Classics, Controversy and the Masses: Orson Welles on the Radio

FAIN: FT-52626-04

Marguerite Hailey Rippy
Marymount University (Arlington, VA 22207-4299)

This project examines the 1938 radio plays of Orson Welles with two goals: to recover the plays as evidence of an aesthetic bridge between his work in theater and film, and to show the roots of his cinematic narratives in radio. The radio plays illustrate Welles's concepts of narrative, self-promotion, and communal performance. In the plays, Welles explores topics such as fascism and racism, using mass performance to provoke cultural conversation. His performances resonated with an anxious public, transforming him into an American griot--an honorary storyteller of national experience. The plays reveal the cultural inheritance radio offers American cinema, and the project fits the We the People initiative.

Media Coverage

An interview with Marguerite Rippy on her new book, ORSON WELLES AND THE UNFINISHED RKO PROJECTS (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Jake Hinkson
Publication: Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource
Date: 10/18/2009
Abstract: Jake Hinkson who frequently writes about Orson Welles at his blog, The Night Editor, has sent along this informative interview he conducted with Marguerite Rippy for Wellesnet readers to enjoy.
URL: http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=898

Review: Marguerite H. Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. (Review)
Author(s): Matt Wanat
Publication: Screening the Past
Date: 4/18/2010
Abstract: Marguerite H. Rippy’s book on Orson Welles offers a provocative, ground-breaking, and occasionally scattered exploration of Welles’s construction as a ‘star director’ and the significance of this cultural-textual project to a variety of modern and postmodern aspects of twentieth-century media. While Rippy explicitly sets out to privilege the ‘postmodern perspective’, her book ultimately succeeds in a broader project that integrates an array of extra-diegetic and intra-diegetic concerns, some fundamentally postmodern and others perhaps not.
URL: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/27/orson-welles-unfinished-rko-projects.html

AC Book Reviews (Review)
Author(s): Jm Hemphill
Publication: American Cinematographers Online Magazine
Date: 9/1/2009
Abstract: The latest addition to the ongoing conversation about Welles is Marguerite H. Rippy’s Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects, which focuses on the director’s work in the 1940s. During that period, he made Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, as well as the aborted It’s All True, the movie largely responsible for derailing his career in Hollywood. He also embarked on a number of lesser known productions left unfinished but which offer key insights into his working methods, thematic preoccupations and enduring legacy in American filmmaking.
URL: http://www.theasc.com/book_reviews/September2009/index.php

Cinema Book Reviews (Review)
Author(s): Chris Pallant
Publication: Southwestern Journal of Cultures
Date: 10/19/2009
Abstract: Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective proves a useful addition to film scholarship, particularly in its dissection of the Wellesian star persona. Divided into four chapters, Rippy’s study details the unfinished Life of Christ, Heart of Darkness, and It’s All True RKO projects, while also spending time discussing Welles’s early radio work, his First Person Singular performances, and the completed Citizen Kane (1941).
URL: http://southwestjournalofculturescinema.blogspot.com/2009/10/orson-welles-and-unfinished-rko.html

The Best Movies Never Made (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Abby McGanney Nolan
Publication: Slate
Date: 6/25/2010
Abstract: An article offering a synopsis of unmade films: Orson Welles as Christ, Paul McCartney as Frodo, Al Pacino as Noriega, and seven other near-misses.
URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/summer_movies/2010/06/thebest_movies_never_made.html

Associated Products

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective (Book)
Title: Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective
Author: Marguerite H. Rippy
Abstract: This monograph traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography. Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects offers a fresh look at Welles in his full complexity. Rippy trains a postmodern lens on Welles’s early projects and reveals four emerging narrative modes that came to define his work: deconstructions of the first-person singular; adaptations of classic texts for mass media; explorations of the self via primitivism; and examinations of the line between reality and fiction. These four narrative styles would greatly influence the development of modern mass media entertainment. Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/orson-welles-and-the-unfinished-rko-projects/oclc/690552708&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.
Secondary URL: http://www.amazon.com/Orson-Welles-Unfinished-RKO-Projects/dp/0809329123/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325724762&sr=1-1
Secondary URL Description: Amazon has links to used and electronic copies of this book, as well as to the print version.
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 10-0809329123

Prizes

Publication Grant
Date: 12/1/2008
Organization: Text and Academic Authors Association
Abstract: Marguerite Rippy has been awarded a $150 TAA Publication Grant that will allow her to incorporate a copyrighted photograph of Orson Welles from his unfinished film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in her book, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. The photograph of Welles that Rippy will be using in her book is from a rarely seen series of promotional stills taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, whose photographic rights are now held by the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography.

Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship
Date: 12/1/2006
Organization: Lilly Library, Indiana University
Abstract: The Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship program supports research and provides access to the collections of the Lilly Library for scholars residing outside the Bloomington area. Project proposals should demonstrate that the Lilly Library's resources are integral to proposed research topics. Candidates are encouraged to inquire about the appropriateness of a proposed topic before applying. Successful applicants will receive an award of up to $1,500 in support of travel, living, and/or research expenses. Awards must be used within one year of the award date and recipients must reside in Bloomington during the period of their awards.

It’s Not True: Orson Welles’ Pan American Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: It’s Not True: Orson Welles’ Pan American Project
Author: Marguerite H. Rippy
Abstract: This paper examines the various incarnations of Orson Welles' unfinished Brazilian project, It’s All True, a pseudo-documentary that studied racial and class politics manifest in the cultural ritual of Carnival. It’s All True represents the furthest step in a concept Welles had been exploring for some time: documentary fiction. His merger of politics and fiction while filming, however, resulted in the tragic drowning of a Brazilian national hero. His film, too, became submerged in studio reluctance and red-tape, and parts of it were literally thrown into the ocean
Date: 3/3/2006
Primary URL: http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=past_conferences
Primary URL Description: The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Vancouver, BC Convention

The Genius of Adaptation: The Influence of Radio on Orson Welles’ Film Aesthetic (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Genius of Adaptation: The Influence of Radio on Orson Welles’ Film Aesthetic
Author: Marguerite H. Rippy
Abstract: In 1937, Orson Welles was a respected young performer/director associated primarily with the New York theater. By December of 1938, he had secured one of the most lucrative film contracts ever granted to a young writer, director and actor from RKO studios in Hollywood. During this single year, Welles devoted himself primarily to radio performance, developing his radio series First Person Singular, later to become sponsored by Campbell’s Soup and retitled Mercury Theater on the Air. Two concepts were central to this radio series: first-person narration, and adaptation of classic literature. Welles excelled at a performance style that positioned his voice as the conduit for adaptation, a recognizable guide for the listener through a literary experience deemed “classic” by its association with Welles. The first-person approach placed Welles in the school of American star directors, or auteurs, but his consistent interest in the adaptation of literature written by others troubles the concept of auteurism, which often demands that the director be seen as a primary author of the text. Studying Welles’s radio plays as they relate to his cinema projects suggests that one of our most famous film directors was deeply indebted to radio for his unconventional notions of “text,” “author,” and “audience.” Welles’s genius was one of cultural adaptation and media manipulation, twin strategies which he articulated through a first-person narrator.
Date: 04/07/2006
Primary URL: http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/past_programs.php
Primary URL Description: The individuals who comprise the PCA/ACA are a group of scholars and enthusiasts who study popular culture. The PCA/ACA offers a venue to come together and share ideas and interests about the field or about a particular subject within the field. It also provides publication opportunities and sponsors the PCA/ACA Endowment.
Conference Name: Popular Culture/American Culture Association Joint Conference, Atlanta, GA

Tricks and Treats: The Postmodern Legacy of War of the Worlds (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Tricks and Treats: The Postmodern Legacy of War of the Worlds
Author: Marguerite H. Rippy
Abstract: Orson Welles’s exploration of the line between fact and fiction, most famously exhibited in his 1938 Halloween War of the Worlds broadcast left two very different entertainment legacies. First, the broadcast offered a template for how to forge collective American identity through media-projected fear. But the broadcast had a secondary impact as well—to help foster an emerging distrust of broadcast media itself. Radio in 1938 occupied a similar rhetorical spaces to that of television today in the American imagination. Both act as media sources that Americans turn to for reliable, real-time information about the world outside their homes, but these media sources are sources of both tricks and treats for the American public. Increasingly, misleading the American public by media manipulation, which was regarded as dangerous and transgressive in Welles’ era, has become a common political strategy. This paper will suggest that Welles’ experimentation with the line between fact and fiction—a theme often explored in his cinema work-- originated in radio broadcast and reflects a postmodern concept of erosions of the “real.” In an era of seemingly unbelievable political events, it appears the entertainment values hyperbolically matched social values. That is to say, Welles became adept at representing the disorienting state of modern consciousness as it evolved toward postmodern disorientation. His characters often represent the inability to construct any single “truth” when it comes to personal or public history.
Date: 04/05/2007
Primary URL: http://www.pcaaca.org/
Primary URL Description: The individuals who comprise the PCA/ACA are a group of scholars and enthusiasts who study popular culture. The PCA/ACA offers a venue to come together and share ideas and interests about the field or about a particular subject within the field. It also provides publication opportunities and sponsors the PCA/ACA Endowment.
Conference Name: Popular Culture/American Culture Association Joint Conference, Boston, MA.

Heaven Forbid! Orson Welles‘ Liliom Controversy (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Heaven Forbid! Orson Welles‘ Liliom Controversy
Author: Marguerite H. Rippy
Abstract: Before there was Citizen Kane, there was Orson Welles the radio persona, the creative director and star of the show Mercury Theatre on the Air, which gave us the infamous War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast, and which also left behind many more radio adaptations of famous texts. Each of these radio broadcasts offers significant insight into Welles’ emerging adaptation strategies, as well as his methods of negotiating between commercial sponsors, audience expectations, and his own creative expression, all of which are key to understanding his emerging cinematic style. This paper studies the controversy over a 1939 Orson Welles radio broadcast of "Liliom," the Molnar tale that formed the basis of the later musical adaptation, Carousel. The Liliom controversy lasted from August to November of 1939, during which time Welles had to defend his creative freedom against attempts at censorship by religious organizations and commercial sponsors. The controversy centered on representations of scenes of heaven and the afterlife, and Welles felt frustrated and yet intrigued by the challenge of bringing it to broadcast—enough so that it influenced an initial proposal for a film about the Life of Christ to RKO. The “Liliom” controversy tells us much about the process of generating mass entertainment in this era, and the role that commercial sponsors, religious organizations, and the media played in the creation of Welles’ creative vision. The controversy also illuminates what was not deemed controversial at the time--namely the graphic depiction of domestic violence.
Date: 04/09/2009
Primary URL: http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/past_programs.php
Primary URL Description: The individuals who comprise the PCA/ACA are a group of scholars and enthusiasts who study popular culture. The PCA/ACA offers a venue to come together and share ideas and interests about the field or about a particular subject within the field. It also provides publication opportunities and sponsors the PCA/ACA Endowment.
Conference Name: Popular Culture/American Culture Association Joint Conference, New Orleans, LA

Author Talk/Film Showing on Orson Welles (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Author Talk/Film Showing on Orson Welles
Abstract: Inspiration for the ongoing Shirlington series "Films of Orson Welles," author Marguerite H. Rippy will discuss her pioneering in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. Book-signing to follow at the Shirlington Busboys and Poets.
Author: Marguerite H. Rippy
Date: 09/20/2009
Location: Shirlington Public Library and Busboys and Poets, Arlington, VA
Primary URL: http://libcat.arlingtonva.us/iii/encore/search;jsessionid=823CBCCEC5DF6010BA53384F1F038F28?lang=eng&target=rippy&btnG.x=0&btnG.y=0&site=Library_Pages&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=library&client=library&proxyreload=1&collection=1
Primary URL Description: Shirlington Public Library Events: Calendar

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