Too Much Johnson - Production

Production

Welles cast Joseph Cotten in the lead role, with other parts going to Mercury Theatre actors including Eustace Wyatt, Edgar Barrier, Ruth Ford, Arlene Francis and Mary Wickes. Welles' wife, Virginia Nicholson, appeared in the film under the name Anna Stafford. Bit parts were given to Welles' Mercury Theatre producer John Houseman, assistant director John Berry, composer Marc Blitzstein and the New York Herald Tribune's drama critic Herbert Drake; Welles gave himself a small role as a Keystone Kop. Among the uncredited extras for a crowd sequence was a young Judy Holliday.

Paul Dunbar, a newsreel cameraman for Pathé News, was the film's cinematographer. Location photography took place in New York City's Battery Park and Central Park. Additional shooting took place on a Hudson River day-trip excursion boat and at locations in Yonkers, New York, and Haverstraw, New York. Interior shots were set up at a studio in the Bronx, New York. For the Cuban plantation, Welles created a miniature structure next to a papier-mâché volcano, with store-bought tropical plants to suggest the exotic Caribbean flora.