Behind the Scenes: Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958) with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles

The studio took a look at the cut. They really didn't like what they saw. Orson always said that it was rather puzzling to him, that he didn't really know why the studio turned against the film. The studio rewrote sections, re-shot, re-edited. When they finally showed the preview version to Orson, he looked at it, was not happy with what he saw, and that's when he turned around and fired back the 58-page memo. He felt that the story was more confusing in Universal's cut than in his. Mostly, they ignored everything that was in the memo and finished the film the way they wanted to. Rick is the one who had the idea of seeing if he could convince Universal Pictures to go to the memo and try to follow all the instructions in it. Trying to undo the damage that the studio had done. I remember that when I just saw a touch of evil, I thought, well, this is Orson back in the saddle again. He really, really is showing all the marvelous talent that I had experienced with him on Citizen Kane. I think I literally saw it over 20 times in the years that followed because it was such a compendium of editorial techniques, let alone photographic techniques. I never did figure out what the plot was for about 5 or 6 times that I saw it. I didn't really know exactly what the plot was. It didn't seem to interest me terribly. And when I told that to Orson, he was appalled, because he thought that the plot has to work. And I'm the one who brought up The Big Sleep. I said, well, The Big Sleep. He said, I never understood this cult for The Big Sleep. He said, it absolutely makes no sense. My understanding of how Orson became involved in this was that he had just done a picture for Universal as an actor. And they asked him to play the heavy in this thing called Badge of Evil, which is a novel. And he needed the money, so he said OK. Then they got in touch with Charlton Heston. I was off in Michigan where I was raised over the holidays and doing some hunting and so on. And the script for Touch of Evil was among a couple that I'd taken with me that I hadn't read. And I got a call from one of the Universal executives saying, you know, have you had a chance to read it? I said, it's OK, and who's directing it? And there was a pause, and the guy said, well, we don't have the director set yet, but we've got Orson Welles to play the heavy. And I said, why don't you have him direct? He's a pretty good director. There was a long pause. There was a pause at the other end of the line. They said, well, let us get back to you. So then they called Orson and they said, well, besides playing the part, would you like to direct? One night in early of 1957, I came home from dinner, and there was a telegram there, and it said, dear Janet, can't wait to work with you. I'm so happy you're going to be in my picture, signed Orson Welles. But I knew nothing about any pictures, so I called my agent, and he said, oh, he was not supposed to call you. There's no script yet. You haven't seen a script, and I haven't made any deal. And I said, I don't care. I want to work with Orson Welles. His concept in his rewrite of the script of having the honest prosecutor be Mexican was obviously a very good idea. It made an excuse for the whole border crossing and so forth. And if I were to do it today, I would play it with just the faintest touch of accent. Now, of course, when Orson and I were discussing it, he said, now look, let's imagine this guy. He comes from a very wealthy Mexican family. He's going to be president of Mexico someday. He's educated at Stanford, Harvard Law, summa cum laude, and he speaks English perfectly. I dyed my hair black and grew a mustache and dyed that black and faintly olive color in the makeup. That was about the end of it. I did not read the novel Badge of Evil. In the novel, the girl was Hispanic and the guy was American. Of course, in the picture, it's just the opposite. So that's the way it was when it got to me, finally. The week before we started rehearsals, I was doing a TV show, and I broke my arm. So I had it set, and I walked in to see Orson, and he said, I thought you broke your arm. And I said, well, I did. And I showed him, he said, oh, that's a cinch to camouflage. When I was in the nightie and the teddy, what we did was we sawed the cast and took it off, and then after the shot, we'd put the cast back on with tape. Of course, Orson was able to call on a whole galaxy of star actors to do bits for him. We really literally never knew who was going to be on the set. Joe Colea, who was wonderful as Quinlan's deputy, I guess, and very significantly, Akim Tmerov, who I guess could play almost any kind of a part. He was wonderful. Joseph Cotton is the doctor, and we didn't know that. It's not in the script. Of course, Marlena was an old friend. They go way back to entertaining the troops in World War II. She was in his magic act, he sawed her in half. Orson called her to do this picture and said, Listen, you have to play a gypsy woman. And she said, I know where I can get my wig from Golden Earrings, from Paramount. I know how I can get the wig. And he said, Great, bring the wig and come on over and we'll work it out. And didn't even tell Universal about it. I had no scene with Marlena Dietrich, to my eternal disappointment. Marlena told me she thought the best moment in any movie she ever did, her best moment was the last moment in Touch of Evil when she says, What does it matter what you say about people? There's a funny story about when they were watching the dailies and suddenly they said, Is that Marlena Dietrich? And they said, Yeah, that's Marlena Dietrich. Do we have a deal with her? No, I don't know, where'd she come from? I don't know. Dennis is one of my contributions to the film. I had some idea of how flexible an actor Dennis was. So I called Orson up on the phone and said, You know, you really should talk to this guy. I got to tell you, though, I turned it down to begin with because there really weren't that many scenes in the script. So Charlton Heston came to the set of Gunsmoke and said, You're absolutely nuts. You've got an opportunity to work with Orson Welles. Everybody in Hollywood wants to be in this film. He's got people like Marlena Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mercedes McCambridge. If you don't do this part and have this experience of working with Orson Welles, you're nuts. And so I went home and I thought about it a while and I said, I think maybe Chuck is right. So I changed my mind and I accepted it. Who knew what Dennis Weaver was going to do with that? He made it a gem. The production office requires that one of the assistant directors call the production office as soon as the cameras start turning so they know when you actually began the work. And then they have to call again when you print the first take. And in the case of Orson and Touch of Evil, we didn't even turn the cameras till after lunch. He said they rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed all day. And so finally we started shooting and did, I think we started, first turned the camera about 3.30 or 4. And he did, I can't remember, 6, maybe 7 takes. Again, hard to reset and all that. And that was about 5.30. And then he said, OK, that's a print and a wrap, through for the day and through with this scene entirely. We are now 2 days ahead. They just literally shot 2 days' work in one day. He just wanted to prove that he could. Very clever. Orson, you know, disliked being thought of as a show-off director. Because his favorite directors were men like Ford or Renoir, whose camera work did not announce itself, as Orson would say. And when you do an opening shot that sort of announces itself, here comes a great shot, he always was a bit worried about that sort of thing. But he just didn't see any other way of doing it. It seemed like the best way to do the scene. And it is a hell of a way to set up a story. Start on the insert of a bomb, pull back, The opening shot of the picture, it was such an unheard-of shot. It went for like 3 or 4 blocks and 3 1⁄2 minutes. I mean, you had goats, you had cars crossing, you had policemen, unbelievable kind of shot. The Chapman boom scene is a great shot. It was technically very complicated. Everything had to be just right, right on. And the pressure got to the man at the border. Understandably, because he had very few lines, but they were crucial. And he would have to watch this galaxy of lights coming down the street and the camera and the boom going up and down and the other car going through. And so we'd get to his part and he'd start to talk and he'd love his lines. And the poor man, it got so bad. It was like, oh, you can do it, you can do it. Oh, I didn't do it. It was heartbreaking. Then finally, it's the shot we used, the last shot. And Orson said, look, one more take. And in the background of the shot in the sky, you can see the sky paling. It is getting to be dawn. So Orson said, look, we've got only a couple more chances here. When it comes to you... Don't say anything. Just mouth the words. And he said, and for God's sakes, don't turn around and say, I'm so sorry, Mr. Wells. So the guy did move his lips and he did not say anything and we got the shot. Later, someone asked him, why didn't you just replace him? And I love Orson for this because he said, that would have destroyed that man. You know, we were shooting in Venice and there were these oil wells, these derrick, up in the middle of the night, flopping up and down, drilling this oil. Venice, California, before it was redone and made beautiful, it was very run-down, seedy, and it looked like a border town. It kind of had a Tijuana flavor. I don't think we would have walked those streets by ourselves at night. I remember we had all learned our lines, and I recall Wells saying, let's go to lunch, guys. But as we were sitting at lunch, he started to rewrite the scenes. He was juggling the dialogue around. As lunch ended, I recall he was handing his new script, his new notes to the script girl, and he said, retype these and give them back to the actors. And when I looked at them, and all of a sudden I realized that my lines were not where they were supposed to be. And I went, oh, my God. How are we going to do this? I don't believe we even had a rehearsal. He just said, well, let's shoot it. One of many nights of night shooting we had in the film, I would say more than half the picture takes place at night, and we were down in the basement of this hotel in Venice peeing into the drain because there was no men's room. And Orson said, you know, this would be a marvelous place to shoot that confrontation between you and Joe Callea. And I said, yeah, it would be nice, wouldn't it? And I said, but I think they've got that scheduled for Monday, don't they? They've got the set all built back at Universal. He said, yes, yes, but they'd be much better here. He said, we have to get Joe down here. And he called an assistant. He said, get Joe Callea down here right away. I said, Orson, it's 3 o'clock in the morning. I said, he's in bed, he's asleep. He said, he'll be all the better in the performance. And he was right. They got Joe down, and he came in blinking and blowing his nose, and where was he? Which was just the sense of unease and insecurity that the character should have in the scene. And Orson, as he often was, was right again. The first day of shooting that I worked, and he was in his outfit as Quinlan, I was so, I was just like, because I didn't know what he was going to do because he wasn't that heavy at that point. Everyone thinks because later on he got heavy. And so when they saw A Touch of Evil, they thought that was him, and it wasn't at all. That's why I was so shocked, because as the director and just in the rehearsal actor, he wasn't anything like that. And then all of a sudden, he's got this big paunch, and he put on these jowls, and the eye bags under his eyes. He was a master at makeup. There's a very funny story about that. When he came back to Hollywood, he was back in Hollywood for the first time in 10 years, and for the first time in 10 years, he was shooting a picture in Hollywood also. And he threw a party for all his old friends, the Goldwins, the Warners, everybody at his house, but he was shooting late, so he didn't have time to take off the makeup. So he arrived still in his Hank Quinlan makeup and padding, and he was heavily padded for the part, and Orson looked pretty good at 47. He didn't look like Quinlan. Anyway, he walked in, and everybody said, Hey, Orson, oh, you look great. Boy, you haven't changed at all. You look just great. He thought that was a funny comment on life in Hollywood. As a cinematographer, I think A Touch of Evil was an influence on our whole generation of cinematographers. Russell Meddy was one of the leading cinematographers of the day. Meddy's style on his film was very high contrast. It was very in keeping with Wells' previous pictures and something that Meddy was very strong in too. Orson loved black-and-white film. I mean, I think he did all but one of his films in black-and-white. He said to me, he says, You know about black-and-white, it's the actor's friend. And I said, Why do you say that? He says, Because every performance looks better in black-and-white. In fact, I defy you to name me a great performance in color. I don't think there is one. Understand, this is 1957, and Wells had been in France and had seen the Eclair Camoflex, which was one of the first 35mm cameras really designed to be handheld. On a feature, I had never seen a handheld camera used. And that was the first time, I think, that an IMO camera was used to shoot, which enabled him to get, you know, he got all those things like from the shots way down here looking up. I mean, you could manipulate it. You got the fluidity because the camera moved with the action. Here was Wells giving a lesson to the filmmakers of the world about what these tools could mean. Orson wanted to do what became the first shot, the first dialogue scene in a moving car in the history of film. And we were shooting again down in Venice, though this was a day shot, in an alley, a long alley. But they wanted to be able to block off the traffic, of course. And Orson said, now we'll put the camera on a platform on the front, take out the windshield, put the camera down. And they did all that. But of course, by that time, the convertible was so full of equipment and lights and sound equipment, everything, that you couldn't get the sound man in, you couldn't get the camera operator in. So Orson said, and the first AD said, well, we can take out the whole front of the car and just pull it behind the truck. And Orson said, no, no, no. He said, these lads can handle this. He said, see, just show them how to turn on the sound and when it gets to speed and the camera, all that. So Mort was the sound man, and I was the operator and the director. And I'd say, action. And we'd be driving along and doing the scene, talking to each other the way you do when you have to really drive. And so we did three or four takes. And finally I said, cut, print. Thank you very much. My first experience at directing. The motel, that sequence was rather risque at that time. So many subplots going on that, I don't know where the censors knew where to look first. What was suggested in that scene was gang, lesbianism, drugs. But we didn't exceed the censors' extremes. It was just the suggestion. It just starts with the noise. And then there's, you know, the voice through the wall. And then there's a rattle of the door. And you see the various shots of these guys. And then you see her, Mercedes McCambridge. It was so scary. When she said that line, it was scary. I mean, I was scared. I was. All-night shooting is difficult. Shooting in the water is double difficult. We shot that scene, which is quite a long scene, over at least two nights. It was the end of shooting on the picture, maybe three nights. And I was wading across the canal and holding this wire recorder. And we finished about 6 in the morning, still dark. And we wrapped the company. And Orson and I went to get some breakfast at a coffee shop. And he brought along a bottle of a very good champagne. We shared, and we were having a happy time telling each other how wonderful we were. And I said, you know, Orson, this is a wonderful film, I think. I'm very proud of doing it and of working with you. And it's been a very exciting time. I think we have a wonderful picture. And I said, you only made one 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 only there to kind of indicate that I have the leading role in the film. I said, that's not true. This film is about the fall of Captain Quinlan. But I knew that, Orson. He said, well, then we don't have to worry about it in the cutting, do we? You never know what the audience is going to say. But just for our own point of view, I think we felt very excited in that we knew we had done things that had not been done before. When they got done with production, they went into post-production, and Orson was there through the early stages of it. And about halfway through, he went off looking for his next gig, whatever that was going to be. During the time that he was gone, the studio took a look at the cut. They really didn't like what they saw. And Orson had left the country, gone down to Mexico, I think, to try and raise money to make Don Quixote. And that's a big no-no. He should never have done that. It was, well, it was... Touch of Evil was the last picture he made in this country. And that's a terrible loss. He did make Chimes at Midnight, and he did make Othello in Europe, but he never worked again in this country. And so thus, in effect, he was blackballed. My first hint that something was wrong was when we were asked to come back and do some added scenes. And I said, is Orson going to do it? They said, no, no, no, he's not going to direct. And I said, well, then I'm not doing them. And, of course, my agent and my attorney said, Chuck, as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, you have to do them. And I realized, of course, that was true. Harry Keller had been hired to write the connecting scenes, they said, the clarifying scenes, they said, and direct these added scenes. I can't say that making those shots hurt the film or particularly helped the film, but it was a very sad event. They rewrote sections, reshot, re-edited, and ended up with what we referred to as the preview version. When they finally showed the preview version to Orson, he looked at it, was not happy with what he saw, and that's when he turned around and fired back the 58-page memo. The memo that Orson Welles wrote on the night of December 4, 1957 was a pleading memo to not dramatically alter the picture, but to change it within significant punctuation points to make it play as a better and more commercial movie. He felt that the story was more confusing in the universals cut than in his, and it is true that they did obscure the story unneedlessly and spelled out certain things and confused you in other areas. It was a pretty sloppy job. Basically, he was trying to argue not only so much even for his own conception of the original ideas about it, but more sort of like this is what we've got now and this is how we can make it better, even from your point of view. Orson always said that it was rather puzzling to him that he didn't really know why the studio turned against the film. He said they had loved all the dailies, because once they saw it put together, it seems to have offended them in some way. I can understand it. I mean, Universal was not noted as being a studio of unusual cinema. This was a pretty unusual film with the cross-cutting and the darkness of it and the kind of savagery of it. Touch of Evil was originally previewed in February in Los Angeles of 1958. After the preview, a woman came out to a studio executive and proclaimed that this was the ugliest, dirtiest movie she had ever seen and hit the studio executive with a handbag. By that point, the studio decided to go back and cut that version, which was 108 minutes, down to 96 minutes, which was what was released, which is a really bastardized version of even the preview version. The home video version, which says restored, is basically a hybrid of the short version and the long version, because the short version, though 96 minutes, has scenes that play a little longer. They decided, okay, we'll take every long scene we can and we'll put it together and we'll come out with a super long version. But it was still not Wells' version. Rick is the one who had the idea of seeing if he could convince Universal Pictures to go to the memo and try to follow all the instructions. There was some resistance at first, but then eventually they said, okay, let's give it a try. And part of the job I had was to be kind of a watchdog, to make sure that in a sense the instructions in the memo were adhered to. I was sort of like the designated Wells scholar, if you will. I called Walter and I said, Walter, I have this Orson Welles project, this 58-page memo. You are the only person I feel can carry out this project. The changes that he talked about in the memo were roughly divided into two parts. Half of them were trying to undo the damage that the studio had done, removing elements that the studio had put in in order to make the film clearer, in order to make it simpler for an audience. One of the biggest changes in the film comes right away with the opening shot of the film. We didn't change the length of the shot at all. What we did do was remove the titles that the studio had put over the shot. That was the first element that we found, which was the textless opening. Naturally, since they're putting titles on the film, they also put title music over the film. Again, Wells wanted to have something completely different at the beginning of the film, which was an interesting but complicated blend of different pieces of music coming from the town itself, so that as you move from one area of the town to another, you also hear what they are playing on their radios. And as you move out of that, that changes and something else comes up. And then you pass by a nightclub and you hear what's going on in the nightclub. And then a car goes by and you hear the car radio. So at any one time, there might be three or four pieces of music seemingly coming from all of the shops and the stores and the nightclubs and the script joints and the car radios. The, what we called, worldization of the sound, which is to make it sound like it was in the environment of American graffiti and having it pass by in cars and that sort of thing, as Wells had already thought of in Touch of Evil. And the whole opening is done in the same style that we did in American graffiti. That was fun to see somebody else come up with that same aesthetic and approach to the sound. I think both Walter and I were very charmed by that whole concept, and he's definitely way ahead of all the rest of us. So I was able to take pieces of music from different places, also from a CD that Mancini had issued in the early 1980s, which had all of the music that he wrote for the film. As a result of changing the soundtrack, you actually, in a strange sense, can see deeper into the image because the sound creates a deeper space that you move through, which reflects what Wells was doing with the camera. The note that Wells spent the most time on in his memo, I think he dedicated eight pages of 58 total, was to try to urge the studio to restore his intercutting of the two stories of Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh. I think in an effort to make the film simpler for what they perceived as a simple audience, the studio had flattened out this structure so that right from the beginning, you followed Charlton Heston's story for, I think, five minutes. And then there was a cut, and you switched to Janet Leigh's part of the story. She was in another area now, and you followed that for five minutes. Ironically, by trying to make the film simpler, the studio complicated things because they told you that the film was going to be about Charlton Heston. And at the end of five minutes, the audience had made up their minds, oh, this is about Charlton Heston. And then suddenly we went with Janet Leigh and for five minutes heard her part of the story. What he wanted, and what we've now done, is to spend just as long with Charlton Heston as you can sustain, and then at the right moment go to Janet Leigh's part of the story, follow her, and then at the right moment go back to Charlton Heston. This does two things. It teaches you that this film is going to be all about the separation of these two individuals, which in fact it is. The other thing this intercutting does is tell you that both stories are important. The man's story is important, and the woman's story is important, and how they relate to each other is important. We weren't working with exactly the same materials that the studio had at the time the memo was written, but we had almost the same. The studio did reshoot a number of scenes that Wells had shot. Unfortunately, the negative of Wells' original shooting was destroyed. The scene in the car between Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston, as they drive away from town looking for the motel, it sticks out, but unfortunately we have no alternative. We simply have to use what they shot because the story requires it. The motel scene was one of the big selling points for the studio when they came to make the trailer. What you have is a gang of teenage youths who are on various drugs who come to this motel, and they're all getting ready to go into Janet Leigh's room and do something unspeakable to her. So when the studio came to edit that part of the film, they tried to build it up as much as possible. Unfortunately, what they did was to build it up so much that it became kind of ridiculous. They used every extra space that they could get coming into this room, sort of like a... I don't know, like a carousel of people surrounding Janet Leigh. What Wells wanted to do was to diminish this to avoid getting a bad reaction to this scene. What we wound up doing was, you see Janet, see them come in, but you have no idea how many people are in the room. And then finally, when you do see a face, it is the leader of the gang, the person who had picked her up on the street back at the beginning of the film. So the focus now is on, what is this person going to do to her now? What is he going to order the gang to do? That other category of changes that Wells wanted to make, changes that a director makes to his own work, forgetting what the studio had done. Wells wanted to remove a close-up that he had shot, but that he realized was having a negative effect on the character of Menzies, who plays Quinlan's sidekick. The scene in question is a confrontation between Vargas, Charlton Heston, and Menzies in the Hall of Records. I could immediately see the effect, which was that Menzies never collapses as a result of that. He stands up for his boss to Vargas 100%. As a result, everything that Menzies does in the film after that, he does on his own account. He does it because, as painful as it is, he realizes that it must be done. He doesn't do it because someone else has the goods on him, has a leash around his neck. At the end of the film, when people see this new version, they say, that character is a really important character. As it used to be, he was diminished in importance because he was always held down, strangely, by this one close-up. It's a fascinating example of the effect of a certain kind of editorial change where you can simply take one thing out and a whole character, the balance of a whole character in the film is very different. We really felt like we were rewriting history and we didn't know where we were going. We didn't know at that point as we were doing it if we had a better film or a more flawed film. Then one night after about three weeks, Walter and I sat there and watched for the first time the re-edit of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. What we found was a more coherent, more commercial, more accessible movie, a movie that made sense at every plot point. I don't think one can definitively say this is Orson Welles' version because, of course, Orson Welles never had the opportunity to execute this version and see it and react to it. But I think it's infinitely better than the version that existed between the two, which was the longer version. It had the advantage of having more footage, but without the shaping that was done so well in this reconstruction. Orson Welles is a great filmic artist, and I've learned a lot from him because I studied his films. I studied them in school and I studied them after school. He really is one of the more amazing geniuses who read all the books, read Eisenstein, and was able to put it in practice. So you can actually see a lot of the things that a lot of the other theorists talk about. They actually see in his movies. I think he's as close to a genius as anybody I've met in all my 60-some years in the business now. He's absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant. You know, as usual, there is this terrible consolation of being 40 years ahead of your time. You know, it's like he used to kid about it. He said, I wish I'd be on time sometimes, you know. It'd be nice to just be of the moment as opposed to always being ahead of yourself. I think it's wonderful that there's an attempt to make the cut that Orson Welles saw in his head. And I think Orson would be thrilled. I think he'd be so happy that the picture's coming out again and being seen. About a year or so before he died, I remember I was with him, and he said, sort of in passing, and I can't remember what the reference to it was, but he said, God, how they'll love me when I'm dead. We're standing here at the corner of Windward and Pacific in Venice, California, which served as the location for the border town in Touch of Evil. And this actual intersection was very much the hub of that border town. And these buildings with the arches used to continue blocks in each direction and all the way down to the ocean. They've been torn down now for the most part, but they were still here when Welles shot the movie. Venice was built and developed by an industrialist named Abbott Kinney, and the idea was that it was a fashionable seaside resort. As the decades went by, and oil started being pumped around here and the canals filled up with sludge and all, the whole area fell into disrepair. And at the time that Welles shot the movie, many of these buildings were vacant and falling down, and it added to the whole corrosive atmosphere and probably in fact suggested the location to him as that border town. This alley is called the Speedway. It's a one-way alley that runs the length of Venice, Santa Monica at the north, the entrance to the Marina del Rey channel at the south. This is the street where Charlton Heston in the movie drives down here in the open convertible with the man from the DA's office while they're conspiring to get evidence. What's unusual about it is that the shot was done right here on location going past these very same buildings rather than, as was typical in the 50s in a studio movie, with a process shot. And that reality, that feeling of speed, adds to the urgency of the scene in the movie. In the 50s when the movie was shot, this entire area was an oil field covered with oil wells and derricks with only the odd house or beach cottage sprinkled in between. Near the end of the picture, Charlton Heston follows Orson Welles and Joseph Calia along here, and there's a high-angle shot from over there, and you see this little Spanish bungalow sort of alone in the midst of this oil field. Of course, now the entire area is covered with condominiums and apartment buildings. Until the last few years, all of this land around here was empty. The bridge, of course, has been rebuilt since the 50s.