Solitaire with Orson: Art, Politics, and Personal Conviction

I was sitting at the window in my Chicago Loop hotel room on a January night in 2018, looking across the Chicago River at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a blandly Contextualist glass and steel skyscraper on Wabash with the same big gold letters spelling out the developer’s name on the side as though it was a can of Spam that the tenants of the Manhattan buildings on Riverside Boulevard insisted be removed from theirs’ when I realized for myself that the critical years of the conservative assault on the so-called “liberal consensus” had arrived and that, this time, at least for the moment, it looked as though the oligarchs were going to carry the day.

I looked down at the sheets of ice shuffling and reshuffling themselves like cards in the river and returned to my work on the screenplay of Orson Rehearsed, the “operafilm” I was developing with a local new music group called the Fifth House Ensemble and my own New Mercury Collective as part of a faculty residency at the Chicago College of Performing Arts set up Henry Fogel and Rudy Marcozzi, with whom I had struck an agreement to give composition lessons to a handful of young composers in exchange for the school’s financial and technical support of my projects. Roosevelt would approve of the project I have in mind: polymathic Orson Welles captured in the Bardo between the now and what comes after. An understandable response to the diagnosis of a deteriorating aortic valve I had just received.

The sheets of ice shuffled and reshuffled themselves below. I wrote, “Orson is meta-modern in its disregard for outmoded conceptions of high and low art; it exists after elitism. It isn’t that the music is eclectic, it is that the idea of style is irrelevant. It is post stylistic. As the political tool of the Big Lie roars back into civic life, I want to conjure for the auditor the dread I feel as a citizen and father. I’ll do this by acknowledging the arbitrariness of traditional narrative, seeking Truth in a corkscrew fashion with Möbius strip-like dramaturgy.” I looked up from my sketchbook, where three figures were taking shape on the stage of an empty theater. He's too much a man, truth is too manifold, for there to be a single avatar. There must be three — a sort of Holy Trinity of the Mind. I rose reflexively and pulled the blind shut, thinking, there’s a difference between a magician and a con man. “There’s no happy ending, just death. The curtain falls; the hero simply dies; a solo piano plays a ragtime tune to an empty theater.”

I can see what used to be the American Bar Association’s building from here if I raise the blind. I can see where dad worked when I was a kid, the bridge where I dropped a coin into the river after he died in case he needed the fare for Charon. Instead I put the pen down, closed the sketchbook, switched off the light, placed my mask securely over my nose and mouth, turned on the CPAP machine, and lay back on the bed atop the covers, breathing steadily so the machine could establish the correct air pressure. I’m alone in a hotel room far from home: if I don’t wear this damned thing, then I could die in my sleep. I closed my eyes and imagined, as I had often done while shooting the short “Orson Memory Palace” films, that I was observing as Orson played Solitaire in the house on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood the way that my father played the game the night my mother died.

1. ONE OF SPADES

Oh, how we enjoy cutting our heroes down to size. Type “drunk Orson” into a search engine and an awful video of an aged, bloated, wounded-bear of an Orson Welles, three sheets to the wind, seated at a table gripping a wine glass, slurring advertising pabulum about a mediocre table wine comes up. We laugh. He's ridiculous, worthy of our contempt. Yet, at 29, in 1944, Welles was still beautiful, stumping for weeks on end for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Welles is said to have coached FDR in public speaking; he wrote speeches for him. Only three years after he and Herman J. Mankiewicz had taken on William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, a gigantic Authority and Power figure, in Citizen Kane, Welles replied to a “get well” telegram from the president (Welles had made himself ill campaigning for FDR) by pledging that, “this is the most important work I could ever engage in.”

2. TWO OF DIAMONDS

Welles’ greatest success as an actor and director in the theater was probably his legendary “modern dress” Caesar, a bare-stage, poor theater reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that debuted in November 1937 as the Mercury Theater's first production. Born of necessity—there was little budget, and street clothes were free — the genius was in the recontextualization of the play as a critique of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Theatrical lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal and Welles collaborated on Caesar's lighting, which — since there was no set — shouldered the majority of the emotional and psychological storytelling. A gifted visual artist, Welles knew the importance of not illuminating the most important thing on the stage, as well as light's ability to shape and define physical space with filmic fluidity. That Leni Riefenstahl’s agitprop Triumph of the Will had already thrown up “cathedrals of light” was known — it also happened to be financially prudent, and in step with the flowering of an emergent theatrical technology. Deftly fusing the iconography of religion and politics, he used electric light to take the place of “Divine Radiance” like Prometheus stealing fire. Light, however evocative, is in itself soulless, and he knew that. The result was that he evoked the gestalt of Auden's Age of Anxiety, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time existential ennui of the characters in Sartre's Paths to Freedom. That's a lot of illumination to pile on an Everyman Brutus’ shoulders. 

3. THREE OF CLUBS

The first scene of Kane after the newsreel is triply reflective: In a movie called Citizen Kane, able actors portraying Reporters (observers of life; supposedly seekers of truth) watch a newsreel (photographs of a life edited together — “fake” news?) in the dark. They're aware that they are missing something and set out on a search for the meaning of “Rosebud.” The Mob in Caesar is transformed into secret police: they're looking for safety in the wrong place. The reporters return empty-handed; the Mob succeeds in handing power over to exactly the sort of politicians it deserves.

Welles believed in FDR the way Beethoven believed in Napoleon. Albert Einstein, the first publicly intellectual scientist, famously spoke out against nuclear weapons; but it was the popularizer, Carl Sagan, who really captured peoples’ imaginations with Cosmos. He did so by traversing the liminal zone between advanced scientific study and poetry. Welles sought truth, too; but, rather than looking out into the cosmos, or taking to the political bully pulpit, he looked inward, choosing as his vessel of exploration the plays of Shakespeare. He repurposed Polonius’ advice, “to thine own self be true” to read, “to love, Jedidiah, on our own terms” in Kane.

My father quoted the line to me as he poured us each an amaretto the night Mother died. As though that explained anything, anything at all, I remember thinking at the time.

Welles did want to be loved, and he knew how to arrange that. (Leonard Bernstein to Ned Rorem: “Our problem is not that we want everyone to love us; its that we’ll never meet everyone.”) Welles seems to have believed that he'd make a fine politician (he contemplated a run against McCarthy in '43), but he was self-aware enough to have the corrupt politician point out to Kane that looking for love from the Mob will get you nowhere. There's plenty of commentary about Welles’ search for the “Rosebud” of love. Most of it limns a narrative which describes a much-caressed genius-boy of nine who lost his mother prematurely, and his charismatic father soon after. It's easy to pigeon-hole Welles the way Harold C. Schonberg, and even friends like Oscar Levant viewed Bernstein — as the “great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights.” But Welles saw past the transaction to what lies beyond acceptance, even admiration.

“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and the Muppets would take seats in the Senate,” wrote Welles at some point. What would he have made of Late-Stage Capitalism, Kakistocracy, and the ascendance of the Tech Bros?

Throughout his work, Welles asked whether love is true, or if Love is Truth, and the other way around. Of course we get the politicians we deserve. Does Donald Trump, think about love? Paraphrasing Robert Bolt's screenplay toLawrence of Arabia, “some men lie to others; they conceal the truth. Other men lie to themselves; they forget where they hid it.” True, one cannot write about love with tears in one’s eyes, but Welles was a romantic who did not lie to himself. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about crafting the illusion of love, as manifest in his fascination with magic tricks, for example, his documentary essay F for Fake, and so forth.

Welles points out, through the character of Jedidiah in Kane, “That's all [Kane] wanted out of life ... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give.” Like Bernstein, Welles had an enormous capacity to give and to get love; that capacity made them both great popularizers and artists. But Welles could have settled into a senate seat about as comfortably as Bernstein the executive directorship of an orchestra.

4. FOUR OF DIAMONDS

Welles’ dramaturgical chops were those of one who, like Bernstein, intuitively knew exactly what the emotional and psychological nuclear reactors powering a scene were, what each relationship sparked from, what powered each work as a whole. If Bernstein had Mahler, Welles had Shakespeare, and both did their finest work in the theater when editing and reinterpreting the Bard — Bernstein with West Side Story and Welles with Caesar.

He sought artistic freedom (as opposed to simple self-actualization, which is easier, because it requires only selfishness and singleness of mind to achieve), of course, and achieved it. While to the outside world Welles lamented that he spent ninety percent of his time raising money, he wisely had Kane lament, “If I hadn't been rich, I'd have been a truly great man.” I believe that Welles’ masterpiece was not Kane, or Chimes, but Moby Dick Rehearsed. Why? Because thirty years after having noted that RKO had given him the “world's biggest train set,” he was able to create a theatrical sandbox in which every performance was different, every evening like a page from Joyce's Ulysses, disconnected from other performances, but connected because the ideas flow from one place to the next like water. He found a way to be paid to do as he pleased.

The enormous self-restraint required to cope with complete artistic freedom (and to therefore not deserve the slings and arrows of every critic who lays it on with the “self-indulgence” rap because it’s easy, and because they can) prompted Stravinsky to point out at the start of the 20th century that, "now that we can do whatever we want to do, we must first decide what we do not want to do." Welles understood that people resent being preached to—hence the Bible's parables, which really are ripping yarns. He understood that, for every Poetics of Music (whether ghost-written by a Robert Kraft or not), Carl Sagan Cosmos, Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces, or Bernstein Harvard lecture, there will always be a host of intellectuals smarter, more insightful, more adept at argument, poised to envelop the scene in the smoke of argument, the entanglements of nomenclature, the rules of rhetoric, so that, in a couple of beats, we're all back on “safe” ground, mundanely talking about talking about the thing rather than doing the scary work of, as Wallace Stevens pointed out, grappling with “not ideas of the thing but the thing itself.”

It takes a poet running at full bore to conjoin, as Welles did in Midnight, Shakespeare’s “nimbus floods” with Melville's allegorical mists, and the moral haze hanging over Walt Whitman's descriptions in Specimen Days with a healthy, Midwestern dollop of 1 Corinthians on top, reminding us, like the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, that “we see through a glass, darkly.”

Which brings us back to those reporters sitting in the dark at the beginning of Kane, seeking truth in fiction. Manifesting the Aristotelian admonition to grapple with the Art and Life paradigm, Welles staged them as denizens of Plato’s Cave. Behind the fire, the javelin of light stabbing down from the projection booth, is a stage / screen. We're all puppeteers, he reminds us, vying with one another to construct the most viable reality. Remember high school classics class? If you skipped it, or didn't do your homework; or if you did do your homework and you have fallen for the effluvial torrent of the Big Lie, then you have feelings and identify what you see and don't like as “fake news.”

Nevertheless, one person escapes the Cave. He emerges into the sunlight, sees the Cave for the prison and illusion that it is, re-examines his former existence, and determines to return to the Cave to spread the Good News. Naturally, they crucify him.  (Look at him! He doesn't work out; he's obviously not disciplined or in control of himself! He's fat, drunk, doing a wine commercial. He's the object of ridicule who seems to have learned nothing from Falstaff, for there he is, looking and acting just like him! Why should we believe anything he says?) As Andre points out so wittily to Wally in My Dinner With Andre, New York City may in fact be a prototype of the concentration camp of the 21st century, built by the inmates who take a perverse pride in what they've created. “Aren't we schizophrenics?” he asks. “Are these flickering shadows Reality?” asks the returning escapee, the reporters, the audience, the artist.

5. FIVE OF HEARTS

“Rosebud” is whatever you want it to be and then again not. It is the key, but then it isn’t; it’s like the keys in Hitchcock’s films — Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, even Psycho. It’s a McGuffin, that’s all: Rosebud’s a plot trigger. “Let’s go see a film,” said Mother that Christmas vacation, and then having her reveal to me during a screening of the 39 Steps (more keys!) that she had cancer. Lost childhood, lost parents, lost lovers, lost youth, lost dreams, loss, loss, loss. Welles allowed that Kane, the ultimate narcissist, must “at least have loved his mother.” Maybe Rosebud wasn't a sled; maybe Rosebud was just a Head Fake — a  cosmic basketballer looking straight at you while passing off to his teammate.

Jedidiah pans Kane's wife's performance. She, of course, has little talent, and Jedidiah has a choice: he can go easy on her out of compassion and pity, or he can assess her as an extension of her husband’s ego. She's “nothing special,” but she's special to Kane. (“When everyone's special, nobody is.”) Rilke reminds us that Art is never understood by criticism; beauty's beholder’s eye, and so on; but Kane's inability to see his wife as separate from himself is what motivates him. He demands she be perceived as gifted the way that our current president feels that he's a genius because “fate is what happened.” Jedidiah hits the nail on the head. (“Never,” my Uncle Clifford once admonished me, “rub a man's rhubarb.”) Kane must fire him just as surely as the denizens of the Cave must, upon the Hero’s return, reject the bringer of news of the blazing, brilliant, brightly-lit outside world.

“Ask not what you can do for your country,” quipped Welles. “Ask what’s for lunch.” Lucas, Spielberg, and other more “commercially viable” great filmmakers made more money and acquired more Power; but Welles’ Authority has never been questioned.  When he tried to play the game of life on their terms, he couldn’t help leaving the clichés on the cutting room floor instead of cooking them into meta-modernist, self-referential speeches about creativity and the avoidance of responsibility for what you’ve just said. Because he couldn’t help becoming invested. He cared. Even Touch of Evil is an art film flying under the radar as a potboiler with Charlton Heston serving as Hollywood's canary in the cinematic coal mine. Welles had heard the Chimes at Midnight. He had learned that it is more important to be understood, in the end, than it is to be loved.

The night Mother died in my arms, my father, who had been playing Solitaire downstairs, quoted Joseph Cotton's line to me by way of explaining himself and why his wife hadn't died in his arms. When my own personal Jedidiah writes his review and hands it to me, I hope that I shall have mostly kept my eyes on the ball.

Delivering this talk at Amherst College in March 2018.

This essay served as working notes for a public address at the Chicago College of Performing Arts Center for Arts Leadership delivered on 18 January 2018 and on 5 March 2018 at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.

An Affair of the Heart -- Interview: Toronto Film Magazine

 TFM:  How did you start making films and what was the first film project you worked on?

 DH: Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a congenital, degenerative heart defect. I began looking for a story to tell in which I could explore reconciling my own mortality: what issues run through the mind of a fully expressed artist conversant with the relationship between art and life seriously facing the prospect of death? I chose Welles as my subject because he was an artistic polymath—writer, visual artist, actor, director, filmmaker—and a deeply-committed social activist who also strove to live a complete and fulfilling personal life. I have always believed as a theater person that (as architect Louis Sullivan posited) “form follows function.” 

 Consequently, it seemed obvious to me that Welles’ ebullient creative generosity and aesthetic range, intellect, and art required a many-layered dramatic treatment—one that fused images and sound on a deeper than usual level, wedded electro-acoustic and live music, live performance and film, opera and music theater, and jubilantly mashed-up musical and visual languages. I determined to build a multi-media piece that used the “bardo odyssey” of the great filmmaker Orson Welles (the film takes place as he lay dying of a heart attack) to do this.

 I knew that this deep dive was going to require more than a love of movies, an acquaintance with the writings of André Bazin, and access to some video equipment. The editing process is so important to any life, but it is central to a writer, composer, or filmmaker. I had scored some films, so I was conversant with that end of things; but my subject in Orson demanded that I not just imagine but feelhow it feels to edit film month after month. I had directed my operas professionally, conducted them, written their libretti, knew the ropes of live theater; but I had never directed a film, or managed a film production team. It turns out that the opera and film worlds are astonishingly similar. That’s how I came to start making films, beginning with Orson Rehearsed.

 TFM: Which musical genre and which genre of filmmaking fascinates you as an artist and why? 

 DH: I feel most comprehensively expressed as a composer of music interwoven with some sort of dramaturgical narrative. I’ve written eleven operas, yes, but I’ve written an awful lot of music for the concert hall—five symphonies, a dozen concerti, reams of chamber music and hundreds of art songs. Although I am a passionate collaborative artist, I admit to really liking the highly centralized and subjective control of the auteur model as defined by François Truffaut in his essays because it comes closest to the way that composers used to function in the opera world.

 TFM:  How does it feel to write, direct and then compose music for a personal style of indie film?

 DH: Absolutely wonderful. I have savored every second of the Process of making Orson Rehearsed: from discovery with the actors during the rehearsal and staging of the live component of the film, to learning how to live the life rhythm of a film editor; from the familiar process of scoring to film, to the unfamiliar process of shooting film myself to music already scored and seamlessly switching alternating between the two. My goal was not to document a live performance, make a music video, or an Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but to create a pathway toward a new genre which is not a hybrid but something more personal, more resistant to categorization—a film about opera, an opera about film.

 TFM:  What is the most challenging aspect of being an independent filmmaker in the film industry?

 DH: I don’t have an answer for that yet. My process as an artist is driven forward by continual reinvention and discovery, and I am just now learning the challenges of being an independent filmmaker. 

 TFM: How difficult is it to fund indie films?

 DH: To the extent that the world of an opera composer is similar to that of an independent filmmaker, I am familiar with the process of bringing producers and presenters to the table, hearing their vision, collaborating, making art with the artists and resources in the room instead of the ones in my head, and letting projects either unfold or evaporate, depending on things I can’t control. Funding is always a problem, of course. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have access to the tools and the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

 In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective, which is basically my sandbox, or, as Welles would say, train set, in which I build little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. 

“These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film.” Daron’s editing notes detailing the synchronization of images in the three simultaneously-projected films-within-the-opera-within-the film for the “Everybody’s Shakespeare” sequence. At this stage, these took the place of storyboards.

TFM:  Tell us about the process of the production for Orson Rehearsed? 

 DH: First, I threw spaghetti at the wall for six months in Logic Pro. I created about twenty 3-6 minute long “think pieces” about specific events and elements in Welles’ life that he might think about while dying. These dramatic beats combined manipulated snatches of recordings of my own acoustic works stretching back to the 80s, sound effects, brief snatches of Welles interviews, loops, and newly-composed vocal lines—most performed by my wife, vocalist/composer Gilda Lyons, and some by me—and mockups of what would become acoustic instrumental lines.

 I chose to divide the character of Welles into three avatars: one young, one middle-aged, one dying. This allowed for ensembles and multiple points of view. They sang a libretto that combined newly-written material by me with words drawn from public domain sources and repurposed—Shakespeare, Welles himself, Emma Lazarus, and others. Gradually, these spaghetti-throwing sessions generated a core of about a dozen musical ideas that held the entire piece together.

 Simultaneously, I filmed dozens of high-def video scenelets that would serve as visual equivalents to the musical motives being tossed up during the work in Logic—a man’s hands typing on a manual keyboard in New Haven; a woman’s hands gliding over piano keys in New York City; a child blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or tracing the letters carved into tombstones in a graveyard; hail falling in Paris; waves breaking and the sun setting in Nicaragua; an elevated train passing by overhead in Chicago; the desert outside of Albuquerque, and on and on. These images ended up unifying the films projected onstage during the live production component of production, and also served as raw material to be edited into the final film.

 During the next six months, since the film was taking place in someone’s mind and would unspool in real time in the theater, I gradually arranged the essays into a sequence, dropping some, adding others, in order to create a psychological and emotional narrative that would take the place of physical action. I edited together all the footage into three sixty-minute films that would accompany the three Orsons in live performance. These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film. I edited into this mix some licensed stock footage of a red silk scarf, film leader, the Statue of Liberty at sunset, some protestors, and a poignant skein of footage culled from a 40s newsreel of a boy walking away from the camera on a country road. This boy ultimately became a rather important “ghost character.”

 Once I had synchronized the electro-acoustic soundtrack to these films, I composed the acoustic chamber orchestra component that would be performed live by the Fifth House Ensemble at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in conjunction with the electro-acoustic score, conducted by Roger Zahab. A trusted and admired colleague who generously (and bravely) agreed to my request that we eschew the standard “film to image” gear that is used for screenings of Hollywood films when orchestras show them, Roger (who had access only to a click track) marvelously coordinated live singers, an orchestra, and pre-recorded sounds in a theater entirely by ear. I asked him to do this because I wanted the risk, the excitement, and the flexibility of live execution that I have grown to feel as a conductor myself is the secret ingredient to great opera performance.

 Next, I stage directed the show with the immensely gifted and creative cast. Their performances were captured visually over two shows and a dress rehearsal by three stationary cameras and one roving closeup camera—sort of one step up from the usual archival video. The soundtrack audio was recorded in the house. I wanted the soundtrack to sound captured live in order to advance the dialectic of “live” versus “canned” and the combination of the two. Post-production, and live concert mixing can make everything sound so homogenous that nothing sounds “real” anymore.

 I left Chicago with about ten hours of audio and video and let it sit for nearly a year before diving back in. First, I ever-so-gently massaged the soundtrack and had it mastered. Then, I cut the performance film to the soundtrack. Next, I intercut the pre-shot films and the live performance footage (which I washed out into black and white to differentiate it from the pre-shot films) before adding a third layer of semi-opaque “ghost” images screened in red and blue that carried forward elements of both. I received important feedback from colleagues at this stage about what was and was not “landing”—Rabab Haj Yahya, H. Paul Moon, John Corigliano, and Todd Vunderink, among others. This last stage of the process slowly brought the film’s messages into clearer relief and allowed me to discover what the rhythm of the recurring images and music were trying to express. 

 TFM: What inspires you to work as an artist in society and what kind of impact would you like to have on your audience as a filmmaker and composer? 

 DH: Artists of conscience can speak truth to power and make a difference (for the better) by reminding people of their humanity and interconnectedness, the responsibility we have to one another. I try to do that. I am proud to serve on the faculty of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts of Roosevelt University because the institution’s values match my own. That generous, staunch support helps me to amplify my citizenship and hone my craft while sharing it with students.

 TFM: What is your next artistic project? 

 DH: I am directing a staged production of my opera New York Stories for Florida Grand Opera in the spring, and then directing a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate).

 TFM: What do you think about the distribution of indie films and what do you recommend to emerging artists? 

 DH: I don’t know enough about distribution to make any recommendations. At present I am submitting Orson Rehearsed to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, who knows?

TFM: Why do you make films? 

 DH: Really, it circles back to process for me. I’m just feeling my way forward as an artist and as a human, learning, going deeper into truths, and working to connect, and to make the bit of difference I can, as I am able. I’m very lucky to have landed in a place where I can discover and reinvent while collaborating with extraordinary artists.  

 This interview originally appeared in Toronto Film Magazine on 23 November 2020 when Orson Rehearsed was awarded the “Best Composer” laurel at the Montreal Independent Film Festival. You can read it there by clicking here.