A Lost Orson Welles TV Pilot That’s as Groundbreaking as “Citizen Kane”

Only two prints exist. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDTnpfEglo

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/a-lost-orson-welles-tv-pilot-thats-as-groundbreaking-as-citizen-kane/

Only one episode of the resulting project was ever filmed, the pilot, titled “The Fountain of Youth” (it’s streaming on YouTube), and it’s as artistically original for television as “Citizen Kane” was for the movies, and—at least in part—for a very similar reason. The pulp-fiction plot, based on a short story by John Collier and set in New York in the nineteen-twenties, concerns a middle-aged scientist named Humphrey Baxter (Dan Tobin) who falls in love with a twenty-three-year-old burlesque dancer, Caroline Coates (Joi Lansing). When he leaves town for three years of study in Vienna, she leaves him for a muscular tennis star, Alan Brody (Rick Jason). When Humphrey returns to New York and finds himself dumped, he relies on the product of his research—a vial of an anti-aging potion, the titular fountain—to get his revenge. The story is both pleasantly seamy and inconsequential, as pat and flimsy as a mad-science soap opera. Its psychological dimensions are infinitesimal; its social context is nonexistent. But what Welles makes of the story is—or, rather, should have been—a template for what the art of television could have become.