What happens when one oddball genius collides with another? In 1982 the legendary writer, director and actor Orson Welles was guest-hosting the Merv Griffin show when Andy Kaufman stopped by. Although the pair were from different generations, there was a lot of overlap between these titans — they were both fantastic actors, and they each shared a trickster’s penchant for hoaxes and fakery,

Here’s the interview…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.

Today we remember the death of the late, great Orson Welles who exited this stage on October 10, 1985. The date of Welles’ death makes October a great time for looking back at the genius, but an even better reason is his War of the Worlds broadcast from October 30, 1938 — probably the greatest Halloween trick of all time. Remembering that unprecedented, and unequaled public prank here’s a bit from the War of the Worlds site about a 1957 television movie that recreated the panic surrounding Welles’ radio show…

Like the later 1975 telefilm The Night That Panicked America, this is a dramatisation of the events of October 30th 1938, when Orson Welles scared a nation witless with his adaptation of The War of the Worlds. However, this is a virtually unknown gem of a production dating back to 1957. Made for the renowned weekly anthology series “Studio One”, it is a really extraordinary 50 minutes of live television, featuring an incredible cast of soon to be major movie and television stars and a very accurate re-enactment of the broadcast…

Confusing or not, the actual script is extremely faithful to the original broadcast, right down to the use of the original orchestral arrangements. You get the impression that someone on this production had some first hand experience either of the actual War of the Worlds broadcast, or at the very least, of this period in broadcasting history. It’s a great piece of work, and captures the infectious air of mischief that is said to have permeated the studio that night. Alas, we do only get the first half of the broadcast re-enacted, and much of the material that would have been read by Welles is missing or only hinted at, but this does not really detract from the performances and the authentic feeling of realism…

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for appearances by James Coburn, Edward R. Murrow, Warren Oates and even a young Warren Beatty as a college student playing a card game. Here’s The Night America Trembled…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts

It’s common for folks like myself and the readers of this blog to frequent sites and browse magazines filled with articles about leaps in information processing, advances in artificial intelligence and the future of human/machine interfacing. It’s the 21st century after all, and even though many of our institutions and officials are woefully culture-bound to reality paradigms that were cast aside many decades ago, the rest of us are living in the future and busy helping to define what tomorrow will be instead of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by perceived, pessimistic inevitabilities.

We’re used to this kind of thinking and these ideas in 2015, but we can also feel the anxiety of trying to maintain a sense of self and place when the very nature of information seems to be changing, and changing everything we understand about ourselves and the world around us.

Some folks saw this coming almost 50 years ago, and you can watch a movie about it. Here’s the skinny from a YouTube page about Future Shock…

‘Future Shock’ is a documentary film based on the book written in 1970 by sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler. Released in 1972, with a cigar-chomping Orson Welles as on-screen narrator, this piece of futurism is darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia… A great opening features a montage of car crashes and civil unrest intercut with two figures walking
in a green field (while creepy synthesizers play in the background) who are soon revealed to be automatons with creepy robot faces — a nice metaphor for the fear of the unrecognizable, cold, and chaotic future society that Toffler thought we were all headed for…

So what exactly is “Future Shock”? Sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler explains: “We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems
and it’s decision-making processes… Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over-stimulation…”

“Toffler’s main argument is that humanity (as of 1970, when the book was written), is in the midst of an enormous shift from an industrial society to a super-industrial society; this new society will be characterized by such things as an acceleration of images, words, ideas, and technologies that could possibly overwhelm mankind, resulting in a serious disconnect when
these new ideas reach their fruition (if not well before then). This disconnect is ‘future shock’, an inability to process the enormous amounts of information and change associated with the super-industrial revolution.

This is Future Shock…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.

While David Bowie’s portrayal of Nikola Tesla in The Prestige is still my favorite on-screen depiction of the famous mad scientist, this 1980 production from Yugoslavia is an ambitious attempt at bringing Tesla’s tale to the cinema, and Orson Welles’ turn as J.P. Morgan is worth the price of admission. Here’s the Wiki…

The Secret of Nikola Tesla (Serbo-Croatian: ‘Tajna Nikole Tesle’), is a 1980 Yugoslav biographical film which details events in the life of the discoverer Nikola Tesla (portrayed by Serbian actor Petar Božović). Tesla was born to ethnic Serb parents in 1856 Croatia (at the time, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He arrived in New York in 1884, became an American citizen in 1891, made immense contributions to science and died in Manhattan at age 86 during World War II in 1943.[1]

This biography includes references to his amazing abilities of detailed mental visualization as well as the slowly intensifying personal habits, indulgences or eccentricities for which he became nearly as well known. The film portrays Tesla in a battle with Thomas Edison over the clear superiority of Alternating Current over Direct Current. It also depicts Tesla’s dream of supplying consumers all around the globe with limitless free energy.

If you’re new to Tesla’s story this production is a perfect primer. If you’re a Tesla scholar you’ll still want to take a look at this rare gem. Here’s The Secret of Nikola Tesla…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

Today we celebrate the 1906 birthday of Brother Theodore, a German American monologist known for his rambling rants and self-described “stand-up tragedy.” Born Theodore Gottlieb, he was an artist described as “Boris Karloff, surrealist Salvador Dalí, Nijinsky and Red Skelton . . . simultaneously”.

Here’s an overview from the Wiki…

Gottlieb was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Düsseldorf, in the Rhine Province, where his father was a magazine publisher. He attended the University of Cologne. At age 32, under Nazi rule, he was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until he signed over his family’s fortune for one Reichsmark. After being deported for chess hustling from Switzerland he went to Austria where Albert Einstein, a family friend and alleged lover of his mother, helped him escape to the United States.

He worked as a janitor at Stanford University, where he demonstrated his prowess at chess by beating 30 professors simultaneously,[2] and later became a dockworker in San Francisco. He played a bit part in Orson Welles’s 1946 movie The Stranger. This was one of the several movie appearances he made beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1990s. These were mostly small parts in B-movies, although he did provide the voice of Gollum in the 1977 made-for-television animated version of The Hobbit and the follow-up adaptation of The Return of the King (1980). He also voiced Ruhk, Mommy Fortuna’s assistant and carnival barker in The Last Unicorn (1982).

Just prior to his death from pneumonia, he recorded several monologues for the controversial documentary series, Disinformation.

Here’s an epic playlist of the man’s words and wisdom…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.

I’m not sure why this didn’t get a Google Doodle, but Orson Welles would have been 99 today and I think that’s worth noting. I love covering films and I love talking about magick — Welles knew a bit about both.

Welles was a child prodigy who founded the groundbreaking Mercury Theatre company in New York. After creating audacious productions of Julius Caesar and Macbeth — which relocated the play from Scotland to Haiti and featured an all African-American cast — Welles took his company to the airwaves and The War of the Worlds is still considered one of the most famous radio broadcasts of all time. Hearing the siren song of Hollywood, Welles lit for Los Angeles where he would make one of the most important films of all time while also crippling his career and himself so badly that he would never really recover from the wounds.

First things first: Here’s Welles’ earliest film. It was made while he was a 19 year old student at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock Illinois. Here’s the Wiki…

An elderly woman sits on a bell as it rocks back and forth, while a servant in blackface pulls at a rope. A dandified gentleman appears at the top of a stairway and doffs his hat to the lady; he smiles and courts her attention. She does not respond, but the servant hangs himself. The scene changes to an darkened interior: the gentleman sits at a grand piano and plays, but something is wrong. He opens the piano’s lid and finds the woman lying inside, dead. He leafs through a number of tombstone-shaped cards with different inscriptions – “Sleeping”, “At Rest”, “With The Lord” – and finally chooses one that says “The End”.

The film’s action, such as it is, is intercut with random shots of bells, headstones, a church cross and other images, sometimes printed in negative. Many years later Welles acknowledged that the film was an imitation of the early surrealist films of Luis Bunuel and Jean Cocteau. He did not consider it a serious piece of work, and was amused at the idea of being added to his creative canon.

Here is The Hearts of Age…

And here is a PBS American Experience documentary that captures Welles at his greatest and most reckless. “The Battle Over Citizen Cane” is a heavyweight slug-fest between Welles and newspaper giant William Randolph Hearst, whom Welles satirizes in the film. The two men tore into each other personally and professionally and, at the end, both of them were changed forever.

The rest of us got a great film out of the battle, but what did we lose?

Rosebud?

Here is The Battle Over Citizen Cane…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.