Nice peas / Bad salmon
Today: Miles Klee, senior writer at Wired, author of the novel Ivyland, and co-author, with Mads Gobbo, of the story collection Double Black Diamond; and Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and Care and Feeding.
Issue No. 621
A Celebration of Orson Welles’s Frozen Pea Commercial Outtakes
Miles Klee
Open Your Mouth, Await the Harvest
Laurie Woolever
A Celebration of Orson Welles’s Frozen Pea Commercial Outtakes
by Miles Klee
I never let a July pass me by without revisiting the infamous 1970 bootleg audio of Orson Welles attempting to record voiceover narration for advertisements for various foods, beginning with frozen peas. “We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire, where Mrs. Buckley lives,” he begins. “Every July, peas grow there…”
Then the wheels come off. Welles begins to fight the directors over the timing of his lines as they match up to the (unseen) visuals of the commercial (“We were on to a can of peas, a big dish of peas, when I said, ‘in July!’”), and then over the wording of the script itself, growing particularly frustrated when someone suggests he change “Every July” to “In July”—and, for inscrutable reasons, emphasize the word “in.”
“There’s no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with ‘in’ and emphasize it,” the great auteur fumes. “Get me a jury and show me how you can say ‘In July,’ and I’ll go down on you. That’s just idiotic, if you'll forgive me my saying so.”
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