From the archives, a sampling of the favorable notices that greeted the release of Orson Welles’ first Hollywood film on May 1, 1941. The trade paper Variety wrote of its young director-star: “Welles has found the screen as effective for his unique showmanship as radio and the theatre.”
“Citizen Kane VR” is a virtual reality project launched at the University of Michigan — home to a massive collection of Orson Welles’ papers. A team of programmers and 3D artists have already re-created one of the Xanadu sets,
Researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have solved a “Citizen Kane” mystery that has perplexed film scholars just in time for the landmark film’s 80th anniversary on May 1.
The French publishing house Éditions Mimésis has released Après Welles: Imitations et influences (After Welles: Imitations and influences) — a collection of essays in French on the impact Orson Welles has had on cinema. It was edited and compiled by Jean-Philippe Trias of the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier.
Orson Welles fans who were left cold by “Mank” will find some relief in “Voodoo Macbeth,” a USC School of Cinematic Arts production that delves into an important moment in American theater and race relations.
When Matthew Asprey Gear, author of “At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City,” announced last fall that he would offer an online course for newbie and veteran Wellesians, we were intrigued. Apparently, we were not alone. The course was a success on both sides of the Atlantic and another is in the offing.
One of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers and one of its finest filmmakers enjoyed what the latter described as “a very strange relationship.”
An ambitious plan to reconstruct the 132-minute preview version of Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons” using animation to replace the cut scenes is underway.
Even a contemporary director with as fine and as comprehensive an understanding of film-making as David Fincher, is still subject to the same myths about Orson Welles.
Film historian Joseph McBride, who penned “Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael” in 1971, graciously offered to revisit the authorship of Citizen Kane for Wellesnet after screening David Fincher’s new Netflix movie Mank — the latest in a string of unflattering film portrayals of Orson Welles.
Documentarian Mark Cousins looked into The Eyes of Orson Welles, now psychoanalyst/psychotherapist Jack Schwartz has published a paper on what could be called “the mind of Orson Welles.”
Harlan Lebo, author of “Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey,” has unveiled his painstaking research into the hundreds of differences between the landmark movie’s final script and what ended up on the screen.
Veteran critic Todd McCarthy says Welles will “have to suffer a few more slings and arrows flung by those who will automatically buy into the view that he had nothing to do with the writing of ‘Citizen Kane’.”
Noted author Harlan Lebo has provided Orson Welles fans with something special as the 80th anniversary of “Citizen Kane” nears — a new transcript of the landmark film.
Matthew Asprey Gear, author of “At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City,” will offer a 12-week online course for serious fans of the late filmmaker.
Welles scholar Joseph McBride writes, “Kudos to all involved in ‘Hopper/Welles’ for giving us more bounty from the director’s seemingly endless closet of unfinished material. “
By RAY KELLY Should Hopper/Welles be considered an Orson Welles film? The documentary, which premiered this week at the Venice International Film Festival and will be streamed at the upcoming the New York Film Festival, is not in the final form Welles intended. Rather, it is a fragment of a project that never developed beyond […]
By RAY KELLY Noted author-actor and all-around Renaissance man Simon Callow is enduring the COVID-19 shutdown like the rest of us. But Wellesians will be delighted to know he is using this time to write the fourth and final installment in his Orson Welles biography series. Wellesnet has fielded more than a few queries in […]
Update 5/15/2020: In just three days, a group of volunteers from around the world transcribed more than 1,300 letters (almost 2.000 pages), mostly handwritten, sent to Orson Welles and his network CBS in the wake of the infamous 1938 War of Worlds radio broadcast. ______ By RAY KELLY The University of Michigan at Ann […]
By MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR (Marching Song: A Play by Orson Welles with Roger Hill; edited by Todd Tarbox. 178 pp. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.) Like a few other American giants — Mark Twain and Duke Ellington come to mind — Orson Welles left behind vast archives of unreleased work in varying states of completion. He’s […]
