Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Orson Welles Commercials

Poor Orson Welles. The guy was one of the few indisputable geniuses of cinema, but had trouble financing nearly every film he tried to make post-Citizen Kane. In the late seventies, he became the voice of a number of national ad campaigns and even shot some commercials, many of which have ended up on YouTube. Here he is in his rotund later years trying his damnedest to do a commercial for champagne. Looks like he sampled a few bottles before the shoot:


But wait, there's more. Here's a now-classic recording of him trying to do a radio commercial for frozen peas and getting mad at the idiotic ad copy:


Of course, none of this compares to his last film role as Unicron in Transformers: The Movie. Here's a short video that tells the whole story:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I loved how they used his voice in the Transformers movie. Although interesting to learn that the reason they put it through the synthesizer was because of his laboured breathing.