?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
WELLES BEGINS HIS FIRST FORAY INTO MOTION PICTURES (ENTERTAINERS.) WELLES, ORSON. Two Typed Letters, each Signed, "Orson," to cinematographer Harry Dunham ("Dearest Harry" or "Harry, my love"), one with a small ink drawing, inquiring about documentary footage taken in equatorial regions and reporting that he has engaged him to photograph scenes in New York City. The drawing, a sketch of a figure behind a motion picture camera pointed at another figure on a beach with arms around a palm tree. Each 1 page, 4to, "Mercury Theatre" stationery; faint staining to extreme left edge, horizontal folds. [New York], 9; 30 August 1939
9 August 1939: "I am crazy about moving pictures as you know, and I even like Hollywood. The only thing that is missing, is you. "Do you know any good documentary stuff on Africa, the Malays, Indo-China, South America and all the rest of the damp, equatorial and tropical never-never lands? Do you know anybody who might know? If I need it and could arrange it, would you like to go down there yourself and make some 'keys' for me?" 30 August 1939: "I am negotiating with your employer and have every reasonable hope that a few days will see a consum[m]ation of a deal which will find you and your little camera, out on the high-seas and under the bridges of New York City, making many artistic shots of these things, just at dusk. "This would be instructive work for you and will keep you out in the open. . . ." Harry Hickenlooper Dunham (1910-1943) was a cinematographer who filmed Orson Welles's first bumbling attempts at directing when, in 1938, Welles and some of the Mercury Theatre company began shooting--and never completed--a version of William Gillette's play, Too Much Johnson. During World War II, Dunham enlisted in the Air Force and, flying over New Guinea in October of 1943, he was forced to crash land his plane, which killed him.
