Too Much Johnson (2013) on Netflix
Augustus Billings is a New York playboy whose mistress is married. To get away from her violent husband, he takes the name of a Cuban plantation owner who expects a mail-order bride.
- Watch on NetflixThis title is not on Netflix right now. Please check back later for updates.
- Watch on NordVPN
- Netflix2.8/5
- IMDb5.6/10981 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
The film was made as one part of a stage production of an 1894 comedy, with silent passages meant to introduce the acts; the live scenes and the filmed ones took turns. Its story follows Augustus Billings, a New York playboy whose mistress is married. To escape her violent husband he borrows the identity of a Cuban plantation owner, a man who is waiting for a mail-order bride. The sequences were shot in the tradition of slapstick comedy so that the play's chases, duels and comic conflicts could be expanded. The Connecticut theater had no projection equipment, so the footage was left out of the show. It was long believed lost until a print turned up in a warehouse in Italy and the film was restored.
Cast
Show all 13 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Too Much Johnson (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While cutting Too Much Johnson, Orson Welles was so absorbed that he barely noticed when the film caught fire in the projector; assistant John Berry ran into the hallway with the burning machine while Welles stayed behind, smoking his pipe and examining a strip of film.
- A fire at Welles's villa in August 1970 destroyed the only known complete print of Too Much Johnson; a copy was then discovered in Italy in 2008.
- Welles meant the film to run with the stage show at the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut, but the theater's ceiling was too low to project it, so the production opened on August 16, 1938, with no film.
- During post-production Welles's cast went unpaid for the shoot, the film laboratory refused to hand over the processed film until it was paid, and Paramount Pictures sent an attorney's letter claiming it owned the rights and that any public showing would require payment.
- Welles and his crew shot roughly 25,000 feet of film in ten days, which he edited on a Moviola in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, where John Houseman remembered visitors wading knee-deep through a crackling sea of flammable nitrate film.
- For the Cuban plantation scenes Welles built a miniature structure beside a papier-mâché volcano and used store-bought tropical plants to stand in for Caribbean flora.
- On February 5, 2015, Too Much Johnson was screened and performed for the very first time as a complete stage performance, at the Film Forum in New York City, as Welles had originally intended.
