Frozen Peas Tape

Welles’ later career was comprised, not so much of his directing films, but working as an actor, often as a voice actor. A famous component of this new career-within-a-career was his acting as a spokesperson for Masson wines.
However, he also appeared in a couple of advertisements for a British purveyor of frozen foods, and the attempt to tape one of these created a much-ballyhooed incident, one that has become an Internet sensation.

Welles may have been having a bad day, may have been frustrated with the role of the pitchman, or may have just been displaying a capacity for throwing tantrums that manifest itself various times in his career. Whatever the case, it wasn’t a good day to be the commercial’s director.

Welles was reading the commercial’s copy: “We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs. Buckley lives. Every July peas grow there,” when the director interrupted with “I’d start half a second later.”

Rather than addressing that direction per se, Welles begins a fencing match having to do with some field of snow and how that renders the reference to July inappropriate. The director then asks if Welles can emphasize the word “in” in “in July.”

Orson jumped on this comment with “that doesn’t make any sense! Sorry, there’s no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with ‘in’ and emphasize it.” Speaking like a headmaster dressing down a student, he continues, “get me a jury and show me how you can say ‘in July’ and I’ll go down on you!’ Impossible! Meaningless!”

The worst of his tirade was over, and the exchange didn’t continue much longer, though some renderings of it splice in a snippet from a different commercial, one for Masson. Between Welles and Harry Hamburg, it is more fiery than the frozen peas debacle, with Hamburg telling Welles he’s a has-been and then asking him why he screwed Herman Mankiewicz out of writing credit for Citizen Kane.