Don Quixote

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One of Welles’ notable unfinished projects was an adaptation of Don Quixote. This ambitious project was begun in Mexico City in 1957. Welles was able to get an investment of $25,000 from his friend Frank Sinatra.

He began shooting on the streets of Mexico City, using improvisation as much as written dialogue, aiming for a feel of an old silent picture.

The project, as was the case with so much of what Welles worked on, would bottom out financially and be placed on a back burner while he worked on others. What set it apart from others that flamed out quickly was that Welles would go back to Don Quixote over and over, repeatedly dusting it off.

Maurizio Lucidi was a photographer and editor on the project. During a hiatus from it, he was working on, Welles tried to woo him to Paris to work on Don Quixote. He sent him a telegram reading “Won’t you come and have some fun.” In need of a follow-up, he sent one reading “I need you,” with the third cutting to the chase: “send any kind of money.”

When they did get to work, Welles showed Lucidi a novel way to dub dialogue. He recorded all the dialogue first, then used it to guide the cuts of the film footage. It was meticulous, nearly-obsessive, time-consuming work.

Since Welles was financing the project himself and not contractually obligated to a studio, he felt there was no hurry and nothing from keeping him from coming back to it intermittently. He also changed the premise and other plot material from time to time. At one point, he was considering having Quixote and Don Pancho surviving a nuclear holocaust.

He continued to talk about actually finishing the project until his death. Not long after, forty-five minutes of footage of the project was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Then, in 1990, Oja Kodar, whom Welles had willed the footage of his unfinished projects, sold the rights to the surviving footage of Quixote to the Spanish filmmaker Paxti Irigoyen. However, there was additional footage held by Italian filmmaker Mauro Bonanni, who was in a legal dispute with Kodar. Without access to that footage, Iirgoyen and his director, Jesus Franco soldiered on. They cobbled together what they had and used some footage that probably wasn’t intended for the film. Their finished product, Don Quixote de Orson Welles premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, to a negative reaction.



Sources
Don Quixote (unfinished film). Wikipedia. en.wikepedia.org

Giddings, Gary. The Dark Knight: Orson Welles’s ‘Don Quixote’ www.nysun.com. Sept. 9, 2008
Higham, Charles. Orson Welles: Rise and Fall of an American Genius. New York:
St. Martin’s Press

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