Apology to Jonathan Rosenbaum

I have been gathering up the most fearsome array of scholarship possible to respond to a thoroughly offensive assertion that kicks off the 2004 "documentary" Shadowing the Third Man, which has unfortunately been included in the supplemental materials of the otherwise excellent updated DVD edition of The Third Man coming from Criterion on May 22. I'm not going to get into my issues here—I'm trying to contact Frederick Baker, the writer/director of the film, and get his response to the one question I have for him before taking him to task. But anyway, one book I added to my library in my gathering was the great Jonathan Rosenbaum's new anthology Discovering Orson Welles.

Therein is the one piece he ever wrote for the print version of Premiere, an account of his work on the 1998 reconstruction of Touch of Evil entitled "Touch of Evil Retouched." He prefaces the piece with an account of its commissioning and editing. "I knew one of [Premiere's] editors, Anne Thompson...she checked with the other editors at the magazine and reported that ther was a lot of enthusiastic interest. When I asked her what approach I should takes ,he urged me to write a first-person account of my experience on the project from beginning to end, which yielded a first version. She reported back that I should interview Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Walter Murch and integrate some of this material. After doing this, I was told that the editors felt that a first-person piece made the piece too much about myself and that the readers of Premiere couldn't be expected to know anything about the film, so I should add a detailed plot summary without making the piece any longer. The second revision had to be cut further after the piece's layout was done, eliminating practically all of the interview material."

I take no issue with any of this per se. I'm just trying to remember at what point in the process I was brought in to assure Jonathan that Premiere was, in fact, dealing in good faith with him. (I served much the same function in doing the line edit of the 1996 Premiere article entitled "David Lynch Keeps His Head," for which efforts its author David Foster Wallace nicknamed me "The Mollifier" in the acknowledgements section of his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.) I was the guy responsible for copyfitting the piece, that is, making it fit into its layout. Now that I think of it, I actually take slight issue with Jonathan's assertion that Premiere's editors didn't expect its readers to know anything about Touch of Evil. Jonathan's perspective kind of underscores the difference in between those who sometimes write for putatively big glossy magazines and those who put together putatively big glossy magazines every month. It's not that we don't think our readers don't know anything about Touch of Evil. It's that we don't want to LOSE those readers we have who don't know anything about Touch of Evil. A fine distinction, I know, but one we kind of lived by, because those times, like these, were parlous ones for print magazines.

Nevertheless, reading Jonathan's account made me feel bad, and although since I worked with him on the piece I've blurbed him and met him and we now enjoy a collegial relationship when we run into each other at festivals, I wanted to publicly apologize for any discomfort he felt during the sculpting of his piece for the print edition of Premiere. It's a knotty business, magazine-making. I know my friend Mr. Wallace was ready to go to press with his version of the nightmare that resulted in an article that appeared in Premiere under the title "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" and in his anthology Consider the Lobster under its original name "Big Red Son," but was dissuaded from doing so by various forces. It's quite a harrowing tale, I can assure you, and I think it would be best told by the both of us...better still, by Dave, myself and Mssrs. Evan Wright and Nathaniel Welch. Make us an offer, if you can track down our reps. Or, as OMC put it, "Wanna know the rest? Hey-buy the rights." Enjoy!

Comments

[Jonathan Rosenbaum]

Glenn:

Coming across your post via Greencine Daily in an Oberhausen cybercafe-- where I´ve gone to relax after completing my duties as jury member at the short film festival here--I'd just like to thank you for your elucidation as well as your generosity. And, for whatever it's worth, I think that (a) your "fine distinction" is actually a point well worth making, and (b) whenever I bought Premiere, your reviews were always the first thing I read.

[G.Kenny]

Thank you, sir. And the post wherein I take "Shadowing the Third Man" to task, as I believe it deserves to be, will follow soon.