What's in a name? If you are born Margarita Carmen Cansino, you will be a minor Flamenco dancer, abused by your father, exploited by a seedy husband. If you are Rita Hayworth, you will be groomed to succeed Delores Del Rio at Columbia Pictures, become a Sex Goddess and eventually marry a Moslem prince. If you are Olga Palinkas, you may wander your days a minor Yugoslavian artist, but when Orson Welles changes your name to Oja Kodar, and stars you in a movie he has written, there's no telling how far you can go. What if your name were Richard Ives Welles rather than George Orson Welles? Or Kimball Adams Minaker or Raymond Romano instead of William Blake Pellarin?

Such is the underlying theme of Writer/Director George Hickenlooper's adaptation of Orson Welles' screenplay: THE BIG BRASS RING.

According to Editor Jonathan Rosenbaum (This Is Orson Welles), when Welles' independent production of Isak Dinesen's The Dreamers, starring Oja Kodar, bogged down for lack of finances in 1981, he was challenged by Henry Jaglom (A SAFE PLACE, 1971), a friend and fellow director, to write a new screenplay containing a part for a bankable star. During their regular lunches at Ma Maison in Hollywood, Jaglom brainstormed ideas with Welles until one day the older man told an interesting story about a veteran presidential advisor's conflict with a potential candidate.

Jaglom exclaimed something like, "That's it. Write it tonight."

The next afternoon, Welles brought in 12 pages, shortly eight more, within three months -- aided by mistress Oja Kodar -- the complete script. Encouraged by Gore Vidal, and inspired by that politically interested novelist and playwright's The Best Man, Welles continued to polish his screen play. Over the next year-and-a-half, Jaglom came up with a backer, Producer Arnold Milchan, who promised to provide a modest eight million dollar budget, if Jaglom could sign Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, or Burt Reynolds to play the part of Candidate William Blake Pellarin opposite Welles as Advisor Kimball Adams Minaker. All the superstars had publicly spoken of a desire to work with Welles, each suggested he would work for practically nothing to be with Welles, and each had read the script.

The film would be a contrast between public and private lives in American politics. A Kennedy Democrat, a Vietnam Veteran, a narrowly failed 1980 Democratic Presidential candidate, William Blake Pellarin goes to Europe to ask an old political guru, Kimball Adams Minaker, how he can win the next time out. In traveling through Europe and Africa together, stalked by an assassin, the pair explore the heart of the American political psyche. From their combined experience, they plumb the political degeneration of America from FDR's New Deal to the Cold War, the McCarthy Witch Hunts, the Kennedy Assassinations, Nixon and Watergate, to the election of Ronald Reagan. A closet homosexual, Minaker conceals the fact that he has fallen in love with Pellarin.

You can readily see, the budget aside, even in 1981 or 1982, how the superstars turned down the project, and why Welles never made the film. Still, the unproduced script, along with that of The Cradle Will Rock, was widely admired and discussed; and following Welles' death in October 1985, Oja Kodar continued to campaign for a production of THE BIG BRASS RING.

After his successful documentary about the shoot of APOCALYPSE NOW (Coppola, 1979), entitled HEARTS OF DARKNESS (1991) -- using Welles' radio narration of Conrad's great story, "The Heart of Darkness" -- George Hickenlooper was able to buy the rights to THE BIG BRASS RING from Kodar. For several years, he worked on updating the script with her, and later still with F. X. Feeney. Eventually, they produced a film which made the round of film festivals, garnered prizes, but failed to find a distributor. It was picked up by Showtime Cable in 1999 and nominated for several Emmy's.

THE BIG BRASS RING Hickenlooper came up with centers on the 2000 Gubernatorial race in Missouri. William Blake Pellarin (William Hurt) is a charismatic politician, a Vietnam veteran, with a wealthy, beautiful wife Dinah (Miranda Richardson), who is bankrolling his Independent campaign, preparatory for a run at the presidency in 2004. The opening shot is of the flowing Mississippi, and Kim Minaker speaks words attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "It is common enough that we triumph under adversity, but if you would truly wish to test a man's character, give him power!" Then between and behind the titles, we see a cryptic sequence of Minaker (Nigel Hawthorne) taking studio photographs of two nude young men.

We cut to a political forum two weeks before Election Day, where Pellarin, on TV monitors and in person, is decrying the decline of the American Governmental System, quoting Philosopher Randolph Bourne, in the year of his death (1918), that we are becoming (then) "a political free-for-all." Down a long hallway trips the stylish Dinah. Education is the key to turn things around, says Pellarin. He will be the Education Governor! (Where have we heard that one before? and how often?) Dinah looks coolly on.

Leaving the hall, Pellarin, followed by cameras and peppered with advice from staff ("You spoke of 'revolution,' and don't use 'soccer,' use 'football'!), is accosted by a young TV correspondent, Cela Brandini (Irene Jacob), who asks him the significance of the name "Raymond Romano." Pellarin shrugs. (This is one Raymond not everyone loves.)

We see Ms. Brandini monitoring a TV interview tape about Pellarin she conducted in Cuba with Kimball Adams Minaker, former Senator from Rhode Island. An old advisor to JFK, a political maverick of a type which once flourished in the Democratic Party (Adam Clayton Powell, for instance), Kim Minaker (Nigel Hawthorne) had been Blake Pellarin's early political mentor. Then, he was caught in a scandal, disgraced, and went into exile in Havana. Unknown to Pellarin, Minaker is preparing to fly back to the U.S. with a figure from Pellarin's past.

There are scenes on a Mississippi River levy, low angle shots Welles would have loved of figures on a stone stairway against the sky, others of Pellarin bantering with Ms. Brandini and various newspeople. Clearly, Brandini and Pellarin have a discreet "chemistry." ("Who is Ray Romano?" continues, however, to be her professional mantra.) A series of dreams and flashbacks introduce Pellarin's past, his troubled relationship with his brother. Meanwhile we learn of his equally troubled marriage to Dinah ("richer than God"), for she is a secret alcoholic, who holes up on the riverboat that is the Pellarin Campaign Headquarters.

A great political party scene has Democratic (?) Candidate, Senator Homer Dick, fencing verbally with the Independent Pellarin. "Homer is in the vanguard of the . . . what do they call it? -- The Post Literate Society," the Senator's wife proudly informs her group.

THE BIG BRASS RING darkens steadily with the revelation that one of Pellarin's security staff, Kinzel (Ewan Stewart), is a former "black-ops" man in the CIA, and that he seems to have more than one loyalty. Summoned by a note from "Little John-John" (who turns out to be a black man in a wig and maid's costume), Pellarin takes a lonely speed boat ride to rendezvouz with Minaker and his pet monkey on, The Louis Quatorze, another riverboat, a haven for gay young men. Bizarre as these developments sound, they illustrate typical Welles themes: the unhappy relationship of a mentor and his pupil, the misunderstandings of a father and his children. Hickenlooper handles these sequences well, invoking Falstaff, Prince Hal, and King Lear.

I will not spoil all the yeasty directions the story takes, other than to say it holds together with a certain fascination until near the end. The problem I think is that in the original screenplay, Kim Minaker enticed his would-be assassin on a long illustrative journey through a Tangier night town. In context of the movie's logic, the sequence looks as if it were shot (or at least planned), but not spliced in, and its absence from the finished work gives THE BIG BRASS RING an abrupt climax which does not allow the denouement a sufficient weight.

And so, we are left with the Shakespearean question: "What's in a name? That which we call a name by any other name would smell as sweet." (Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2.) But, of course, a name does matter, in political, economic and many other arenas. As Minaker tells Pellarin: No man in America can become President if he has a certain name, "not a Tsongas, not a Dukakis, not a Cuomo!"

Orson Welles, from his young manhood, had a deep interest in what is now called "Liberal Politics." In the 1930's, he acted as a radio consultant to FDR on the famous "Fireside Chats"; in the 1940's he wrote speeches for Roosevelt in his Third and Fourth Presidential Campaigns. Welles's ill-fated expedition to Brazil to make IT ALL CAME TRUE, for Nelson Rockefeller and the State Department, was in part to establish a reputation of gravitas before running himself for political office. He considered challenging Joe McCarthy for the Senate in his home state of Wisconsin in 1946, and a few years later he was tempted to take a try at Governor of California. He was his entire life a Champion of Civil Rights (even before there was such a term). And all of that is at the heart of Welles' screenplay for THE BIG BRASS RING, but Hickenlooper, Feeny and (presumably) Oja Kodar have chosen to stress Welles' personal life rather than his political interests in their adaptation. They have added references to CITIZEN KANE (1941), to Welles' alcoholic father, and most interestingly, for me at least, to Welles' little known brother.

George Orson Welles had a brother, Richard Ives Welles. Ten years older than Orson, he was nineteen at the time of their young mother's death. Awkward, suffering a stutter, Richard became increasingly erratic. He failed in everything he tried, and in 1927, at age 23, he was diagnosed schizophrenic and committed to the Kankakee Institute in Wisconsin, where he would remain for ten years. Their father Dick Welles disowned him, redistributing Richard Ives Welles' share in the family estate to a trust fund for the younger George Orson Welles (very like, on a smaller scale, the fund which figures so decisively in the life of Charles Foster Kane ).

Orson Welles appears to have suffered considerable guilt and shame over Richard. According to Barbara Leaming, Welles biographer and confidant, Welles, as a boy, saw Richard Ives Welles as "a distortion of his own strangeness." [We might remember that until just recently, "madness" was considered hereditary or "to run in families."] Both brothers figure in Welles' first mature literary work, written when he was 17 in Spain: Bright Lucifer. It is a bit of blood and thunder about two haunted brothers, set deep in the North Woods, in which a demonic boy, Eldred, conjures death for elder brother Jack, a drunken Hollywood screen writer, provoking younger brother, Bill, to kill Eldred in revenge.

In any case, Richard Ives Welles emerged from the asylum in 1937, just as George Orson Welles had become the toast of Broadway and Radio. Richard began to give press interviews in which he claimed that he had written some of young Orson Welles' stage and radio adaptations of famous works. Destitute, the older Welles was put on salary and found work by his brother. It is one of the ironies of the relationship that at certain times on Broadway in 1938 and 1939, when Orson Welles was starring as Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and as Falstaff in Five Kings, his adaptation of Shakespeare's Tudor Historical Plays, Richard Ives Welles was sweeping out his younger brother's theater after the footlights had been turned off. Orson Welles continued to support his older brother with a stipend until Richard Ives Welles died in San Francisco in 1975.

You will have to see the film for yourself (now on video) to pick out the many references to this relationship which Hickenlooper and Kodar have added to Welles' script. (Even to having Kimball Adams Minaker write a book entitled, Bright Lucifer.)

Finally, although Hickenlooper's version fails in the end, and we can have no idea how Welles would have changed his screenplay in production (as he always did), THE BIG BRASS RING is an interesting political thriller, and a discourse on American Politics. William Hurt's portrayal of William Blake Pellarin is splendid, as is Miranda Richardson's of Dinah, and Nigel Hawthorne, doing (I think) a kind of take on Gore Vidal/Truman Capote, steals every scene he is in.

The original music by Thomas Morse is moody, and Kramer Morgenthau's location photography around St. Louis, Missouri, and Alton, Illinois, has an appropriate "look": warm, damp, lonely and slightly sinister.

Despite changing her name from Olga Palinkas, Welles was never able to make Oja Kodar a star. She was his lead in a couple of unfinished projects, and scintillated in his excellent documentary essay, F FOR FAKE (1974). Obviously, she would have played the Italian-American TV Correspondent, Cela Brandini in a Welles' version. Like Rita Hayworth before her, Kodar remained a friend to and supporter of Welles for the rest of his life -- and beyond. She recently appeared in a German film documentary, ORSON WELLES: THE ONE MAN BAND. At that time, Oja Kodar donated two tons of Welles' film projects to the Munich Film Archive, which is cataloging and restoring various works as I write.

Quite a gal.

What's in a name?

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UPDATE: May 6, 2004 -- In preparing a display in honor of Welles's birthday, May 6, 1915, it struck me how unintentionaly relevant THE BIG BRASS RING is to our current Presidential Campaign. After all, William Blake Pellarin is a Vetnam Veteran, who has made a failed bid for the presidency, and he is running for governor of a Middle Border state in 2000, preparatory for a real presidential bid in 2004. He is a moody, troubled man, married to wealthy woman. There seems to be some confusion about his bloodline and past.

Though he was running for re-election for Senator from Massachusetts in 2000, does not the figure described sound a bit like John Forbes Kerry?

We shall see.

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UPDATE: August 31, 2004 -- As we enter the Republican Republican Convention, the comparison I made in May seems even more apt. The band of "Swift Brothers" have been wheeled out to confuse the voters about Kerry's Vietnam War record, as a Karl Rove-like Kimball Adams Minaker unveils Pellarin's brother in THE BIG BRASS RING.

We might even look at the names John Ellis Bush and George Walker Bush . . . but that might be a whole other movie.

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F FOR FAKE --

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Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older