tells us to count the kitts, cats, sacks, and wives…but doesn’t say to include the narrator or the husband. So maybe it’s 2,800.
6. To summarise, the correct answer is 1, 9, 2802, 2753, 2800, 69, 420, 666, 1234567890, and many others besides, your choice of which depends on grammatical and syntactical ambiguities. Being able to calculate correctly is no use in linguistic quicksand.
In infosec you sometimes hear the analogy “steel door in a cardboard wall” – a security system attempting to defend a space that’s indefensible. Here, mathematics is like a steel-framed bridge spanning two cliffs of chalk. You can use a calculator to add up numbers. You can create a futuristic quantum D-wave supercomputer with no purpose except to add up numbers. It won’t help. There’s no way to know how many people were going to St Ives, because the answer is ultimately found not in mathematics but in the capricious winds of the English language.
