Trivia / The Lady from Shanghai

• Copiously Credited Creator: Produced, directed, co-written by, and starring Orson Welles.
• Creator Couple: Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth were married while making the film, but they were undergoing a divorce at the time it was filmed. Hayworth had in fact hoped that she could change Welles' mind on dissolving their marriage by working with him on the film, but alas, by the time it was released the divorce had been finalized.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Rita Hayworth, famous for her luxuriant red hair, got a short haircut and went platinum blonde for this movie.
• Executive Meddling:
  • As was often the case with Orson Welles' work. The original cut ran around 155 minutes (including a much-extended funhouse climax) and had a much different musical score (the Hall of Mirrors segment was intended to play entirely without music). Studio execs ended up cutting almost half the runtime and commissioning a jazzy score designed to underline the action.
  • Welles knew that Rita Hayworth was deeply unhappy with the way Hollywood treated and commodified her as a sex object, so he deliberately shot much of the film trying to downplay and even deconstruct the concept of Male Gaze as much as possible, by rarely having her in close-up. Neither the editor, Viola Lawrence, or Harry Cohn, the overseer on the project from Columbia Pictures, understood what Welles was try to accomplish, so the latter overruled the decision, and made Welles do reshoots, which included a lot of close-ups of Hayworth.
• One for the Money; One for the Art: Orson Welles made the film to finance a stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days.
• Reality Subtext: Orson Welles very deliberately made sure that the film was laden with subtext about him and Hayworth's relationship, and the unfair way Rita Hayworth was treated by Hollywood, and especially Harry Cohn, the very controlling producer responsible for managing her contract.
• What Could Have Been: Ida Lupino was interested in playing Elsa Bannister.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Orson Welles originally pitched the film as an adaptation of Carmen. When it became clear that he would have to work with Rita Hayworth, the woman he was in the middle of divorce proceedings with, he changed his mind and instead wrote up a script based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake, which he gradually filled with Reality Subtext about him and Hayworth's relationship and how Hollywood and Harry Cohn in particular treated her.

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