On Friday, June 8, the City of Woodstock and Classic Cinemas unveiled the final piece of the Woodstock on Film and Stage Mural project. Before the mural itself was conceived, Woodstock artist Bobby Joe Scribner set himself on a mission – in 2015 he met Croatian actress Oja Kodar, at the centennial celebration of her late paramour, Orson Welles. Kodar, a fellow sculptor, created a statue of Welles in the coastal city of Split, but lamented to Scribner that America itself had no monument to what many consider to be its greatest cinematic genius. Within weeks, Scribner set to work correcting that oversight. Now, after three years and $10,000 in community donations, a bronzed, seated statue of the writer, actor, and director can be found in what he himself considered the closest place he ever had to a hometown.
“I suppose it’s Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere,” Welles said in a 1960 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it’s that.” Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but would spend the first ten years of his life living in Chicago, New York State, Madison, and after his mother’s death, on tour with his wealthy but alcoholic father in East Asia and the Caribbean. In 1926, he came to Woodstock for what would be his only formal education, at the renowned and exclusive Todd Seminary for Boys. The Todd School, as it was later called, was a preparatory school that attracted the children of wealthy families from all over the United States. Taking a rounded and creative approach to education, the Todd School taught not only traditional academics, but sailing, aviation, farm work, and – to the constant interest of Welles – radio, theatre, and film production. The later headmaster of the school, Roger Hill, would be regarded by Welles as the greatest influence on his own life. “I wanted to be like him,” says Welles. “I was passionate about the theatre – putting on plays was all I ever wanted to do with my life – and Skipper, God bless him, was the only one of my elders who encouraged my theatrical ambitions.” For Hill’s part, he was one of the few adults to understand the complicated and troubled youth. “In some ways, he was never really a young boy, you know,” says Hill.
Half a year before his graduation in May 1931, Welles’ father died of heart and kidney failure in a Chicago hotel. Welles had told him he would stop seeing him in an attempt to stop his drinking, and believing the plan had backfired, he blamed himself for his death. With no family left and a small fortune in his inheritance, Welles abandoned a Harvard scholarship and took to Europe. It was in Dublin, claiming to be a Broadway star, that Welles bluffed his way into his stage debut as Duke Karl Alexander of Wurttemberg in a production of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jud Suss. After half a year in Ireland as a stage actor and producer, Welles returned to Woodstock to work with his mentor Hill on Everybody’s Shakespeare, a series of illustrated books adapting Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth for student plays. The books would sell 100,000 copies over the next ten years, with Welles donating all of his own royalties to the Todd School. Between directing a Todd School production of Twelfth Night that won first prize at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and organizing the six-week Todd Theatre Festival at the Woodstock Opera House in July 1934 (shooting his two earliest short films, Twelfth Night and The Hearts of Age, at Todd during each), Welles was introduced by Hill to playwright Thornton Wilder, who would give him the connections to start his career in New York. After directing an all-black Macbeth set in a fictionalized Haiti, and a production of Julius Caesar whose costumes and sets were based off the then-ongoing Nuremberg rallies, Welles found himself catapulted to global stardom when he took his Mercury Theatre company to the radio, broadcasting the infamous 1938 adaptation of War of the Worlds.
If radio was the internet of the 1930s, then Welles, at age 23, was one of its first and most successful trolls. In an innovative meta-media production, Welles took on the role of a newscaster interrupting a regularly scheduled music program with news of “explosions occurring on the planet Mars” and a “strange meteor” falling on a farm in New Jersey. His bulletins become increasingly panicked as “on-the-scene reporters” describe an alien war machine emerging from the crater, followed by an all-out invasion of New York and the rest of the world. Science fiction fans would have quickly recognized the plot of the iconic 1898 novel by H.G. Wells (no relation to Orson), but across the United States there were thousands who were briefly convinced of a real-life Martian invasion. Derided by everyone from the New York Times to Adolf Hitler as the “fake news” of its day (themselves exaggerating the panic to the already fictional story), War of the Worlds was nonetheless a landmark moment in America’s cultural history, showing the power and potential of mass media in a way never seen before. For Welles, who lamented “I’m through… washed up” when calls from furious police and scoop-crazed reporters flooded the CBS office, it was the start of worldwide fame and a sweeping Hollywood contract that would lead to Citizen Kane, consistently ranked as one of the best films ever made.
Despite his rise as one of America’s most renowned actors and directors, Welles never forgot his fondness for his adopted hometown. His 1946 film The Stranger, depicting the hunt for an escaped Nazi war criminal, was originally supposed to be set in Woodstock around the Todd School campus. Though he was kept from this wish by the film’s budget, he included numerous references to his childhood alma mater in the finished cut, including “Harper vs Todd” in the gymnasium of his fictional school as well as the names of several Todd teachers and buildings. It’s unfortunately fitting that just as Welles’ career and health disintegrated later in life, little today remains of the school he loved so much – just one building out of the original nine survives as an apartment complex on McHenry and Seminary Avenues. But if Welles were to walk through town today, perhaps to the Woodstock Theater later this year to see his last film, The Other Side of the Wind finally released, he might (after ribbing its munchkinlike stature) be happy to find his one American monument in the place in the world where he would have appreciated it most.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 