Michigan adds to its Welles collection

Letters, postcards, diaries and doodles from a teenage Orson Welles — along with unpublished scripts of his many incomplete projects from the 1950s and ’60s — have been acquired by the University of Michigan.

The items, from youngest daughter Beatrice Welles, add to the already-extensive trove of Welles memorabilia that the university holds as part of its “Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers” collection.

The new acquisitions not only include heavily annotated scripts for well-known films such as “Chimes at Midnight” and “The Immortal Story” but also screenplays that scholars and fans of Welles, who died in 1985, had heard about but not seen.

Among them: scripts for “Ulysses,” “The Unthinking Lobster” and “Operation Cinderella.”

There’s also a script for “Fountain of Youth,” the pilot for a TV series for Desilu Productions that made it to the air and won a Peabody. The series, though, wasn’t made.

“It’s sort of the missing piece of the Welles puzzle,” said Philip Hallman, curator of the collection. “It documents a period people haven’t had the opportunity to see original material from. It really shows just how productive he was during this period. It’s voluminous, the mountain of scripts he was writing.”

Beatrice Welles — whose mother, the Italian actress and countess Paola Mori, was Welles’ third wife — said she had long wanted to house her father’s items in one place, even if he might not have been too happy about where they ended up: “He hated anything scholarly,” she said.