Me and Mr Welles
Travelling Europe with a Hollywood Legend
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In late autumn 1968, Dorian Bond was tasked with travelling to Yugoslavia to deliver cigars and film stock to the legendary Hollywood director Orson Welles. The pair soon struck up an unlikely friendship, and Welles offered Bond the role of his personal assistant – as well as a part in his next movie. No formal education could prepare him for the journey that would ensue. This fascinating memoir follows Welles and Bond across Europe during the late 1960s as they visit beautiful cities, stay at luxury hotels, and reminisce about Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, among others. It is filled with Welles' characteristic acerbic wit – featuring tales about famous movie stars such as Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich and Steve McQueen – and is a fresh insight into both the man and his film-making. Set against the backdrop of the student riots of '68, the Vietnam War, the Manson killings, the rise of Roman Polanski, the Iron Curtain, and Richard Nixon's presidency, Me and Mr Welles is a unique look at both a turbulent time and one of cinema's most charismatic characters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This memoir from Bond (Famous Regiments of the British Army) about working as Orson Welles's personal assistant during the late 1960s proves an unfortunate, overly hagiographic misstep. The text is confusingly structured and cluttered with extraneous asides (as when, upon climbing into a dinghy during production of Welles's unfinished oceangoing thriller The Deep, Bond makes the thuddingly obvious point that it's "nautical custom" to sit down immediately). A degree of Welles's famous charm comes through when first meeting Bond, who'd been dispatched to Yugoslavia to bring Welles his cigars, he quips, "With a name like that you've just gotta be a movie director!" Likewise, there's some pleasure to be taken from the sometimes vivid descriptions of the various European countries Bond visits while working for Welles, including a post Soviet invasion Prague, where he observes the National Museum covered with "the violent pockmarks of heavy machine-gun fire, big scars the size of a human fist." However, movie buffs, this book's most obvious intended readers, will be put off when Bond blithely refers to film early on as "a rather tedious subject" (despite professing a love for it elsewhere). While Bond conveys his sincere admiration for a mentor long gone, only the hardest of hardcore Welles fans need apply.
