Personal check, 7 x 3, filled out in type and signed by Welles, payable to Western Costume Company for $88.40, November 25, 1957. The memo line indicates that the check was for “Purchase of costume—Sancho Panza, ‘Don Quixote.’” After the legendary problems that attended the making of such classics as Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Hollywood became ever warier of the temperamental former wunderkind. By the 1950s, Welles found it increasingly difficult to mount his ambitious productions, and he was forced to provide major financing for his films from his own pocket. Shoestring budgets and intermittent cash flow often meant erratic shooting schedules, in some cases spread over a period of years; resourceful visual effects were sometimes employed to deliberately disguise the spareness of the sets or costumes. Welles was long obsessed with bringing Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote to the screen, and production began in 1955 with Francisco Reiguera in the title role and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza. Welles continued shooting for some 14 years, assembling and reassembling the cast and crew whenever he could raise the funds. In his final years, he grimly joked that he was going to call the film “When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote” and reportedly expressed his hope to complete the project as late as four months before his death in 1985. His decades of labor yielded more than 300,000 feet of footage, later edited into a 116-minute version that debuted to mixed reviews in 1992. Light vertical fold, and bank stamps and punch cancellations (the latter just touching first letter), otherwise fine condition. An unusually significant and poignant association! R&R COA.
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