What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?

A Portrait of an Independent Career

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by Joseph McBride

Type: Biographies
Subject: Director > Orson Welles
Keywords: Orson Welles, analysis
Publishing date: 2022
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 394 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8131-5237-0

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Book Presentation:
In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles's career after Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made, fell into a long decline. The author 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 widely misunderstood later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew the director and worked with him as an actor on The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's personal testament on filmmaking. To put Welles's later years into context, the author reexamines the filmmaker's entire life and career. This newly updated edition rounds out the story with a final chapter analyzing The Other Side of the Wind, finally completed in 2018, and his rediscovered 1938 film, Too Much Johnson. 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.

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles's life and work. McBride's revealing portrait changes the framework for how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.

About the Author:
Joseph McBride is the author of twenty-four books, including acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg, two other books on Welles, and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. A former reporter, reviewer, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood, McBride is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.

Press 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. -Martin Scorsese, director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Irishman

As with the invaluable accounts of Dickens written during Dickens's lifetime, McBride has charted a course through the smoke for all future scholarship (and, one prays, film restoration). Twenty-first-century Welles research begins here. -Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.

Despite McBride's fortune in having a closer involvement with Welles than most critics, this book is never reverential. Instead, it presents a balanced and complex picture of an extremely talented but difficult personality whose personal flaws are less important than what he attempted to achieve. -FilmInt.

See the publisher website: University Press of Kentucky

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