{"id":34536,"date":"2021-02-12T19:37:05","date_gmt":"2021-02-13T00:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=34536"},"modified":"2021-02-12T19:40:06","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T00:40:06","slug":"the-bootleg-files-caesars-guide-to-gaming-with-orson-welles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/12\/the-bootleg-files-caesars-guide-to-gaming-with-orson-welles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: Caesars Guide To Gaming with Orson Welles"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 757: <\/strong>\u201cCaesars Guide to Gaming with Orson Welles\u201d (1978 video starring the one-time Mr. Kane).<\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> On YouTube.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> None.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> Never intended for home entertainment release.<\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE:<\/strong> Not likely.<\/p>\n

Orson Welles is the cinematic gift that never stops giving. Just when you think you\u2019ve seen every film and television appearance credited to him, another long-lost piece of ephemera manages to emerge and fill out his already considerable canon. This past week, a pair of Facebook friends shared a half-hour video that Welles did on behalf of the Caesars Palace resort in Las Vegas in 1978 \u2013 I never knew this existed and was excited to check it out.
\n<\/p>\n

\u201cCaesars Guide to Gaming with Orson Welles\u201d was never intended for a wide release, but was broadcast on the closed-circuit television network within the vacation destination. How it slipped out of the hotel and into unauthorized YouTube postings<\/a> is unclear, but its emergence offers an interesting glimpse of Welles during a rough patch in his life.<\/p>\n

The 1970s seemed to begin on an optimistic note for Welles \u2013 he received an honorary Academy Award and the American Film Institute\u2019s Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was featured in popular films including John Huston\u2019s \u201cThe Kremlin Letter,\u201d Mike Nichols\u2019 \u201cCatch-22\u201d and Claude Chabrol\u2019s \u201cTen Days Wonder.\u201d By the end of the decade, however, things were somewhat less hopeful: his feature film \u201cThe Other Side of the Wind\u201d was permanently stalled due to legal issues beyond his control while his completed production \u201cF for Fake\u201d was blasted by critics and ignored by audiences. Long-percolating problems with the Internal Revenue Service required that he take almost any job offered to him, no matter how demeaning to an artist of his talent. Thus, Welles was a ubiquitous presence during this time as a variety show guest, the narrator of hokey documentaries and television commercials, and the loquacious fixture on television talk shows while he vainly attempted to jumpstart dozens of film projects. <\/p>\n

In 1978, the management of Caesars in Las Vegas reached out to Welles to host a video designed to guide their neophyte gambler guests through the rules of the popular casino games. Welles reportedly agreed to the job on the provision that he would be paid in cash \u2013 he needed money to cover his expenses and was not eager for the IRS to garnish his earnings. The casino had no problems with this request and Welles completed his work in a day\u2019s presence on-camera and extra narration recorded later.<\/p>\n

\u201cCaesars Guide to Gaming with Orson Welles\u201d opens with a montage sequence regarding the highlights of a Caesars vacation, including glimpses of the gaming rooms, the hotel\u2019s amenities and blink-and-you-miss views of entertainers including Andy Williams, Tom Jones and Sammy Davis Jr. (The Davis moment is edited in a way that gives the impression the star is gleefully admiring two white women in a hot tub.) Frank Sinatra\u2019s ring-a-ding-ding version of \u201cLuck Be a Lady\u201d is heard on the soundtrack during this montage.<\/p>\n

The viewer finds Welles puffing on a cigar while dressed in the trademark black clothing he favored during this time. He speculates his hosting duties came about because \u201cI know a little about cards, a little about gaming and because, well, I\u2019ve been known to take a long shot or two.\u201d Welles imagined prehistoric men throwing animal bones as the forerunner of dice games and observed that every known culture has included its own games of chance. But he also assured the viewer the games at Caesars are \u201cremarkably simple to play.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the next half hour, Welles offered a running narration the fundamentals of such casino games as baccarat, dice (also known as craps), blackjack, roulette and keno. For the most part, Welles is off-camera with his narration while the viewer watches simulations of the casino games. When he is on camera, Welles is usually standing between a pair of seated young ladies wearing rather low-cut dresses, his cigar burning slowly in his right hand while his eyes occasionally glimpse at the cue cards from which he is reading his lines. The woman rarely acknowledge his presence and never speak to him.<\/p>\n

In between these sections, the viewer gets brief glimpses of the multiple dining options located within Caesar. For guests who prefer Japanese, Greek, Spanish or old-fashion American glutton-inspired dishes, there is something to satisfy everyone\u2019s taste.<\/p>\n

Welles\u2019 fans will find this video interesting because he is mostly standing and is seen in a very full figure \u2013 during this period of his life, Welles was usually filmed seated and from the chest up. Here, however, his girth is not obscured and his obesity was never more obvious. Even worse, Welles appears to grow more visibly tired as the video progresses \u2013 one can assume this was shot in sequence, with the star\u2019s energy waning as the production day dragged on. (Some unkind online voices speculated Welles was drunk during the latter part of the video, perhaps recalling the notorious outtakes from a Paul Masson commercial where he obviously enjoyed the wine before his time on-camera.)<\/p>\n

Robin Greenspun, filmmaker and founder of Cinevegas, told the Hollywood Reporter that this video was shot in the resort\u2019s private casino, which was near the Palace Court restaurant at the time. Welles enjoyed the warm Las Vegas weather\u2019s benefits on his health and the city\u2019s lower cost of living, and moved with his wife Paola and daughter Beatrice to the gaming capital later in that year. (He also kept a home in Los Angeles with his mistress Oja Kodar, but that\u2019s another story.)<\/p>\n

I am not certain how long Caesars kept this video on its closed-circuit television network. Mercifully, the video was preserved and can be easily seen online \u2013 Caesars has made no attempt to have it removed from YouTube. And while it ain\u2019t \u201cChimes at Midnight,\u201d at it least it offers a peek at what Welles was up to between stillborn film projects and Merv Griffin guest shots.<\/p>\n

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to the award-winning podcast \u201cThe Online Movie Show with Phil Hall\u201d<\/a> on SoundCloud, with new episodes every Monday. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 757: \u201cCaesars Guide to Gaming with Orson Welles\u201d (1978 video starring the one-time Mr. Kane). LAST SEEN: On YouTube. AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None. REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Never intended for home entertainment release. CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely. Orson Welles is the cinematic gift that never stops giving. Just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":34537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1532],"tags":[2657,2659,2660,2658,1477,1566],"class_list":["post-34536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-online-movie-show","tag-caesars-palace","tag-closed-circuit-television","tag-gambling","tag-las-vegas","tag-orson-welles","tag-the-bootleg-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34538,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34536\/revisions\/34538"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}