YouTubeArt: Orson Welles Reciting Moby Dick

In 1971, on a break from acting in Claude Chabrol's Ten Days' Wonder, Welles started filming scenes for an intended one-hour adaptation of his 1958 stage production Moby Dick-Reheased. Started in Strasbourg, he continued in his home in Orvilliers, with his cinematographer Gary Graver improvising the look of being at sea with a broken mirror and a splash of water. The above is a snippet of the surviving 22 minutes, which were reconstructed by the Munich Film Museum, and which I was lucky enough to see during Film Forum's Welles retro in '05.

I cribbed all of the above info from Joseph McBride's invaluable book, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, which describes the astonishing amount of work Welles produced in the later years of his life...all of which is caught up in legal limbo due to the jerry-rigged financing Welles had to construct since Hollywood wouldn't support any of his projects.

Also on YouTube: a clip from his final feature The Other Side of the Wind, which has never been released (but Peter Bogdanovich says a deal with Showtime is in the works); and a clip of Welles reciting a monologue from The Merchant of Venice.