Above I’ve posted two views of the infamous Paul Masson wine commercials which helped support Orson Welles and his filmmaking career throughout the 1970s. The first consists of outtakes and the second shows the finished commercial. Unfortunately, as the outtakes show, Welles is too drunk to perform. The director aborts three takes before apparently throwing in the towel. The second video shows the finished commercial–the big ‘save’ was the idea to use a limited amount of Welles’s unusable footage sans sound. Later, on a more sober day, Welles recorded the rest of the commercial in voice-over. (The tag to the commercial, however, shows Welles on-camera reading his lines just fine. Perhaps it was shot at the beginning of the day on which he got too drunk to perform?) The fact is, though, that it’s a delight to behold even a sodden Welles–and I love the way the dopey male model sitting next to him holding the wine bottle is forced to freeze like a statue, bottle atilt, waiting for Orson to hit his cue lines which simply aren’t forthcoming. Which leads us to the really important questions: do they make Paul Masson wine anymore? Or has that vineyard been subsumed by Francis Coppola’s winery?