A friend and I have been mulling over cinematic portrayals of real-life historical figures, stars, and celebrities. We’re not particularly interested in historical or biographical accuracy but in which famous figures are most often depicted in the movies and by whom. Just as I was thinking about how to turn this idea into a blog post, along came Me and Orson Welles, which is director Richard Linklater’s new movie about the legendary boy genius before he came to Hollywood. Me and Orson Welles inspired me to think further about the use of real-life figures as characters in fictional films and prompted me to uncover other cinematic portraits of the great director.

Typically, Orson Welles the movie character represents some facet of artistic genius, and he is always rendered larger than life in keeping with Welles’s real-life public persona. The title for this post is a direct quote from Welles. In some films, he symbolizes artistic purity or integrity that is being compromised by corporate or commercial interests, because of the way the real-life Welles was treated in the Hollywood studio system. Unappreciated for his visual innovations, ousted from RKO after the box office failures of Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons, and artistically hemmed in by the studio system, Welles found his directorial career in a freefall after Kane. I think some directors draw parallels between the big man’s battles within the studio system and their own struggles to make serious films in a contemporary Hollywood that is run by corporate hacks who refer to movies as franchises and products and think remaking Yogi Bear as a feature-length movie is a good idea (no kidding). Not all films about Welles use him in this way; sometimes, he represents the dark side of genius in which an artist of his caliber has a huge ego to match the level of his talent. While a big ego is necessary to withstand the harsh criticisms of detractors, the loved ones around him are emotional casualties of his artistic temperament and self absorption. I imagine that those American filmmakers familiar with his career and legend must feel as though they stand in his shadow. If they aspire to his level of personal artistry, then they understand that the systems in commercial filmmaking work against that goal. Small wonder that Orson Welles—the most famous victim of the clash between personal artistry and industry practices—holds a fascination as a subject matter for today’s directors.

CHRISTIAN McKAY AS WELLES AND ZAC EFFRON AS RICHARD

The narrative in Me and Orson Welles unfolds from the perspective of young Richard, an ambitious high school senior who wheedles his way into a tiny but showy part in Welles’s famous 1937 Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar on Broadway. The story takes place the week before the play opens and climaxes on opening night. During that brief time, Richard hobnobs with the members of Welles’s Mercury Theater troupe, falls for the theater’s secretary, and learns about the lofty heights and dark depths of artistic genius. In the film, Welles’s persona is indeed larger than life—large enough for both an enormous talent and an enormous ego. Like Richard, we stand in awe of that talent in two key sequences in which we see Welles work his magic. The first is a radio program in which he acts in a melodrama alongside several veteran radio performers. He breezes in just seconds before air time and offers a bravura performance with that magnificent voice, stunning his costars by effortlessly adding to his dialogue on the spot. He improvises by throwing in a passage from the novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which does indeed enrich the lowly little radio program. The second sequence that showcases his talents is the recreation of several scenes from Julius Caesar at the end of the film. Welles had adapted, conceived, directed, and starred in this famous production, and the brief snippets that we see are  spellbinding. By this point in the film, viewers who know the Welles legend are calculating his age—at least I was.  If he was 25 when he shot Citizen Kane, then he was about 22 during this time frame. When Welles remarks about his production of Caesar, “How am I going to top this?,” we not only know the answer but we are further awestruck because his crowning achievements—The War of the Worlds and Kane—are yet to come.

McKAY OFFERS A PERFORMANCE AS WELLES, NOT MERELY AN IMPERSONATION

On the other side of the coin, we see Welles cheat on his pregnant wife, Virginia Nicholson, deny artisans their proper credit, and betray a 17-year-old kid. Structuring the narrative through the eyes of young Richard allows us to reflect on both sides of the character. However, Linklater’s sympathies for Welles are telegraphed through a couple of lines repeated in the dialogue: “We’re always waiting on Orson,” and “With Orson, you forgive a lot.” The characters, Linklater, and by extension, the film’s viewers, forgive his personal trespasses because he is so gifted. I know the film was based on a novel, and it is likely that the main character’s name was Richard in the novel, too, but I could not help but think that director Richard Linklater saw facets of himself in his two main characters—both the man with the artistic vision and the person who idolizes him.

English actor Christian McKay stars as Welles, and his voice, gestures, and expressions are perfect—he is simply Orson Welles reincarnated. However, McKay gives a performance, not an impersonation. [In my opinion, he was better than Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, and I was amazed that his name has not been in contention for any awards, proving once again that in today’s Hollywood, it’s the size of the marketing campaign that counts.] Ben Chaplin costars as George Coulouris, James Tupper is Joseph Cotten, Eddie Marsen plays John Houseman, and Leo Bill steals his scenes as Norman Lloyd.

THE REAL WELLES PERFORMING ON THE RADIO

I researched the actual production of Julius Caesar to see if that would help me get more out of the film. Welles reworked the play by setting it in Fascist Italy, with the characters wearing “black shirts” and knee-high boots a la Mussolini and his followers. It was a bold move for 1937 when much of American political opinion was influenced and infused with isolationist views, but Welles had no qualms about spouting off to the press about the “dictatorships” of Mussolini and Hitler. He turned the play into a criticism of what the world’s leaders were allowing to happen in Europe, just as he had turned a previous production of MacBeth into a political comment by updating it to 1930s Haiti.  Linklater’s recreation of Welles’s production of Julius Caesar captured the extreme high-contrast lighting and minimal set design that the play was lauded for. Too bad Me and Orson Welles was not shot on film, because the effects of low-key and high-contrast lighting are compromised by digital filmmaking, which renders classic lighting styles flat and murky. That’s a casualty of digital filmmaking, and I am always surprised that reviewers, bloggers, and others who write about movies do not point out these visual compromises as we race headlong into the digital age. The lighting is significant in this sequence of Me and Orson Welles not just for historical accuracy but also because it is reminiscent of the lighting in Citizen Kane.

To me, the specter of Citizen Kane and its relationship to Welles hangs all over this movie. In an early scene in Me and Orson Welles, a huge steak from a nearby restaurant is delivered to Welles at the theater while he is in the middle of the chaos of fixing the play at the 11^th hour. Welles sits down to eat while he barks, “I’m starving.” In an early scene in Citizen Kane, young Charles Foster Kane receives a huge supper of roast beef or steak at the newspaper while he is in the middle of the chaos of fixing the first edition of the Enquirer at the 11^th hour. He bellows loudly, “Joseph, I’m starving.” Apparently, the real-life Welles liked to have steaks and meals on fancy trays delivered from well-known restaurants to the theater, and he ate them in front of everyone while he continued to work. To me, the steak scene provides a key to Linklater’s depiction of Welles. Citizen Kane is the story of a powerful, charismatic man-in-charge who abuses that power, destroys the people around him, and then loses everything he had. That Welles fused his real-life quirks into the fictional role of Charles Foster Kane suggests he related to the character, which is revealing. That Linklater references this scene from Kane in his movie tells us that he, too, sees Orson Welles in the character of Kane. Just as Welles knew the tragic outcome of Kane’s story as he was writing and then acting the role, so did Linklater know the outcome of Welles’s life, in which he, too, lost most of what he had. It’s this kind of self-reflexivity that made Linklater’s film have an undercurrent of tragedy just below the glow of nostalgia on the surface.

McKAY AS WELLES

Me and Orson Welles is one of those films that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. It’s a coming-of-age story, complete with a broken heart, for all the Zac Effron fans (he plays Richard); it is an entertaining walk down memory lane for film buffs who remember Welles, Coulouris, Cotten, Houseman, Lloyd, and the other real-life figures in the story; and, it offers a pointed and poignant comment about a great director for those of us who embrace the Welles of legend. The storyline captures him at the height of his talent as he revels in the glory that it brings, and we viewers forgive his pettiness and faults because of that talent. But, some of us know the end game, in which an extremely talented artist was beaten down not only by the systems and practices of the film industry but perhaps by his own flaws.

The movie inspired me to recall other films that feature the character of Orson Welles, and I thought it timely to list them here. For the Welles fans out there, feel free to comment on your favorite.

D'ONOFRIO AS WELLES IN "ED WOOD"

1. Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994). Tim Burton’s depiction of the world’s best director in his biopic of the world’s worst director is my favorite cinematic interpretation of Orson Welles. Depressed and downhearted because the production of one his low-budget disasters is not going well, Ed Wood stumbles across his idol, Orson Welles, in a restaurant. Wood confesses his problems, and Welles recalls that he and the studios never saw eye to eye either, but he always stuck to his creative vision. The two share the kinship of artists who love the movies but are thwarted in their work by forces beyond their control. Rejuvenated, Wood returns to the set to finish one of his anti-masterpieces. Burton equates Wood and Welles (and himself) not in talent but in the love of the craft. Of course, this event never happened. But, Burton made this film in the early 1990s, and he was rightly predicting the industry’s increased reluctance to support directors like himself who used commercial film as a medium of personal expression. To Burton, Ed Wood—even with his reputation as the world’s worst filmmaker—is better for the industry than the suits who run the studios.

2. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Welles, and he was so inspired that he wrote, directed, and starred in a short titled Five Minutes, Mr. Welles.

MACFADYEN AS WELLES ON THE LEFT

3.  Cradle Will Rock (Tim Robbins, 1999). Robbins’ recreation of the state of the arts during the Depression included a subplot about the staging of Marc Blizstein’s famous leftist play by Orson Welles and partner John Houseman. Welles was played by Angus Macfadyen with talent and ego intact. Here, Orson Welles is one of the giants of the era, along with Diego Rivera, who were part of the fabric of a thriving arts scene accustomed to mixing politics and art. That conservative political factions worked to stop this mixing of art and politics is part of the point of the film; obviously, Robbins was drawing parallels between the mid-1930s and 1999 in that regard.

4. RKO 281 (Benjamin Ross, 1999). The title refers to the project number given to Citizen Kane at RKO. This is the story of Welles’s battle to get the film released despite the machinations of William Randolph Heart to stop it. I like the behind-the-scenes quality of the plot, and Liev Schreiber makes a believable Welles. The end scene in which Welles and Hearst accidentally meet in the elevator is priceless, but keep in mind that the story was the product of Welles’s penchant for mythologizing himself and most likely did not happen. As much as I like this film, I regret the emphasis it places on Hearst’s connection to the film. Personally, I always find it to be over-emphasized. Kane was not intended as a Hearst biopic—not even a thinly veiled one. To harp on the Hearst-Kane connection detracts from the reasons the film is so important. Those critics and biographers who know little about filmmaking techniques tend to focus on the Hearst story because they lack the understanding to explain the real significance of the film, which is the deep focus photography, the innovative use of sound, the function of the high-contrast lighting, the use of blocking to define character relationships, and the complexities of the narrative structure.

RKO 281 was made for cable television. Originally, it was intended to be a theatrical release, and at one time director Ridley Scott was attached to the project. My guess is that Scott would have made beautiful recreations of Kane’s high-contrast lighting and offered a stunning use of mise-en-scene. Ironically, none of the major studios thought the public would be interested in a film about a 60-year-old movie, and the project was sold to cable. Poor Orson Welles—screwed over by the studios even after his death.

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Related films include: The Night that Panicked America (1975), with Paul Shenar as Orson Welles in the aftermath of America’s most famous radio broadcast; Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess (1983), with Edward Edwards as Welles; Malice in Wonderland (1985), about gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons featuring Eric Purcell as the man Parsons’ loved to hate; and Fade to Black (2006), a thriller starring Danny Huston as Welles.