Orson Welles

Today marks the birthday - in 1915 - of Orson Welles. He was a remarkable entertainment talent as an actor, writer, director, producer and more. Before he was thirty, he had terrified the nation with his realistic Halloween night presentation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1938) and awed film audiences with Citizen Kane (1941). Welles was already a rather contentious artist when he achieved almost instant fame. Both elements helped label him as a difficult, if not reckless, personality and he never endeared himself to the Hollywood in-crowd. The consequence of "all that" was a limited number of noteworthy films and a long list of unfinished projects, "may have beens." and the question,"Whatever happened to Orson Welles?"

Welles has now been missing from the world scene for over a generation. The film and stage industries will always owe him immensely for what he brought to them and for the treatment his genius received at the hands of the motion picture cartel.

Here is a sample of Welles's cinematic genius, the famous "crane shot" from the opening scene of his film, Touch of Evil (1958):

And here is a brief television obituary including an interview Welles made eight days before his death: