Articles on Orson

[Johnny Dale]

Couldn't find an exisating thread for this category,
so starting one here

2/25/04. Welles & Huston

[Harvey Chartrand]

It's sad how he let himself go.
Check out the many images of Orson Welles at http://pro.corbis.com/ and you'll see that his incredible weight gain happened around 1951 and 1952. You'll also notice how truly addicted to cigars Welles was. Even when he broke his foot on Broadway in '56 and had to be carted off in an ambulance, he had a cigar going.
Towards the end, when traveling, Welles would have to wait for planes to be emptied of passengers. Then he would struggle off the plane and shift his massive bulk onto a baggage hauling vehicle. This would ferry him to the airport terminal, where he would switch over to a wheelchair. Welles could walk, but carrying around those 400 pounds over several decades had effectively destroyed his ankles and ruined his back.

[Jeff Wilson]

To some extent, his weight gain likely came from his decreased workload once he left America; spending his time trying to charm moneymen and only occasionally working certainly wouldn't have helped his physique. Didn't he only become morbidly obese around the early 70s or so? Before, he was heavy, but not to the extent that it was crippling. I do get tired of reading articles that either consciously or not equate his weight gain with his fall from glory, meaning he got fat because he became a crap artist. If you compare the amount of work he did from 1936 to 1950 to after, it's no wonder he got fat, especially if he continuing eating and drinking at the same pace. It's his fault in some respects, but ingrained behavior like that is hard to overcome.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

Thanks for the pics, man. there are some i haven't seen before, some great ones. You know, some of my favourite pics of Welles are when he was The Beard, looking over the moon having just arrived as the King of Hollywood. Then he shoved it right in their faces with Kane - not a single safe commerical rule obeyed! Who wanted to be the King of Hollywood anyway!

Welles went from thin-to-fat his whole life - have you seen pictures while he was making Ambersons? He only got thin when he had to diet to look okay for a movie. He had to diet madly and wear corsets to look as good as he does in Kane and Jane Eyre, Macbeth, The Stranger, Othello - same goes (though he doesn't look that good) for Lady from Shanghai. Whenever Welles didn't have to be in a movie, he didn't have to diet, so he concentrated on being creative. If he was madly dieting through Ambersons, would we be left with the work of sustained beauty we have? Hard to say. At one point he just couldn't take the pounds off anymore. Besides, the only reason he was able to lose so much weight in the old days was because of diet pills, which must have been wrecking havoc on him Requiem for a Dream style. Once it was realised those pills were harmful, it was impossible to lose four hundred pounds in a few weeks!!

[maxrael]

nice to have a thread to put these in:

"Genius And Folly" - Conrad article

[maxrael]

i've spent a while looking for this article and now i've found it i thought i might bookmark it here...

Bogdanovich, who recently contributed an audio commentary track to the DVD release of Citizen Kane, disputes the idea that Welles spent his latter years stewing in bitterness over the way Hollywood had rejected him after his Kane glory days. Welles' feelings about the film business and his own legend were more complicated than that, Bogdanovich says. "It would come out in funny ways. Orson really wasn’t bitter, it wasn’t his thing. And he didn’t play the martyr." On the other hand, when it was announced that Welles was to receive a special Oscar at the 1970 Academy Awards and Bogdanovich asked him if he would attend the ceremony, the older director replied that he would not, despite being virtually right around the block in Beverly Hills at the time. "They’re not gonna get me that way," Welles said.

"And he didn't go," Bogdanovich recalls. "He called Huston and asked Huston to accept it for him. And I was sitting with Orson at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in the fucking bungalow, watching the Oscars. And Huston goes up, you know, half a mile away from us or whatever it was, and says, 'I'm accepting this. Orson's in Spain working and couldn't make it. And this is for you, Orson.' And Orson says, 'Thanks, John! Bring it over!'"

The director’s unreleased The Other Side of the Wind may finally see the light of day, says Peter Bogdanovich