What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: unfinished film, award tribute, frame enlargement, Orson Welles, Other Wind, Citizen Kane (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
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From Booklist

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky (October 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813124107
• ISBN-13: 978-0813124100
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #769,338 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Director's Independent Years, November 5, 2006

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Everyone knows that Orson Welles made _Citizen Kane_, possibly the most audacious and most analyzed movie to come out of Hollywood. And then what happened? He had been called a "boy genius", having made the movie (co-written, directed, and starred) when he was but twenty-five years old, but within a decade the term was used with sarcasm, and Walter Kerr wrote that Welles had become "an international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been." Welles had been knocked down, and in the view of many, he never got up. Certainly, he never made anything like a _Kane_ again, but that isn't really fair: no one has. It is true that he never produced the sorts of films that were Hollywood-popular, but he did not at all disappear. Joseph McBride, a film historian who knew Welles, has answered the title question in his book _What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career_ (The University Press of Kentucky). The answer, quite simply, is that Welles worked and worked for decades in film, writing scripts, making movies, and (perhaps because few would bankroll him) doing things his own way. It's a sad story, in many ways. No one could doubt Welles's genius, and there are so many "if only" episodes in this book that it is often a depressing account. But Welles was not a tragic figure; he reflected years later that he might have made a mistake in staying in films (rather than, say, returning to the theater in which he had previously made his mark). But he would not have had it any other way: "I'm just in love with making movies," he said, and indeed, it was only death that stopped him.

McBride necessarily describes the problems that beset Welles immediately after _Kane_, when Welles could no longer get anything close to the full control of a film which he had practiced on his first movie. Still wanting to make movies, he left Hollywood to continue in Europe. McBride makes the case that contributing to Welles's decision for self-exile was his fear that he would be called to testify in the Communist witch-hunts. Welles loved shooting films and he especially loved editing them (as anyone who has seen _Kane_ can tell). There are plenty of pictures Welles worked on whose footage has been lost, but many others have the footage saved by fans or by creditors, and they frequently propose bringing out a finished version, hiring someone to pull the scenes together into a finished movie even so long after Welles's death in 1985. One producer mentioned she'd like to see a particular film screened not as an unfinished work by Welles, but as a film the way he might have finished it; but she says, "Finished by whom? Who can you substitute for Orson Welles?"

McBride does not go deeply into Welles's inability to finish things. Certainly it was attributable in a large part to Welles's way of skin-of-his-teeth filmmaking, whether or not it was some deep-set psychological disability. Welles could have written a magnificent autobiography, but when he got advances for such a work, he always returned them to the publishers. McBride writes, "Welles was deeply ambivalent about reminiscing, perhaps because he would have had to address issues he usually found too painful or delicate, such as his sexuality, his family life and some of his more traumatic experiences in Hollywood." Some of the stories of incompletion here, however, are extraordinary. His finished negative of _The Merchant of Venice_ was simply stolen from Welles's production office in Rome. The Iranians held funding for his meditation on filmmaking in the sixties, _The Other Side of the Wind_, and then the Shah was overthrown. "It's hard to imagine a movie career more littered with sensational catastrophes than mine," Welles admitted. He seldom admitted that he was the source of the less sensational catastrophes; a cameraman who worked with Welles late in his career said that Don Quixote was never completed because Welles "moved around too much, stuff got lost." For sensational and unsensational reasons, the losses recounted here are staggering. Nonetheless, McBride shows that they cannot be blamed, as some critics say, on Welles's being lazy or dilatory. The decades were filled with work for him, and he was pounding out a manuscript for a brand-new project on the night he died. As an independent filmmaker, Welles may have never fully lived up to his potential, but with a record of films that includes _Touch of Evil_ or the supremely weird _Lady from Shanghai_, his pattern of incompletion must be a minor sin. Much of McBride's personal account comes from his being an actor in _The Other Side of the Wind_ (of course, never finished) as were such droppable names as John Huston and Dennis Hopper. McBride's story won't re-make Welles's post-1950 career, but it isn't just a story of loss and lost opportunities; it is one of real movie history and at least some genuine artistic success.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Story behind a Misunderstood Talent., October 6, 2006

By	Tony Williams (Carbondale, Il United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book's title aptly describes its critical task in taking issue with the misleading images perpetuated by certain critics and journalists concerning the significance of Orson Welles as a major cinematic talent who developed, rather than declined, after making CITIZEN KANE. The author had the benfit several years of contact with the director before he died as well as the opportunity to appear before the camera in the still unreleased THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

McBride has been engaged in Welles's scholarship since his early 1970s monograph dealing with the director and is in a good position to promote the case that Welles was more of what we would describe as an independent film director rather than a Hollywood figure. This book covers similar territory to the first two volumes of Simon Callow's biographical project but has the advantage of extending beyond the final chapter of HELLO AMERICANS to document Welles work in Europe and his return to Hollywood up to his eventual death. It is also a much more balanced work than either of Callow's two volumes by avoiding tendencies towards cheap character assassination (mercifully limited in Callow's second volume but still present in certain instances) to document a person who was both a genius and a difficult person.

The key argument of this book is that the director was more sinned against than anything else. His Hollywood career was deliberately sabotaged by studion executives and he was under surveillance by the FBI for some 15 years. Despite that, Welles never gave in but directed several fascinating films and worked on others that still remain to be completed up to the very moment of his life. Welles was a fascinating character, a product of the New Deal Cultural Front, and a cinematic innovator in many ways. He left a legacy of completed American and European films as well as other works that challenged the boundaries of mainstream cinema. McBride delivers this argument in an eloquent manner and documents his sources meticulously.

This is one of the best biographies that has appeared so far on the subject. It aims to reveal the truth concerning Welles's real creative challenge to the establishment which several notorious treatments have attempted to deny. McBride writes in a very engaging manner and makes a strong case for the reassessment of the legacy of Orson Welles as one of America's major talents of the twentieth century. It is a really important work demanding wide readership and respect for its very valuable achievement.

The University of Kentucky Press also deserves congratulations for publishing this work along with the recent books on Cecil B. De Mille, Thomas Dixon and Peter Lorre which are all instrumental in rewriting film history and refuting so-called standard interpretations.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Its value thus is twofold: as a biography for Welles fans, and as a history of film industry operations and politics., December 10, 2006

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Mention the name Orson Welles and his most famous involvement - with the radio scare 'War of the Worlds' - immediately comes to mind; but for a deeper understanding of Welles' life and career you need What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career. His later projects were largely self-financed and erratically distributed, but film critic and biographer Joseph McBride has a personal familiarity with Welles from previous projects worked on with him and here shows how the Hollywood studio system forced Welles out of the industry. Its value thus is twofold: as a biography for Welles fans, and as a history of film industry operations and politics.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch