“I think Orson Welles’s tragedy lies in the mix between monumental talent and filthy immaturity. Sure, there is genius in Citizen Kane, who could argue? But when Welles says, ‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography, pfff… Let’s say that this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have (cinematographer) Gregg Toland around him to prepare the next shot… Gregg Toland, damn it, an insane genius!   I say that without wanting to be disrespectful to Welles, I know what I owe him, like I know what I owe Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or Hal Ashby. But at 25, you don’t know what you don’t know. Period. Neither Welles, nor anyone. It doesn’t take anything away from him, and especially not his place in the pantheon of those who have influenced entire generations of filmmakers. But to claim that Orson Welles came out of nowhere to make Citizen Kane and that the rest of his filmography was ruined by the interventions of ill-intentioned people, it’s not serious, and it is underestimating the disastrous impact of his own delusional hubris.”  — David Fincher in Premiere (France)

By GABRIEL M. PALETZ

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. Fincher’s remarks make clear that there are two divisive legends about the older director: either Welles the genius of American film crushed by the movie industry, or Welles the genius of American film ruined by, in Fincher’s words, “his own delusional hubris.”

With the current release of Fincher’s film Mank that depicts Welles’s relationship with the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, I would like to address one mistaken fact among the younger director’s statements about Welles and his echo of the two myths, to show how different Orson Welles was from the way he is still perceived and portrayed.

In the interview, Fincher criticizes Welles for crass immaturity for his claim that: “‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography.’” This would be a sign of immaturity in a novice film director, but it is not what Orson Welles said. The gist of the quote Fincher attributes to Welles, Welles attributed to Citizen Kane’s cinematographer Gregg Toland. Here is what Welles said about Toland, his own inexperience as a film director on Kane and about learning cinematography in the book This is Orson Welles, the series of interviews Welles gave to Peter Bogdanovich, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

“It’s impossible to say how much I owe to Gregg. He was superb…the greatest gift any director—young or old—could ever, ever have…I was calling for things only a beginner would have been ignorant enough to think anybody could ever do, and there he was, doing them. His whole point was, ‘There’s no mystery to it.’ He said, ‘You can be a cameraman, too — in a couple of days I can teach you everything that matters.’ So we spent the next weekend together and he showed me the inside of that bag of tricks, and, like all good magic, the secrets are ridiculously simple. Well, that was Gregg for you — that was how big he was. Can you imagine somebody they now call a ‘director of photography’ coming right out and admitting you can bone up on the basic technical side of it all in a weekend? Like magic again: the secret of the trick is nothing; what counts is not the mechanics, but how you can make ‘em work.”

How different Welles’s words are from Fincher’s summary of what he says. Welles demystifies the mechanics of film-making while preserving the need for craft and invention, making the tools of cinematography accessible while paying tribute to the exceptional cinematographer Gregg Toland. With all Toland’s skill, evident in the films he shot with other renowned directors such as John Ford and William Wyler, he never exceeded either his accomplishments or recognition from a filmmaker, as on the one movie he made with Welles. The two shared a kindred prowess and daring on Citizen Kane, in one of the most fruitful collaborations of Classical Hollywood—that pushed the Classical Hollywood Style into new dimensions. This is the legacy of Kane that Fincher, in his own trend-setting pictures with cinematographers like Harris Savides, Jeff Cronenweth and now Erik Messerschmidt on Mank, can recognize.

To quote Fincher again: “…to claim that Orson Welles came out of nowhere to make Citizen Kane and that the rest of his filmography was ruined by the interventions of ill-intentioned people, it’s not serious, and it is underestimating the disastrous impact of his own delusional hubris.” Here Fincher recapitulates the two views of Welles’s career, as either a destroyed or self-destructive artist. There were certainly examples in Welles’s creative life of both studio executives who mangled his works—particularly The Magnificent Ambersons — and of Welles’s difficult temperament. His need for control and grandiloquent theatricality were notable, although hardly unknown among film directors. When Fincher also criticizes Welles for immaturity, it is worth remembering that the older director was a child prodigy, a star of both Broadway and radio at 20—and one of the earliest youthful celebrities across theater and the twentieth-century mass media.

But recall Welles in all his complexities, as the defender of American democracy, who played dictatorial characters like Charles Foster Kane that he condemned, and whose irreverence, self-deprecation and observation led him to laugh that “I don’t know any complete adults.” The Welles who could not have made Citizen Kane without his experience in theater and radio, who synthesized the techniques of these arts and brought them into American sound films and who accumulated all these experiences to do more adventurous and still little recognized works in broadcast television.

Thirty-five years after Orson Welles’s death, we know he did not come out of nowhere. He came out of the U.S. federal arts programs in the second half of the 1930s that transformed the mass media. In his youth, as a star of the New Deal programs, he gained exceptional opportunities in commercial theater, radio and then in Hollywood film-making. He took advantage of those opportunities to revolutionize American films. In his recent public remarks, David Fincher laments the lack of risk-taking in Hollywood. In this, he has more in common with Welles than with the other directors he mentions in his interview. References to Welles focus on the director’s personality. Yet the possibility to do challenging work in mainstream culture matters more from his career. Without Welles, no Mank. More importantly, without the boldness and flair of Citizen Kane, no Fight Club.

Genius, immaturity, destroyed, self-destructive — yet one word never associated with Orson Welles is — courage. That, with all his other qualities, is what he displayed in continuing to make works for the mass media after Kane, despite the changes to the entertainment industries and his peripatetic lifestyle. And he succeeded in postwar thrillers, adaptations of literary classics and his personal, zestful stamp on the essay film. He left us myths about himself from which we are only starting to break free. He also left us much more than Kane, in fragments, treatments, scripts, pilots and whole films we are only beginning to discover.

May Fincher’s film Mank restore to movie-watchers the wit and insight of writer Herman J. Mankiewicz. May it also preserve the complexities of his co-scenarist, in the great, enveloping ego and generous, inspiring brilliance of Orson Welles.

* * *

(Gabriel M. Paletz teaches film in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Southern California, where he earned the first PhD in cinema history with a minor in film production. He has written about Orson Welles for Cinémathèque Française and Moviemaker, among other publications. Paletz has just finished his book Genius of the Age: Orson Welles and the Cultural Moment.)

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