August 5th
Martin Scorsese once said that Orson Welles was "responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than anyone else in the history of the cinema.” At 25, Welles, already a theatrical innovator, took Hollywood by storm and revolutionized filmmaking. He was an outsized personality, and a giant of the stage, radio and film, Broadcaster and BBC executive Huw Wheldon once said that being in a room with Welles “was like being in a room with a cathedral.”
Born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, George Orson Welles grew up in a home where he quickly learned to be interesting to the adults or he would be banished to his nursery. Declared a prodigy by his doctor at only eighteen months, Welles would be publicly recognized as a genius throughout his childhood. His parents separated when he was only four, and after his mother’s death in 1924, Welles went to live with his alcoholic, playboy father, Richard. The elder Welles traveled the world with his son, later settling in Peking (now Beijing), China. At the age of ten, Welles was sent to travel Europe alone to learn self-reliance. On one such trip, he found himself at a beer garden, surrounded by Nazis. “I was placed next to a small man with a very dim personality. He made no impression on me at the time, but later, when I saw his pictures, I realized that I had lunched with Adolf Hitler.”
In 1926, Welles received his only formal education when he was sent to The Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. There, he was compared to a young Mozart for his unusual ability to discuss subjects like the Bible and Shakespeare at eleven. With the approval of his headmaster, Welles was allowed to explore his obsession with the theater, directing and acting in many productions, which earned him local fame and determined the course of his life. After graduation, Welles pretended to use a pre-college trip to Ireland to paint but instead auditioned for Dublin’s famed Gate Theater, where the tall, sixteen-year-old lied about his age and acting experience. However, according to Gate Theater founder, and Welles’ future Othello (1951) co-star, Micheál MacLíammóir, it was “obvious to us that he’d had none at all.” By his own account, Welles was immediately cast in starring roles because the Gate needed actors.
Welles returned to the United States amid the Great Depression but was soon appearing on stage with Basil Rathbone and Katharine Cornell on a Shakespeare tour in 1933-1934. Back in New York, Welles’ deep voice made him an in-demand radio actor, most famously as the title character of The Shadow, with its famous opening, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” Welles was so busy that he had to hire an ambulance to rush him between radio stations in New York City traffic, and rarely had time to rehearse. Through John Houseman, he became involved with the theater arm of President Roosevelt’s Federal Works Project and produced several innovative plays, including the April 14, 1936, all-Black production of “MacBeth” at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem. On opening night, the audience went wild with enthusiasm, but the eminent Herald Tribune theater critic, Percy Hammond, did not. His review was so scathing that, according to actor Norman Lloyd, two voodoo companies pounded drums, created a voodoo doll of Hammond and chanted his name in revenge. Percy Hammond died nine days later, on April 25th, and “MacBeth” remained sold-out for ten weeks.
Kicked out of the federal program for attempting to stage Marc Blitzstein’s banned, left-wing musical, “The Cradle Will Rock”, Welles and Houseman formed The Mercury Theatre. The company was so successful that CBS hired Welles to produce a series of hour-long radio plays as The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The most famous of these was the October 30, 1938 production of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”. Those who tuned in to the show late believed that aliens had landed in New Jersey, and panicked. Welles ended the show by assuring listeners that it was nothing more than a Halloween prank, but by then, the police were in the control room, and the switchboard was flooded with angry calls from across the country. It was headline news the next morning, and Welles was forced to proclaim his innocence at a press conference. The truth came out years later when Welles admitted that he had done it deliberately because he was tired of audiences believing everything they heard on the radio. The War of the Worlds made Orson Welles a household name. Although threatened with several lawsuits, he managed to escape prosecution, later saying “I didn’t go to jail, I went to Hollywood.”
RKO Pictures was in financial trouble in 1939 and thought Orson Welles could be the Boy Wonder to pull them out of the red. In July of that year, RKO offered him a six-picture contract at $150,000 per film, a percentage of the gross and total artistic control, which was almost unprecedented in Hollywood. For his first release, Welles and writer Herman Mankiewicz collaborated on an original story of a multimillionaire newspaperman and his untalented opera-singing mistress. That film would become Citizen Kane (1941). Welles’ cinematographer was Gregg Toland, who asked to work with Welles because he had no preconceived notions about making movies. Toland told Popular Photography that Welles gave him the freedom to pursue “several ideas generally accepted as being radical in Hollywood circles.” Toland and Welles wanted the audience to “feel it was looking at reality, rather than merely at a movie.” Through the use of angles, deep focus, innovative lighting and realistic sets, they created what Kenneth Tynan called, “an adult vocabulary” of film. When newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst learned that Kane bore more than a passing resemblance to his own life, he threatened to publish exposés of the film industry, causing MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer and others to offer RKO $1 million to burn all prints of the film days before the release. When RKO refused, Hearst used his influence to keep Kane out of major theaters and forbade his editors to even mention it. Citizen Kane was critically acclaimed on its release in May 1941, with the notoriously tough New York Times critic Bosley Crowther calling it, “far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.” It won Mankiewicz and Welles the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated in eight other categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Welles) and Best Cinematography. Today, it seems incredible that Citizen Kane wasn’t a box office hit, but without the support of a major theater chain, it lost RKO money. Within fifteen years, Citizen Kane would rank among critics’ lists of the best films ever made. It was the creative highlight of Orson Welles’ career, and he was only 26 years old. For the rest of his life, Welles would struggle to make films without studio interference.
The financial failure of Citizen Kane led to RKO renegotiating Welles’ contract, which reduced his budget and removed his right to a final cut. This would be painfully obvious in his next film, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” With the United States now at war, Welles was sent by the government to Rio de Janeiro to make a propaganda film to help strengthen relations between the Americas. Once he was out of the country, and without his knowledge, RKO drastically recut Welles’ meticulously planned film and shot a “happy ending” that destroyed his vision. Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was another box office disappointment. Decades later, Welles’ partner, Oja Kodar, found him watching television late at night with tears streaming down his face. He was watching The Magnificent Ambersons.
Welles arrived back at RKO to find his next project, It’s All True, canceled, the footage reportedly tossed into Santa Monica Bay and the Mercury Theatre actors thrown off the lot. He would not direct again until The Stranger (1946), in which he also starred. It was the only film Orson Welles directed that turned a profit on its first release. Since he did not write the screenplay, he was just an actor and director for hire and would consider The Stranger his worst film. He was equally disappointed with The Lady from Shanghai (1948), starring his soon-to-be ex-wife, Rita Hayworth. Welles had offered to direct the film to repay a loan to Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn, who had bailed Welles out of financial difficulty. Hayworth was Columbia’s hottest property, so Cohn wanted the film to be a starring vehicle for her. After the mixed results of the first preview, Cohn forced Welles to cut the film from 155 minutes to 86 with an editor Welles despised. The Lady from Shanghai lost Columbia half a million dollars, and Welles later told director Peter Bogdanovich, “Whenever the name would be mentioned, people would change the subject to save me embarrassment.”
Thus began a new period in Welles’ life, in which he acted in other directors’ films, including Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), to finance his own and have artistic control. While he beat out Cary Grant and Noel Coward for the role of Harry Lime, he rejected an offer of twenty percent of the profit instead of cash, which would have made him wealthy, since The Third Man was the most financially successful film in which he appeared. Throughout the 1950s, Welles made films in Europe, like Othello, awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Confidential Report (aka Mr. Arkadin, 1954). He returned to Hollywood to direct and appear in Touch of Evil (1958) on Charlton Heston’s insistence, but, once again, there would be no big box office hits. Welles’ cinematographer, Gary Graver, said the big misconception about Welles was that he couldn’t get directing jobs. The truth was, Welles was frequently offered films, including Popeye (1980), but rarely anything that interested him enough to accept.
For the next three decades of his life, Welles continued to work steadily, whether acting in his Chimes at Midnight (1965), in which he played Falstaff, or directing The Immortal Story (1968) for French television. He narrated several films and documentaries and even appeared in commercials, most notably for Paul Masson Wines. Welles also worked on many unfinished projects, like The Other Side of the Wind, which was finished and released posthumously to critical acclaim in 2018. A great conversationalist, Welles was a frequent guest on late-night talk shows, where he performed magic tricks and held audiences spellbound with his stories. On October 10, 1985, a visibly frail Orson Welles appeared on The Merv Griffin Show. Afterward, he went home, sat down at his typewriter, and died sometime during the night of a heart attack. He was 70 years old. Of his professional struggles, The New York Times wrote in his obituary, “Welles blamed his critics and the financiers of Hollywood. Others blamed what they described as his erratic, egotistical, self-indulgent, and self-destructive temperament. But in the end, few denied his genius.”
