Too Much Johnson (2022)

A Silent Film Score

For: fl(=picc.)-ob(=CA)-cl(=BC)-bn / hn-perc-pft-2vln-vla-vlc-cb (single players or sections)

Duration: 49’

• Hit Points and Timecodes refer to the Hagen cut of Too Much Johnson (1938) available for download from Burning Sled Media. Technical specifications and screener available from admin@burningsled.org

Movements: Prelude | Packing | In the Boudoir | In Flagrante | And They're Off | Ballad for Joe | Old Hundred Variations | Hat Gag | March of the Women | The Chase Resumes | Marc's Rag | Cuba | The Cuban Duel | Final Chase | The Enemy of my Enemy

First Performance: 22 July 2022 / Wintergreen Music Festival / Wintergreen Festival Orchestra / Erin Freeman

Dedication: “Commissioned by the Wintergreen Music Festival, for Erin and Peter.”

Publisher: Peermusic Classical | Licensing | Technical Questions

Program Note:

Filmed in 1938, Orson Welles’ unfinished (and unscreened) silent film Too Much Johnson was shot to serve as the film component of a staged production of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy. It was meant to be shown between acts of the play, and not to stand up as a narrative on its own. The ceiling of the Stony Creek Theatre, in Connecticut—where my own film Orson Rehearsed was screened in August 2021 and where Welles was staging a rare “out of town tryout” before moving the production to Broadway—was apparently too low to allow for its projection, and so Welles’ production debuted without film.

Evidently, there was also the matter of an attorney’s letter that Welles received from Paramount informing him that they owned the film rights. Ironically, both of Paramount’s film versions of the play are now lost. The footage for Welles’ film, shot only three years before Citizen Kane, his explosive cinematic debut, was also believed lost, but in 2008 a work print was found in a warehouse in Italy. Read more here.