No other actors appear in the footage. Oja Kodar would later recall Orson Welles toying with the idea of casting Timothy Dalton, Peter Ustinov, Oliver Reed, Bud Cort, and Jeanne Moreau. However, Gary Graver later stated that Welles was planning to use younger and lesser known British actors.
In 1994, Peter Bogdanovich reportedly planned to make The Dreamers, but the production never came about. In 1996, the rights to the Karen Blixen source material was purchased from Oja Kodar by Andy Howard, who was Welles' business manager during the final years of his life. To date, Howard has not brought Welles' concept of The Dreamers to the screen.
The footage for The Dreamers consists of two segments running 10 minutes each. The first segment was shot in black-and-white and involves Orson Welles in costume and make-up as a 19th-century Dutch-Jewish Merchant who recounts the story of Pellegrina Leoni, an Italian opera diva who mysteriously disappeared after losing the ability to sing. The second segment was shot in color and features Oja Kodar as Pellegrina, who declares her farewell to her merchant friend while announcing that she is disappearing to seek a new anonymous life. Part of the Kodar footage was shot outdoors in the garden of Welles' home.
Orson Welles never acquired financial backing for this project and a full production of The Dreamers never came to fruition. The surviving footage is archived in Germany's Munich Filmmuseum, and it has been made public in several film festivals and retrospectives of Welles' work. Parts of the footage were included in the documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band and as a special feature on the Criterion DVD release of Welles' 1973 feature F for Fake (1973).
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