Orson Welles And The Story Of The First Number Two In Film History
Who better to lay the movies' first on-screen log than a man the industry had been shitting on for ages!
It’s a wonder any films got made under the totalitarian weight of America’s Hays Code. With ‘bad’ language curtailed and even light petting between married couples frowned upon, baser bodily functions were completely off the menu.
So while Russian peasants happily pissed into a tractor radiator in Alexander Dovzehno’s Earth (1930) and a small boy peed on a wall in De Sica’s neo-realist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1948), bowel-voiding had to wait until Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Joseph Heller’s modern classic.
And who dropped said historical log? Appropirately enough cinema’s shit pioneer was none other than Orson Welles. The pan wasn’t the only thing Orson crapped all over, either, with the big man spending the bulk of the picture shitting on Nichols from a very great height.
And where would we be had this glass ceiling not been smashed? Well, we wouldn’t have Trainspotting’s worst toilet in Scotland for starters…