What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?
A Portrait of an Independent Career
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A “personal and passionate” account of the Citizen Kane director’s years as an expatriate and self-funded filmmaker (Los Angeles Times).
At twenty-five, Orson Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely considered the best film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system, and his work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the popular following he once enjoyed. Frustrated by Hollywood and falling victim to the postwar blacklist, Welles left for a long European exile. But he kept making films, functioning with the creative freedom of an independent filmmaker before that term became common and eventually preserving his independence by funding virtually all his own projects.
Because he worked defiantly outside the system, Welles has often been maligned as an errant genius who squandered his early promise. Film critic Joseph McBride, who acted in Welles’s unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, challenges conventional wisdom about Welles’s supposed creative decline in this first comprehensive examination of the films of Welles’s artistically rich yet little-known later period. During the 1970s and ’80s, Welles was breaking new aesthetic ground, experimenting as adventurously as he had throughout his career.
McBride’s friendship and collaboration with Welles and his interviews with those who knew and worked with him make What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? a portrait of rare intimacy and insight. Reassessing Welles’s final period in the context of his entire life and work, this revealing portrait of this great film artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is regarded.
“[An] anecdote-illuminated account of Welles’s later years.” —The Washington Post
“Joseph McBride. . .has a clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone.” —Martin Scorsese
“A definitive study.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With Welles, all roads lead to Citizen Kane, and it's there that many of his troubles began, McBride (Orson Welles; Steven Spielberg: A Biography, etc.) asserts in his lengthy examination of the famed filmmaker's career. Labeled a communist by the vengeful publisher William Hearst, Welles found himself blacklisted in the industry. He left for Europe, later writing in Esquire that he "chose freedom." He produced only two movies during the eight years he spent abroad, but McBride asserts that his expatriate period resulted in tremendous growth as an independent filmmaker. Much of the book revolves around the saga of Welles's unfinished Hollywood satire, The Other Side of the Wind, which the author worked on. Instead of fully exploiting the insider angle, McBride instead comes across as a name-dropper, constantly reminding the reader of his relationship with his subject. McBride's passion for film (Welles's films, specifically) and his closeness with the director provide enough insider material to satisfy Welles fans and film buffs, though readers with a casual interest may want to look elsewhere.