My research into the unprecendented work done on Touch of Evil in 1998 began here, with a lengthy phone interview with Rick Schmidlin in August of 1998, a month before I’d even had a chance to see the new cut. The man who proposed the radical idea of creating a new version of the film by following the instructions that Welles sent Universal executives in the famous 58-page memo (which had been discovered a few years earlier) began in the music business. He developed from a lighting director for live concerts rock shows to a producer of music videos and long-form music projects, as well as expanding into other areas of documentary filmmaking as both producer and director. But his revision of Touch of Evil became the buzz event of 1998 long before its unveiling at Telluride and Toronto. (It was set to debut at Cannes but the screening was cancelled in deference to the protest lodged by Beatrice Welles-Smith, who claimed that her “moral rights” were being violated by the revision of her father’s work – ironic given the dedication of the creative team to honoring Welles’ direct requests – and that controversy only gave the film more attention). Schmidlin was passionate about this project but insistent that it not me mistaken for a director’s cut, as no such cut ever existed in life. In his own words, “It’s an academic example utilizing two of the finest people in their field – one as a scholar of the critical medium, one as an educated scholar of commercial editorial and sound medium – and taking Welles‘ documentation and translating them to the screen.” The bulk of the interview was conducted over the phone on August 4, 1998, with a follow-up conversation on August 24.
Since his work on Touch of Evil, Schmidlin helped produce the restoration of Thomas Edison’s first sound film experiment (again working with Walter Murch) and a reconstruction of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, utilizing stills and explanatory cards to fill in for the hours is excised and missing footage.
When did the Touch of Evil project begin? With the discovery of the memo?
Basically what I originally wanted to do was a laserdisc and just document on the laserdisc for Universal the project so I could get the most amount of living beings involved and be able to get the most documents put together so there was a good documentation of this film and explore what elements may exist within the vaults. But over the years the laserdisc kept on getting passed and I talked to a friend of mine, Louis Feola, who was then the president of Universal Home Video, and Louis eventually approached Chris McGurk, who at that point was vice president and COO, and he brought it over to Jim Waters and they sparked an interest in it. So they let me investigate it with Bob O‘Neil and basically what we did was I was able to investigate what film elements existed in the can relating to the film. At that same time I did more research within the libraries and eventually Jim Waters asked Lou Wasserman, though research I had found through Jonathan Rosenbaum, which I will get into in a second, and basically Jim Waters asked Wasserman if a memo existed and Wasserman produced it through his contact, the 58-page memo. The reason I knew about the memo was that Allen Daviau had alerted me while I was involved in the laserdisc project that there was an excerpted memo that appeared in Film Quarterly in 1992 from Orson Welles from the book This Is Orson Welles that was not published. And basically he told me that there was a memo that Welles had written. Detailed editorial notes. That‘s how I became aware of the memo itself. It was basically based on all this that we wound up with a green light to recut the film theatrically the way Welles had requested that the final cut be done.
So this project actually began long before you found the memo.
In thought. It was developed as wanted to do a laserdisc and basically it was a film that needed to be more seriously addressed than previously had been done with it.
