Too Much Johnson (1938 film)
Too Much Johnson is a 1938 American silent comedy film written and directed by Orson Welles. An unfinished film component of a stage production, it was made three years before Welles directed Citizen Kane, but it was never publicly screened. It was shot to be integrated into Welles's Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette's 1894 comedy, but the film sequences could not be shown due to the absence of projection facilities at the venue, the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut. The resulting plot confusion reportedly contributed to the stage production's failure.
Joseph Cotten and Edgar Barrier in Too Much Johnson (1938)
Howard Smith, Mary Wickes, Orson Welles, Virginia Nicolson, William Herz, Erskine Sanford, Eustace Wyatt and Joseph Cotten outside the Stony Creek Theatre during the two-week run of the Mercury Theatre stage production of Too Much Johnson (August 16–29, 1938)
Orson Welles directing
Joseph Cotten and John Berry
The Mercury Theatre was an independent repertory theatre company founded in New York City in 1937 by Orson Welles and producer John Houseman. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programs and motion pictures. The Mercury also released promptbooks and phonographic recordings of four Shakespeare works for use in schools.
Poster for the Mercury Theatre's three spring 1938 productions—Caesar, The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Cradle Will Rock—running simultaneously in two Broadway theaters
Orson Welles at age 22 (1938), Broadway's youngest impresario
Orson Welles as Brutus in Caesar (1937–38)
Marian Warring-Manley (Margery), Whitford Kane (Simon Eyre) and George Coulouris (The King) in The Shoemaker's Holiday (1938)
