The Don Quixote of Orson Welles

In 1955 Orson Welles was commissioned by CBS television to produce a 30 minute film adaptation of the Miguel de Cervantes novel ‘Don Quixote’.
Given the epic scale of the book and the limitations of time and budget that had been placed upon him, Welles decided to produce a film set in the modern age with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as anachronisms, bewildered by the advances of the future.
Welles produced some test footage with Mischa Auer as Don Quixote but CBS were unhappy with both the shots they saw and the concept of the project and cancelled production.
By this point Welles had decided to expand the film to feature length and produce it independently. Frank Sinatra invested $25,000 in this new version and Welles provided additional funding from his own earnings as an actor and director.
Spanish actor Francisco Reiguera was cast as Don Quixote, Akim Tamiroff, a Russian born actor, was cast as Sancho Panza and American child actress Patty McCormack was brought in to play a little girl that would meet Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and explain the modern world to them.
The production was undertaken without a script with silent scenes being improvised around the streets of Mexico City where the initial filming took place.
Welles planned to dub in the dialogue at a later date as he enjoyed working with the improvisational style that he felt was similar to the production of early silent comedies.
Eventually funding began to dry up and filming became a haphazard affair that Welles would organise around other, more lucrative, work.
Production was moved to Spain to save money but this proved problematic as Reiguera was a Republican exile from the Spanish Civil War and could not always be guaranteed access to the country.
Work on the film stretched from the Fifties into the Sixties with no end in sight.
As the filming slowed down McCormack physically outgrew her role and had to be dropped from the film. Welles amended the concept by introducing himself as a character, playing a film director who wanted to cast Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as themselves in a adaptation of the book he was filming.
By 1972, Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff were both dead and the film was still not finished.
Welles claimed that he had completed as the principal photography he needed with both actors and the film simply needed to have the dialogue dubbed onto it, which he planned to do himself, and be edited together.
Months before his death in 1985, Welles was still insistent that he would be able to complete the film.
Orson Welles died on the 10th of October 1985 with his Don Quixote still unfinished.
Footage was stored all over the world, some of it not stored properly and ruined, and other footage apparently lost.
In 1990 Spanish producer Patxi Irogoyen and director Jesus Franco acquired the rights to the footage from the project.
Once they assembled all the film they could get they realised that over the life of the production Welles had worked in various formats of film which meant that visually the film would look inconsistent.
The lack of a script and the changes in the concept over time also meant that in terms of narrative the film was confused at best and Welles had only recorded part of the dialogue to be dubbed over the footage.
Irogoyen and Franco did what they could. A new script was produced and actors hired to complete the dialogue.
In 1992 ‘The Don Quixote of Orson Welles’ premiered at the Universal Exposition in Seville.
The premiere was threatened when an Italian film editor called Mauro Bonnani called on organisers to not show the film as he had 20,000 meters of footage in his possession that he felt was integral to a reasonable version of the film being completed. Bonnani was unable to come to an agreement with Iroygen and Franco over the use of his footage and a lawsuit soon followed.
Reviews of the film were mostly negative and, although it was screened at Cannes that year, it has never had a commercial cinematic release...