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ORSON WELLES/ 2011
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0205 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"Rosebud..."
- The dying word of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles)
Orson Welles -
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theater, and television after starting his career in radio drama. Welles is noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality. He was always an outsider to the studio system and directed only 13 full-length films in his career, although his first feature film, Citizen Kane, is widely considered a seminal movie classic. While he struggled for creative control in the face of studios, many of his films were heavily edited and others left unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur."[1]
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated,[2] they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
Citizen Kane (1941), his first film with RKO, in which he starred in the role of Charles Foster Kane, is often considered the greatest film ever made. Several of his other films, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Touch of Evil (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1965), and F for Fake (1974), are also widely considered to be masterpieces.[3][4][5]
In 2002, he was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics,[6][7] and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time.[8] Well known for his baritone voice,[9] Welles was also an extremely well regarded actor and was voted number 16 in AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list of the greatest American film actors of all time. He was also a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor and an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety shows in the war years.
Hollywood (1939–1948):
RKO Radio Pictures president George Schaefer eventually offered Welles what generally is considered the greatest contract ever offered to an untried director: complete artistic control. RKO signed Welles in a two-picture deal; including script, cast, crew, and most importantly, final cut, although Welles had a budget limit for his projects. With this contract in hand, Welles (and nearly the entire Mercury Theatre troupe) moved to Hollywood. He commuted weekly to New York to maintain his commitment to The Campbell Playhouse. (DEBATE: Film historians have cast doubt on the accuracy of this claim of complete control. Based on much later access to the said contract, UK film critic Alexander Walker averred, in a BBC radio documentary about Kane, that Welles did NOT have final cut of his films. Something that would seem to be confirmed by RKO's mashing of Welles' follow-up movie to Kane, "The Magnificent Ambersons"?).
Welles toyed with various ideas for his first project for RKO Radio Pictures, settling on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he worked on in great detail. He planned to film the action with a subjective camera (a technique later used in the Robert Montgomery film Lady in the Lake). When a budget was drawn up, RKO's enthusiasm cooled because it was greater than the previously agreed limit. RKO also declined to approve another Welles project, The Smiler With the Knife, based on the Cecil Day-Lewis novel, ostensibly because RKO executives lacked faith in Lucille Ball's ability to carry the film as the leading lady.
In a sign of things to come[citation needed], Welles left The Campbell Playhouse in 1940 due to creative differences with the sponsor. The show continued without him, produced by John Houseman. In perhaps another sign of things to come[citation needed], Welles's first experience on a Hollywood film was narrator for RKO's 1940 production of The Swiss Family Robinson.
Citizen Kane:
RKO, having rejected Welles's first two movie proposals, agreed on the third offer, Citizen Kane, for which Welles co-wrote, produced, directed, and performed the lead role.[25]
Welles found a suitable film project in an idea he conceived with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, (who was then writing radio plays for The Campbell Playhouse). Initially entitled The American, it eventually became Welles's first feature film (also his most famous and honored role), Citizen Kane (1941).
Mankiewicz based his original notion on an exposé of the life of William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew socially but came to hate, having once been great friends with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Mankiewicz had been banished from her company because of his perpetual drunkenness. Mankiewicz, a notorious gossip, exacted revenge with his unflattering depiction of Davies in Citizen Kane for which Welles bore most of the criticisms.[citation needed] Welles also had a connection with Davies through his first wife.[citation needed]
Kane's megalomania was modeled loosely on Robert McCormick, Howard Hughes, and Joseph Pulitzer as Welles wanted to create a broad, complex character, intending to show him in the same scenes from several points of view.[citation needed] The use of multiple narrative perspectives in Conrad's Heart of Darkness influenced the treatment.
Supplying Mankiewicz with 300 pages of notes, Welles urged him to write the first draft of a screenplay under John Houseman, who was posted to ensure Mankiewicz stayed sober. On Welles's instruction, Houseman wrote the opening narration as a pastiche of The March of Time newsreels. Orson Welles explained to Peter Bogdanovich about the writers working separately by saying, "I left him on his own finally, because we'd started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on storyline and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine."[25] Taking these drafts, Welles drastically condensed and rearranged them, then added scenes of his own. The industry accused Welles of underplaying Mankiewicz's contribution to the script, but Welles countered the attacks by saying, "At the end, naturally, I was the one making the picture, after all—who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank's and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own."[26]
Charles Foster Kane is based loosely on parts of Hearst's life. Nonetheless, autobiographical allusions to Welles were worked in, most noticeably in the treatment of Kane's childhood and particularly, regarding his guardianship. Welles then added features from other famous American lives to create a general and mysterious personality, rather than the narrow journalistic portrait intended by Mankiewicz, whose first drafts included scandalous claims about the death of the film director Thomas Ince.
Once the script was completed, Welles attracted some of Hollywood's best technicians, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, who walked into Welles's office and announced he wanted to work on the picture. Welles later described Toland as "the fastest cameraman who ever lived."[25] For the cast, Welles primarily used actors from his Mercury Theatre. He invited suggestions from everyone but only if they were directed through him. Filming Citizen Kane took ten weeks.[25]
[edit]Reaction
Mankiewicz handed a copy of the final shooting script to his friend, Charles Lederer, husband of Welles's ex-wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as the nephew of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper saw a small ad in a newspaper for a preview screening of Citizen Kane and went. Hopper, realizing immediately that the film was based on features of Hearst's life, reported this back to him and he threatened to give "Hollywood, Private Lives" if that was what it wanted. Thus began the struggle over the attempted suppression of Citizen Kane.
Hearst's media outlets boycotted the film. They exerted enormous pressure on the Hollywood film community by threatening to expose fifteen years of suppressed scandals and the fact that most of the studio bosses were Jewish. At one point, the heads of the major studios jointly offered RKO the cost of the film in exchange for the negative and all existing prints, fully intending to burn them. RKO declined and the film was given a limited release. Hearst intimidated theater chains by threatening to ban advertising for any of their other films in any of his papers if they showed Citizen Kane.
The film was well-received critically, with Bosley Crowther, film critic for the New York Times calling it "close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood".[27] By the time it reached the general public, though, the publicity had waned. It garnered nine Academy Award nominations (Orson nominated as a producer, director, writer, and actor), but won only for Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Although it was largely ignored at the Academy Awards, Citizen Kane now is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Andrew Sarris called it "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since The Birth of a Nation."[25]
The delay in its release and its uneven distribution contributed to its average result at the box office, making back its budget and marketing, but RKO lost any chance of a major profit. The fact that Citizen Kane ignored many Hollywood conventions also meant that the film confused and angered the 1940s cinema public. Exhibitor response was scathing; most theater owners complained bitterly about the adverse audience reaction and the many walkouts. Only a few saw fit to acknowledge Welles's artistic technique. RKO shelved the film and did not re-release it until 1956.
During the 1950s, the film came to be seen by young French film critics such as François Truffaut as exemplifying the "auteur theory", in which the director is the "author" of a film. Truffaut, Godard and others inspired by Welles's example made their own films, giving birth to the Nouvelle Vague. In the 1960s Citizen Kane became popular on college campuses as a film-study exercise and as an entertainment subject. Its frequent revivals on television, home video, and DVD have enhanced its "classic" status and ultimately it recouped its costs. The film still is considered by most film critics and historians to be one of the greatest motion pictures in cinema history.
References:
1. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. 2007. Pp. 6.
2. ^ a b Little green men, meowing nuns, and head-hunting panics. McFarland. Retrieved March 30, 2010.
3. ^ "Touch of Evil". rogerebert.suntimes.com. Retrieved December 30, 2009.
4. ^ "Chimes at Midnight :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies". Rogerebert.suntimes.com. June 4, 2006. Retrieved December 30, 2009.
5. ^ Eder, Bruce. "Orson Welles > Filmography – Allmovie". Allmovie. Allmovie.com. Accessed May 28, 2010.
6. ^ "Sight & Sound |Top Ten Poll 2002 – The Directors' Top Ten Directors". BFI. September 5, 2006. Retrieved December 30, 2009.
7. ^ "Sight & Sound |Top Ten Poll 2002 – The Critics' Top Ten Directors". BFI. September 5, 2006. Retrieved December 30, 2009.
8. ^ "TSPDT – The 1,000 Greatest Films: The Top 200 Directors". They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? Theyshootpictures.com. January 2010. Retrieved January 27, 2011.
9. ^ Christey, Jaime N. "Orson Welles: An Incomplete Education". Senses of Cinema. Sensesofcinema.com. Accessed May 3, 201
25. ^ a b c d e "Orson Welles", Authors and Artists for Young Adults 40 (2001)
26. ^ This is Orson Welles, Chapter 2 : Guaymas, Page 54, Da Capo Press, 1998 Edition)
27. ^ Movies.nytimes.com, New York Times, May 2, 19
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles
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