As Me and Orson Welles expands this week to theatres across America, one of the primary audiences who may be especially interested in seeing the film and talking about it will be teachers and their students. Therefore, here is a short excerpt from Orson Welles chapter taken from Everybody’s Shakespeare, the book he wrote in […]
Reading Simon Callow’s perceptive two books on King Henry IV, Part One and Part Two made me want to revisit Welles masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight. In doing so, I also looked at one of the best interviews Welles ever gave about a single movie, his long talk with Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio that was […]
While looking through the lavish and quite fabulous new Taschen book, THE INGMAR BERGMAN ARCHIVES, edited by Paul Duncan, I was astonished to see how much of Bergman’s career outside of his movies I was totally unaware of. I daresay that most people in America probably know as little about Bergman’s work on the Swedish […]
As a special Christmas treat, Wellesnet is presenting the beginning of the autobiography that Orson Welles abandoned after writing only the first two chapters, remarking that he found it extremely difficult to write about himself and much preferred to write about all the fascinating people he had known, beginning, as you will see, with his […]
Early in June, 1970 Orson Welles appeared as a guest on The David Frost Show and gave the comments below to Sir David about his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. Later that same month, Welles was a guest host on the Frost Show and talked to (among others) these famous luminaries: Duke ELLINGTON, Louis […]
One of the highlight’s of Gary Graver’s memoir, Making Movies with ORSON WELLES is the inside view it gives us on the making of The Other Side of the Wind. Perhaps the book may finally help to sweep aside the last remaining obstacles and get the Showtime deal to finish the movie back on track. […]
To celebrate Gary Graver’s wonderful new memoir, Making Movies with ORSON WELLES, I thought I’d offer a sample of the delights it has to offer. To start, here is the text for an incredibly detailed memo Welles wrote to Gary Graver which appears to have been written around 1972, when Welles was in the midst […]
Q: Where is home for you? ORSON WELLES: I have lots of homes …I suppose its Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere. I went to school there for four years, and if I think of home, it’s there. It may be a tedious cliché to say that school days are the happiest days of your life, […]
In retrospect, one of the amazing things about Orson Welles’ Almanac, was the historic times in which they were written. World War II was still being waged, and although by early 1945 things were looking much better for the Allies, it was still far from certain if the war would actually come to an end. […]
This column features a hilarious riposte to The New Yorker magazine’s then recent article describing Welles’s new political activities as both columnist and speaker on world affairs. According to Welles, The New Yorker sent along an attractive young Juliette Riche-like female reporter to draw Mr. Welles out about his serious new activities, who ended up […]
In this column, Welles writes from Washington D. C., where he has flown to assess the seemingly slim chance former Vice-President Henry Wallace has for becoming President Roosevelt’s new Secretary of Commerce, after 14 conservative Senators have voted against Wallace’s confirmation. _________________________ ORSON WELLES’ ALMANAC By Orson Welles – January 29, 1945 A number of […]
In this column, Welles reports on a French collaborationist who had an office in the Pentagon, prefiguring one of the ideas behind the next movie he would soon be directing, The Stranger. _________________________ ORSON WELLES’ ALMANAC By Orson Welles – January 26, 1945 This is St. Paula’s and St. Polycarp’s Day, and is auspicious for […]
Since several of Welles’ s upcoming Almanac columns feature detailed comments about the (at the time) departing progressive Vice-President, Henry A. Wallace, here is some brief background information about the highly charged political atmosphere in January of 1945: Henry Wallace was Roosevelt’s Vice-President, but had been dumped from the ticket at the party convention in […]
In his third column Welles really hits his stride, producing an absolute gem! Here he pontificates for the first time on two of the great actors and directors of the time: John Barrymore, who was a great friend to Welles when he first came to Hollywood, and C. B. DeMille, who was more of a […]
In Welles’s second column, he follows up his quote of President Woodrow Wilson’s call for peace, by reporting on the current progress of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. These proposals refer to the name of the mansion in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. where representatives from China, the Soviet Union, the United States and the […]
Thanks to the efforts of writer and researcher Peter Giordano, Wellesnet will be able to offer up an ongoing series of Orson Welles rare Almanac columns that appeared in the pages of The New York Post, beginning in January of 1945. As noted recently, Welles was a great friend of The New York Post’s regular […]
Thanks to Sir Bygber Brown for posting the letters Orson Welles wrote that are currently for sale at www.abebooks.com You can visit the site to see more details about buying the letters, but since they are selling for $2,000 and up, I don’t imagine many people can afford them! However, because they are all quite […]
Shortly before his 18th birthday, in the spring of 1933, Orson Welles booked second class passage on a tramp steamer, The Exermont bound for Morocco, where Welles would stay as the guest of the Arab Sheik, Thami el-Glaoui in the Atlas mountains surrounding Tangier. While onboard ship, Welles worked on his introduction for the books on Shakespeare he was […]
By Lawrence French Given the primal place both Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway hold as titans of American culture, it seems strange that so little has been written about their memorable meeting to work on Joris Ivens The Spanish Earth. Perhaps this is because so little seems to be known about what actually took place, […]
Given the ongoing controversy over how Touch of Evil should be exhibited – at 1.85 or 1.33 – here are Orson Welles own thoughts about filming in CinemaScope, VistaVision and other wide screen film processes, as published in the 1958 International Film Annual, No. 2 edited by William Whitebait. Strangely enough, the book was published […]
