All is Welles

Guitarist Gary Lucas returns to the James River Film Festival with "Too Much Johnson."

Guitarist Gary Lucas is used to working with legendary creative icons — Captain Beefheart, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Bernstein and Popeye the Sailor, just to name a few.

Now we can add maverick film and theatre director Orson Welles to the list.

Lucas will provide a live soundtrack to Welles’ 66-minute silent film, “Too Much Johnson,” at the Byrd Theatre on Saturday, April 22, as part of the 29th annual James River Film Festival. He’ll also sit in with Richmond’s own Hotel X as that avant-jazz ensemble does live scores for a trio of “city symphony” films on April 21 at the Grace Street Theater.

The Syracuse, New York native is a JRFF favorite, having appeared at five previous installments of Richmond’s longest running film festival, adding his dramatic soundscapes to everything from the 1920 German silent film, “The Golem,” to the Spanish version of “Dracula,” to a selection of classic Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons from the Fleischer Studios.

The prolific musician says he loves coming to Richmond for the James River Film Festival, but touring, whether solo or with his supergroup band, Gods and Monsters (featuring members of Talking Heads and Television), is kind of a drag these days. Since the pandemic, when he successfully web streamed weekly live performances, he’s been concentrating on doing soundtrack work for TV documentaries like “The Burial of Ashes” for ABC-Disney and PBS’s “We Speak NYC.”

Style Weekly recently caught up by phone with the man that The New York Times calls “the guitarist with 1,000 ideas” and asked him about his pioneering work in live scoring silent films, and what it takes to be a successful collaborator.

Style Weekly: How many times have you performed live with “Too Much Johnson”?

Gary Lucas: I did the premiere in New York four or five years ago and I did the European premiere, so this will be the third time.

This is a workprint, right? There was never a final edit made of the film.

That’s all that exists. Mysteriously, they found this reel in a trunk in Pordenone, Italy where they also happen to have a famous silent film festival. It was made in the sound era [1938] but it’s a takeoff on the days of silent movies and he was actually working on it when he got the call to come to Hollywood to do “Citizen Kane.” It was made for what was intended to be a multimedia stage production of a 19th century farce called “Too Much Johnson” and it was shelved because he found out that the slope of the theatre where he was going to stage the play would not accommodate the projection system. It never got utilized.

So for years it was a lost Orson Welles film, and all that’s been found was this workprint, which means it includes every take, spliced together on one reel. Somehow Eastman House in Rochester wound up with it and I contacted them and they said, “Go out there and play it. The more the merrier.”

What was your process for coming up with the music?

I don’t have a set bunch of themes. It’s very much a psychedelic improvisation performed in the moment. I get surprised every time I see the movie, there’s so much going on.

In all of the books on Welles, “Too Much Johnson” was thought of as a minor curio, something he did on the fly. But it totally fits in with the visual style of his classic feature films.

Whatever he did bears the touch of a master.

You were one of the first modern musicians to start live scoring silent films. Do you ever quote yourself when performing, like will you throw in a lick or a passage from a Captain Beefheart or Jeff Buckley tune?

It’s possible. I never know until I get in front of these films what I’m going to play. That’s what makes it fresh to me.

Has a film ever stumped you?

Well, no. But the most frustrating was when I was asked to perform with an Erich von Stroheim film, “The Wedding March.” It’s almost three hours long and I got a commission to score it from La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. I’d had a really good performance there a year earlier of Tod Browning’s classic “The Unholy Three.” That went really well and I wanted to go back but I couldn’t choose the film, it had to be something that was part of their programming and they had this Stroheim festival going on. They wanted me to do “The Wedding March” and I took the assignment reluctantly because the film was so long. I think I pulled it off, no one was disappointed, but … it’s just a boring fucking film [laughs].

What has been your favorite film to score?

I’d say “The Golem.” Especially the first go-rounds because I had a collaborator with me, a keyboardist I’d been playing improvs with since I was a boy, Walter Horn. It was a tag-team effort. And in the beginning, the only extant print was a black and white Museum of Modern Art print that was at regular speed. Since then they’ve come out with a restored version with tinted color and it’s beautiful to look at. But they’ve restored it back to silent speed – 18 frames per second instead of 24 — which makes it really boring, especially in the way my music fits in, and it adds 20 minutes to it whereas it really moved, bam bam bam, in the regular version. Festivals won’t let me play it now at regular speed because, you know, purists.

You’ve worked successfully with so many different artists, not just Beefheart and Buckley, but Lou Reed, DJ Spooky, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsburg and others. What’s the secret of collaborating?

It depends on who it is but if it’s a singer, like when I worked with Jeff, I’ll write the music and have them write the lyrics and the melody because they have to sing them so they should be personal to them. I trust the other person to meet me in the middle there. That’s how I like to work, on a trust basis, not where I’m dictating parts. Many of these collaborations were initiated by music I’ve written, and that can often influence the melodies. I’ve done it in different ways, though. I’ve sat in rooms with singers and hashed out a song line by line, debating whether we should go to an A-minor or a D chord.

But Beefheart didn’t work like that, right?

No, he was the composer / dictator. But truth be known, the [Magic Band] had a lot of input and weren’t credited generally speaking. We worked hard to realize his vision but his decisions would change almost capriciously from rehearsal to rehearsal. He was a moody person. It was often hard to figure out what was driving him. A lot of times it could have been that he wanted to assert ultimate authorial control, so he would often second guess himself.

Gary Lucas will perform a live score to “Too Much Johnson” at the Byrd Theater as part of the James River Film Festival on Saturday, April 22 at 9 p.m. $15. The festival will run April 20-23 in venues across town. For a complete list of films and events, and purchase tickets, go to jamesriverfilm.org

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