Orson Welles Was A Dick

I've reading a book about Orson Welles. It's an interview transcription documenting everything said at lunches by another director.

If you ever decide you want the inside scoop on celebrities and how they talk when they think no onw is watching or listening. It's this book. I prefer not to reveal the book here, since it seems some people who believe/want to be in the business may not want to be soured so quickly.

But as far as I've read, Orson Welles hated everyone. As a staunch liberal, it's weird to hear his disgust for Jews and the Irish. He became a bitter, angry insulting person who was once labeled a "boy genius" presumably because of "Citizen Kane." He lashes out at everyone he's ever dealt with in Hollywood. And, at the end of his life, was resigned to begging actors to be in his movies. It's Shakespearean in the sense that who you see up, may be the same people you see down. And either view (in Hollywood terms) sucks.

It's a strange feeling as I'm reading it, the common cynicism I feel for movie making. Not that I have ever earned the success he has, but I'm a little, de-mystified that someone who could've/should've/would've embraced the society of filmmaking, was so ostracized and marginalized as some eccentric fat nut. I'm certain he felt the constant outsider. And his views on people say....like how incompetent Jimmy Stewart was, or how much he thought actors were stupid. The better ones were the most dumb. He just seemed he hated the whole thing. All for one thing...making movies.

He LOVED the process, hated the product. He hated everything we (dopes) cherished. He considered Hitchcock movies dull and dumb and derivative (what we can agree on). HATED "Casablanca" as throwing fish to the seals. And it's hard to dispute that his take on the modern day movies have nothing to do with story, but spectacle. Another thought that I've also entertained.

It's not hard to see, he...as director, writer, producer and actor had insight to the machine that overtook Hollywood. Mostly (as I find this to be the most accurate), his disgust for lemmings. The cowardly system to which favors are only given when one gives back. Desperate to return to making movies, it seemed more that he was infected with the sense of grandeur that the rest of the town, if not world, should bend to. Of course, that wasn't meant to be. He was that massively obese man who died at his typewriter.