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After Touch Of Evil’s success, many had expected Orson Welles to throw himself right into his next film project. But Welles himself had other plans; rather than immediately dive back into the maelstrom of feature filmmaking, the great entertainment kingpin chose to focus on his role as co-writer and producer on the Twilight Zone television series, which was steadily gaining in popularity and becoming what in modern pop culture lingo is known as “appointment TV”. In short, what that meant was people were changing their evening personal schedules to get home in time to accompany Messrs. Welles and Serling on their weekly journeys through the fifth dimension. Zone’s came as a surprise to programming executives at CBS’ competitors, who’d considered it too esoteric to possibly attract a mass audience.

        If the old saying is true that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, then Twilight Zone had a great many flatterers in its second and third seasons on CBS. In reaction to Zone’s growing status as the leading sci-fi anthology show on prime time TV, rival network ABC introduced its own weekly anthology program in January of 1960; titled The Outer Limits, it took Zone’s Space Age strangeness and added to the mix a dose of old-fashioned ghost story-type chills. One of the major differences between Limits and Zone was the way that their respective opening and closing narrations were delivered to the viewing audience-- whereas in Zone Rod Serling often appeared front and center to give his précis of what was about to happen, the Outer Limits narrator would stay discreetly off-camera throughout Limits’ entire run on ABC. Another crucial distinction between Zone and Limits was that the undercurrent of poetic justice running through many of Zone’s episodes was conspicuously absent from Limits.

        Zone would end up outlasting Outer Limits on the air by at least two and a half seasons, but Welles and Serling weren’t about to rest on their laurels. They remained just as diligent about their writing work as they had been in the past; if anything, Serling now became more concerned than ever about getting it right when he turned out a script. Every American with a TV set was an unofficial critic in the brave new world of coast-to-coast video broadcasting, and that meant Serling and Welles had millions of critics who had the power to give the series the ultimate positive review by keeping their sets tuned in to CBS or the ultimate negative review by switching to one of the network’s competitors. Whatever they might differ on, CBS execs were in unanimous agreement: they did not want viewers defecting to NBC or ABC.

       Right around the end of Zone’s third season Serling discovered a novel whose main storyline struck him as particularly timely in view of the nuclear arms crisis then facing the world. Titled Seven Days In May, it described a conspiracy by far right wing extremists to topple a pro-disarmament President of the United States and the efforts of a White House military aide to derail that conspiracy. Coming into print on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Seven Days quickly became a best-seller and spent at least ten weeks on the New York Times top 25 books list. Recognizing a hot property when he saw one, Serling went to Welles and persuaded him that they should collaborate on writing a screenplay based on the novel; from that point it was only a matter of time before Serling and Welles bought the film rights to Seven Days In May and started working on the first draft of what would eventually be a 42-page script.

        It wasn’t long after they set to work on that draft before the Hollywood rumor mill began turning out names for a possible Seven Days In May film cast. One of the earliest candidates for the male lead in the proposed Serling-Welles adaptation of Seven Days was Ray Milland, who nearly two decades earlier had left an indelible imprint on movie history for his raw portrayal of troubled alcoholic Don Birnham in the drama The Lost Weekend. But after Milland’s first screen tests for the part of Colonel Casey, Welles concluded that Milland might be better suited to play Cssey’s antagonist General Broderick, the mastermind of the conspiracy to overthrow the President. The role of Colonel Casey would eventually go to Kirk Douglas; veteran screen actor and A Star Is Born alumnus Frederic March would be cast as the President.

        Serling and Welles finished their final draft of the Seven Days script in June of 1963; shooting on the film began three months later. The already challenging task of making the movie became still more complicated when a group of extras hired to portray anti-treaty demonstrators had the bad luck to run into a crowd of actual extreme right-wingers who were marching to denounce President Kennedy’s push for a ban on atmospheric nuclear bomb testing. Dozens of the extras were arrested by D.C. police; it took substantial amounts of time and effort to get all the legal knots untangled. “Maybe we should make a stagecoach Western instead.” Serling quipped to Welles shortly after the last of the unfortunate extras was released from police custody. Some of the extras were so embarrassed by the incident they threatened to quit the film; two of them actually did quit, vowing to never set foot in the nation’s capital again. However, the movie’s production crew recovered quickly from this incident and filming resumed in early September.

       Serling, Welles, and Seven Days director John Frankenheimer were back in Hollywood on November 22nd doing post-production work in preparation for the movie’s scheduled December 10th release when they received word of JFK’s assassination. It was a bitter shock for all three men, but especially so for Serling, who’d been an admirer of the president and shared many of his liberal political views. After a ten- minute discussion with one another and a phone call by Welles to one of the studio executives bankrolling the movie, the three men agreed Days’ release should be postponed until the spring of 1964. It would be nearly three weeks before the Serling-Welles team finally resumed post-production chores, and another month after that before the film was deemed ready for theatrical release.

       Seven Days’ premiere in early April of 1964 was an unusually somber affair by Hollywood standards, though it’s hard to say if this was because of the grim nature of the movie’s central storyline or if it was due to lingering grief over JFK’s murder. Welles was notably absent from the movie’s world premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and might have also missed its New York debut had Serling not persuaded him to attend for the sake of a sizable contingent of his fans who’d made the trip to Manhattan specifically to meet Welles in person.

       After Twilight Zone went off the air for good in June of 1964, Serling and Welles decided for the time being to focus their energies primarily on making movies. One project they were looking forward to bringing to the silver screen was an anthology of original horror and supernatural stories collectively titled The Night Gallery(the title referred to a set of paintings on which the stories would be based); another was an adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s aviation-centered novel Airport. The Airport project in particular excited Welles, who saw in the world of commercial flying a veritable gold mine of storytelling opportunities-- especially in the romantic department. Accordingly, he made it a point during casting for Airport to choose the most romantic leading man he could find to play the pilot whose tumultuous love life would be the centerpiece of the movie’s main story.

       His search eventually led him to singer-turned-matinee idol Dean Martin, who had established himself as a major Hollywood draw with his performance in the Las Vegas caper film Ocean’s 11. Martin’s hiring inspired more than a few jokes about his fondness for martinis, but before all was said and done he’d be the one having the last laugh on his doubters. Martin aced his audition for the pilot’s role in the Welles-Serling adaptation of Airport and would subsequently be deemed by film critics as one of the major elements in the movie’s success at the box office in the summer of 1966. And as if that wasn’t enough to make the doubters eat their words, Martin scored an Oscar at the 1967 Academy Awards for Best Actor. Welles would subsequently bring Martin back to reprise the pilot’s role in two other Airport films and a one- off TV special in 1975.

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    Things didn’t go quite so successfully for Welles on one of his subsequent cinematic projects, a documentary about Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro’s expeditions to the New World. Almost from the day he committed himself to getting the documentary made it seemed to be absolutely jinxed; his first two choices for the voice-over narrator’s job both died within days of being hired, and passport troubles with the State Department delayed the start of filming by nearly six weeks. And even when he did finally manage to get production started, Welles found his work frequently interrupted by the political upheavals which were roiling Latin America. Twice during the first week of shooting he was nearly shot in local revolts, and a lighting assistant on his crew had the bad luck to get arrested in a crackdown on dissidents.

    But that was only the beginning of Welles’ troubles south of the equator. Before the third week of shooting was over, a hurricane had destroyed most of the filming equipment and the head writer for the project had quit after a very public showdown with Welles over a set of proposed last-minute changes to the narrator’s script. The fourth week saw two critical negatives get destroyed when a fire broke out at the storage building where Welles was keeping the rushes for his film. The last straw for Welles came late in the fifth week when the payroll for the film crew’s salaries was stolen by bandits; with very little to show for his troubles, the frustrated director pulled the plug on his documentary and brought his production crew back to America. All that remains of the ill-fated Pizarro documentary today is a handful of still photos and a dozen pages of handwritten notes by Welles.

    After the Pizarro project collapsed whispers started to circulate around Hollywood that maybe Welles was starting to lose his touch, that his best days were if not over they were at least numbered. Naturally, such talk irritated the great filmmaking veteran and he resolved that he would silence his detractor by making a great movie that would impress audiences and critics alike. That soon brought up the question what the theme of said movie should be-- and in his search for a suitable answer to this question he was eventually inspired to consider adapting one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous books for the silver screen...

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     Adapting The Great Gatsby into a film is no easy task-- as anyone who’s sat through the recent Baz Luhrmann version can attest. A 1926 silent movie of Gatsby disappeared without a trace; the 1949 remake has been kept off the screen for decades by copyright disputes. Indeed, when Welles told a friend he was intending to shoot his own cinematic version of Fitzgerald’s saga of love and death in 1920’s Long Island, the friend immediately said to Welles that he was insane. Translating Fitzgerald’s books from the page to the screen was a delicate proposition in general; specifically seeking to make a film version of Gatsby was tantamount to playing leapfrog in a minefield. Anything could go wrong...and very well might before a single line of script had been typed. Not that the chance of failure or even disaster had ever stopped Welles before....