Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios [Paperback]

Clinton Heylin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

Revealing the facts rather than the myths behind Orson Welles' Hollywood career, this groundbreaking history analyzes the career of one of the most well-known American filmmakers. Exploring why Welles' films never matched his youthful masterpiece Citizen Kane, this investigation delves into the enemies that hounded him, his unwaning faith in his audience, and the brilliance of his films—before they were butchered by the studios. Based on shooting scripts, schedules, internal memos, interviews, articles, lectures, and personal correspondence, this work creates a concrete picture of his professional and artistic struggles and successes. This heartbreaking tale brings to life the intelligent, perceptive, and passionate man who, for all his failings as a person, was utterly uncompromising in his art.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Using shooting scripts, shooting schedules, internal studio memos, private correspondence to and from Welles, and the director's interviews and public lectures, Heylin re-evaluates the circumstances under which Welles produced the six movies he made for Hollywood studios, from 1941's Citizen Kane through 1958's Touch of Evil. The depth of Heylin's research on Welles's consistent workaholic approach to his art, especially his examination of a 58-page memo Welles wrote to Universal after it dismantled Touch of Evil, aids Heylin in arguing against the claim put forth in other Welles bios that his work declined after Citizen Kane due to his own egotism and excess. Heylin's is the most well-researched and evenhanded refutation of this line of thought published to date, and shows in detail how Welles "was undone by real people, with real motives"—most notably Columbia studio head Harry Cohn, who cut The Lady from Shanghai from 155 to 86 minutes. Heylin (Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry; Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited; etc.) persuasively argues that Welles did indeed make masterpieces after Citizen Kane, but that audiences never got to see them because of continual intervention from Hollywood studio bosses who "had no idea what [Welles] was doing, and why he was taking so long to do it." 12 b&w photos. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Orson Welles' travails within the Hollywood studio system, which all but demolished his career as one of cinema's most brilliant directors, are the stuff of legend. Executives pulled the plug on many ambitious projects, and the problematic state of many that were realized, recut, and with scenes by studio hacks added, have contributed to the widely accepted view that Welles had a fear of completion. Heylin's meticulously researched defense of Welles confirms that the primary obstacles were external. He explicates the changes wrought on nearly all Welles' films in detail, from the mangled masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons to Welles' final American release, Touch of Evil, and he examines the budgetarily hindered works Welles made in European exile, too. He doesn't absolve Welles--he notes his habit of disappearing for days at critical junctures--but in light of the personal animosity he shows studio heads displaying toward Welles, it is hard to have anything but sympathy for the director. A fascinating encapsulation of one great example of the perdurable struggle between art and commerce. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556526202
• ISBN-13: 978-1556526206
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,099,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Revisionist history of a great director, February 22, 2005

By 

H. F. Gibbard "Noir Guy" (Dark City, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Cappella Books) (Hardcover)

Orson Welles is often cited as the classic example of an artist who peaked too early. His great work for the Mercury radio theater (including the infamous "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast) was followed by his 1941 film debut "Citizen Kane," consistently rated in polls as the greatest film of all time. After that, embarrassment...a long, slow decline until he became the pathetic figure in wine commercials before he died.

The usual explanation for this focusses on Welles' own character flaws. He was self-indulgent, this explanation says, irascible, unable to bring a film in on budget, constantly trying gimmicky scenarios that didn't have a chance of working or of garnering an audience. Welles supposedly left us a clue to his own personality in "Citizen Kane": the self-obsessed loser who finishes his days alone due to his own inability to relate to others.

Clinton Heylin thinks otherwise. He believes Welles could have accomplished a string of cinematic miracles, perhaps as great as "Kane," had the Hollywood studio system just given him the chance. Heylin has done his homework. He carefully reconstructs what happened to each of Welles' films within the studio system, beginning with "The Magnificent Ambersons" and continuing to "Touch of Evil." It is a fascinating look at what went wrong, and why.

The book has its faults. It is written with breathless prose at times, and you won't find much objectivity about Welles within its pages. Occasionally, the author seems so full of adulation for Welles that he refuses to see his faults. The book accepts Welles' own praise for his relatively untampered-with version of Kafka's "The Trial," for example, which I found (on a first viewing, at least) to be hilariously self-indulgent. (Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles turned out to be a very bad combination, in my opinion, though I know there are people who adore this film.)

Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to understanding Welles and his struggles with the studio system during the years 1942 through 1958.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Welles's Battles, Sympathetically Portrayed, June 13, 2005

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R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Cappella Books) (Hardcover)

When _Citizen Kane_ was released in 1941, it was hailed by critics as a marvel, a film that had accomplished by innovations in plot, theme, photography, and sound what no movie had done before. It was as thick with meaning and style as any play or novel; the enormous numbers of books and articles devoted to it since that time, and its continuous inclusion on any list of great films, confirm how important a work it is. Orson Welles, new to Hollywood, young, brash, and brilliant, had delivered a masterpiece in his very first try. He had made the system work in ways it never had before. He would bring further new and innovative works from Hollywood, it seemed certain. But Welles never again had the freedom that he was able to use on _Kane_, and only made five further movies within the Hollywood system. How did this happen? In _Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios_ (Chicago Review Press), Clinton Heylin has given a useful and informed summary of the troubled give-and-take that resulted in the studios taking all his films except _Kane_ away from Welles at the vital editing stage. "I believe that the only good work I can do is my own particular thing," Welles once said, looking back and using the idiom of the sixties. "I don't think I'm very good at doing their thing."

Heylin comments extensively on other commentators on the Welles productions, because he has set out to redress what he sees as a misinformed analysis that has laid blame on the inner demons of Welles himself for his shocking failure to follow up _Kane_. For instance, Charles Higham wrote twenty-five years ago that Welles blamed others for wrecking his work, but that the real culprit was Welles's own fear of completion. This was, according to Heylin, "a neat little box in which to wrap any enigmas the work itself threw up." It was simple, and attracted many other commentators, and even cost Welles an investor for one of his later projects. However, Heylin shows that Welles was eager to get his films done, finishing them against the odds and against the shortsightedness of studio heads. Welles was not undone by his own inner failings, but "by real people, with real motives." In the stories about each of the six films here, Heylin shows that after _Kane_, Welles directed some fascinating films whose flaws are not due to his own inability to complete them, but to his inability to complete them in his fashion. _The Magnificent Ambersons_, _The Stranger_, _The Lady from Shanghai_, _Macbeth_, and finally _Touch of Evil_ are all covered here in fine detail, and their individual problems laid out.

One of the sound ideas that Heylin stresses is that not all the complaints the studios had against Welles ought to have been based on their financial worries. It is true that Welles didn't care much about making money, nor did he take pains to get the money men on his side in his endeavors. Welles could, when he wanted, work fast and inexpensively; _Kane_, for instance, was not a particularly expensive movie, and its glorious effects are all the more wonderful for being, on the whole, simple and cheap. Welles could film many pages of script in a single take, using combinations of shots that could compress ideas in an economic model any studio would embrace. He was certainly difficult to work with, self-indulgent and not only flouting Hollywood rules but disappearing from the studios at just the time when he should have been there to support his own versions of his films. Heylin takes the stance, however, that Welles was over and over again a victim, and _Despite the System_ marshals an impressive collection of facts (shooting scripts, rewrites, memos, and of course, other authors' books of interpretation) to support such a view. Against the system, Welles had considerable triumphs, but the subject here is his defeats, and they are told with sympathy; his admirers will read this book with a heartbreaking sense of loss.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Readable, of course, but not all that was promised, September 12, 2005

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Iconophoric - See all my reviews

This review is from: Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Cappella Books) (Hardcover)

This book is heavy on argumentation. Whatever newly researched material it provides (and whether it provides much at all is debatable) is wound up in the fiber of a polemic the likes of which we haven't seen since the glory days of the Andrew Sarris-Pauline Kael Wars. I wish there had been a little less nonchalant jab-shooting at those with whom the writer doesn't see eye-to-eye, and a little more substance that was new.

That said, I will concede that this book is, naturally, highly readable. But bear in mind, it would be hard to imagine a book about any aspect of a life like Welles' being anything but readable. Having read Leaming's friendly biography and the Bogdanovich interview book (This is Orson Welles), however, I have to say everything here feels more than merely familiar, like something I (as a reader of books on this topic) have known for years now.

It begins to look as if a resifting through the same plate of sand is all we are going to get from further books about Welles, barring some sort of major uncovering of tapes, films or personal papers. And that doesn't appear likely at this point.