http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/celebri ... ppearances
Welles had become a movie director because “We’re in the age of film. Film is at the heart of life.” Yet he’d lived well into the age of TV—an age in which people increasingly became famous for no discernible reason—and came to see his image reshaped by the medium in ways he could never have imagined. How many of those who saw him dozens of times on talk shows died without ever seeing a single complete Welles picture? The world applauded him for being a great director, but how many actually watched what he was directing? Businesspeople hired him to hawk merchandise; filmmakers knew he’d give their hackwork a touch of class. He was both great and famous, but by the end there was hardly any connection between these two adjectives.
For anyone who has seen those post-Kane movies, Welles’ denouement is as heartbreaking as the last moments of Kane: Welles, who at his death was working on a new film, was almost universally regarded as having spent decades coasting on past glories. One of his biographers, Joseph McBride, spells the irony out succinctly: while such colleagues as John Huston “didn’t balk at directing mediocre movies for hire in order to remain bankable, Welles was heroically unwilling to compromise as a director. But he was willing to do almost anything as an actor/personality…Unfortunately, since the American public rarely saw the films such whoring allowed him to direct, whoring was all most people thought he was doing.”