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At twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915-1985) 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. 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.
Frustrated by Hollywood and falling victim to the postwar blacklist, Welles departed 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 legendary unfinished film The Other Side of
the Wind, provocatively challenges conventional wisdom about Welles's supposed creative
decline in his new book, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (University Press of
Kentucky). McBride is the first author to provide a 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 the director 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, McBride's revealing portrait of this great film artist will change the terms of how Orson
Welles is regarded.
Joseph McBride is an internationally known film critic and historian. His fifteen books include
biographies of Steven Spielberg, John Ford, and Frank Capra and two previous studies of Orson
Welles. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Reviews:
"There has been so much written and said about Orson Welles over the years, and quite a bit of
it has been fixated on the myth of his self-destruction at the expense of everything else:
Welles has become the epitome of fallen genius, our fallen genius. Joseph McBride, who has a
clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone, exposes that idea as the myth
it is and always has been. He brings Welles and the difficulties he faced--professional,
political, personal--into extremely sharp focus, and leaves us with a portrait of a fiercely
independent artist who wanted to work with his camera and film stock as freely as a painter with
his brushes and canvas. This is an extremely important book."--Martin Scorsese
To order What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, use this link to Barnes and Noble.
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