John Houseman
John Houseman was a British-American theatre and film producer, actor, director, and teacher. He became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director Orson Welles from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of Citizen Kane. He enjoyed a distinguished career as an influential producer of both the stage and screen, and was the founding director of the drama department of the Juilliard School and co-founder of The Acting Company.
Houseman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture for producing William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. As an actor, Houseman won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in the 1973 film The Paper Chase, which he reprised in the 1978 television series adaptation.
He was also nominated for four acting Golden Globe Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award for producing. In 1979, Houseman was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Early life
Houseman was born September 22, 1902, in Bucharest, Romania, the son of May, a governess, and Georges Haussmann, who ran a grain business. His mother was British, from a Christian family of Welsh and Irish descent. His father was Jewish and from Alsace–Lorraine.Haussmann was educated at Clifton College in England, became a British subject, and worked in the grain trade in London. He moved to Argentina as a speculator in the international grain markets before immigrating to the United States in 1925. He had a successful business career and was on the Chicago Board of Trade.
Houseman had married actress Zita Johann weeks before the 1929 stock market crash, with international markets in chaos. Johann encouraged him to reinvent himself with a new career path in the theater. He changed his birth name, Jacques Haussmann, taking the stage name John Houseman and began by translating works in German and French into English for the New York stage. He became a United States citizen in 1943.
Theatre producer
On Broadway, Houseman co-wrote Three and One and And Be My Love. Composer Virgil Thomson recruited him to direct Four Saints in Three Acts, Thomson's collaboration with Gertrude Stein. He later directed The Lady from the Sea and Valley Forge.Collaboration with Orson Welles
In 1934, Houseman was looking to cast Panic, a play he was producing based on a drama by Archibald MacLeish concerning a Wall Street financier whose world crumbles about him when consumed by the crash of 1929. Although the central figure is a man in his late fifties, Houseman became obsessed by the notion that a young man named Orson Welles he had seen in Katharine Cornell's production of Romeo and Juliet was the only person qualified to play the leading role. Welles consented and, after preliminary conversations, agreed to leave the play he was in after a single night to take the lead in Houseman's production. Panic opened at the Imperial Theatre on March 15, 1935. Among the cast was Houseman's ex-wife, Zita Johann, who had co-starred with Boris Karloff three years earlier in Universal's The Mummy.Although the play opened to indifferent notices and ran for a mere three performances, it nevertheless led to the forging of a theatrical team, a fruitful but stormy partnership in which Houseman said Welles "was the teacher, I, the apprentice."
He supervised the direction of Walk Together Chillun in 1936.
Federal Theatre Project
In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration put unemployed theatre performers and employees to work. The Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project was headed by Rose McClendon, a well-known black actress, and Houseman. He describes the experience in one of his memoirs:Within a year of its formation, the Federal Theatre had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll at an average wage of approximately twenty dollars a week. During the four years of its existence its productions played to more than thirty million people in more than two hundred theatres as well as portable stages, school auditoriums and public parks the country over.
''Macbeth'' (1936)
Houseman immediately hired Welles and assigned him to direct Macbeth for the FTP's Negro Theater Unit, a production that became known as the "Voodoo Macbeth", as it was set in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe and starred Jack Carter in the title role. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play premiered at the Lafayette Theatre on April 14, 1936, to enthusiastic reviews and remained sold out for each of its nightly performances. The play was regarded by critics and patrons as an enormous, if controversial, success. After 10 months with the Negro Theater Project, however, Houseman felt he was faced with the dilemma of risking his future:... on a partnership with a 20-year-old boy in whose talent I had unquestioning faith but with whom I must increasingly play the combined and tricky roles of producer, censor, adviser, impresario, father, older brother and bosom friend.
Houseman later produced for the Negro Theatre Unit Turpentine without Welles.
In 1936, Houseman and Welles were running a WPA unit in midtown Manhattan for classic productions called Project No. 891. Their first production was Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr. Faustus which Welles directed while also playing the title role.
Houseman and Welles put on Horse Eats Hat. Houseman, without Welles, helped in the direction of Leslie Howard's production of Hamlet.
''The Cradle Will Rock'' (1937)
In June 1937, Project No. 891 produced their most controversial work with The Cradle Will Rock. Written by Marc Blitzstein, the musical was about Larry Foreman, a worker in Steeltown, which is run by the boss, Mister Mister. The show was thought to have had left-wing and unionist sympathies, and became legendary as an example of a "censored" show. Shortly before the show was to open, FTP officials in Washington announced that no productions would open until after July 1, 1937, the beginning of the new fiscal year.In his memoir, Run-Through, Houseman wrote about the circumstances surrounding the opening night at the Maxine Elliott Theatre. All the performers had been enjoined not to perform on stage for the production when it opened on July 14, 1937. The cast and crew left their government-owned theatre and walked 20 blocks to another theatre, with the audience following. No one knew what to expect; when they got there Blitzstein himself was at the piano and started playing the introduction music. One of the amateur performers, Olive Stanton, who played the part of Moll, the prostitute, stood up in the audience, and began singing her part. All the other performers, in turn, stood up for their parts. Thus the "oratorio" version of the show was born. Apparently, Welles had designed some intricate scenery, which ended up never being used. The event was so successful that it was repeated several times on subsequent nights, with everyone trying to remember and reproduce what had happened spontaneously the first night. The incident, however, led to Houseman being fired and Welles's resignation from Project No. 891.
Mercury Theatre
That same year, 1937, after detaching themselves from the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Welles did The Cradle Will Rock as an independent production on Broadway. They also founded the acclaimed New York drama company, the Mercury Theatre. Houseman wrote of their collaboration at this time:On the broad wings of the Federal eagle, we had risen to success and fame beyond ourselves as America's youngest, cleverest, most creative and audacious producers to whom none of the ordinary rules of the theater applied.
Armed with a manifesto written by Houseman declaring their intention to foster new talent, experiment with new types of plays, and appeal to the same audiences that frequented the Federal Theater the company was designed largely to offer plays of the past, preferably those that "...seem to have emotion or factual bearing on contemporary life." The company mounted several notable productions, the most remarkable being its first commercial production of Julius Caesar. Houseman called the decision to use modern dress "an essential element in Orson's conception of the play as a political melodrama with clear contemporary parallels."
Houseman and Welles later presented The Shoemaker's Holiday, Heartbreak House and Danton's Death.
Radio
Beginning in the summer of 1938, the Mercury Theatre was featured in a weekly dramatic radio program on the CBS network, initially promoted as First Person Singular before gaining the official title The Mercury Theatre on the Air. An adaptation of Treasure Island was scheduled for the program's first broadcast, for which Houseman worked feverishly on the script. However, a week before the show was to air, Welles decided that a program far more dramatic was required. To Houseman's horror, Treasure Island was abandoned in favor of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with Welles playing the infamous vampire. During an all night session at Perkins' Restaurant, Welles and Houseman hashed out a script.The Mercury Theatre on the Air featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris.
"The War of the Worlds" (1938)
The Mercury Theatre on the Air subsequently became famous for its notorious 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which had put much of the country in a panic. By all accounts, Welles was shocked by the panic that ensued. According to Houseman, "he hadn't the faintest idea what the effect would be". CBS was inundated with calls; newspaper switchboards were jammed.Without Welles, Houseman staged Douglas Moore's The Devil and Daniel Webster.