Freddie Gillette, chauffeur for Orson Welles in his final years, has died. He was 89. Gillette was a devoted patron of Los Angeles’ New Beverly Cinema, which announced his passing on Twitter today. “Sending our love to the friends and family of longtime New Beverly patron Freddie Gillette, who has passed away at the age […]
Mark Cousins documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles and five films from the late director will be screened later this month at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A DCP of Cousins’ examination Welles’ work as a visual artist runs daily on June 21-27. The Eyes of Orson Welles had its premiere as a Cannes […]
The Hollywood Hills home where Orson Welles once lived has undergone $1.7 million in renovations. The 1920s Neoclassical Revival home at 1717 North Stanley Ave. has changed hands several times since Welles’ died there on October 10, 1985. He had shared the home with his longtime companion and collaborator, Oja Kodar. Its current owners, Dan […]
Want a whiff of Orson? Carine Roitfeld, former editor of Vogue Paris, this week unveiled Carine Roitfeld Parfums, a collection of seven boutique scents, including one named after the late Orson Welles. “I have so many projects, but the one thing I really like and never did was perfume,” Roitfeld told The Hollywood Reporter, noting […]
By RAY KELLY Truly, I detest websites that post phony news stories on April 1. Juvenile stuff like, “They just found the lost Orson Welles cut of The Magnificent Ambersons in the storage room of a Rio nightclub! — Ha!! April Fools!!!” Ugh. Still, there is a sense of obligation to post something a little […]
Janus Films has revealed its poster and trailer for the U.S. release of Mark Cousins’ acclaimed documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles. The film, which begins its run Friday, March 15, at the IFC Center in New York City, explores Welles’ life and career through a trove of paintings and sketches he created throughout his […]
By RAY KELLY The fact that the word Wellesian was added to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary in 2018 was hardly surprising. Orson Welles ― who has been dead for 33 years ― had one of the best years of his career in 2018. This could have been the year his fans simply reflected on […]
Maverick, a new play set during filmmaker Orson Welles’ final months, will run February 6 through March 2 at the Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village. The play is based on the real-life happenings of Frank Beacham, a young video maker, who was given the creative opportunity to work with Welles in the months […]
New York’s The Quad will showcase Orson Welles work as an actor with a dozen movies he appeared in, but did not direct. Actor for Hire: The Other Side of Orson Welles runs between December 7 and 13. The retrospective samples four decades of Welles’ film appearances for other directors, from rewarding star-turns to scene-stealing […]
By RAY KELLY On a sunny Monday afternoon a week before Christmas, Peter Bogdanovich, Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall gathered in an editing suite at Tribeca West in Los Angeles to view the progress made on the completion of The Other Side of the Wind. As his colleagues arrived, Rymsza explained that editor Bob Murawski […]
By MIKE TEAL Composer Daron Hagen will direct the world-premiere of his new work, “Orson Rehearsed,” at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago on Saturday, September 15, and Sunday, September, 16. Mr. Hagen describes his work as “a 70-minute, multi-media, Joycean stream-of-consciousness dreamscape, comprised of the Zuzu’s petals-like memory shards of life, streaming through the mind […]
(Editor’s note:Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s once overlooked archive of Orson Welles scripts and personal correspondence in Turin has received a great deal of attention in recent months thanks to Massimiliano Studer, co-founder of Forma Cinema, and Alessandro Aniballi, co-founder of Quinlan.it. The Italian film scholars first publicized the contents of the collection earlier this year. Matthew Asprey Gear, […]
By RAY KELLY A previously unknown English-language novel credited to Orson Welles has been discovered in the archives of the National Museum of Cinema in Turin. The bound hardcover typescript of V.I.P. ― mistakenly cataloged at one point by the museum as a treatment for the movie The V.I.P.’s or V.I.P ― is an English version of Welles’ […]
“The Eyes of Orson Welles” will have its North American premiere at the Traverse City Film Festival on August 3.
By RAY KELLY Edinburgh’s independent arts venue Summerhall is working with filmmaker Mark Cousins (The Eyes of Orson Welles) and Orson Welles’ youngest daughter, Beatrice, on the first-ever major exhibition of late director’s artwork. The Drawings and Paintings of Orson Welles will be exhibited from August 2 through September 23 at Summerhall. The Scottish exhibit, curated by […]
An online trailer has dropped for the upcoming opera Orson Rehearsed. The work, conceived and written by Daron Hagen, and based on the life of Orson Welles will debut at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago on September 15-16, 2018. Hagen is a prolific composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music for the concert hall and stage. He […]
The upcoming The Other Side of the Wind, directed by Orson Welles and co-starring Peter Bogdanovich, is not first project pairing of the two filmmakers. Their relationship dates back to 1961 when Bogdanovich organized a Welles film retrospective, the first in the United States, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Welles, […]
Updated on June 9 with video of unveiling at end of post. __________________ A bronze sculpture of Orson Welles will be dedicated on Friday, June 8, at 6:30 p.m. in the late actor-director’s adopted hometown of Woodstock, Illinois. It will be placed near a 118-foot long mural, located along the Main Street Pedway adjacent to Classic Cinemas […]
The 2018 Cannes Film Festival ended with jurors giving a favorable nod to Mark Cousins’ documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles. Of the 17 documentaries submitted in competition, the jury gave the Cannes L’Œil d’or (Golden Eye) documentary award to Stefano Savona’s Samouni Road ― a French-Italian co-production that recounts a 2009 incident in which […]
To commemorate The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, the West Windsor Arts Council in New Jersey is gearing up to launch a new public arts project and install at least 10 Martian-themed sculptures around town over the next few years. It hopes to have the first sculpture in place in time for the broadcast’s 80th […]
