Originally written as the tenth chapter of my book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000), this is also reprinted in my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles. Because of the length of this essay, I’m posting it in two installments – J.R.
3. The taboo against financing one’s own work. I assume it’s deemed
acceptable for a low-budget experimental filmmaker to bankroll his or
her own work, but for a “commercial” director to do so is anathema
within the film industry, and Welles was never fully trusted or respected
by that industry for doing so from the mid-forties on. This pattern
started even before Othello, when he purchased the material he had
shot for It’s All True from RKO with the hopes of finishing the film
independently, a project he never succeeded in realizing. As an
overall principle, he did something similar in the thirties when he
acted in commercial radio in order to surreptitiously siphon money
into some of his otherwise government-financed theater productions
during the WPA period, a practice he discusses in This Is Orson
Welles. John Cassavetes, who also acted in commercial films in order
to pay for his own independent features, suffered similarly in terms of
overall commercial “credibility,” which helps to explain why he and
Originally written as the tenth chapter of my book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000), this is also reprinted in my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles. Because of the length of this essay, I’ll be posting it in two installments – J.R.
Nothing irritates one more with middlebrow morality than the perpetual needling of great artists for not having been greater.
— Cyril Connolly
During my almost thirty years as a professional film critic,
I’ve developed something of a sideline — not so much by
design as through a combination of passionate interest and
particular opportunities — devoted to researching the work
and career of Orson Welles. Though I wouldn’t necessarily
call him my favorite filmmaker, he remains the most
fascinating for me, both due to the sheer size of his talent, and
the ideological force of his work and his working methods.
These continue to pose an awesome challenge to what I’ve been
calling throughout this book the media-industrial complex.
In more than one respect, these two traits are reverse sides of
the same coin. A major part of Welles’s talent as a filmmaker
consisted of his refusal to repeat himself — a compulsion to
keep moving creatively that consistently worked against his
credentials as a “bankable” director, if only because banks rely
on known quantities rather than on experiments. Read more
