Hot air Orson
From Andrew McCullough Sir: Rupert Christiansen, in his review of Peter Brook (Books, 26 March), notes that Brook made a 75-minute television film of King Lear with Orson Welles; and asks if it has survived.
Yes, it has ... in a way. It wasn’t a film but live black and white television, recorded on film stock in 1953 or 1954. The quality of all such recordings, known as kinescopes, is pretty bad. It may be difficult to locate as it wasn’t a special but was done on Omnibus, a weekly ‘cultural’ show lasting an hour and a half, backed by the Ford Foundation. Alistair Cooke was the spokesman.
I was the television director, so Peter and I had several rows, but they didn’t compare with his epic battles with Orson. At the producer’s party after the show, we found a quiet corner and, sadly demolishing a bottle of Scotch, did a post-mortem on our failure. I tried to take the blame, but Peter would have none of it.
‘No, no,’ he said gallantly. ‘It was all my fault. Watching Orson on stage as Othello, I had a sudden vision of him as the Michelin Man, and thought if I could get a giant pin and punch through all those protective tires, get through to the real him, I’d find something wonderful. Well, I punched through all those tires. And what did I find? More hot air.’ Kinescopes of the show can be found at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and Beverly Hills.
Andrew McCullough
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