The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Free

produced and directed in Italy and North Africa in the early 1950s. Often he used earnings from his acting jobs to subsidize his films, or he found backers whose support was fleeting. This method resulted in one of his masterworks,
Chimes at Midnight
, but it delayed
Don Quixote
far beyond hope of finishing and had frustrating or absurdist consequences for several other films, including his color production of
The Merchant of Venice
, which was completed but never exhibited. His last major film,
The Other Side of the Wind
(discussed in chapter 10 ), occupied fifteen years of his life and remained incompletely edited when he died, largely because his French-based Iranian producer, Astrophore Films, kept him waiting interminably for “end money.” In 1977 Welles wrote an eleven-page letter to Medhi Bouscheri, the president of Astrophore, lamenting the fact that a few clips from
The Other Side of the Wind
had been shown for the AFI Life Award TV broadcast honoring Welles. The completed film was “‘eagerly looked forward to’” by the film community but had failed to appear. “‘And for me, personally,’” he wrote, “‘that failure has been mortal. As a director, my reputation by now appears to have beenblackened beyond reparation’” (quoted by James Pepper, introduction to
The Cradle Will Rock
, 8). After the Iranian revolution and Welles’s death,
The Other Side of the Wind
was subject to protracted legal negotiations between the Iranians, Oja Kodar, and Welles’s daughter Beatrice, who, although he had three children, claimed to be his sole heir. Then on October 29, 2014, very close to Halloween (often a lucky day for Welles), a front-page story in the
New York Times
announced that a Los Angeles production company, Royal Road Films, had cleared the legal hurdles and liberated the 1,083 feet of the film from a Paris warehouse. The producers, aided by Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in
The Other Side of the Wind
, intend to release the film in 2015, the centennial year of Welles’s birth.
    As I write the introduction to this third edition of
The Magic World of Orson Welles
, the centennial is approaching, scheduled to be celebrated by retrospectives, conferences, and memorial events at New York’s Film Forum, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the city of Woodstock, Illinois, where Welles attended school as a boy. Chuck Workman’s documentary
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
had its first theatrical run in late 2014 and will appear in many venues during the centennial. The revision and expansion of my book has been prompted by these events. If I were writing it entirely anew, it would no doubt turn out differently in some ways. (At the very least, the title would be different; the one it has, which sounds to me like an old Mantovani record album, was Oxford’s idea—I proposed
Bright Lucifer
, but Oxford vetoed anything that might require a subtitle.) I nevertheless agree substantially with what I first wrote. I’ve been content to make several corrections and additions to the main text and to compose this introduction, which offers new information, expands on some major themes, and comments on Welles’s career from a twenty-first-century perspective.
    In addition to its close stylistic analysis of the films, one aspect of my book that most pleases me is its discussion of politics, which had not been emphasized in earlier writings about Welles. His political attitudes were complex and, like most people’s, contradictory. As I’ve tried to show, he was a social progressive but also a critic of modernity—an artist who commanded the twentieth century’s new media but who was romantically nostalgic for the past. He was a champion of equality for blacks and Latinos, but where women were concerned he was sometimes retrograde. His mother was an outspoken leader of the suffragist movement,