With the centennial of Orson Welles’s birth in May, there is no shortage of books due on the late actor-director’s life and work.
Authors are delving into Welles’ early days, final years and some of his notable works on radio and film.
We expect to update and expand upon this list as we move closer to May 6, 2015. Authors are encouraged to please email us at contactwellesnet@gmail.com for inclusion in this list.
Here is what to expect (so far) in 2015:
Young Orson by Patrick McGilligan – HarperCollins will publish this look at Welles’ early days on May 12. McGilligan’s biographies include the acclaimed Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only; the Edgar-nominated Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life. He has also penned biographies of Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman, and James Cagney, along with the oral history Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist with Paul Buhle.
Orson Welles’s Last Movie by Josh Karp – An exhaustive look at the making, and lengthy attempts to release, The Other Side of the Wind. Karp, author of A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Straight Down the Middle: Shivas Irons, Bagger Vance, and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Golf Swing, has produced the definitive account of the Wind saga. The 352-page book will be released on April 21 by St. Martin’s Press.
Orson Welles Volume 3 by Simon Callow – The acclaimed biographical trilogy comes to a close in late 2015. The first two volumes, The Road to Xanadu and Hello Americans, impressed many for their attention to detail. Callow tells Wellesnet his own acting work has delayed plans to release Volume 3 in time for the 100th anniversary of Welles’ birth on May 6. He is currently directing an operatic version of A Christmas Carol.
Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News by A. Brad Schwartz – Due on May 5 from Macmillan’s Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the book relies on hundreds of letters sent directly to Welles after the broadcast. Schwartz draws upon them, and hundreds more sent to the FCC, to recapture the roiling emotions of a bygone era, and his findings challenge conventional wisdom.
O Magnificio Wells: Obras Inacabadas (The Magnificent Welles: Unfinished Works) by Adalberto Müller. (Editora Azougue. Rio de Janeiro. 165p. Portuguese). This book deals with some of most important unfinished projects or phantom films by Orson Welles, and the way they are connected to other films and to Welles’s biography. Based on a long term research on Welles’s archives in the US and film archives abroad, it reveals the backstage of projects like Too Much Johnson, Heart of Darkness, It’s All True, Don Quixote and Moby Dick. The book stresses the intermedial and intercultural aspects of Welles’s artistic personality. (The chapter on Don Quixote should be published separately in a American magazine in 2015).
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