Orson Welles' memorabilia, back in time with Kyle Chandler, Noir's unfathomable universe

Orson Welles would have preferred making the memorabilia available to film buffs and fans as opposed to sending them to a museum. "It's about the last thing he would've wanted. He just did not believe in schooling, he did not believe in academic things," Beatrice Welles said in a telephone interview. "And museums kind of have that connotation and I thought 'No, this is not right for him.'" In all, she is handing more than 70 items over to Heritage Auctions, which will stage the auction on April 26.

"People are still talking about him decades after his death," Barrett said. "One of the enduring signs of fame is when young people know who someone is — someone who might have passed away decades ago." Barrett said she thinks Welles' old Bell & Howell movie camera will be one of the bigger sellers. According to his daughter, he used the camera for home movies.

Other items are reminders of Welles' more painful Hollywood experiences. Two scripts for "The Magnificent Ambersons," a 1942 film he wrote and directed, reveal two different endings Welles had in mind; neither ended up in the film. The movie, which centers on a spoiled heir's attempt to keep his mother from marrying her first love, was famously re-edited by someone else. "They kept on changing his pictures around and not letting him finish them. That hurt him," Beatrice Welles said. "The only one he was allowed to do completely from start to end was 'Citizen Kane.'"

Long considered Welles' masterpiece for its innovations in editing and cinematography, the 1941 "Citizen Kane" follows the lonely life of wealthy publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane. Not among the auction cache is any Rosebud-type childhood memento of Welles'. Rosebud was the name of the sled mourned by the titular character in "Kane" that burns at the end of the film. According to Beatrice Welles, director Steven Spielberg bought a version of the sled in 1982, also at auction, and was later teased by her father about its authenticity. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

"Memories are radically unstable. Memories are always already re-visions of a past. Memories are also fixed as memorabilia, collections of ticket stubs, photographs, wine corks, baseball cards. Thought to preserve the memory in some platonic form (like Hume's idea of memory as a copy of an original experience), memorials and memorabilia (evidence verité) are better understood as refashioning past events and people for the present and future. Film is reconstituted and revised memory. It's a paradoxical living memory that emerges in present time." -"Persuasive Visions: Film and Memory" (2012) by Jessica Silbey

On August 14, 1945, the day the war ended, a raucous crowd who had been waiting in Washington’s Lafayette Square for official word, quickly swelled to fifty thousand when the news came. In New York the cork popped, and animal spirits foamed up. A laughing, screaming, yelling, dancing, singing, drinking, kissing crowd of more than 750,000 people packed Times Square. By Wednesday it would grow to 2 million. A Brooklyn war wife described the scene: 'All the streets were jammed with people, mostly servicemen, packed in tightly from curb to curb. Confetti and streamers were ankle deep and were being sold at every street corner. Policemen and M.P.s took no heed of the goings on like the sailors and soldiers grabbing every woman and girl in their arms and passionately kissing them in spite of kicking, screaming, and protesting.'

A nurse named Edith Shain heard the official announcement on the radio while on duty at Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side. Without changing out of her white uniform, she and a coworker hurried to Times Square. She didn’t get very far down Broadway before a sailor grabbed her and mashed his lips on hers while bowing her back in a dance-floor dip [...] Hank Thompson was a performer who sang about straying men in songs like “Soft Lips” and “The Grass Is Greener Over Yonder”. He had a hugely popular hit in which a young man is drawn to the bars and dancehalls in the war towns. Called “The Wild Side of Life”, with a tune based on the old Carter Family song “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” it contained the line “I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels/I might have known you’d never make a wife.” -"The Noir Forties (2012) by Richard Lingeman

Laura Leighton & Kyle Chandler in "Early Edition", Everybody Goes to Rick's (2000) episode: Gary travels back in time to 1929, and is the proprietor of a speakeasy at the location where McGinty's is currently located. Gary must try to prevent the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Kyle Chandler had extensive college theater experience and a love for the game of baseball. The Buffalo native grew up an Atlanta Braves fan, suffering through a pennant drought in the 1970s and '80s not unlike that of Cleveland Indian fans. He has been a familiar face since the early ‘90s, from his leading roles on the series 'Homefront' as injured Cleveland Indians outfielder Jeff Metcalf and 'Early Edition' as Gary Hobson, a stockbroker turned hero who had the ability to change the course of the future.

In 'Man, This Joint Is Jumping' (Episode 9, Season 1) of 'Homefront': Everyone is jumping at the chance to win a local dance contest, hosted by Allan Carmichael. Ginger Szabo and Jeff Metcalf win the contest and are given the chance to go to Hollywood. "I was broke when I got the job," Chandler says, "the very first scene I did with Tammy Lauren was a love scene - the first one I'd ever done on film - and I was too nervous to know whether it really worked or not. But after that, I felt very comfortable in any scenes with her. We just hit it off from the start, like old buddies." Lauren knew when to throw a little weight around - she cleared the set to make Chandler more comfortable for that first kissing scene. He says the one thing about his 'Homefront' performances that galls him is his baseball swing. Although he played some little league baseball, "I think you can tell from my swing that I'm not a professional. It's very hard to duplicate a pro's style. -Cincinnati Enquirer (1993)

Answering the question "What is film noir?" is as slippery and as convoluted as the genre itself. The short answer is that it describes a type of black-and-white urban melodrama made after World War II in which a violent, duplicitous woman leads a gullible tough guy to his doom. So far, so good. But what of Leave Her to Heaven, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made? Or Out of the Past, set primarily in the rustic eastern Sierras? The Maltese Falcon was released several months before Pearl Harbor, every woman in In a Lonely Place is absolutely respectable, and there are scores of noirs in which the hero emerges sobered but unscathed. It wasn't just the movies: the whole world was going cuckoo. Think of the mad drippings of Jackson Pollock, the rapid-fire discordance of Charlie Parker, the demented poetry of Tennessee Williams, the rising popularity of psychoanalysis and of existentialism —a philosophy that centers on "the plight of the individual in an unfathomable universe," a pretty fair summation of the best noirs ever made. Tough new hyper-realistic films from the rubble-filled streets of Rome had an immediacy that captivated U.S. audiences, and American filmmakers returning home from Midway and Anzio and Buchenwald would never make the same kind of movies again. Celluloid like that is combustible, but it will never die. Source: www.pacificsun.com