Transcript
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction... I don't think any words can explain a man's life. The broadcasting system and its affiliated station presents... Columbia Network takes pride in presenting... Rogue Spud.
Speaker: We take you now to Grover Mills, New Jersey. Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theater and star of these broadcasts... There's a voice. Just a voice. I never really saw him.
Speaker: He was only the hero, horsesonwell a great lover, horsesonwell and a dirty dog. Good morning, this is Orson Welles speaking. How do you do, ladies and gentlemen? This is Orson Welles. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen. This is Orson Welles speaking.
Speaker: A unicorn. Well, here it is, anybody wants to see it. All right, class is in session. Come on in take your seats. We are ready to learn My code looking very studious with a pencil in her mouth.
Speaker: I was actually trying to take notes as to what pages the goddamn document started on. oh yeah. Spoiler alert for five minutes from now, but the play starts on page 66. A bad sign if you're trying to read this on the phone at the beach.
Speaker: Which, I mean, again, talk about about your great beach reads. But yeah, we'll we'll get into all of that.
Speaker: just This is an auspicious episode, though. This is. I'm very excited for this. this This is essentially the reason it's not this episode. not project specifically jesus fucking christ we'll get what it represents yes we will have 100 oh christ alive ah but yes this is finally we're officially covering uh the first uh uh uh officially published i want to say at least work of orson wells yes uh again probably not not published until later never actually i think performed
Speaker: performed until years later, not performed at the time it was written. so we We discussed this. I think we should probably mention first, before we get too deep into the weeds here, welcome to Wells University.
Speaker: um oh yeah. the the class all about ah the the life and work of one Mr. Orson Welles America's favorite filmmaker question mark quick big question mark big question mark big question mark a question mark as large as the man himself indeed later in life later later in life right right yeah right you you actually take that question mark and and invert it and you get a profile of Orson is what is what you get there
Speaker: um Anyway, I am one of your TAs. My name is Stephen Fox. Where their pronouns? He, him.
Speaker: oh God, you killed me with that one. Hi, I'm Hope. um She, her. yeah This is going to kill me. Welcome back to Wells University. we are we're We're having a day.
Speaker: Can I just tell you? Listeners, we're having... We're having a day, class. and but But we're finally getting into, and again, this has been what we've been building up to across the last, what, seven episodes? No, Jesus. We're finally able to talk about the capital T, the capital W work, the work.
Speaker: Yes. And this is what we've been, the the initial pitch for this was to go episode for episode, a new piece of Wells' work every week And so we're after seven weeks of preamble.
Speaker: Oh God. Babies. Here we are. That motherfucker. Stop being so interesting before you turn into a teenager. You little asshole. Um, Yes, that and this is this is where we are. we meet in Last week we covered basically everything leading up to this moment, and including this moment, ah the writing of the piece we are now discussing, which is the 1932, at least that's when it was initially penned, play by Orson Welles.
Speaker: comma with Roger Hill in like a significantly smaller font. Oh boy. It's a tiny little font. Roger gets tiny little font for a skipper. Um, it is marching song. a play an epic dare I call it an epic biographical play on the late life of abolitionist John Brown.
Speaker: ah as Someone who, based on what I'm reading here, ah Wells describes as prophet, warrior, zealot, the most dramatic and incredible figure in American history.
Speaker: I mean, he's not wrong. There's certainly something to be said for that description. the The man was a force all to himself. ah ah So I was trying to like you asked me earlier today, even if I knew that much about John Brown and I claimed to have a quote unquote working knowledge of John Brown's deeds.
Speaker: And I had a moment of panic. It's like, oh, no.
Speaker: oh no, I'm going to have to panic last minute study up on John Brown. And then I realized, wait a minute, somebody else has already done that for me.
Speaker: ah my My partner is in love with ah the comedian Pearlmania500. He's across all social media platforms. Phenomenal. Yeah. yeah We actually saw him last September in Philadelphia because he is a local Philly boy.
Speaker: i was going to say. Yeah. yeah And he has a podcast. And Bex actually had me listen to this particular episode of the podcast a few months ago, which is kind of the only reason I know that it existed.
Speaker: ah So anything I say that sounds factual about John Brown this evening, trust it came from the episode published, I want to say, in March of 2025 on John Brown of the Pearl Mania 500 podcast, Too Many Tabs.
Speaker: And it's... We will absolutely be linking that in the show notes for this episode as one of our... Yeah, invaluable resource for a last-minute panicked. Because, like, I'm coming at this barely for...
Speaker: It's got the veneer of academia to it, but nothing more than ah then a paper-thin coating. Gossamer. It is yeah is a gossamer covering.
Speaker: and and And as as we learned from Seinfeld, one mustn't dissect gossamer. ah ah Jesus Christ. um But like the subject is Orson Welles. So I'm thinking all about like where Orson Welles was at his time in his life when he wrote this and like, oh, hey, what was going on with American history at this point? Speaking of, I should probably queue up that page, which is my normal thing. I think we did that last week, didn't we? In 1932? We covered 1931 last week, if memory serves. Well, then you gotta keep this to date.
Speaker: Let me check real quick. Nope. not We did cover 1932 because John Williams was born then. So nevermind. We've already covered it. Yep. Right on. um ah But ah the farthest thing from my brain was putting academic research into John Brown.
Speaker: John Brown in just extremely broad strokes. um I mean, he's Fuck. ah Orson puts it better than I could ever do in a video that you can find on YouTube. Orson Welles Battle Hymn of the Republic. If you literally just search on YouTube Orson Welles Battle Hymn of the Republic, you'll find videos that are literally titled that, that are about five minutes long, of Orson himself ah briefly explaining John Brown and then it going into better detail about the ah birth of the track The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Okay.
Speaker: Tell me he sings the Battle Hymn of the Republic. No, he does not. He does not. He does not. But it does not matter. It is Orson Welles reciting the lyrics to Battle Hymn as the drums slowly fade in.
Speaker: And you're just... My friend, my friend, I spent today at work bouncing back and forth between like four different versions of Battle Hymn. One of them was Orson Welles' description.
Speaker: The other is a real version of Battle Hymn. And the other was the Muppets. um but I mean, very on brand for us. It's kind of the best. But in very, very fans, which is why we love the fact that Orson worked with the Muppets on several occasions, which we'll get to in a decade.
Speaker: It's the best. um But in very broad strokes, ah John Brown ah was an abolitionist, um ah which means that he did not like slavery and was actually quite opposed to slavery.
Speaker: To all those who practice slavery, he would say, ah, ah, and wag his little finger at them. Snap it out of your hand. um But ah he yeah he tried to start a civil war in 1959, which was, you might know.
Speaker: ah Did I say 1959? You did. Yeah, Eisenhower was president. John Brown was over years old. He would have been 159. Jesus Christ. There we John Brown, famous sea turtle. Now, 1859. Ha ha!
Speaker: now eighteen fifty nine um
Speaker: Oh, God. ah Yeah. 1859, he tried to start a civil war ah several years before the actual American Civil War started. And the idea was that he took a few men and his sons and tried to ah free the enslaved people ah held in harpers ferry virginia which if you if you just look up pictures of harpers ferry uh if you just google image search literally googling all this with you it is where like two or three rivers meet and it is absolutely an idealistic picturesque town we drove through there a few years ago and it's just stunning
Speaker: stunning It's absolutely stunning. It sits right at the borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. And it's actually very close to ah Washington, D.C. And specifically, Harper's Ferry is where a giant armory of weapons was kept.
Speaker: And John Brown was so convinced that the enslaved people, once they were, quote unquote, freed, would pick up arms and rally with him against the slavers.
Speaker: Um... And he was also convinced that it would spur the North, uh, to action, uh, into, uh, helping him do all of this stuff. Um,
Speaker: Because as we will get into, as we were are discussing marching song, the man was quote unquote ordained by God himself to begin. We're definitely going to get into all this shit. Yeah. So he's an absolutely fascinating figure that I happen to agree with on most cases. And Hey, a lot of stuff that we might talk about today might sound like it has some sort of,
Speaker: uh, parallel with today's society. was going to say prescient. The word is prescient. Yes. Uh, uh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, I think, uh, Pearl Mania's take was, uh, uh, uh, cold, ah colder than ice.
Speaker: And, uh, I'm going to endeavor not to say anything that would endanger me, a trans woman in a deeply purple state any more than necessary. but,
Speaker: But fuck slavery, ah to say the least. Fuck the Confederacy. The Union. I'm really not a patriot, but anytime the Confederacy comes up, fucking Union forever. Let's fucking go. i was going to say, and I mean, if we're on a binary about this shit, then yes, 100%.
Speaker: That's unfortunately, it does come down to a binary in certain scenarios, and it sucks. In this scenario in particular, yes, it kind of does. Yes, it it truly does. um But John Brown is an absolutely fascinating historical figure in in any way you can begin to imagine. Even well before ah he tried to start a civil war, he was ah he he founded a small town. He built a school. He built a post office. He built a barn that had a secret room in which he would ah underground railroad enslaved people up to Canada. He, I think the number that Pearlmania, if they want to cite their sources, because that's the source I'm citing,
Speaker: It's an inception. It's an inception of sources. um The number they cited from some sort of official source, don't have it in front of me, was ah over 2,500 enslaved people he helped get to Canada.
Speaker: So the man, he, the man was a true Renaissance man and wanted to share his wealth of knowledge. He became an expert in sheep just so he could teach others the differences in wool and how to raise sheep, et cetera.
Speaker: He bred horses for a little while and then stopped because he found out that people were using his horses as racehorses and he hated gambling. also swear Also swearing. He would hate me.
Speaker: And he as well. Yeah. Yeah. um You know, John Brown, to to your hatred of swearing, I have one thing to say. Fuck that. Yeah. Also, because Wikipedia does him an enormous disservice, go ahead and Google John Brown beard because the man apparently just usually had a beard and it's the most amazing beard.
Speaker: buck fucking wild look you can imagine that in this play as with a beard yeah yeah but like his official wikipedia the the sum total of all human knowledge features no beard and i would like shaven john brown yeah absolutely absolutely slander on the man uh that is that is a beard if i may say that is a beard that would set carl marx to shame it is a Hell of a beard.
Speaker: Hell of a beard. And what's even more special about John Brown is, as Orson puts it so eloquently, it wasn't enough to just say slavery is wrong. Something had to be done about it.
Speaker: So he would he would take a look at Karl Marx with all of his fancy books and be like, no, go shoot the rich people. Yes. Yes, 100%. John Brown getting shit done. But...
Speaker: john brown getting shit done um but As far as this play goes, we have any more preamble?
Speaker: i doubtly I probably should say the ending of the story ah ah John Brown, ah his sons were killed ah so were the rest of his people had like four five sons, right? he had a lot of It was the 18-somethings What else was there to do but just Yeah, exactly um What's latex?
Speaker: But But i said But he was very much hanged by the neck until dead on December 2nd, 1959. And yeah,
Speaker: um and yeah and then just several years later, if I'm remembering my dates correctly, was it 61? American Civil...
Speaker: or When were those dates? 1861. There you go. So just two years later, two years later, ah really, the ah the the rest of the North, so to speak, was was suddenly fighting for John Brown's cause, ah which, of course, leads us into the beautiful lyrics.
Speaker: John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on. Which is where we get the title of podcast. play that we're discussing today uh marching song a song eloquently apparently performed throughout this play by john brown's oldest and um least mentally acute son, perhaps, ah John Brown Jr. Yeah, that's, and, you know, we've been talking a lot about um ah Orson's ah brother um and the the portrayal, depiction, um the anything of ah mentally
Speaker: ah ill people in the past several episodes, for want of better words. um ah yeah Even just basic neurodivergence was treated as a kind of horror show up until very recently, historically. like um and even And even still, unfortunately. There is no way you can not convince me that Orson is a high-functioning autistic. There is no way you can convince me.
Speaker: Certainly not. um Strong sense of justice. What? now I've never heard of such a thing. um But I would also like to point out we are recording this in July. So happy disability pride month. That's right.
Speaker: Pride gets two months. Yeah. ah Yeah. yeah So ah happy disability pride to ah to all who celebrate. um This will not be going out until late August, but still. Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, ah John Brown Jr. is ah depicted with all of the ah care and sensitivity that you would expect from a play written by a white teenager in the 19... A white affluent teenager in the 1930s.
Speaker: Yes, 100%. It is. That is. Now, I think he was probably in his early 20s by this point. He was born in 1915. This is 1932, so...
Speaker: He wasn't 20 yet. What are you doing? Is he not 20 yet? 1915. Math my worst subject. He's 17 years old. Fuck me. sorry. a girl a drink. Math is my worst subject. okay he's seventeen years old fuck me i'm sorry
Speaker: buy a girl drink worst subject
Speaker: I truly, i truly, i know there's a bottle of Malort with your name on it. Truly, I only know this off the top of my head because everybody's always just like, well, he made Citizen Kane when he was 26. And I think it's way more interesting that he scared the shit out of half the nation at 23, which know isn't till 1938. So 1932 isn't till nineteen thirty eight so nineteen nineteen thirty two is Less than 1938. Touche. You're right. No, you're right. and you're you are he You are not at all incorrect. I am dumb at math.
Speaker: you're and you're I also just do math as part of my job, which is an insane thing to consider for me. um Hope. I have a secret to share with you.
Speaker: i work in finance Oh, buddy. Oh, buddy. Aren't you glad that we are of the generation that they lied to one final time? You'll never have a calculator in your pocket at all times.
Speaker: Boy, howdy, am I? And I was one of those people that was be like, you know what? Try me. Yeah. Try me. i will. I will 100 percent do everything in my power to carry a calculator in my back pocket. of it Yeah. There was already that smart ass kid in like middle school, like the late 90s for me was like, ah, wristwatch calculator. There it is. Yes. 100 percent. That was a thing that existed in our lifetime. And it seems so quaint.
Speaker: It really, it truly does. I mean, I remember when the the Dick Tracy, like, watch... I mean, I don't remember, because obviously wasn't a child when those comics came out. But, like, I... i You know, the the notion of the the the watch communicator was a cool thing. I think we had those, like, when the Dick Tracy movie came out in 1990...
Speaker: i'm gonna I'm going to be old for a hot second and say, like, I hate smartwatches. I fucking hate smartwatches. Same. Yes. We have Dick Tracy ah fucking Inspector Gadget technology, and it's the dumbest, stupidest thing. I'll see people, like, look at their watch and then just stare at it and then poke at it for five minutes. And then if it's a big, noisy room, they'll hold it in their ear for five minutes as they're trying to listen to it Bitch, you have a cell phone.
Speaker: use that It's in your pocket. It's in your pocket right now. Get the fucking cell phone. Stop listening to your watch. You look like a nitwit. it My watch is analog and solar power. Half the people I'm walking past are having conversations on speakerphone as they're walking through the grocery store about things unrelated to groceries.
Speaker: Just insane. What a world we live in, Hope. during A world that neither Orson Welles nor John Brown could have ever predicted. John fucking Brown. John John Brown.
Speaker: Let's talk about marching song. I will say one more one more note on John Brown before we move on. The reason that i relied on you so heavily for the John Brown knowledge is that I had a private school education and it may shock you to learn. John Brown never came up.
Speaker: Would it shock you to learn that he also didn't come up in American public, school of regular American public school education? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Fascinating how they just kind of gloss over the union. Good confederacy. Bad.
Speaker: Let's not get into the reasons here. Right. um Chris. Got to mention Dred Scott. Got to mention. I fucking I and this was covered in school before no I got out of high school before no child left behind really had a chance to was teacher by the time no child left behind was a thing yeah so I was in education at that point. I cannot begin to imagine the shit show that kids are being taught now about this this very important stuff.
Speaker: And I swear to God, I've said this a lot before, you can learn anything from anywhere. So if you're learning important American history from a dumbass podcast by us, by extension, and ah a less dumbass podcast by another Philly couple, you ah yeah do what you must learn what you can it check your sources check your fucking sources uh make sure they're a trusted source but uh it's fucking sucks um yeah marching song i'm gonna close five of these tabs too many tabs too many tabs um
Speaker: I'm going to keep the Orson Welles Battle Hymn of the Republic tab open because I'm going to put that in the show notes. That's understandable. But i'm going to close a few more of these. um So yes, Marching Song, the play that we are here to discuss. Again, we i if I remembered to put it in the show notes for last week, then it was a part of your required reading.
Speaker: We put the link to the archive.org copy that we used to read um for this. the The first thing that I noticed, Hope, as I started reading this play, there is a very... And I texted you about this earlier. ah There is a very audacious... clip First of all, there are three pages of just... Four pages of characters and set in scenes. Like, it's it's just... The first four pages are just that.
Speaker: But then he writes, right before the character listing... ah Between the scenes and the character listing, he says every character and every situation in this play is historically accurate.
Speaker: And then nine lines later, he refers to a character named David Henry Thoreau. And I threw up my hands and said, Orson, hubistic fasterard you you.
Speaker: It is not David Henry Thoreau. It is Henry David Thoreau. And granted, he is referred to correctly in the dialogue itself, but not in the actual notes of the play, which I found infuriating.
Speaker: Steve, you might as well just cut out that that clip of you saying, Orson, you hubristic bastard, and use that as like a Morning Suze sound drop for our podcast, because that's the entire history of Orson Welles.
Speaker: He's a hubristic bastard. Hey, I can take on the biggest media empire in the world with my first movie and nothing bad will happen to me.
Speaker: Spends the rest of his life scrambling for money. Right. I can yeah i like go down to Brazil and construct a monumental ah movie that will unite the people of North and South America.
Speaker: it never gets finished. I can mount a production of one of the greatest novels ever constructed in human history, never finishes the fucking film. Like, i I can borrow money from the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran and finish my final magnum opus on what it means to be an auteur and don't finish it for another 50 years after my death. Like,
Speaker: Hubris, thy name is Orson. I love him so much. I do too, Todd. pod What a genius. What an amazing message. Well, speaking of genius, let's actually talk first off about the fucking table of contents for this shit.
Speaker: Yes, please. Because they're... Because the first thing that you read in this thing, besides like, you know, obviously the cover and the, the byline and the copyright information is the eulogy that Orson Welles delivered for Ruth Hortense Geddes Hill in 1982. It's just a page long, but that is the first thing you read the eulogy he gives for his coauthors, uh, uh, uh, late wife.
Speaker: Yeah. Um, Who died just a few years before he did. Yep. ah That's something that just kind of hit me the other day. Orson only made it to 70. Didn't ah that never really? Roger Hill outlived Orson. Yeah. ah But like page one of the PDF, which we should probably also link to in the show notes, is entitled Gestation of Genius, Orson Welles, Roger Hill, and the Road to Marching Song by Todd Tarbox.
Speaker: and The son of Hasky Tarbox, who we've mentioned several times on this podcast already. right ah Correct. And ah the play itself starts on page 49 and ends on 144. The total document size... total document So, like...
Speaker: is a hundred and seventy five pages the total document size so like Only about half of this book is the actual play. Yeah. there's a lot of There's a lot of preamble and there's a substantial epilogue as well.
Speaker: ah Yes. And lot of epilogue, honestly, I was checking it out a little bit. It's just well, a decent chunk of it anyway, is literally just ah transcriptions of radio broadcasts Orson would give ah later on in the 40s.
Speaker: Most notably, if I can pull up the actual. Here we go. ah Yes, it is the affidavit of Isaac Woodward Jr. And if you want to hear Orson Welles' possible autist, probable autist, have a extremely strong sense of justice in, I believe, 1946, go listen to the affidavit of Isaac Woodward Jr. It is...
Speaker: Gut-wrenching, to say the least. ah it's It's truly insane, repulsive stuff.
Speaker: um But then, of course, it's Orson Welles delivering the story, and he does it with typical Orson Welles panache, which is to say more panache than any other human being on the planet has ever achieved.
Speaker: Correct. So it's just kind of... amazing um And that was something he was doing in the late 40s, early 50s, was delivering through his radio broadcast, which he continued to do, even into his Hollywood era, um delivering these kind of impassioned political...
Speaker: speeches on these ah effective like news broadcasts that he would host and like people would write in and he or he would read news stories from across the country and find causes that he truly believed in and would speak impassionately about them for you know the duration of his program and he's he's again ah for his time was an incredible political activist yo Incredibly so. And that starts, I think, here. We see we see the the the the beginnings of that through this play.
Speaker: We really do. I've been trying to describe, but you know how you got the brunt of the the insanity when I was reading the the Dune books? Yes. um Bex has been present for the insanity that I am experiencing reading Marching Song by Orson Welles and Roger Hill.
Speaker: Side note, I also lied. It claims the play starts on page 49. It actually starts on page 66. It's just more fucking preamble and like stage directions yeah and stuff up before that.
Speaker: Right. It's just Jesus Christ. Actually, it starts on page 69. Nice. Up until then, it's literally the list of scenes, settings and the list of characters because there is 111 billion characters in this fucking play. Right.
Speaker: And half of them introduced one scene. Yeah, literally scene seven is literally just people walking in saying, hi, this is my name, and then leaving. it literally They're literally coming out of the floorboards. It's like a fucking clown car.
Speaker: Oh, God. who have hit a take about a lot of this later, but we'll get there. Yeah, well, it it's it's, yeah, I have a lot of opinions. But the way I described this play to ah Bex was ah white people progressive. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of white people progressive in this in the same way that somebody, ah some directors...
Speaker: that like to ah feature themselves in minor roles in their their movies, that feature um major actors that are ah people of color. He himself is not a person of color, but he'll give himself a role where he gets to use the N-word, like, freely. oh who Who might you be talking about? I wonder. We haven't a foot to stand on.
Speaker: um But anyway... I'm real. um I'm not proud of myself for that one. That's ah yeah okay. Yeah. so I'm not going to hold it against you. Fair enough.
Speaker: ah But it's just, it's a lot of like, as I said, white people progressive where for 1932, um,
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of like forward thinking. it is. If you're a white person. If you're a white person, Literally everybody else is already like, all like we know. we know.
Speaker: yeah ah Somewhat related, we just watched Sinners the other night. Holy fucking shit, what a movie. I just re-watched Sinners. Sinners is gonna come back up in this episode. it a hundred of It's fresh in the mind. Holy shit.
Speaker: I texted you the other day, yeah, we just watched, i just re-watched Sinners and now all I want to do is talk about Sinners. Right, right, right. So this is a podcast about Michael B. Jordan's biceps.
Speaker: um
Speaker: Orson, you've got a nice baby face. Backseat. We're going to talk the biceps right now. Michael Biceps Jordan. um That's what the that what stands for. That's what the B stands for. Yep, yep, yep. Also, he is the best part of Space Jam colon A New Legacy.
Speaker: That sounds like a low bar, Stephen. it You know what it is? Oh, no. you So you haven't seen it. Why would I have seen Space Jam A New Legacy?
Speaker: I have quote-unquote respect for the original, which means I have not watched it since 1996. Don't watch it. You will hate it. don't plan on it. Newsflash hope. It sucks.
Speaker: um But the theme song. The theme song shall live forever. Come on, in slam, and welcome to the jam. No, 100%. it's I have a mashup of that, and all I want for Christmas is you, and it works out well.
Speaker: Way better than you'd expect it to All I know is that movie that movie Made me believe I could fly It made me feel I could touch the sky Oh god that song also came for Space Marching song by Orson Welles would think about it every day no the joke in The joke in The New Legacy is they're like Don't worry guys it's the halftime thing Where they're all like they're down And like they're really struggling and like don't worry guys We got Michael Jordan to come in and talk to us And they open the doors and out through the fog Is Michael B. Jordan and he's like hey guys How's it going And they're like, that's Michael B. Jordan. That's not Michael Jordan. he's like I'm Michael Jordan.
Speaker: Shut up. and said He's down to play. That's nice. I like that. yeah And I mean, Ryan Coogler, I think, did produce that movie. So if I'm not mistaken, think he did.
Speaker: Ryan Coogler, Space Jam.
Speaker: Producer in Space Jam, A New Legacy. Oh, I told you. i would not lie to you about these things, so. so i mean And you know Michael B. Jordan and and Ryan Coogler are are tight. they They do all sorts of stuff. In fact, Coogler has been in every movie Coogler has directed. And he's been great in all of them, except for the one I fucking haven't seen.
Speaker: But yeah. But I'm sure he's great in it. yes I'm sure. No, I haven't seen two. But I know he's great in in one of the two I haven't seen. but guess guess which one I haven't seen that I'm pretty sure he's great in.
Speaker: ah and I don't know Ryan Coogler's biography or filmography off the top of my head. It's the second Black Panther movie. Oh, I so i kind of fell off a Marvel. I don't blame you for that one.
Speaker: Same. Same. Same. Yeah. Yeah. eatinging Not even saying fantastic, plus which will have been out at this point. Yeah. I can't. I respect the man.
Speaker: i understand Marvel. What Marvel was trying to do. I don't think Chadwick's too fundamental to that, to that thing. That is, that is a load bearing Chadwick. And, uh, uh, it's, uh, I don't, it, that first movie was so good.
Speaker: It was so good. You said load bearing Chadwick. Fuck. Why would you do that? yeah Well, well, Marching Song by Orson Welles and Roger Marching Song, yes.
Speaker: It starts off – oh, no, you had a thing. No, it's – no, I was going to jump right into it. It starts off in a way that we've come to expect from works of Orson Welles. It becomes a trope in a lot of his works, starting with Citizen Kane.
Speaker: And I think it's more of a trope with characters he plays than it is with characters he writes. But Charles Foster Kane fits the mold. Harry Lime fits the mold. Even fucking Lou Lord in the Muppet movie fits the mold of a character that we talk about for a long time before we ever actually see the character. And by the time the character actually appears, he is the most dynamic presence possible because everyone has already got an idea about him built up in their minds.
Speaker: Yes. i I mentioned to Bex while I was reading this on the beach the other day, ah John Brown doesn't show up for like 20 odd pages. And Bex, because we had just watched Jaws the night before, just absentmindedly goes, the John is broken.
Speaker: That's what that meant. Okay. Apropos of nothing. And I'm like, I don't know the fuck this means. so I'm not going to respond. Isn't it better than just receiving pictures of pages of Dune without context?
Speaker: Not necessarily, because those would always be accompanied with a goddammit, Frank. And I'd always be like, oh, God, what did her dad do now? And then I'd open it up and it would just be a screenshot of Dune. and i'm like, oh, OK, not not her dad. OK, I stand by my statement in either case.
Speaker: God damn it. And you're right to do so. Yeah. Yeah. So, oh, Christ alive. A play of the stirring days just before the Civil War concerning chiefly John Brown, prophet, warrior, zealot, the most dramatic and incredible figure in American history.
Speaker: The locale of the scene and the tenor of the times presented before each act by stereopticon slides on a plain traverse curtain These views blending into each other with kaleidoscopic effect depict newspaper headlines and views of the immediate surroundings, ending in each case with the exterior of the scene about to be opened.
Speaker: In two instances, there is some action played in front of the final projection. The orchestra carries popular tunes of the period. Thank you, Orson, for including all of that stage direction as to how your precious play should be presented in all forms.
Speaker: The... and the And the opening is essentially, it's kind of the start of Citizen Kane. It's two newspapermen talking about this meeting of abolitionists in Massachusetts that's going on behind these closed doors. And occasionally someone will open a door and you'll hear like Henry David Thoreau. I'm sorry, David Henry Thoreau or um what's what's the other? William Lloyd Garrison or Rufus Wentworth.
Speaker: ah No, Wentworth is one of the journalists, sorry. You'll hear one of these one of these great abolitionists screaming behind closed door. And then at one point, um the kind of our, ah i guess our point of view character, John Henry Kagey, enters and kind of throws the doors open. He's from Kansas, so he knows all about John Brown.
Speaker: ah He's described as a writer, cynic, and hero. That great contradiction of terms, cynic and hero. He believes in nothing, but he believes in John Brown. um is kind of the the, all you need to know about his character pretty much.
Speaker: But he throws open the doors and there's it's and it's very similar to that newsroom at the beginning of Citizen Kane where everyone's sitting around but you can't see anyone's faces because they're all in shadows and they're all talking about John Brown and then all of a sudden John Brown shows up as a shadow on the wall, like this mammoth shadow that consumes all the other shadows.
Speaker: Of all the other men at the table. yeah you're going to need a bigger stage. yeah Exactly. 100%. The john is broken. That's funny. That's funny.
Speaker: I'm so sorry. We literally watched Jaws on the 4th of July ah because you wanted to see we wanted to see a crooked politician get some comeuppance. um Now, he's still mayor in that second movie. No, I know, I know. and it's It's the panic, though. The panic on his face in that hospital sequence does me a world of good.
Speaker: um But, God, what was it that I said... the other day. It's like, ah you yell abolitionist, people say, huh? What? You yell John Brown.
Speaker: You got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July. um By the way, they throw around the word abolitionist later on, like in scene seven in particular, the way that um ah Mrs. What's-Her-Face, I called her a Miss Hudsucker earlier, and that's not her name.
Speaker: Mrs. What's-Her-Face. Huffmaster. Love that. Not better Not Huffmaster. Huffmaster. Huffmaster. Mrs. Huffmaster, that's what we call you right before a record. hey you oh And end during a record. Uh-oh. Here comes the pipe.
Speaker: Pipe felt appropriate for Orson. yeah and as and indeed Actually, if you could get ah a cigar, a weed cigar, i don't know if they even make those, but that probably most appropriate. have to roll very thick, and I'm shit at rolling, which is was going to say, you'd have to get a Cheech and Chong-style joint for that one. This is why I'm like a pipe and bong girl. I don't know what to tell you otherwise.
Speaker: I'm a edible boy. I don't know what to tell you. And that way I'm very much like Orson Well gluttony is not a secret vice No But okay so let's let's like How in depth do you want to get into this Do we want to read all 7,000 characters That appear in this show I'm not doing it I patently refuse Did you mean you at least catch Broad strokes sp broad strokes i think then you don't i mean did you at least catch the fucking quote unquote cameo appearance that is the final name listed in the opening that caught me a lot of those toward the end of the toward the end of the character list yeah we're gonna say so we're gonna sit on that one that one's right now big one that's yeah big one it that's it and what a button what a button can i just tell you
Speaker: Now, I'm going to tease the audience at this point. I do have a big giant story. i call it my Abraham Lincoln story. um i I don't I'm confident I've never told it on microphone before.
Speaker: that i would share it I don't even know that I've ever heard it yeah Probably not. I kind of only remembered that it existed a few months ago. ah um Bex actually got mad. Why have you never told me this before? That's amazing.
Speaker: So just a little tease there ah for a story. um But yeah, a billion characters show up in this goddamn thing. um Some of them for no longer than like five minutes.
Speaker: If that. And a lot of times they walk into a room, say, either a variant on, I think slavery is good, or I think slavery is bad, and then they leave or die. One of the two.
Speaker: ah They say one of those two opinions and do one of those two actions, leave or die. Yep. John himself does not show up. Yeah, John himself, if you're starting on page 66, doesn't properly show up until ah a while.
Speaker: Yeah. Into the goddamn thing. Scene three of like ten no eleven scene three of eleven Which is still a significant – but you basically get two chapters, two two and a half chapters of an 11-chapter book of people talking about your main character before your main character even shows up.
Speaker: Which is, again, that's the Harry Lyme thing. That's what makes the character of Harry Lyme is that he doesn't show until halfway through the fucking movie. And then he steals the whole fucking movie. No one remembers Snow Cotton in that damn movie.
Speaker: everyone remember was name hey Hey, fucking put some na of respect on the name Joseph Cotton. That dude rules. I fucking love Joe Cotton. That movie hangs on Joe Cotton. okay this We respect Joe Cotton's in this house.
Speaker: Side note. exactly It just thundered here. So if I disappear... That's why. That's why. um But so let's let's try and get some of this in there.
Speaker: I'm also realizing I really did fuck up. It's page 66 per the PDF. It's page 49 per the actual book document itself. Because there's a lot of those like Roman numeral preface pages leading up. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Whoa! That was an enormous lightning strike. Sorry. Literal giant bolt of fucking lightning. um How far are you? ah Well, it's thundering now, so that was a good ah eight seconds.
Speaker: Okay. i don't know. You're ways off. Yeah, yeah, Let's see. ah ah Oh, yeah. The ah the big yellow-orange patch is, like, right overhead now. So that's exciting.
Speaker: Yeah, that's nice. Way to go. Yeah, good. um
Speaker: But yeah, so we... I made... yeah oh man. This this this play. um yeah there there is a lid play As we mentioned, scene seven is literally a scene where after the the the hick neighbors leave the house, people literally just start coming out of the floorboards.
Speaker: And there's a good dozen people at least. It's truly... It is. it is um now okay so i'm going to try and detach myself from thinking about this in terms of an american history um peace cro right yeah yeah and try to think of it more ah because that's the nature of this podcast from a orson wells as a creative aspect And as I said earlier, this is so obviously written by a rich white teenager in 1930 fucking two.
Speaker: yeah He did the homework and he wants you to know that he did the fucking homework. So he is going to list every fucking name he can find. He is going to name drop every historical event he can find.
Speaker: um it It's truly buck wild stuff. Every character, like, and and with the exception of characters like second Huffmaster son and Huffmaster daughter, right every character is named and every character has an actual historical analog.
Speaker: Yeah. like And again, that we talked about this last step last ah last class. um where Right. Kayfabe. Kayfabe. That's right. That's right. where' where you know We talked about the trip that he and Hill took as as chaperones for this Todd School trip you know across these historic sites.
Speaker: And they made sure to stop at these places because Wells wanted to research this project. And research this project he did. And there some times where the story just grinds to a halt.
Speaker: So that Wells can tell you what he learned. Like in terms of pacing, there are moments when it is absolutely interminable. Yeah.
Speaker: This actually just reads like it. Well, I know he had graduated school at this point, but this actually reads like it was a ah homework that had a ah ah minimum page requirement.
Speaker: Yes. Very much so. Yeah, it's it's rough. And I also wanted to shout this out just because this really caught me off guard. so he in in the In the descriptions, in italics, in between people's ah dialogue and the such like... um Like such as.
Speaker: it will It will describe ah the physical appearance of a new character that is that has entered. And most of the time, it's... ah Let's see. ah it's It's mostly just like a tall, handsome man of sandy hair or something like that.
Speaker: But when it comes to... the young women okay yes okay yeah we're gonna get you notice this let's do it i did 100 he spends a paragraph each on annie and martha and it i'm just like really dude like yeah okay dude let's let's start with annie i'm trying to find annie's description uh shit if you can find it before i can ah here we go yes I'm going to adopt my ah cross promote my other podcast at the moment. The lanes between a smash hit in the fan fiction world. If I might add very proud, let me adopt my narration voice for this.
Speaker: i was going to say, I'll do mine for Martha. i was Okay. ah Near this door in the parlor stands Annie, the second youngest of the Brown family, not yet 17.
Speaker: A handsome creature, unconsciously grateful in her simplest movement, tall and lithe and beautifully poised. She wears her crisp, ugly gingham like a goddess. Annie has her father's eyes.
Speaker: Not helpful to this audience. But the twinkle in them, a delightful, faintly satanic light born somewhere in the corners of her brave, wide mouth, is distinctively her own.
Speaker: A child aesthetically, not spiritually, profound, quiet, reserved. She lives within herself a happy and abundant life. Hers is a life full of deep joys and sorrows, unexpressed.
Speaker: Fucking unnecessary. And now I know too much about Orson. Like, like, oh, i oh wait, to wait till we get to Martha, I hope. oh Wait till we get to Martha.
Speaker: ah Why did you say that name? God damn it.
Speaker: Save Martha. I've not seen any iteration of those dog shit movies. And yet I know everything there is to know about them. And that pisses me off. We just covered man of steel for a disenfranchised by just, I mean, the episode comes out tomorrow as of the date of this recording And will have been out for over a month by the time this episode drops. A scroll way back to the the the distant year of 2025 in your pod catchers of choice.
Speaker: um its But like the dude has this amazing need to flirt with women that are long dead.
Speaker: It's truly upsetting. Like literally in the video that I sent you the link to that should be in the show notes. That is Orson Welles explaining the history of the battle hymn of the Republic. He literally like tries to get his Mac on fucking ah Julia Ward. How who is extremely dead by the time he's recording that like super very dead um like Orson Orson put it in your pants, man.
Speaker: Come on, man. Come on. Have some decorum. ah Here's how he describes Martha, who must be saved. The front door in the parlor opens and Martha comes in.
Speaker: She's a truly beautiful girl with gold brown hair and a serious baby wide blue gray eyes. She is childishly earnest and erratic as a child in moods and emotions.
Speaker: There is something puckish and youthfully impish about her, but she lacks Annie's mature sense of humor and perspective. Born in the shadow of tragedy, despite her breezy manner, she is a little girl trying to be a grown-up, trying to look and act like a wife, a woman of responsibilities.
Speaker: Her big, questioning eyes mirror the wonder and bewilderment that is in her soul. In her passionate and undisciplined heart, she loves her husband, Oliver, deeply, almost wildly.
Speaker: But she also loves Edwin Cook and many others. There is something of the real mother, the essential mother impulse, beating in that little child heart of hers. Now, she is loaded with parcels.
Speaker: She kicks the door shut.
Speaker: I hate this. I hate this. In like six paragraphs. She's 15, by the way. yeah In six paragraphs time, you find out she's fucking 15. yeah And like that sent me into a goddamn tizzy.
Speaker: Now, real fast, I do want to say. 15 and fucking married. And fucking married. I watched, hope I watched the musical The Color Purple the other day. Oh boy. Okay. That fucking depressed me because the main character of that movie is basically bartered away to a dude in town at the age of 14.
Speaker: And she's already been ah pregnant and ah born children twice by that point in her life. Like that movie is fucked up. Yeah. you know and see yeah wait And like, OK, so one, let's be completely fair to the time at which this takes place.
Speaker: eighteen fifty nine 1859 average life expectancy listed ah is 39.4 years. yeah Now I'm going to say that's probably more like the, the, the mean rather than the median or the whatever it was, right but like,
Speaker: The high end of average life expectancy was 39. So fucking Martha, who must be saved from this bullshit, ah is close to middle-aged, which is super depressing to think about. It's depressing to think about...
Speaker: one the sexualization of children in this kind of way it's also super depressing to think about people hadn't started washing their fucking hands when they try to operate on people um what's the it's the it's the twitter joke isn't it it's like i'd love to be a doctor in civil war times they'd be like hey doctor my stomach hurts yeah you got ghosts in your blood you should do cocaine about it you should um mean about it And then they pour a bunch of tar where your leg used to be.
Speaker: Like, yeah, like it's shit sucked. um And, and, oh God. And in God, I mean, in other parts of the world, like, like Great Britain, barbers, like decades before barbers were doctors.
Speaker: Like if you, if you needed, like, if you had like a stomachache or something, you'd go to your fucking barber about it. Like, ah the fucking logic chains in in western civilization right such as it is is truly upsetting um haircuts and amputations hey i've got a toothache i'd better go get a haircut about it like yes that's it A ton of memorial parlor. The fact that like dentistry is considered separate from health insurance still is deranged beyond measure.
Speaker: Hell yeah. But Jesus Christ. Yeah, scene seven, in which both of those descriptions take place, also features the introductions of 35 dudes, none of whom are described as such.
Speaker: I mean, you you get brief, brief, just and that's made this portion just god-awful to read is that you get these people coming up out of the floor and each one gets a very brief description and then the characters in the play will stop and go oh and here's this character and then some characters it'll show this person sneaks up here but they don't get described until four pages later and you're like wait when the fuck did this guy come in again you gotta backtrack and oh my god it's it's It feels like one of those things that would work really well on screen or on stage, but on page is exhausting.
Speaker: If you have like a good director, yeah, it could be good. But otherwise, still, all it boils down to is people walking on, introducing themselves, stating an opinion about slavery and then going away.
Speaker: And and he'd already had this thought several times. But at this point, I realized, oh, this is why this play didn't get produced on Broadway in the third one. Okay, this is a hot take. This is a hot take, you know, 92 years after. it is lightning even more. Lightning-ing-ing.
Speaker: Whatever it is. More now. Yeah. um I don't know if it's coming across up on the webcam, but oh well. It's not. But yeah, hot take for a play 92 years after it was supposed to be ah put on. 92 years after it was written.
Speaker: This play sucks. Yeah. This is a bad play. love that. I know this is his start. This is probably him getting like real grips with like fucking...
Speaker: just writing a play right and it's certainly a hundred pages of a play and it has a it it it for all of our bitching it has a coherent kind of plot ish it has a it has a place where it starts and a place where it ends But like, come on, it happens in the middle.
Speaker: um I don't mean to compare like anybody else to Orson Welles, like especially casting Orson Welles in an unfavorable light, because he was certainly not at the height of his powers at this point, um considering he was also wrote this to be a school play.
Speaker: um if If that's ah but right and remembering. i No, I think um this was, no, this was his, his, these were his Broadway ambitions. Yeah. Oh, buddy.
Speaker: Oh, buddy. Try, ah, buddy. But again, like it's, everyone's got that, you know, I could make it thing. Like, and then they and they're like, and as and this is his, is this is, and other than getting second or getting like the special commendation for the Julius Caesar production we talked about a few weeks ago, probably his first real taste of rejection.
Speaker: Yeah. So as as I was saying, um there are the bones of a good play in here. There's so many fascinating things you could do with a stage production about John fucking Brown.
Speaker: Right. just go Just go take a skip through his Wikipedia article if you doubt me. It's the most fascinating shit. But this is not the way to do that.
Speaker: You need to cut out about 25 of these characters to make this thing watchable. And that cuts it down to about 40 pages. I was going to say, if this were designed to be a school play, that's kind of perfect because most criteria for a school play is can we cast a ton of kids so we can get all their parents and grandparents to come to the show?
Speaker: Exactly. That's exactly how ah my school district ran their school shows. They stuck to the classic Broadway productions because they know there's going to be three or four giant ass numbers in there where all of the kids can come out on stage. And yeah, but like it would make sense if this was a school play.
Speaker: This should not be a school play. No. You're going to I mean, it's moderately educational. It's that it is. But at the same time, you're going to get into the territory that I remember listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda talk about how where a predominantly white high school was putting on Hamilton.
Speaker: And hey we've all gotten tans for it. no Yeah, yeah, exactly. like So imagine that, but way worse. um um I heard a story about a youth summer camp of predominantly white kids. No, strike that.
Speaker: All white kids putting on a production of Hairspray, which, if I may say so, defeats the fucking purpose. Oh, no. Oh, no. See, this is why my kind of high school like stuck to things like Hello, Dolly or the Music Man.
Speaker: um yeah shit like Yeah, exactly. My Fair Lady. I played the mayor in The Music Man. i was, ah what's his name? Mayor Shane. No, well, in the in The Music Man, yes. In My Fair Lady, I was, um fuck, Alfred Doolittle.
Speaker: Oh, yeah I got you got the big fucking songs of the show. godamn God damn. And what's the real joke is ah the night before my wedding this this past January, I was literally texting my friend who played Eliza Doolittle in my production of high schools. My fair my fair lady.
Speaker: ah So it was like, oh, we've come full a circle. Excellent. I love that. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I was, I was a teacher when those productions were being done at the school. Cause when I was at that school, we didn't have a theater program. So I played the conductor in the music man as a brief cameo.
Speaker: Oh, that's the first one. Nice. Yeah. And then I did in My Fair Lady, I was George, the bartender who kept throwing your character out of the bar. Hey, hey, hey, we get together. I think we can do a just a Broadway review here.
Speaker: um i would love that. so bad So ah one thing real fast about ah the music man and your role in the music man. I need to shout out my ah ah my former. He retired my junior year, so I didn't have him for senior year. Very sad.
Speaker: But Mr. Nelson, our music teacher and choir director and who directed the musicals. um Uh, always loved the music, man. It was his favorite show.
Speaker: And he was very proud of the fact that he had the first line in the music band because he was originally cast as a sophomore as the conductor in the music band.
Speaker: And that was the first show ever performed at the sham any high school. So Mr. Nelson had the first line performed at the first musical at Neshaminy High School.
Speaker: Very proud of him. He was one of my favorite teachers ever of all time. ah Shout out, Mr. Nelson. I should probably make sure he's not dead yet.
Speaker: Oh God, that would be awkward. I don't know.
Speaker: okay. He was honored as an alumni this year. He's still kicking. Hell yeah. All right. Good. Okay. We're golden. We're good. right Everything's fine.
Speaker: Shout out Mr. Nelson. Love you. Yeah. Shout out Mr. Nelson. But, uh, okay. I don't know how in depth we truly want to get into with this play. We're an hour in. I don't think we need to get that in depth with it.
Speaker: We truly don't. Um, But one thing I want to comment on is the way that Wells portrays Brown, because we I mean, we mentioned the kind of the Orson trope of talking about him for 20 to 30 pages before he actually shows up in the play itself. properly Yeah.
Speaker: And by that point, he is this legendary figure. But even as early as scene four, he is yeah imbued with this godlike status.
Speaker: And I feel like the deification of Brown feels almost too heavy handed. Like yeah he's laid it on really thick, really fast. Like you hear a few people say bad things about him, but mostly it's laudatory. Mostly it's, you know, just gushing praise for the man.
Speaker: And then you start to see these like little elements of, of the, like that Wells is painting him as a Christ figure. You get, um
Speaker: And we're back. Yep. Yep. Yep. That certainly was the Beck special. Good job. All right. I told Hope right before I hit record, we're going to do the Beck special.
Speaker: It took me a moment to realize what you had said. yeah yeah okay good i just went on a face journey there on webcam it was it was i know this is an auditory medium but you listeners are missing out because it was remarkable um had a little bit of a power outage there on one of our ends gi one just a little one may have god doesn't want this podcast getting out warm uh for the last 20 minutes um Anyway, I think I was trying to make a point.
Speaker: ah you You were making a point. yeah So ah the deification of John Brown. And it a it started to become clear to me that Orson is a and And we've referred to this mostly as Orson's work because even though it was written in collaboration with Roger Hill, as we mentioned last week, Hill really just kind of was there to push Orson forward. This is mostly Orson's script for all intents and purposes. And I think it reads that way.
Speaker: yeah But one thing that becomes abundantly clear is that Orson is depicting Brown as a Christ figure for good or ill. And for those of you not familiar, a Christ figure is someone like, ah to to use a piece of art that I know Hope is intimately familiar with, Neo in The Matrix.
Speaker: often A character who, you know, dies for the salvation of men and women and enemies. Everyone, basically. Humanity. They won't that. They won't.
Speaker: Neo died twice. So, uh, uh, uh, Jesus can suck it. Um, Christ figure more like he's a Neo figure. Um, uh, it would be a type of Neo. Nevermind.
Speaker: I'm not, I'm not hope just finding a statue you of Neo finding shit. This, this Neo sits right on my desk. It came with swappable heads so you could get Keanu Reeves regular, Keanu Reeves with melted out eyeballs, and Keanu Reeves wearing a band around his eyes. Which is the one you have elected for.
Speaker: Because I bought the toys from the Matrix Revolutions. Completely fitting and in character for me. Right. i was going to say, yeah. Listen to the Matrix Reclamations podcast. It's a delight.
Speaker: Please do. Yes, it's wonderful. miss doing it. I miss listening to it, frankly. Good. We'll talk about Jesus. Yes, let me talk about Jesus for a little bit. For those of you who don't know Jesus this was a man who lived a long, long time ago.
Speaker: And he accidentally created an entire religion of bigoted people. Yeah. let me check Let me check my notes here. He lived in Palestine. Neat. Okay, cool. Continue, please.
Speaker: So it it becomes this kind of sacrificial figure. And it became clear to me in scene four that this is what Orson was doing.
Speaker: um You have kind of his his little army, his like kind of close-knit group of people, the guys crawling out of the floorboards. Those are, for all intents and purposes, his apostles.
Speaker: You have ah the guy who visits, you've got the guy who visits Washington who goes up to a group of slaves and literally tells them to prepare as John the Baptist, the guy who goes out to prepare the way of the Lord.
Speaker: and then, of course, at the end of the play, you know, he dies in an attempt to liberate mankind, humanity, right? So, like, there there's a lot of parallels that he's attempting to draw here.
Speaker: um and and And, of course, the depiction of Brown as this beatific figure, as this kind of person who is incapable of sin and wrongdoing, um kind of becomes central to his entire character. And we end up seeing that, I feel like, really comes through...
Speaker: um throughout the play. And I, I feel like that almost has to be intentional on Orson's part, particularly for all the talk they, all the talk they do of, this is the purpose that was ordained for Brown from the beginning of history.
Speaker: This has already been set in stone stone since before the beginning of time. Like that very much calls into question, like texts like John chapter one in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
Speaker: And then the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. Like this idea that, Since the beginning of time, Jesus' has a life and sacrifice was preordained. That's baked into the biblical cake. Did I mention that I taught religion for eight years?
Speaker: Important context for our listeners. Yes. Yeah. um Yeah. Yeah. um I'm afraid the only Bible passage I have memorized is ah Ezekiel 25, 17. And you haven't even memorized it correctly. I'm i'm sorry to tell you.
Speaker: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the self. You're going to make me look up Ezekiel 2517, aren't you? Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the fighter of lost children. I will strike down upon me with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.
Speaker: And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. Nope. I got it right. Still 20 odd years in. i know it's not a real Bible verse, but fuck that. I got that memorized. Here's the actual passage.
Speaker: I will carry out my vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. And they will know that I am the Lord when I take my vengeance upon them. So you you you you do kind of have it memorized, but you've got a lot of other shit memorized too.
Speaker: I'm going to go ahead and say we should just let Tarantino write a book of the Bible and we'll just call it a day. um Really? That guy? bibles are Bible's already out of order. He's a shoo-in.
Speaker: The aforementioned director who likes to put himself in movies where he ah a made no such. If you go back and listen to the tape, I did not list any names whatsoever to connect those two things. No, you didn't. but But, gee, I wonder could have possibly been talking about. Gosh, golly gee.
Speaker: Uh, okay. So yeah, that's okay. Yeah. I would actually take what you're saying a step further and say that John Brown himself made himself a Christ-like figure because he did at least claim if, if we can't prove it, he's been dead for years.
Speaker: Uh, he at least claimed he was literally a prophet of God or that God at least told him to do this shit. All like Joan of Arc. Um, but, uh, uh,
Speaker: I think the parallels were there to begin with. And Orson Welles just kind of it. I honest to God, I think it just kind of happened. Like Orson might've played it up a little bit in the fact that he has a billion apostles, but like, um, uh, uh, mean, I mean, do we kind of get like a last supper sort of thing in there? Do they eat?
Speaker: I mean, there's, they eat that, that mammoth scene in, uh, in chapter seven where everyone's coming out of the floorboards. I have to imagine it would be there. that's kind of what I mean. yeah like Yeah. That, that feels like something.
Speaker: um No, I, see I see, I see, I see what you're saying entirely. And yeah, that's, it's funny that I went to jaws and you went to Jesus in terms of like our parallels with the treatment of John Brown.
Speaker: And yet so on brand for both of us. If we're getting right down to it, yes. Upsettingly so. So you could say that John Brown was sort of ah he who points the way or the Lisan al-Gaib of the days leading up to the American Civil War.
Speaker: Yeah. All right. um But in that way, in that way, in that way, Brown is the John the Baptist that leads us into the Civil War, preparing yeah America for the revolution that is to come. ah Exactly. I guess that would make ah Abe Lincoln um ah the Jesus figure in this.
Speaker: I mean, in the larger story of the Civil War, quite potentially, but in the microcosm story of John Brown, not so much. In the in the larger Civil War narrative, then yes, I think you're probably correct.
Speaker: ah Speaking of Abraham Lincoln, Hope. Oh, yeah. how does How does this play end? Enlighten us, please. Oh, motherfucker.
Speaker: This play ends. This play ends. It's spoiled in the cast list. It is. If you you make the mistake of reading the entire cast list, then, uh-oh, you know how this ends.
Speaker: But like 140 pages into this thing, like, or at least like on ah per the pages of the the the the book, by the time you get to the end of the play, the final name, the final person that they introduce hits you like a fucking hammer in the darkness.
Speaker: um It's like, hey, we don't approve of Brown, do we? We're we northerners. He hasn't our sanction. And a passing guard happens to be John Wilkes Booth.
Speaker: I am not a northerner, sir.
Speaker: Now, okay, now... As you said, Orson claimed this was all based in real fact. Correct. And the kneecapping of ah ah John Wilkes Booth showing the fuck up in this in this play caught me so off guard. It took me like five minutes to be like, wait a minute.
Speaker: No, no. Because it fucking feels like a Marvel after credits stinger. Yes. like Like we're setting it up for the Lincoln assassination sequel. Right. Exactly.
Speaker: yeah In Avengers. John Wilkes Booth will return. yeah ah ah I just watched Thunderbolts the other day, too.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. John Wilkes Booth will return in America. Civil War. God. It's right fucking there. It's right fucking there. It's right fucking there.
Speaker: It's right fucking there. But it just pissed me off. And then I just thought, wait a minute. He claimed to have based this on fact. Let me look this up. John Wilkes Booth was actually present at the hanging of John Brown.
Speaker: Correct. So I don't think he was a motherfuck prison guard and had a conversation with a couple of his associates. But like per the brief reading that I did into this, like he like drafted in himself in as like a day player to the local militia. Yes. Militia, because that's something you could do at the time. The militia was led by fucking Robert E. Lee. Correct. So, Jesus Christ. Yes. um
Speaker: So, like, it is Orson... It is, in fact, based in fact. But it depends. factually adjacent. That's a good way of putting it. Adjacent to the truth. Yeah. um But, like, still, it really does hit you out of fucking nowhere. Like, fucking...
Speaker: it it is the proper It is the proper ton of bricks to smack your audience in the face with right before that final curtain. it It sucks. It sucks.
Speaker: yeah this is This is not a good plan. But i will say the final scene, scene 11, is literally just on the gallows, it's the final speech by John Brown, which you can hear a little bit of Orson reading himself in, uh, that, that clip of him talking about the battle hymn, which is in the show notes, by the way.
Speaker: Uh, but then it ends with, uh, the original version of the battle hymn of the Republic. John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.
Speaker: um, Now, to that end, I did look up real quick the original marching lyrics to that tune. Glory, glory, hallelujah remains... solid, uh, instead of, uh, his truth goes, his it's it's still, his soul goes marching on.
Speaker: Um, but it's really just a single lyric repeated three times. And then his soul goes marching. So it's, uh, he's gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord.
Speaker: John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back. John Brown died that the slaves might be free. There's that Jesus for you again. The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down.
Speaker: um kind of kick ass as a marching song yeah but then as a but then as orson explains in that clip uh julia ward how kicks it up to 11 into what how does he say it it's the most heart quickening tune ever produced by america it's god in heaven it's even the the man had it had a way for a turn of phrase he was still developing it here this is like Orson Begins, like even more than our Orson Begins episode. Like this is kind of We literally did Orson Begins. We did that. That's the thing we did.
Speaker: This is our eighth Orson Begins episode. I know. But this is our last Orson Begins episode. I'm so excited to get to the Dark Orson Returns. um Dark Orson Rises.
Speaker: Yeah. Damn it. We're doing it again. We're doing it again. Motherfuck. Okay. This is that thing we did. We spent all night putting his name into movies. Uh, yeah, it's Orson could have been in sinners. Lord knows in what, but like, that's a movie we were talking about. So I'm just going shoehorn Orson in there.
Speaker: If, if they had made sinners when Orson was still around, he would have been playing the, uh, the, the head of the clan that sells. Yes. I had the exact same thought just now. Yes. Orson could have pulled it off ivan off. Oh, he would have fucking killed it. Uh, right before Michael B. Jordan kills him.
Speaker: Spoiler alert for sinners. I mean, you haven't seen sinners by now, you probably are making an active choice not to. So it it ends with the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is kind of the greatest way to end anything forever. The Battle Hymn of the Republic. like um it It really does.
Speaker: It really does suck how much I like. am not happy with the state of this country at the moment. Fuck the Supreme court. At the same time, at the same time you start playing battle him. I'm just like, glory, glory. I can't not, you can't not do it. There is such a banger.
Speaker: There is an, a recent episode of, the disenfranchised podcast. I believe it is our land of the lost episode where Tucker just goes on a tirade toward the end of that episode. This goes on a tear.
Speaker: And afterward, I suggest in the record, we should put the battle hymn of the Republic under that. Well, he went back. and edited the Battle Hymn of the Republic into that in such a way that the beats of the song match the rise and fall of his land. And it is... I'm going to download that episode right now and listen to it while I'm at work tomorrow. It is our most disjointed episode ever because we do everything in our power to not talk about that movie.
Speaker: And um it is followed by our Man of Steel episode, which is our probably most focused episode and maybe our second longest after the check my notes here, Dune episode with, check notes, check notes, Hope Lickner.
Speaker: Oh, Buck Wild. Do I do i know about Dune? I don't know. me Yeah, yeah. Oh, side note, Tucker, I did get the notification in my gen today ah to force you to watch the 84 Dune. and So heads up.
Speaker: If you haven't watched it and this point, yeah, text me now at the point of ah you editing this podcast. So that's that's marching song by Orson Welles and Roger Hill for good or ill.
Speaker: Yeah. So I opened up a ah ah ah a a document to rank the Orson Welles projects. um We're sitting at we're sitting at one at the moment. So right now this is one. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm going to call this last place right now because I did not... I will not be returning to this project anytime soon. No, I... um But it does give me an opportunity. Stephen, would you like to hear my Abraham Lincoln story? Hope. I have been dying this entire episode. And we'll close out the episode. Yeah, we'll talk about next week's assignment, what it won't be, what it will be, etc. Yeah, there's some complication there.
Speaker: Hooray. um So, to set the scene, it's the distant future, the year 2000. Right. I am in the ninth grade. um and I am, I, I am going to be partaking in my, middle schools, uh, science fair project, uh, uh, once again.
Speaker: um it's just as true a credit for me at this point, but I like science fairs. So fuck it. So my mom had the brainwave. You know what? I'm actually going to back it up a little bit.
Speaker: The year, but yeah, the year beforehand, um, I had, ah
Speaker: I had tested the durability of baby clothing in fire situations to determine what was the safest brand of baby clothes ah to purchase for your child ah in the event of fire.
Speaker: And my mom... My mom kind of, I'll admit it she was the creative lead on these things. um You can see that she wanted to exercise like some sort of like creative control over this shit.
Speaker: So she Orson her wells her way into this project. um But she wanted to call them that that project Burn Baby Burn. Holy shit, that's so perfect, though.
Speaker: It hurts, though. It hurts, though. so It does, but Hope, it hurts because it is so good. That is to set the scene for what to mom much credit, but that is so good.
Speaker: Well, now I'm going to give my mom a little bit more credit because because for the ninth grade, the one that's relevant to this story, ah she um she came up with the idea of um why don't you do a medical history science fair project and you could investigate...
Speaker: if Abraham Lincoln would have survived with today's medical technology. Now, today, of course, is 25 years ago, the year 2000. And spoiler alert, that's November 2019.
Speaker: um But spoiler alert, he would have survived with 2000s medical technology, but he basically would have been a bit of a vegetable. right um Even 10 years later, people suffering similar ah headshot ah traumas would have lived a much fuller coherent life. oh interesting um But just as a little bit of little tiny bit of background information, because it's going to be relevant very quickly.
Speaker: um I don't know how much you know about the Abraham Lincoln assassination. um But he was shot. He was shot by a star of marching song by Orson Welles. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth in the back of the head of on the left-hand side, very close to the base of the skull, and the bullet wound up just behind his eyeball on his right-hand side. So oh so the the bullet kind of crossed across his brain, and because people were, as noted earlier in this episode, ah not exactly hip to the whole medical game in 1964, what they did was they took a silver rod
Speaker: and basically poked around in his head. They basically ah scrambled his brains in order to find the bullet. Um, And they were able to remove it with essentially extremely long extractors. Now also to point out, god also to point out, not far away from this ah event in, in, in Washington DC at the Ford's theater, or at least the, ah the place he ended up dying at across the street from it.
Speaker: I know too much about this subject. You um was, did it make was the world's was one of the world's first x-ray machines. Yeah. Okay. They could have fucking just taken the dying president down to the newfangled science machine had a way easier time. It doesn't matter.
Speaker: So it's a very small bullet because it was a very small caliber gun. Please do not ask me specifics about the gun. It's been 20 years and I don't give a shit about guns. Needless to say, it's an incredibly small bullet.
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: For this science fair project, I'll give myself a little bit of credit. It was the one that all of the dads were crowded around. yeah i could I wrote basically, yeah, it was everybody, all the dads loved this.
Speaker: And I made a little presentation out of a, um, what is meant to be a ah flag box. If you, if you've had ah a, a, a loved member, a loved one um ah pass that served in the armed forces in America, you're given a flag and then you can preserve that flag in a triangular box.
Speaker: I bought one of those boxes from like, fucking thank you. It was a 44 caliber Philadelphia. Hey, Philly Derringer. Whoops. i I made sure to include that part. Cause I figured yeah you'd love that. Thanks buddy. Go birds.
Speaker: But the fuck. So I bought one of those flag boxes from fucking AC Moore. And I set up with like a little American flag. I made a tiny little two so yeah ah actual size clay model of the pistol, which freaked out a lot of people in the year 2000. Yes. Yeah. a gun in yeah It's clay. There's like tinfoil on the inside.
Speaker: But more importantly. So like, but like, come on. I know. ah I know. It like just happens. It was a year before. It wasn't a regular thing back then. i cannot i cannot overstate it was not a regular weekly event at that point in time yet.
Speaker: um Which I know, which sucks shit. But more importantly to the purpose of this story, I also made a a life-size replica of the bullet that was in his head. Now, in order to study this subject, I obviously read a lot of books. I went to, I actually, as a 14 year old interviewed a brain surgeon who has done surgeries, like who had at that point done surgeries, uh, similar to what he would have done on Lincoln. And that's where I got the bulk of my medical information. But As far as the actual events itself, we actually went to Washington, D.C. on a little weekend trip, and we went to the Ford's Theater.
Speaker: We saw a presentation ah by the National Park Service on what exactly happened that night down in the basement of the Ford's Theater, the lower levels.
Speaker: They have the life mask and the death mask of Abraham Lincoln. And that's buck wild to see, to see just how much he aged in the years of the Civil War between like 61 and 64. They say being the president is the most stressful job in the world.
Speaker: I feel like it's even more stressful if you're presiding during the American Civil War. Kind of a rough time. Yeah, ah to say the least. But To the extreme purposes of this story, we also went to the Smithsonian Museum of Medical History, which is absolutely fascinating because they have there the bullet and a fragment of Abraham Lincoln's skull.
Speaker: Now, my mom had gotten into contact with the nice people at the museum. I do not. This was 25 years ago at the time of this recording. I do not know their names. I do not know if I'm what I'm about to say is wildly illegal.
Speaker: So I don't want to throw anybody under the bus. But, but. It was not on display at the time that we went to visit. Now, ahead of time, my mom had gotten in contact with the nice people at the museum.
Speaker: They took me into the back rooms, the archives of the medical branch of the Smithsonian. They put into my bare hands.
Speaker: held. I held. i held in my bare hands, the bullet that was extracted from the skull of Abraham Lincoln and a fragment of the skull from Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker: And I, I think back on that now and I'm like, this is the most consequential bullet in American history. You're giving it to, ah you're giving it to a 14 year old.
Speaker: Please take this. I remember saying out loud, please take this away from me. Oh my God. Yes. Yes. It's, it's, it it it doesn't make any sense telling this story 25 years later.
Speaker: That is amazing is what that is. That is, I, holy shit. It, Like, I don't think i I think I felt a little of it at the time, as I said, because I said, literally, please take this away from me.
Speaker: I'm 14. What the fuck am I going to do with this? But like, even now, like, they weren't giving it to me. i was like, yeah, well, let me put this in the shopping bag. And it's like, bye, everybody.
Speaker: From the souvenir shop. Yeah. Exit through the gift shop. um But it's, I think back on that now, and I'm just like, Why would you do that?
Speaker: That's insane. Jesus Christ. but But here's the thing. You will never forget that. certainly never will. So thank you to the nice people at the Smithsonian. and also, I'm sorry.
Speaker: Like, if... ah Jesus Christ. That is amazing. Yeah, yeah. That is fucking incredible, if I may say. I've held but It doesn't I can't I can't put it into any words that make it make sense in my head without giving you that entire context.
Speaker: Because if I just told a person on the street, I've held the bullet and the fragment of Abe Lincoln's skull in my bare hands. They would look you dead in the eye and say, who the fuck are you that you got to do that? Yeah, that too. Yeah. Like, you know, you don't understand. Excuse me.
Speaker: I'm white. So, yeah, like that's that's probably the most ostentatious, awful thing I can say. But there was an I was an affluent white American teenager. jeny you Excuse me.
Speaker: I was a teenage white American male, or at least I thought I was. It's a secret. um It's it. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. I, you, um I, e wowzers. That, that is insane. And with that.
Speaker: Yeah. We've come to the end of our marching song episode, everybody. Yeah. On on that, it's that. There's nowhere to go but down from there. Good God. That's amazing. Now, now, and now I got to do like the complete, like serious. I got to hold a skull fragment of JFK. Yeah.
Speaker: um i was at William McKinley. Right. Yeah. Garfield. Yeah. Right. Yeah. ah The one they pulled out of Reagan. Yeah. The one that ricocheted off Trump's head. um and only God, if only we had that one. into the left, man. Back into the left, man. Just a little little further. little left Anyway. Anyway. Anyway.
Speaker: So the homework assignment for next week, the initial... idea And this was something that I floated to hope before we started recording was to cover the other play that Orson wrote about around this time that we discussed very briefly last week, his horror script called bright Lucifer.
Speaker: um There is there, have not been able to find the script for bright Lucifer anywhere. i looked on Wells net because that is it again, an un, just an unmitigated miracle of a resource.
Speaker: And the resource they had there was a was three ah videos from ranging from 16 to 25 minutes of Acts 1, 2, and 3 of the audio of an amateur performance from 1997, which is the first performance ever of Bright Lucifer, with portions of the script typed out over it.
Speaker: ah So it it it is kind of... and And Hope said, and I think rightly so, that's too many hoops for people to go through to listen to a podcast episode yeah for for something that they they will not engage with otherwise.
Speaker: So here's here's what we're saying. Unless there is a huge demand in the weeks leading up to the release of this episode, which I – looking at our numbers, there will not be – um But if if that is something that you are interested in, let us know.
Speaker: Again, the original production of it was 1997. So if there is enough interest in us covering it, we'll cover it when we get to the year 1997, which will be lot of decade or so.
Speaker: So and and ah if if otherwise ah we can, like, as I said, ah it either comes into the public domain in about – um three five Three to five years, or it comes into the public domain in 100 years.
Speaker: So ah yeah if I'm remembering the numbers that you were shooting out there. so I think it said if it was unpublished, 120 years. So from plus we're looking at like i think the twenty fifty s
Speaker: ah So we will figure out a way to cover that in some fashion as the years of this podcast wear on um But again, it'll likely be probably closer to 1997 than will be to 1932, 33.
Speaker: yeah So in lieu of that, we are opting and instead to cover next week the series that ah the other collaboration, great collaboration between ah ah Wells and Hill, ah the series Everybody's Shakespeare.
Speaker: ah We were able to find a link to a one complete volume of Everybody's Shakespeare published under the title The Mercury Shakespeare has a second printing in 1939, which includes the texts Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, and um want to say The Merchant of Venice.
Speaker: So we'll put a link to that in the show notes for this episode, and we'll be covering kind of that series and its intent next week. And doing a little reading of the, I would say the supplemental material there, because otherwise it just Shakespeare.
Speaker: But we may we may find ourselves watching some productions of those of those plays before before we record that episode. But that is the homework assignment for the next episode.
Speaker: um You can find us on very limited social media platforms, actually. I think we're at this point, we're just on Blue Sky and YouTube at WellesUPod. ah You can shoot us an email at WellesUPod gmail.com to let us know how we're doing.
Speaker: And if you do, we might read what do you have to say here on the episode, here in this little segment at the end of the episode. Also, if you're online and you like what we're doing, swing on over to, oh gosh, what is it called? Apple Podcasts, Spotify.
Speaker: ah Give us a nice five-star rating. And if you do that, please leave a review. That goes a long way to helping us find other listeners like yourselves. And we like you. So other people like you would probably be pretty cool too.
Speaker: ah So give us give us that validation. And again, if you leave us a nice review, we'll probably read it here on the podcast. So yeah. Everything sounds better with Madeline the Republic.
Speaker: We can we probably just ask Tucker to put it underneath what we're saying here. we probably could, but that would prevent us from just going into glory, glory, hallelujah.
Speaker: lo re Glory, glory, hallelujah. Keep it rolling. lord reg Glory, glory, hallelujah. This is not going to sink. Ah, shit.
Speaker: Let's go figure it out. We'll figure out. we're figure it out. Good luck, Tucker. Good luck, Tucker. We love you. All right. And again, while we're here, special thanks to our editor, producer, Tucker, ah for all the hard work he does in making us sound as good as he possibly can. Thank you, Tucker, for all the hard work you do.
Speaker: ah You are dare I say it, the man. Yes. You can find ah me, your host, Stephen Foxworthy, on social media at Chewy Walrus on Blue Sky and Letterboxd.
Speaker: You can also listen to my other podcast, Disenfranchised, with the aforementioned Tucker and occasionally our good friend Brett Wright when he's able. We talk about movies that failed to get past the first film in their franchise, those franchises of one, as we call it.
Speaker: ah You can also listen to me occasionally popping up on the Pod and the Pendulum I think at this point we're probably wrapping up or getting close to wrapping up the Summer of George, covering the George Romero Living Dead movies, of which I have been part of several of those recordings. So go listen to those.
Speaker: ah That's been a lot of fun. And I think after the Summer of George, we're tiptoeing into Predator territory, which I'll be on a few of those as well, because Predator is one of my favorite movie monsters. Love that Predator. Um, hope, where can we find you around the internet these days?
Speaker: Uh, please don't. Um, okay. Fair enough. Uh, I have a website that I keep forgetting to update cause fuck it. Um, but the the only one of my other podcasts that is currently active, I'm very proud of it.
Speaker: It's called the lanes between it is. I can't imagine it has much crossover, audience potential with this podcast. Yeah, exactly. It's, uh, It's an audiobook fan fiction, essentially, ah that we're doing, focusing around the characters of Caitlin and Violet from the series Arcane.
Speaker: Smiling quietly. i found Yeah, exactly. i found myself in a strange international coalition of of lesbians, and i couldn't be happier. The fact that call that just makes me so happy.
Speaker: ah my former my My one friend ah came up with the phrase UNICEF, which just, yeah, I know. Yeah. Oh, I almost got a spit take out of you. I almost got a spit take out of you.
Speaker: Damn close. Damn close. So close. Damn. um But I couldn't be more proud of that. If that's your jam, probably not. But if that is your jam, give it a shot. um I'm super proud of it.
Speaker: ah But that's really it for me these days. ah Do we have an official sign-off for this? i ah Yeah, I guess I'm i'm your TA, a Stephen Foxworthy, for my co-TA, a Hope Stow. Until next time, class dismissed.
Speaker: Bell. Tucker edited in a bell. Yeah, Tucker yeah mean tucker edited in a bell. edit him There we go. All right. And do that at the beginning of the episode, too. Like after the theme song, bell, and then before the closing theme song, bell, which Tucker also wrote.
Speaker: He'll probably want us to include that. So he'll probably won't put in the bell until probably about right.
