Max Collins - The War of the Worlds Murder

The voice in his ear was that familiar resonant baritone: “Walter, I didn’t bring you here to loaf!”

Gibson, his fingertips red from typing, said, “I’m sure you didn’t, Orson. Any suggestions?”

“I suggest you come up to my suite-toot sweet! I have a rehearsal at the theater at seven…so time is, as they say, a’wastin’!”

Soon Gibson, portable Corona in hand, stepped from the elevator onto the eighteenth floor, where-after calling ahead to check on Gibson’s pedigree-the butler stationed there walked him to Mr. Welles’s suite.

The door, which was unlocked, was opened for Gibson by said butler, and when Gibson entered, he was greeted by Welles, or rather Welles’s voice, which boomed from the bedroom.

“Have you had lunch, Walter? Or for that matter, breakfast?”

“No!” Gibson called out.

The suite made Gibson’s own St. Regis room seem like a bungalow at the Bide-a-Wee Motel in Peoria, Illinois. In addition to the requisite fifteen-foot ceiling with chandelier, the living room was ornately appointed in the Beaux Arts manner, with a decorative fireplace, an Oriental carpet and Louis XV furniture.

“I’m just calling down for room service!” Welles’s voice informed his guest. Like the Shadow in full hypnotic mode, Welles thus far remained invisible.

Pausing to set down the typewriter to get out his Camels, Gibson suddenly put the pack of smokes away, deciding not to light up-not in here.

The expensive chairs and the two swooping sofas were stacked with spools of film, laying in careless coils, and on an end table pulled out into the middle of the room had been deposited what looked like a movie projector-sort of. The thing had two big spools (heavy with film) and an oversize viewfinder. Bits and pieces and fragments of film were scattered to either side of the machine, whose presence amid these antiques seemed vaguely futuristic, even alien.

Welles called: “ Walter! What would you like?”

“Something light! Fish, maybe?”

“Fine!..Come in, come in….”

Through French doors, Gibson found Welles in a bedroom dominated by a four-poster bed, on the unmade edge of which the wunderkind sat, using a white-and-gold nightstand phone that was as magnificent as the bed itself. With the command and detail of a battlefield general, Welles was giving an elaborate order for food-were further guests expected? — as he sat in a white terrycloth robe with a ST. R crest, his feet slippered in black.

Gibson stood with his portable typewriter fig-leafed before him.

After hanging up, Welles got to his feet and beamed at Gibson, shaking his hand heartily, warmly, his eyes locked on the writer’s.

“Finally, we’re going to get some work done, ay?” he said, as if the world had been conspiring against the pair.

A table near a bay window looking out on Fifth Avenue through sheer drapes was littered with scripts in black binders, which Welles cleared with an arm, sending them clattering to the floor, or anyway Oriental carpet. Welles gestured for Gibson to sit, which he did, and Welles sat opposite, leaning on his elbows, steepling his fingers.

“You’ve been very patient with me, Walter.”

Gibson shrugged. “Entering your world is something of an adventure for me. I live a fairly sedentary life, you know.”

“I do know, Walter-despite the whirlwind you’ve witnessed, much of my time is spent hunkered either over a typewriter myself-or a script with a rewrite pen. The first place a production has to be mounted, after all, is in the mind.”

Nodding, Gibson asked, “If I might…and I don’t mean to be rude or anything…but why would you invite me to the city to work on a project, when you have a Broadway production about to open, and a radio show to put on?”

Welles folded his arms, leaning back; the small but full-lipped mouth took on a scampish little smile. “Walter, my dear friend…I put on a radio show every week. And the Mercury is a full-time repertory company-we go from one play right into another, often presenting several plays simultaneously.”

“So if you waited for a lull…”

The big man gave a tiny shrug. “No such animal in my life of late-and I believe that breed known as the Hollywood producer has the capacity to maintain his interest, his enthusiasm, about as long as a baby does a butterfly.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Welles leaned forward conspiratorially, eyebrows lifted. “I have designed Danton’s Death -this new play, you saw some of it?”

“Yes.”

“I have designed it dramatically-no, melodramatically, in a fashion that I think will demonstrate to the brothers Warner, and the minions they’ve dispatched to scout me, that I have the visual sense required to make films.”

Gibson nodded. “The striking sets, the movement, the sort of…‘cutting’ between scenes, it’s all meant to show you off as a potential filmmaker?”

The kiss of a mouth twitched approval. “Precisely. I expect several key Warner Bros. executives to attend early performances of Danton’s Death -and I want to be ready with a film project for them, to strike while the iron is hot, as they say.”

“Is that the reason for all of the celluloid scattered about?” Gibson asked, gesturing with a thumb toward the French doors. “And that gizmo?”

“What?…Oh, the Moviola! That’s an editing machine. I’m still playing with the film we shot for Too Much Johnson , the farce we’re planning to mount. We had a bad experience trying it out in summer stock, but I’m still hopeful.”

“Ah. You mentioned that on the phone.”

“Yes, I wanted to combine theater with film-present two lengthy portions of the show as a movie. It’s delightful stuff-Joe Cotten’s a natural on screen, funny as hell. But I ran into a wall.”

“How so?”

“Well, I didn’t realize that what I was up to required any special…dispensation. But it turns out MGM had film rights to the play, and they insist on charging us an arm and a leg for me to use my stuff.” Welles shrugged again, a larger more fatalistic one.

Gibson wondered how this skilled if young producer could have used the bad judgment to just do what he wanted, without checking into permissions. But Gibson immediately answered his own question: Welles was a child, a fun, bright, enthusiastic one…also spoiled. Like all spoiled children, he wasn’t much on asking permission….

“I can tell you, though, Walter, playing with this film, seeing how you can tell a story through pictures, little jigsaw-puzzle pieces, well, I get a real charge out of it.”

“So this Warners interest means a lot to you.”

“It does. It does indeed. I have so many ideas about making films-Walter, I can barely contain myself.”

“Such as?”

“You’ve seen the German films? Caligari , for instance? Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ?”

“Sure. Judging by their crime pictures, I think the guys at Warner Bros. have, too.”

“Precisely! But they haven’t taken it far enough.” Welles sat forward, his eyes alive and twinkling, his palms open and outstretched, like Jolson on his knees. “I want to make radio…for the screen .”

Gibson winced in thought. “You mean, do more heightened, sophisticated sound work?”

Welles waved a dismissive hand. “Well, that, too, but…Walter, do the images you produce in your own mind, when you listen to a radio show-do the motion pictures you see in your local movie house match up to that?”

“To my own imagination? Hell no!”

“Ha! Precisely. It was better back in the silent days, when the cameras weren’t so bulky-think of the images von Stroheim achieved, and Griffith, and even DeMille. It was as if you were witnessing your own dreams coming to life…and that’s what I intend to make happen again, but even more so. Low angles, high angles, lighting effects, backgrounds as carefully art-directed as one of my Mercury stage productions.”