An updated edition of Joseph McBride’s book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career has been announced by the University Press of Kentucky.
The 400-page paperback is set for publication on January 11, 2022.
Published as a hardcover in 2006, the book provided an essential look on the final years of Welles’ career and explores his development as an independent moviemaker.
Director Martin Scorsese noted at the time, “There has been so much written and said about Orson Welles over the years, and quite a bit of it has been fixated on the myth of his self-destruction at the expense of everything else: Welles has become the epitome of fallen genius, our fallen genius. Joseph McBride, who has a clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone, exposes that idea as the myth it is and always has been.”
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? was lauded by Sight & Sound, American Cinematographer, The Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times and New York Review of Books among others.
“What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career was a challenging book to write, since it started as a way of chronicling and analyzing his late career (1970-85) that few people knew about or understood at the time, and I soon realized that to do so insightfully, I would have to reevaluate his entire career,” McBride told Wellesnet. “What made him an independent filmmaker long before that term came into being, and how and why did he operate almost entirely independently in his artistically bold and adventurous later years? How did that outsider status help shape the work Welles did and affect the public perceptions of him, which were mostly wrong? It took five years to write this book, to do so succinctly while covering a vast amount of work without getting mired in side issues and keeping the principal theme in focus, while still keeping the book quirky and personal throughout.”
In updating What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? for its first-ever paperback edition, McBride has included significant developments of the past decade, chiefly the surprise discovery of the 1938 footage shot for the stage show Too Much Johnson and the completion of Welles’ last major work, The Other Side of the Wind.
“These two ‘new’ Welles films enable me to bookend my critical study/memoir about him by discussing how he worked as an experimental, avant-garde filmmaker in both his early and late careers. Since I was involved with Other Wind from the beginning (though I am tempted to quote Mr. Bernstein: ‘From before the
beginning, young fella, and now — it’s after the end’), it’s especially satisfying to bring the story of Other Wind to a happy conclusion in this new edition, which I hope will find many new readers in paperback.”
He added, “I am grateful to the University Press of Kentucky and to fellow Welles scholar Patrick McGilligan, who shepherded this book along there, for letting me try to encompass Welles’ richly complex career in this suitably unorthodox and investigative book.”
McBride was involved in The Other Side of the Wind from the first day of filming when he was cast in the role of Mr. Pister. After Welles’ death, he labored with cinematographer Gary Graver on an unsuccessful effort to complete the movie for Showtime and was a consultant on Netflix’s completion three years ago.
“Henry James’s biographer Leon Edel wrote that a biographer should be a ‘participant-observer,’ and I have tried to do that throughout my 50-plus years of writing on Welles, even though I have never written a biography of him but three critical studies instead,” McBride said. “Blending memoir with critical study in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? enables me to benefit from my good fortune in knowing him and working with him as an actor during his later career, which was so bounteous it keeps providing us with surprising new discoveries from his artistic cornucopia.”
In addition to his three books on Welles, McBride has penned studies on John Ford, Frank Capra and an upcoming look at Billy Wilder. He is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.
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