Silent short Too Much Johnson features Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles.
A 1938 Orson Welles film has been discovered in a warehouse in Italy.
Silent film Too Much Johnson, starring Joseph Cotten in the lead role, was found in a warehouse by the staff of Cinemazero, an art house in Pordenone, Italy.
The silent film was originally intended to be used in conjunction with Welles’ stage adaptation of an 1894 play by William Gillette. The Mercury Theatre planned to show the three short films as prologues to each act of the play.
The nitrate print of the film - left unfinished by the Mercury Theatre and never shown in public - was given by Cinemazero to one of Italy’s major film archives, the Cineteca del Friuli in nearby Gemona, and transferred from there to George Eastman House in order to be preserved.
According to published sources, until now the only known print of Too Much Johnson had burnt...
A 1938 Orson Welles film has been discovered in a warehouse in Italy.
Silent film Too Much Johnson, starring Joseph Cotten in the lead role, was found in a warehouse by the staff of Cinemazero, an art house in Pordenone, Italy.
The silent film was originally intended to be used in conjunction with Welles’ stage adaptation of an 1894 play by William Gillette. The Mercury Theatre planned to show the three short films as prologues to each act of the play.
The nitrate print of the film - left unfinished by the Mercury Theatre and never shown in public - was given by Cinemazero to one of Italy’s major film archives, the Cineteca del Friuli in nearby Gemona, and transferred from there to George Eastman House in order to be preserved.
According to published sources, until now the only known print of Too Much Johnson had burnt...
- 8/8/2013
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
Orson Welles made his feature film debut as a director with Citizen Kane and before that he directed the eight-minute short film Hearts of Age, which you can watch at the bottom of this post. However, Welles worked on another film between those two efforts, which was believed lost forever... until now. Dave Kehr at the New York Times has posted a feature article on Welles' Too Much Johnson, a 1938 film he wrote, directed and never finished based on the play by William Gillette, which has recently resurfaced "in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s." Classic film organization Cinemazero is working with George Eastman House and the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve and transfer the nitrate film to safety stock, after which the 40 minutes of surviving footage will be screened...
- 8/7/2013
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
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