In Elia Kazan’s1989 autobiography he reflects toward the end of the book on the pain of failure and missed opportunity in show-biz. Of course he manages to work Orson Welles into the story, bemoaning the lost promise blah blah blah.Then he bitchily references a tale of Welles keeping a whole
Here is episode five of the wonderful ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’ series, a group of 15 minute monologues he delivered for the BBC in 1955. Here he discusses his infamous ‘War Of The Worlds’ broadcast and even though you’ve probably heard the entire tale before–the accidentally induced mass-panic it caused ask
Here is episode four of the six-part 1955 BBC series ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’. In this fifteen minute monologue OW takes us deftly through a series of unrelated subjects staring with cue cards for actors (‘idiot boards’ as he calls them), Harry Houdini, John Barrymore, more Voodoo. etc. His ‘weave’ is
Here’s episode three of Orson Welles marvelous six-part monologue series ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’, which he made for the BBC in 1955. I posted the first entry in which he recalls his beginnings in the Irish theater on Monday. Yesterday I posted Orson discussing critics and Voodoo. Today the subject is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL3ZoUJ-Tek Yesterday I posted the first of six fifteen-minute TV monologues made by Orson Welles for the BBC in 1955. Today, in a fit of orderliness, I’m posting the second. The subjects at hand in this episode are critics and voodoo and I’ll leave it to OW to spin the
During most of the 1950s Orson Welles was a full-on expatriate, living in various different hotel rooms in various different European capitols, usually paid for by others who often believed they were investing in various Welles projects when in reality they were investing in various meals in various high-end restaurants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvxwf1jxdaMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb1KndrrXsY Above I’ve posted two views of the infamous Paul Masson wine commercials which helped support Orson Welles and his filmmaking career throughout the 1970s. The first consists of outtakes and the second shows the finished commercial. Unfortunately, as the outtakes show, Welles is too drunk to perform. The director
Yesterday I posted about Meyer Levin’s novel ‘Compulsion’, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case that rocked the world in 1924. The novel was turned into a play by Levin and then into a movie produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by Richard Fleisher. Now I’m impatiently waiting for
What do Clarence Darrow, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and James Ellroy have in common?The answer is ‘Compulsion’, the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin based on the infamous murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 killed a 14 year old boy named Bobby Franks simply for the
Apropos of yesterday’s post in which I linked the ill-fated American Movie Classics to the soon-to-be ill fated TCM, here’s another clip of AMC’s Bob Dorian. This time he’s introducing the Orson Welles version of ‘Treasure Island’ which is apparently paired with ‘Isle Of The Dead’. As usual, though, Orson