My Lunches With Orson

Based on long-lost recordings between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom, My Lunches with Orson presents a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur. There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain. Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew—FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more—and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse—sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above— because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny. Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles—if such a creature ever existed.

This is the HARDBACK version. I found Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts fascinating, touching, and revealing of Orson and Roger. It certainly is the Orson I knew in all his complexity and brilliance. - PETER BOGDANOVICH, American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and author I read A Friendship in Three Acts with absolute delight. At last I have got what I have been looking for in vain till now: the sound of Welles's private voice, the warmth, easiness, modesty, fantasy of which so many have spoken but which none have been able to reproduce... - SIMON CALLOW, English actor, writer, director, and author The major and longest-lasting close friendship of Orson Welles's life was with one of his earliest role models-his teacher, advisor, and theatrical mentor at the Todd School who later became the school's headmaster, Roger Hill. Hill's grandson, Todd Tarbox, has given us invaluable and candidly intimate glimpses into many of its stages... - JONATHAN ROSENBAUM, American film critic and author

It is only in the editing studio that he possesses "absolute control." With scholarly erudition, Welles revels in the plays of Shakespeare and discusses their adaptation to stage and screen. He assesses rival directors and eminent actors, offers penetrating analyses of Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, and The Third Man, and declares that he never made a film that lacked an ethical point-of-view. Book jacket.

"In Hollywood myths, veteran film critic Joe Williams dissects the film industry's biggest myths and rumors, from the dawn of the silver screen to the twenty-first century. Myths discussed pertain to superstars, power couples, groundbreaking films, and the industry itself"--Provided by publisher.

During the filming of his celebrated novel THE ENGLISH PATIENT, Michael Ondaatje became increasingly fascinated as he watched the veteran editor Walter Murch at work. THE CONVERSATIONS, which grew out of discussions between the two men, is about the craft of filmmaking and deals with every aspect of film, from the first stage of script writing to the final stage of the sound mix. Walter Murch emerged during the 1960s at the centre of a renaissance of American filmmakers which included the directors Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Fred Zinneman. He worked on a whole raft of great films including the three GODFATHER films, JULIA, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING and many others. Articulate, intellectual, humorous and passionate about his craft and its devices, Murch brings his vast experience and penetrating insights to bear as he explains how films are made, how they work, how they go wrong and how they can be saved. His experience on APOCALYPSE NOW - both originally and more recently when the film was completely re-cut - and his work with Anthony Minghella on THE ENGLISH PATIENT provide illuminating highlights.

Journalist Josh Karp shines a spotlight on the making of The Other Side of the Wind—the final unfinished film from the auteur of Citizen Kane in Orson Welles’s Last Movie, the basis of Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville’s Netflix Original Documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. In the summer of 1970, legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe and decided it was time to make a comeback movie. Coincidentally, it was the story of a legendary self-destructive director who returns to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe. Welles swore it wasn’t autobiographical. The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day, and Welles planned to shoot it in eight weeks. It took six years during his lifetime—only to be finally completed more than thirty years after his death by The Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovich, who narrates the film, and released by Netflix. Orson Welles’s Last Movie is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of the bizarre, hilarious, and remarkable making of what has been called “the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen.” Funded by the shah of Iran’s brother-in-law, and based on a script that Welles rewrote every night for years, the film was a final attempt to one-up his own best work. It’s a production best encompassed by its star—the celebrated director of The Maltese Falcon, John Huston—who described the making of the film as “an adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing.”

Thirty-five directors reveal which overlooked or critically savaged films they believe deserve a larger audience while offering advice on how to watch each film.

Fleeing a Hollywood that spurned him, Orson Welles arrived in Italy in 1947 to begin his career anew. Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, his six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile's book depicts the artist's life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of Othello. Drawing on revelatory new material on the artist's personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italy also chronicles Italian cinema's transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the cold war.