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

by Joseph McBride

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813152370
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Edition description:	updated edition
Pages:	394
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.12(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: "The high priest of the cinema"
2. "God, how they'll love me when I'm dead!"
3. "Committing masterpieces"
4. Orson Welles at large
5. "Twilight in the Smog"
6. "Your friendly neighborhood grocery store"
7. "No wine before its time"
8. Epilogue: "From before the beginning, young fella—and now, it's after the end"—Revelations from Welles's ongoing career
9. Acknowledgements
10. Sources
11. Index

Editorial 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

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.

Personal and passionate.

|Los Angeles Times

Indispensable. Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? is a brilliantly detailed and authoritative work of scholarship and

author of Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in th Steven Bach

McBride, a marvelous critic and biographer, has written a lively portrait of Welles-as-independent-artist.... Invaluable.

Bookforum

McBride is heartfelt in his advocacy, and the book continues to compel throughout.

Sight & Sound

McBride's combination of personal reflection and scholarly analysis makes the book rigorous and affectionate, academic and deeply moving, infuriating and celebratory.... A book against which all future writings on the subject will be measured.

American Cinematographer

Packed with information that can't be found elsewhere, Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? not only answers the question posed by his title; it also fruitfully redirects our sense of Welles's life and career. Best of all, it's sympathetic and serious without ever becoming a whitewash. McBride's protracted experience as an actor for Welles gives him many special insights, and what emerges is a scrupulous, balanced, well-researched, three-dimensional portrait.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

A definitive study, informed by his friendship and collaboration with the Hollywood legend and discussions with people who know Welles.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? is one of the best books you'll find on a filmmaker's career.With a story this good, you'll want to savor every page.

Michael J. Casey

McBride's intimate portrait revealsa man consumed by the love of filmmaking and besieged by a Hollywood more interested incelebrity Schadenfreude than art.

Tucson Sun

Its value is twofold: as a biography for Welles fans and as a history of film industry operations and politics.

California Bookwatch

McBride supplies a missing piece of the jigsaw.... 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.

November 3rd Club

Provocatively challenges conventional wisdom about Welles's supposed creative decline.

Turner Classic Movies

A must have for the Wellesian scholar (or worshipper), fans of old Hollywood, or those looking for insight into the mind of directors. It is a fascinating look at a larger than life filmmaking genius that was always ahead of his time and a highly recommended read.

Monsters and Critics

Scores of books have been written about Orson Welles since his death in 1985, some by colleagues of the great director, others by film scholars. Readers will find the best of both worlds in Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?

Springfield (MA) Republican

The virtue of McBride's book is its anecdote-illuminated account of Welles's later years. As a film historian

Washington Post Book World

McBride on Welles is many things: as biography, it presents the untold story of how McCarthyism warped Welles' career like so many others; as the history of a reputation it forms an expose of how the insidious and typically American distrust of the artist's mode of being obscured and caricatured the second and third acts of a consummate artist even as he went on making masterpieces; as monograph it documents the wild constellation of unfinished and even unstarted projects that never had their chances of being masterpieces; as eyewitness account of Welles' working methods it contains a covert memoir of apprenticeship, and a very tender-hearted one at that. As with the invaluable accounts of Dickens written during Dickens' 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

A detailed look at Welles's later years. McBride was in and out of Welles's orbit for the last fifteen years of the man's life, and he writes warmly about the director's later activities; but he is forthright and honest enough to say that on some crucial level the relationship never clicked.

New York Review of Books

"McBride's combination of personal reflection and scholarly analysis makes the book rigorous and affectionate, academic and deeply moving, infuriating and celebratory.... A book against which all future writings on the subject will be measured." — American Cinematographer

"McBride, a marvelous critic and biographer, has written a lively portrait of Welles-as-independent-artist.... Invaluable." — Bookforum

"Its value is twofold: as a biography for Welles fans and as a history of film industry operations and politics." — California Bookwatch

"McBride on Welles is many things: as biography, it presents the untold story of how McCarthyism warped Welles' career like so many others; as the history of a reputation it forms an expose of how the insidious and typically American distrust of the artist's mode of being obscured and caricatured the second and third acts of a consummate artist even as he went on making masterpieces; as monograph it documents the wild constellation of unfinished and even unstarted projects that never had their chances of being masterpieces; as eyewitness account of Welles' working methods it contains a covert memoir of apprenticeship, and a very tender-hearted one at that. As with the invaluable accounts of Dickens written during Dickens' 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

"Packed with information that can't be found elsewhere, Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? not only answers the question posed by his title; it also fruitfully redirects our sense of Welles's life and career. Best of all, it's sympathetic and serious without ever becoming a whitewash. McBride's protracted experience as an actor for Welles gives him many special insights, and what emerges is a scrupulous, balanced, well-researched, three-dimensional portrait." — Jonathan Rosenbaum

"Personal and passionate." — Los Angeles Times

"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

"A definitive study, informed by his friendship and collaboration with the Hollywood legend and discussions with people who know Welles." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"A must have for the Wellesian scholar (or worshipper), fans of old Hollywood, or those looking for insight into the mind of directors. It is a fascinating look at a larger than life filmmaking genius that was always ahead of his time and a highly recommended read." — Monsters and Critics

"A detailed look at Welles's later years. McBride was in and out of Welles's orbit for the last fifteen years of the man's life, and he writes warmly about the director's later activities; but he is forthright and honest enough to say that on some crucial level the relationship never clicked." — New York Review of Books

"McBride supplies a missing piece of the jigsaw.... 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." — November 3rd Club

"McBride is heartfelt in his advocacy, and the book continues to compel throughout." — Sight & Sound

"Scores of books have been written about Orson Welles since his death in 1985, some by colleagues of the great director, others by film scholars. Readers will find the best of both worlds in Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?" — Springfield (MA) Republican

"Indispensable. Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? is a brilliantly detailed and authoritative work of scholarship and" — Steven Bach, author of Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's

"McBride's intimate portrait revealsa man consumed by the love of filmmaking and besieged by a Hollywood more interested incelebrity Schadenfreude than art." — Tucson Sun

"Provocatively challenges conventional wisdom about Welles's supposed creative decline." — Turner Classic Movies

"The virtue of McBride's book is its anecdote-illuminated account of Welles's later years. As a film historian" — Washington Post Book World

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