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Orson Welles

Anyone here like Orson Welles? I'm going through one of my periodic obsessions with the guy. Watched "The One Man Band" about him last night, "The Stranger" last week, and "F For Fake" a few days before that (Which I'd never seen before). Two weeks before that I watched a reeeeeeeeeeeeallly nice DVD print of "Citizen Kane."

In between I've been watching "Get Smart."

Definitely some cognitive dissonance as a result.
 
I honestly haven't seen many things with him but I do own and really enjoy Citizen Kane. I've listened to his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds and I can only imagine how much panic is supposedly caused to people believing that the earth was actually being invaded by aliens!
 
Most of his stuff was before my time... though I've heard of Citizen Kane, never watched it but I've heard of it, & Orson Welles as well. :p

I think he narrated History of the World: Part I which I've seen. I love Mel Brooks & I've seen most of his stuff.



Catch-22 is on Netflix & I was thinking about watching it.
 
Most of his stuff was before my time... though I've heard of Citizen Kane, never watched it but I've heard of it, & Orson Welles as well. :p

I think he narrated History of the World: Part I which I've seen. I love Mel Brooks & I've seen most of his stuff.



Catch-22 is on Netflix & I was thinking about watching it.

Catch 22 is werid. It's more like an hommage to the book than a movie based on the book. You kind of can't understand the film without reading the book. Which is good on the one hand as the book is AWESOME. On the other hand, upon watching the movie I kind of felt like the book must suck, so why read it?

Orson was continually trying to self-finance films. Hence he took a lot of acting gigs in things that were beneath him (The voice of Unicron in "Transformers: The Movie" was his final screen role) and doing commercials for crap wine and frozen peas. All of that (For 20 years) went into making movies that he was never able to finish.
 
Catch 22 is werid. It's more like an hommage to the book than a movie based on the book. You kind of can't understand the film without reading the book. Which is good on the one hand as the book is AWESOME. On the other hand, upon watching the movie I kind of felt like the book must suck, so why read it?

Well no wonder it's on Netlix... everything on there has like a 2 or 3 out of 5 stars rating. I still might watch it though, I'm always looking for something to watch on Instant and it bugs me that it's all crap.
 
I honestly haven't seen many things with him but I do own and really enjoy Citizen Kane. I've listened to his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds and I can only imagine how much panic is supposedly caused to people believing that the earth was actually being invaded by aliens!

"Kane" was a bomb in the 'States, where it was kind of burried by Hearst publsihing and the studio's fear of lawsuits. Overseas it did great. It won the London Film Academy's "Best movie ever made" award in 1950 and 1960. In 1960, Americans got to wondeirng what this movie was that kept winning, but which they'd never heard of. Thus it got a re-release in the 1960s, and was a belated success. ("Peanuts" strips from the period make a number of refferences to it. Snoopy says it's his favorite movie) I think it won 3 or 4 more times after that.

He was 27 when he made it, and was never able to recreate the success. He joked that "Most people start at the bottom and work their way gradually to the top. That seemed an awful lot of work to me and I'm lazy, so I thought it would be easier to start at the top and work my way down from there."

Interestingly, though, by the time he was 23 he was ALREADY a world-class actor, stage director, writer, producer, and radio director. Everyone wanted a piece of him. Not bad for a guy who was a homeless orphan at age 16!

In a career that spanned 44 years, though, he was only able to complete 12 films, the last in 1973. He's got dozens of incomplete ones, though, and they ended up incomplete for the stupidest reasons. "Beyond the winds" is missing THREE scenes, but it was partially financed by the Iranian royal family, so the negatives are the property of the Iranian government, for instance. It'll never be released.
 

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