| You're such PESTS! |
[Oct. 8th, 2005|01:17 pm] |
(I'm reposting this from my page on myspace.com, because it makes much more sense for it to go here.)
Orson Welles wrote and directed some of the finest films ever made. But later in life, his career stalled out and he was forced to take undignified voiceover work for numerous cheesy commercials. (As a side note, I have a vague memory of being very very young and having a grown-up point me at a commercial on the television and telling me that the large man with the big white hat who sold no wine before its time was, in fact, a very very famous actor. No doubt I duely processed this information and then went back to my Lego.)
One of those most famous outtakes in television commerical voice-over history (if such a thing can be imagined) is of the aforementioned Orson Welles slowly losing his patience with the innane crap he was forced to say and taking it out on the unfortunate audio technicians who were stuck in the studio that day. You can't blame Welles, really. Imagine that you were the genius who envisioned CITIZEN KANE, who turned TOUCH OF EVIL from a B-film to a film-noir classic, and who wrote the finest speech in THE THIRD MAN. Then imagine being so broke that you have to come out with: "We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs. Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there."
You'd probably storm out shouting, "No money is worth this!" too. And before you did that, you'd probably also shout, "In the *depths* of your ignorance, what do you want?!"
Here's the link:
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/365/365-Days-Project-03-01-welles-orson-frozen-peas-spot.mp3
A couple of years ago when I first heard it, I thought it was simply amusing. But each time I hear it again, I think it's even funnier. And now I can't stop listening to it. To misquote a line from CITIZEN KANE: I bet a month hasn't gone by that I haven't listened to Orson Welles grumbling: "Show me a jury that says [...] and I'll go down on you."
(By the way, if some of the quotes sound familiar, that's probably because Pinky and the Brain used portions of the dialog in one of their episodes.)
Anyway, that's not why I'm posting this. I'm posting this because I stumbled over a free MP3 on the Internet where some madman has taken clips from this audio outtake and placed them over a techno/dance backdrop.
http://www.alanrhodes.com/The_Psychotic_Hour-Norway_(featuring_Orson_Wells).mp3
That does it. I must now become a club DJ. I have an odd desire to watch a bunch of 16-year-old Avril Lavigne clones bopping around a nightclub while in the background is Orson Welles shouting, "Impossible!", "Meaningless!" and the organismic, "YES!"
Oh well, I'd be entertained anyway.
P.S. Yes! Always! |
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