My Lunches with Orson Read Free Page B

their kids to bed, go to sleep, and get back to the set at five o’clock the next morning. Everything else in life except for dreams has rules. The only place they’re truly free is when they fall asleep and dream. If you tell them it’s a dream sequence, they will be freed of those rules to be creative, imaginative, and give you all kinds of stuff that they’ve got inside of them.” That was the best advice Jaglom would ever get.
    Welles taught Jaglom two other lessons: First, “Make movies for yourself. Never compromise, because those compromises are going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” And second, “Never give Hollywood control over your tools because sooner or later, they will take them away from you.”
    When Jaglom screened A Safe Place for Schneider, the lights came up and Schneider was crying. Jaglom thought, “Oh, that’s great, I moved him.” Schneider said, “Yeah, I’m very moved. I’m also an asshole.”
    â€œWhaddya mean?”
    â€œThis movie can’t possibly make a penny. Too abstract and poetic. The only person more self-indulgent than you in making this picture is me, for letting you. Why? Because it made me cry.”
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    Jaglom was cutting his second film, Tracks , with Dennis Hopper when he ran into Welles in 1978 at Ma Maison, where the great man was having lunch with Warren Beatty. Now no more than a tarnished monument to an illustrious but checkered career, pursued by creditors, overweight and afflicted with depression—the “black dog” as he called it—Welles had pretty much given up. Schneider had been willing to finance a picture for him early in the decade, starring Jack Nicholson. As he put it, “Jack was ready to work for nothing, but when push came to shove, Orson just didn’t have the courage to work anymore. It didn’t matter what you put on his plate. He was frozen.” Schneider was right. Welles’s high hopes for F for Fake had been dashed on the rocks of public indifference. As he himself explained, “I had begun to think I should stop and write my memoirs of twenty volumes so I could be paid for something and stop this misery.” Or, as he put it to Jaglom, rather more succinctly, “I’ve lost my girlish enthusiasm.”
    Still, much as he might have wanted to, Welles couldn’t or wouldn’t give up. Welles’s attitude toward the studios was ambivalent. He admitted to Jaglom that he had something to prove to a Hollywood that had turned its back on him. And vanity aside, he had an expensive imagination, and he was eager to take advantage of the resources only the studios could provide. On the other hand, he knew that he was temperamentally and aesthetically unsuited to the factory filmmaking practiced by the studios. He was forced to work as an independent filmmaker outside the system even in the late sixties and early seventies, when mavericks were courted, if only momentarily. But by the late seventies and eighties, when the studio system reasserted itself, his chances of finding a studio home vanished entirely.
    Welles and Jaglom became fast friends. They were an odd couple, to say the least. Their backgrounds, personalities, ages (Jaglom was in his late thirties, Welles in his mid-sixties)—even their films were discrepant. What they did have in common was a fierce desire to go their own way. Moreover, the relationship was mutually advantageous. Jaglom was dazzled by the legend and seduced by the reality of Welles. Who wouldn’t have been? He treasured his friend’s advice, basked in his reflected glow, relished the role of Welles’s gatekeeper. He also realized that he had something that Welles needed—energy, enthusiasm, and viability as a working filmmaker. He had bankrolled his own films by selling off the rights for foreign territories to a patchwork of overseas distributors and investors in much