What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career - Hardcover
Synopsis
At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles's career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's satire of Hollywood during the "Easy Rider era"; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles's widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker's entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles's Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles's life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles's later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride's revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.
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About the Author
Joseph McBride is an internationally known film critic and historian who for many years has been considered one of the world's leading experts on Orson Welles. McBride's fifteen books also include acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford, and two previous studies of Welles. A former critic and reporter for Daily Variety in Hollywood, McBride is an assistant professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University.
Reviews
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.
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Conventional wisdom about Orson Welles holds that he squandered the promise of Citizen Kane (1941) in two decades' worth of releases that ranged from masterpieces to misfires. In the 15 years before his death in 1985, he did little but appear in hack movies and lucrative commercials. "I started at the top and have been going downhill ever since," he said. Yet McBride shows those years to have been a period of great productivity, during which Welles worked nonstop on a number of projects, few of which reached completion. The author of two previous books on Welles, McBride got to know the filmmaker he idolized when Welles recruited the young critic to play a role in the most famous of the unfinished works, The Other Side of the Wind. McBride argues that Welles should be viewed not as a failed Hollywood exile but as a progenitor of the independent filmmaking that flourished in the 1970s. Welles fans--essentially, all serious cinephiles--will find McBride's heartfelt defense of the director indispensable, though heartbreaking. Gordon Flagg
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