An Evening with Orson Welles

Production

In 1970, after he had begun filming The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles was contacted by Sears and hired to make a series of half-hour short films that would be available for rental by subscription. Welles wrote, directed and acted in six 30-minute recitations including Ring Lardner's The Golden Honeymoon, Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, writings by G. K. Chesterton and P. G. Wodehouse, and speeches by Socrates and Clarence Darrow. The films were available exclusively through Sears, on special tapes that could be used only with the retailer's high-end Cartrivision — cartridge television — home video machines.

Cinematographer Gary Graver photographed the half-hour videos beginning August 31, 1970, shortly after he met Welles.

"We shot them in a little studio inside Orson's house on Lawlen Way," Graver wrote in his posthumously published memoir, Making Movies with Orson Welles (2008):

Shooting the shorts for Sears was a simple job. We finished them and sent them off. But we never received any feedback and we never heard anything about them again. Now, in hindsight, I wish I'd saved copies of those, since they seem to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth! Only one of those shorts, Ring Lardner's The Golden Honeymoon, is known to exist today. I would love to see those again.

What footage survives from the short film The Golden Honeymoon has been supplemented by audio from the 1946 Mercury Theatre radio play. Other titles that appeared on Cartrivision cassettes were American Heritage, Vol. 1, American Heritage, Vol. II, Noah and Socrates, and My Little Boy.