WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Not certain, but I believe "Me & Orson Welles" did not play at a single theatre in my state of Tennessee. Currently, the nearest showing is 150 miles away from me... in a different state. Regal Cinemas has its headquarters in my town, so this isn't really the sticks. What kind of distr...

The trouble with film writing is that sometimes flicks get loaded with more freight than they can decently carry. Many films are worth coffee table books and no more, IMO. I don't care for Paglia but her monograph on "The Birds" was well-written and exactly what one expects from her; it wa...

She was so marvelous in John Huston's Beat the Devil. That film and Mr. Arkadin, made around the same time, have a similar surface approach: lots of location work, eccentric characters, and unconventional structures. Huston and Welles, of course, were good friends and probably shared a good number o...

Welles was respectful of his elders in Hollywood, and they treated him well, he always said. But of course age has nothing to do with it. There are a lot of hateful people in the world, of all ages. A large number are in Hollywood and, it seems, New York. No film of mine will be submitted to Tribeca...

I can't wait until Keats's book comes out. Until then, I guess we'll have to put up with a lot of thunderous huffing from him. The book does sound intriguing. As for the Chinese theatre sequence, Callow says Welles wrote that he spent time in China with a Chinese theatre group during his adolescence...

I recommend picking up the Newsweek print copy (Dec. 7) for the story's good large photo of a youngish Welles (first page of story). Nice minor addition to a seasonal coffee table. Glenn, kudos as usual but your line "later to be famous, perhaps, like Grover's Mill, little green Martians and To...

Pretty good article in Newsweek Magazine (Dec. 7) about GOW, tied to "Me & Orson Welles." Reviewer Jeremy McCarter devotes 3 more-or-less thoughtful print pages (2 net pages) to our friend, with good photos, and says "charming" of Linklater's opus. It's part of a larger secti...

"Welles died in poverty" seems to be a meme freshly (?) injected into popular journalism by Thomson's latest fantasia - just in time for the release of "Me and Orson Welles." Nice one, David. Don't lose your review of "The Other Side of the Wind." Wasn't Welles pulling ...

Sounds like someone could use a few quaffs from a Ha-Ha Club seidel... Not everyone is a grimly scowling scholar, I hope. It is possible to be accurate and serious about movies and also to acknowledge that movies are, after all, e-n-t-e-r-t-a-i-n-m-e-n-t. Welles would be appalled by any discussion o...

Welles never made a nickel and died in the gutter friendless, talentless, and unloved. Hey, I know it's BS, but it's a swell yarn. With biographers like that, who needs enemies? Instead of deliberately falsifying a person's life on the basis of one's own emotions (an unjust procedure if ever there w...

"[THE STRANGER] was the only instantly successful movie Welles ever made 'within the system,' grossing over three million dollars, on a million-dollar budget." -- Clinton Heylin, _Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios_, p. 196.

Lance said "I tend to think the portrayal was insinuating: if it had been important enough to Welles, he would have had the lines learned immediately. However, the learning of the lines is not quite interesting enough for him.....but, once he sets for himself the challenge of coming up with his...

My problem is that Welles is portrayed there as a dolt. This Welles seems functionally retarded overall. The man we see here is much less intelligent than the man we know. For example, he can't learn a few simple lines. In real life, according to Bill Alland, Welles had trouble with lines in long, s...

Harvey,

"No one in this world, so far as I know, - and I have employed agents to help me - has ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." - H.L. Mencken

Welles's error was overestimating it. He thought too well of his fellow human beings.

Roger, thank you for your comment. It was informative as usual. I am much interested in obtaining a copy of your celebrated reconstruction of "Andersons." Have you any to hand? What is the price? My best thanks for any information you can give me by PM.