In 1997 I got a phone call from somebody that I had never met before, who had been at a lecture that I gave at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on The Conversation. And his name was Rick Schmidlin, and he was a producer and was involved in a project to revive Touch of Evil, Orson Welles's 1958 film for its 40th anniversary in 1998, attempting to do justice by the film. And incorporate all of Welles's notes and reservations about the damage that the studio, Universal, had done to the film on its release in 1958. And I was overwhelmed at the idea of this, particularly coming out of the blue. But I had some time on my hands. I was in-between projects. And I said, 'Tell me more.'
It involved, principally, Rick's discovery of a memo that Welles had written on his first viewing of what the studio had done to the film. Contractually, the director is obligated to see this. But Universal had put strictures on it, meaning, we're only going to show you the film once. You cannot stop the film. And that's it. So there was Welles, sitting in a theatre, scribbling madly as the film projected. And then, he stayed up all night that night, and typed up a 58-page memo to his enemies at Universal, the people who had taken the film away from him. And said, 'Here's what I think.'
And the memo was rumoured to exist. Peter Bogdanovich had a couple of pages from it, I think in his interviews with Welles. But the entire memo had disappeared. And somehow, Rick managed to find it. I think, reading between the lines that it was in Charlton Heston's file cabinet because Charlton, the star of the movie, was also the producer of the movie. And as such, he would have been copied on any of these internal memos.
