Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles - Hardcover

Thomson, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679418342 ISBN 13: 9780679418344

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"Easily the best book on Orson Welles."  --The New Yorker

Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood as a boy genius, became a legend with a single perfect film, and then spent the next forty years floundering. But Welles floundered so variously, ingeniously, and extravagantly that he turned failure into "a sustaining tragedy"--his thing, his song.  Now the prodigal genius of the American cinema finally has the biographer he deserves. For, as anyone who has read his novels and criticism knows, David Thomson is one of our most perceptive and splendidly opinionated writers on film.

In Rosebud, Thomson follows the wild arc of Welles's career, from The War of the Worlds broadcast to the triumph of Citizen Kane, the mixed triumph of The Magnificent Ambersons, and the strange and troubling movies that followed. Here, too, is the unfolding of the Welles persona--the grand gestures, the womanizing, the high living, the betrayals. Thomson captures it all with a critical acumen and stylistic dash that make this book not so much a study of Welles's life and work as a glorious companion piece to them.

"Insightful, controversial, and highly readable--Rosebud is biography at its best."  --Cleveland Plain Dealer


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author

London-born David Thomson graduated from Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. He has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, is on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, Film Comment, Los Angeles, and The New Republic. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.

From the Inside Flap

imes Notable Book of the Year

"Easily the best book on Orson Welles." --The New Yorker

Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood as a boy genius, became a legend with a single perfect film, and then spent the next forty years floundering. But Welles floundered so variously, ingeniously, and extravagantly that he turned failure into "a sustaining tragedy"--his thing, his song. Now the prodigal genius of the American cinema finally has the biographer he deserves. For, as anyone who has read his novels and criticism knows, David Thomson is one of our most perceptive and splendidly opinionated writers on film.

In Rosebud, Thomson follows the wild arc of Welles's career, from The War of the Worlds broadcast to the triumph of Citizen Kane, the mixed triumph of The Magnificent Ambersons, and the strange and troubling movies that followed. Here, too, is the unfolding of the Welles persona--the grand gestures, the womanizing, the high liv

Reviews

Welles is certainly enjoying a boom; soon after the first volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles (Forecasts, Nov. 20, 1995) comes this study by the author of The Life of David O. Selznick and A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson does not pretend to have done vast scholarship or delved extensively into original sources. As a boy in England, he says, he fell under Welles's spell, and his book is a sort of vast, almost novelistic examination of the showman's rich and ultimately deeply frustrating life; it is an attempt to come to terms with the fascination Welles continues to exert, although it is generally agreed that his last 40 years were an anticlimax. Determined to be compulsively readable, Thomson indulges in highly tendentious asides, interrupts himself with questions he imagines his publisher asking and works in chunks of scenes from Welles's movies and snippets from the interviews the star tirelessly gave all his life. The result is a vivid patchwork, a swift, impressionistic take on Welles that is also an often moving tribute to his oblique mix of genius and charlatanism. Not by any means the only book on Welles to read, but a stimulating and diverting one, with some unusual judgments: that his Macbeth, for instance, is better than his Othello, and that the late F for Fake is a neglected masterwork. Illustrated. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Eccentric biography of an even more eccentric genius. Following scores of biographies and critical analyses on legendary filmmaker Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, etc.) with yet another life story must have been a daunting task, even for so clever and prolific a film historian as Thomson (Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick, 1992, etc.). Notably, Rosebud has been closely preceded by the massive first volume of Simon Callow's two- volume biography (Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, 1996). Thomson, in his far shorter single volume, can't begin to compete with the dense details of Callow's work. Instead he tries a different tack: He blends biography with quirky digressions and diversions. Sometimes he directly addresses the reader (occasionally in the sonorous tones of a Wellesian narrator), and sometimes he conducts imaginary conversations with his ``publisher''--all in an attempt to fathom the compelling, self-destructive personality of his subject. Unfortunately, these asides are often coy, superficial, or redundant. But as he moves deeper into Welles's film work, the digressions begin to drop away, as if Thomson were only distracting himself while dealing with Welles's theater and radio work, in which he's clearly not terribly interested (and on which Callow is brilliant). When he reaches the films Thomson begins to shine. He richly conveys the excitement that the films still generate, and gives provocative insights into their meanings. History and analysis deftly merge in an effective presentation of Welles's erratic final years. Still, the result is more satisfying in patches than as a whole. Perhaps Thomson should have found a forum other than biography in which to express his love of Orson Welles. A mulligan stew of a book that is best read as a complement to, rather than as a substitute for, other books on Welles. (69 photos) (First printing of 50,000) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Welles dreamed his life as he lived it and passed down his fanciful interpretations of that life to all who would listen, for example to Barbara Leaming, his personal biographer. Some of Welles' most famous stories, about his production of Macbeth with a black cast in Harlem, the writing of Citizen Kane, all that film footage of carnival in Brazil, Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, his betrayal by studio executives on The Magnificent Ambersons project, have been retold many times in search of what happened to the boy genius who steadily fell from grace after the making of Kane when he was 25. Simon Callow (Orson Welles ) sidestepped Welles' stories to concentrate on the evidence of his achievements; Thomson trots out the myths and reinterprets them in Welles' favor, which he fits into his ingenious conceit of Welles as the antihero Kane. He effectively replaces William Randolph Hearst with George Orson Welles as the model for Kane. Thomson's reiterations, tastefully placed, that Welles died alone on October 10, 1985, "without nurse, companion, camera or recorder," suggest his commitment to his argument. Throughout, Thomson is engaging and humorous, particularly in working with another masterful conceit. On a controversial interpretation or on an exquisite insight, the publisher enters the narrative and converses with the author. Prettily done. Thomson summarizes that Welles was, at once, "magnificent and a poor bastard." And this is, at once, a brilliant and maddening inquiry. Bonnie Smothers

Thomson, author of the terrific Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (LJ 11/1/92) and many other film books, weighs in here with his own take on another legendary film figure. It must inevitably be compared with Simon Callow's ambitious Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (LJ 11/15/95), which, as the first of two volumes, covers only through the 1941 release of Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, Thomson's single volume on an entire life seems rushed by comparison?only 50 pages are devoted to the last 27 years. Little new ground is broken here; even Thomson's usually bright insights seem secondhand and pedestrian. Unless your patrons are begging for more Wellesiana, this is an optional purchase.?Thomas J. Wiener, editor, "Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679418342
• ISBN 13: 9780679418344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 463