Great article on Welles

[smartone]

On Gizmodo - a tech blog -- about Welles and his brief love affair with Betamax technology

http://gizmodo.com/5429390/orson-welles-and-his-brief-passionate-betacam-love-affair?skyline=true&s=x

[Alan Brody]

That is a great article, and sad too. Had he lived, Welles could have cleaned up with video technology.

Whenever I see a tiny new camcorder introduced, or see Apple upgrade a revolutionary application like iMovie, I think of Orson. Oh, how excited he'd be. The pure magic of it all! If he were alive today, he'd be making his movies without regard to raising huge amounts of money. That, for both Orson and his audience, would be an achievement that we'll never be able to enjoy.

As an iMac owner, I also find myself wondering what he would have thought of iMovie, or even Pinnacle or any of the other video software packages. Would he have sworn off film altogether?

[Nathan23]

He's a master of timing, which you have to be as a magician. Frankly, I think he was more in tune with that profession (or trickster) than what we would consider a film auteur - someone whose concern (among others) is cinematic art above all else. A film like Ambersons is nostalgic but devoid of the kind of resonance that appeals to a truly wide audience. I think you have to be a little in love with that period of American history and Victoriana, frankly, in order to truly enjoy the picture. It feels like a time capsule each time I sit down to view it. The film gets lost in the trappings of the period. I don't think Wells was able to transcend that. To be fair, much of the story involves the material loss of that world but I don't think there's any question that essentially it's a period melodrama.