Thursday, December 4, 2014

The "Lost" Tapes of Orson Welles

Recently, my RSS feed for BBC's audio documentaries contained the following item:

DocArchive: The Lost Tapes of Orson Welles

Director Orson Welles was asked to write his life story in his later years. He declined but was convinced by his friend Henry Jaglom to discuss his life over a weekly lunch at their favourite Hollywood restaurant, Ma Maison. The hundreds of tapes, recorded from 1983 to 1985, reveal extraordinary, frank, conversations between Welles and the independent director Jaglom.

Now, I don't think the tapes were really "lost". Indeed, when I saw the name Henry Jaglom in that blurb I immediately thought to myself that I could have sworn Jaglom showed up on TCM to sit down with Robert Osborne and discuss the relationship with Welles. Sure enough, he did in May 2014.

I haven't listened to the BBC documentary yet -- I've got about 45 hours of various radio programs from all around the world to listen to, so I don't see myself getting to it until the Christmas break or so. But for the time being, you can download the documentary here. I think the BBC keeps their stuff up for a month, so you've got another three and a half weeks to download it. It's 23MB, and about 50 minutes. The link to the RSS feed is here.

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