The Film series is the largest series in the collection, consisting of approximately 15.5 linear feet of scripts, production records, correspondence, photographs, and other materials generated by Orson Welles's film work. Much of the material is related to Welles's later films, many of which remain unfinished. These films include The Dreamers , The Other Side of the Wind , The Big Brass Ring , Assassin , and The Cradle Will Rock . The collection also contains material related to earlier films such as Touch of Evil , F for Fake , The Trial, and Citizen Kane .
The series is arranged chronologically by film. For example, all materials relating to Citizen Kane including correspondence, photographs, and production documents, are kept together, physically and intellectually. Immediately after the Citizen Kane materials are materials related to Welles's next project, The Magnificent Ambersons. It is important to note that Welles often worked on several projects simultaneously and a memo filed under one project may touch on another project that he was working on at about the same time. For example, materials relating to The Other Side of the Wind also include some references to F for Fake . Researchers may therefore find additional materials by browsing through material from projects that were being worked on during the same time period.
Completed films, theatrical productions, and radio broadcasts are dated according to their first public showing or general release date. Unfinished or unreleased projects are identified with an approximate date range of the years in the work took place. Within each project, material is roughly arranged by type and position in the creative process with scripts coming first, then pre-production, production, and post-production documents, and lastly photographs and negatives.
It is important to note that there are two groups of files that are exceptions to the project-based arrangement. These two groupings of materials relating to production and investment companies Astrophore & Avenel, and Roprama Film were part of the original order of the collection (i.e. Welles or Kodar or an assistant grouped them in this way). The Astrophore and Avenel material consists of records related to The Other Side of the Wind , F for Fake , Blind Window , and other projects. Roprama Film was a Swiss company established by Welles in 1966. The Roprama files include material related to The Other Side of the Wind , Because of the Cats , and The Deep .
Various stages of the writing process, including treatments and stories, are represented in the film scripts in the Welles -- Kodar Papers. Where multiple scripts for a particular project are present, folders of script materials have been placed in presumed chronological order within a project.
Welles typically worked on scripts in sections, using a script typing service or secretary to produce successive drafts which he then amended and edited. The collection preserves many pages of these working drafts, which sometimes also include Welles's typed or written notes about the story and characters, along with messages to and from his typists. To preserve as much evidence as possible of his working methods, the archivist performed minimal reorganization of the papers, and there are many files of "draft pages" which may contain repetitions and out-of-sequence pages, filed as they were found. As Welles often worked by inserting new pages into older drafts or blending together several different versions of a scene, page numbers may not follow a logical sequence.
After Welles worked on them some pages were placed in folders or envelopes labeled with the state of completion, date, or name of a character or scene, but in many cases no information about the script material was recorded before it was filed away by Welles or Kodar. The precise date of Welles's later corrections and additions to these pages is generally not clear, and there may be multiple photocopies of pages bearing the same typed dates that have different undated hand-written changes.
Many of Welles's unfilmed screenplays, like an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear or The Cradle Will Rock (Welles's dramatization of the story of his famous 1937 Federal Theater production) were essentially completed, while a few, like an adaptation of a screenplay about the Robert Kennedy assassination by Donald Freed and Jack Kimbrough, were apparently never finalized.
Additional script notes:
A film project, The Big Brass Ring was close to production but fell through (though it was filmed by another director after Welles's death). Welles himself also adapted the screenplay as a novella, versions of which closely resemble the screenplay with the shooting directions removed. The novella drafts are filed after the screenplay.
Welles worked on The Other Side of the Wind for a number of years before its completion was blocked by problems with a financial backer. There are numerous versions of its script, including a "Lined Script" with editor’s notes about footage that had been shot to that time. Numerous later drafts show that the film continued to evolve afterwards.