Orson Welles

Orson Welles: The Boy Who Peaked at Twenty-Five

On 21 August 1939, RKO Pictures handed a 24-year-old radio actor who had never directed a foot of film the right to write, produce, direct and star in two pictures — with final cut. It has been called the greatest contract ever offered a filmmaker, and it explicitly subordinated the studio's financial interest to one young man's judgement. Hollywood resented it at once. Welles used it to make *Citizen Kane*, and then spent forty-four years never being handed anything like it again.

Kenosha, and an Orphaned Prodigy

George Orson Welles was born on 6 May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Richard Head Welles, who invented a bicycle lamp and then drank himself out of a career, and Beatrice Ives Welles, a concert pianist who had studied under Leopold Godowsky. The parents separated in 1919. His mother died of hepatitis on 10 May 1924, four days after his ninth birthday. His father died on 28 December 1930, after Orson had refused to see him until he stopped drinking — a refusal that left a lifelong guilt. What remained was Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, which he entered on 15 September 1926, and a teacher named Roger Hill who handed the boy a theatre and stood back. Welles made his professional stage debut not in America but at Dublin's Gate Theatre on 13 October 1931, aged sixteen, in an adaptation of *Jud Süß*.

Harlem, and the Voodoo Macbeth

He toured with Katharine Cornell's company in 1933 and joined the Federal Theatre Project in 1935 under John Houseman. At twenty he directed the production that made his name: the so-called Voodoo *Macbeth*, which opened at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre on 14 April 1936 with an African-American cast, the play relocated to a mythical Haiti and the witches replaced by voodoo. It toured 4,000 miles and defied segregation law in Texas. In 1937 he and Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, opening on 11 November with an anti-fascist *Caesar* in modern dress. Norman Lloyd left the best short description of the method: "When you saw a Welles production, you saw the text had been affected, the staging was remarkable, the sets were unusual."

The Night the Martians Landed

On 30 October 1938, *The Mercury Theatre on the Air* broadcast H. G. Wells's *The War of the Worlds* as a sequence of news bulletins breaking into a dance band. How many listeners genuinely believed it is still argued. What is not arguable is the effect on Welles: at twenty-three he became internationally famous overnight — famous enough that Hitler is reported to have mentioned the broadcast disparagingly, and famous enough that RKO wrote him that contract ten months later.

Kane

*Citizen Kane* opened in 1941, and its authorship has been fought over ever since. Herman J. Mankiewicz built the outline from William Randolph Hearst's life and dictated most of the first draft while bedridden after a car accident, using Hearst's own words for dialogue. Welles supplied 300 pages of notes, revised Mankiewicz's draft, then drastically condensed and rearranged both versions and added scenes of his own; he was candid that he used what he wanted of Mank's. The look belongs substantially to cinematographer Gregg Toland, whose deep focus held foreground and background sharp at once, and to Welles's stated reason for wanting it: "in life you see everything in focus at the same time, so why not in the movies?" Bernard Herrmann's score was re-recorded six or seven times across two full weeks in the dubbing room. Welles was twenty-five, had studied John Ford's *Stagecoach* roughly forty times before shooting, and directed part of the picture from a wheelchair after chipping an ankle on a staircase.

Hearst's newspapers banned mention of it. MGM's Louis B. Mayer offered to buy and destroy the negative. The National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle named it the best picture of 1941; the Academy gave it nine nominations and exactly one award, a shared screenplay Oscar, with Best Picture going to Ford's *How Green Was My Valley*.

Ambersons, and the Long Punishment

He shot *The Magnificent Ambersons* from 28 October 1941 to 22 January 1942, having surrendered final cut in a contract renegotiation. A Pomona preview returned 75 percent negative cards. Editor Robert Wise cut the film from 131 minutes to 88 against Welles's opposition, scenes and the ending were reshot, and more than half of Herrmann's score was replaced by Roy Webb's — at which point Herrmann severed relations and threatened to sue. The film historian Robert L. Carringer called the result one of film history's great tragedies. Even truncated, it drew four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Welles's own summary of the aftermath was blunt: "So I was fired from RKO... I never recovered from that attack."

The European Decades

Everything after is a study in ingenuity under constraint. *The Stranger* (1946), delivered on schedule and under budget, was his only film to earn money on release. *The Lady from Shanghai* (1947) lost roughly an hour to Harry Cohn's re-editing and survives as a noir landmark for its hall-of-mirrors shootout. *Macbeth* (1948) was shot cheaply for Republic with lip-synced dialogue and stylized sets; Jean Cocteau admired its crude, irreverent power. *Othello* (1951) he financed himself across two years in Italy and Morocco, taking acting jobs whenever the money ran out, and it won the Grand Prix at Cannes. As Harry Lime in Carol Reed's *The Third Man* (1949) he made what has been called the most famous entrance in the movies. Then *Touch of Evil* (1958), *The Trial* (1962), *Chimes at Midnight* (1966), *F for Fake*. He collected an Academy Honorary Award in 1970, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1975, a BFI Fellowship in 1983, a Golden Lion, a Palme d'Or and three Grammys.

Why Orson Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on something specific and checkable: Welles could hold an entire production — text, staging, design, sound, performance, camera — in a single head at once, and integrate the parts so that none of them was decorative. That is compositional intelligence rather than taste, and he demonstrated it in three separate media before he turned twenty-six. *Kane*'s contribution was not one trick but a grammar: fractured chronology, overlapping dialogue, visible ceilings, deep focus deployed as an argument about how human attention actually works. The British Film Institute's 2002 poll of directors named him the greatest film director who ever lived, and *Sight and Sound*'s critics placed *Kane* first for half a century, from 1962 to 2012.

The counter-case is real, and Welles knew it better than anyone. He had exactly one uninterrupted production in his life and never got a second. Much of the authorship of *Kane* is shared with Mankiewicz and Toland, and he was not always generous about saying so. His career afterwards is a catalogue of abandoned films, productions begun without financing, and years of self-parody in commercials and chat shows to fund work he could not finish. Whether that reads as a genius crushed by an industry, or as a man whose ambition consistently outran his capacity to organize money and time, is the permanent question about him. The honest answer is that both are true, and that the second is what made the first possible.

Legacy

Welles died in Los Angeles on 10 October 1985, aged 70. The word *auteur* attached itself to him more firmly than to anyone else. His standing now rests less on the single completed masterpiece than on what that masterpiece proved: that a film could be authored, that every layer of it could answer to one intelligence. Everyone who has attempted it since has been working inside a form he defined at twenty-five.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay — 1942
• Palme d'Or — 1952
• Golden Lion — 1970
• Commander of the Legion of Honour — 1982
• Worked as film director, actor and screenwriter