David Thomson writes about Welles in Movieline - The Most Successful Person in Hollywood

[Harvey Chartrand]

David Thomson has written yet another excellent article on Welles — 'The Most Successful Person in Hollywood', which appears in the November 2002 edition of Movieline. The teaser reads: "He died broke and obese, but Orson Welles left behind some of the greatest works in motion picture history." Welles is also profiled in Thomson's masterful The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
Simon Callow's second installment in the Welles saga sounds quite promising. Exploring the FBI angle and Welles' 'fellow-traveler' status in Hollywood is an aspect of the Great One's life that has not yet been fully explored.

[jaime marzol]

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the welles fbi files are online, and not very revealing, or interesting. the informer didn't have much to report, except that welles pissed his money away.

the sinatra file was much more interesting. sinatra had some bad, bad friends.

i think if you go to google and do a search on welles fbi files you will find it. it's about 2 or 3 pages long.

lately i've been reading a lot about the welles fbi thing, and i think people think it's a mountain of stuff, but its less that a mole hill.

there was a film mag article a few years back called the trial of orson welles, also about the fbi files, and also very uninteresting.

watch simon callow do on welles a smear job a la higham on errol flynn. we'll hear welles was a nazi and helped burn jews, or some crazy shit like that.

[Jeff Wilson]

The FBI files on Welles run more than 150 pages, and can be found online, at the APB News site. The annoying thing about reading them is that there is a good deal of material blacked out for various reasons (people still living, security issues, etc). Clearly Welles was hardly a dangerous radical, but the files offer some interesting items nonetheless, if only to help illuminate Welles' political leanings and personal life.

I'll be curious to see what Callow comes up with, as there is certainly a good deal to work with. I'll have to check out the Thomson article, as his writing provides something to talk about and argue over if nothing else.

[jaime marzol]

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they must have added more. when i viewed them at that same site, it was 2 or 3 pages. i'm going there now.

[jaime marzol]

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well, now we'll never know. apb online an article said, is out of cash, and you can't access the site. if any one finds the welles fbi file that is longer than 3 pages, please post site here.

this is the only page that comes in

http://www.apbnews.com/media/gfiles/hayworth/

and all the links are dead

[Jeff Wilson]

If you do a Google search on "welles" and "fbi", it'll be the first link that comes up. Instead of clicking on the direct link, hit the link for the "Cached" version of the site at the end of that particular listing, and you'll be able to view it that way. The main FBI file runs 195 pages, the New York bureau file around 30, I think?

[jaime marzol]

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ok, i found it

http://www.apbnews.com/media/gfiles/welles/pdf/apbnews_welles2.pdf

it's downloading now. hope i get the other 147 pages i didn't get last time

the page has a lot of dead links. can't wait till they fix them.
has me absolutely fascinated, trying to figure out what the fbi was investigating abbott and costello about?

they pissed away some tax dollars didn't they. running investigations on groucho marx, desi arnaz, etc. what paranoid jerks. you think they were using cocaine to stir up all that paranoia?

[jaime marzol]

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about 9 pdf files of fbi reports are downloading as i type this.

ok, i understand them investigating charlie chaplin, and welles, i can see how they were a danger to national security by slightly leaning to the left. and investigating the doors. morrison when not high could have caused some mahem of mass destruction (haaaaaaaa). but investigating the all-american band, beach boys??? my god, is nothing sacred? all they probably did was drink beer and smoke pot!! big deal.

they should also have to reveal how much was spent investigating these harmless people.

[jaime marzol]

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we messed up harvey's thread, so to get back on track:

i have thomson's a biographical dictionary of film. i was shocked when i realized one person wrote it. that it was not put together by an editor. pretty darn good book. did not at all care for his welles book, or some of the articles he wrote on welles.

[ if any one wants to have a real good laugh, go to the apb site and download the fbi file on The Doors. both welles files downloaded, 195 pages, and 60 pages. and almost impossible to read. no wonder thomson is coming to the states to look over the fbi files. he doesn't want to go blind reading the downloaded pdf file ]

[Jeff Wilson]

The only beef I have with Thomson's Biographical Dictionary is the very personal slant of it, which Thomson is obviously entitled to, but I think it limits the book's usefulness as a reference tool, which is what I expect a dictionary to be. Maybe it's just the title that annoys me. It's certainly more interesting to read than a typical dictionary. His Movieline piece was fine, pretty brief though, and not worth picking up the magazine for. I'm amazed a rag like that would run anything on Welles, to be honest.

[jaime marzol]

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that is my friend's exact complaint about the book. it's not a good book for a classic film novice, but if your opinions are set, thomson's book does point things out that are good food for thought.

there is a book called THE AMERICAN CINEMA, published in 1962, by andrew sarris, where he ranks the directors. talk about slanted! it is so slanted that it was scandelous in it's day. my taste runs more with sarris than it does with thomson. THE AMERICAN CINEMA is one of my favorite reference resources. it's out of print, can't buy it any more. my copy is so worn out i keep it in a zip lock bag so i don't lose any pages.

he categorizes the directors, writes a few pages on each one, list his films, then at the end of the book he lists the most significant films released each year. since every welles film made the list, i knew this was the book for me. and sarris' slanted opinions slant in the same direction as mine do, so it's a pleasure to read.

the thomson book is cool, lots of research went into writing it, the sarris book just kicks ass. i highly recomend it to experienced cineastes. well worth the trip to the local pubic library.

here is his list of the directors he considers to be the pantheon:
chaplin, flaherty, ford, griffith, hawks, hitch, keaton, lang, lubitsch, murnau, ophuls, renoir, sternberg, welles.

he's right on the money for me.

the rest of the directors are in these categories:
the far side of paradise
expressive esoterica
fringe benefits
less than meets the eye (love this category)
lightly likable
strained seriousness
oddities, one-shots, newcomers
subjects for further research
make way for the clowns (w.c fields, etc)
miscellany

and not many directors escaped. he must list about 130 of them. mark robson escaped. i remember seeing a robson film, and thinking, 'man, this guy is terrible.' i flipped through my handy director ranking, and robson had been left out. so is richard wilson.

[Jeff Wilson]

I also find the Thomson bio book less than useful because it ignores much of contemporary world cinema, which is something I try to keep up with, particularly Asian cinema. He either doesn't know much about it, doesn't care to, or both. In any event, there are other sources for such films, but in a book as widely respected as his is, it would be nice to pay a little more attention to the rest of the world, if only to get people to look at some of it. I'd rather read about Takashi Miike or Kiyoshi Kurosawa than Reese Witherspoon, who is a new addition.

[LA]

"I also find the Thomson bio book less than useful because it ignores much of contemporary world cinema, which is something I try to keep up with, particularly Asian cinema."

Thanks for that heads-up, Jeff. I've never read that book (not properly, anyway) but was thinking of getting a copy simply because the idea of a reference-book of mini-biographies of directors sounded like something I'd want to read, but I want to know about the world of cinema, not just a small part of it. I don't know nearly enough about the cinema of many countries, and I want to learn more, so for me the ideal reference book is one that contains a large amount of directors (or films) I have never heard of.
I once referred to a copy in a reference library, and read his entry on Welles. I was dissapointed with his view that every Welles films after Kane is merely an adjunct to it. And his Murnau entry included, if I remember rightly, a rather coarse aside regarding Murnau's death, which was rather obvious and didn't really need to be said. But I suppose every writer has his lapses, and I can't judge a book by a couple of pages. Still, thanks for that warning.

Jaime: I got Sarris's The American Cinema a couple of months ago. As a list of the important directors from (roughly) 1927 to 1968 (wasn't it published in 1968, not 1962, or am I reading a different edition?), it's very useful. As a critical work, I often find it annoying, simply because, outside of the Pantheon, Sarris seems to give every director at least a paragraph of extremely harsh criticism (some of them get off lightly but the roasting he gives Wyler (for example) is too harsh, in my opinion). There are one or two other minor niggles, mainly the attack on The Trial in his Welles article, and IMHO the Kubrick article misses the point with a completness I wouldn't have thought possible. It is useful as a guide to the work of several directors, it's just Sarris' attacks on certain non-Pantheon directors that gets me. But I suppose no-one ever agrees with anyone else's taste 100%.

[jaime marzol]

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ok, i was trying to be polite, but that is out the window. thomson's book sucks. i have it because it was a gift. it's been on my shelf for 8 years and i've opened it 3 times. it's a pretty large book. perhaps one day it will save my life when i use it to beat an attacker to death. other than that, i don't think it will get much use. maybe this christmas i'll wrap it up and send it to some one as a gift, let it eat up 8 years of space on their bookshelf.

yes, the sarris book, 1968. my mistake. i should have realized had it been 62 coppola and mike nichols would not have been in there.

sarris roasts everybody. but on a lot of his crit he is not so far off the mark. look at what he says about one of my favorite directors, huston. as much as i love huston, in a left handed way, i have to bite my lip and agree with him.

i guess as an answer to the scandalous nature of sarris' first book, his second such book is titled, YOU AIN'T HEARD NOTHIN YET. it's good, but it's not as much fun to read as the first one.

i discovered a lot of films through that first sarris book, and the back section of the book, the most significant films released each year, to me, is invaluable. .

another great film book is bogdanovich's WHO THE DEVIL MADE IT. the hawks, dwan, and hitch interviews are just great, and so is the rest of the book.

also sarris' INTERVIEWS WITH FILM DIRECTORS has a lot of great information. sarris is not the interviewer, he's the editor.

and since i'm now being honest instead of polite:

i know lots of you guys are into films from all over the world. all these books i mentioned completely ignore world cinema, which is probably why i don't find a single boring section in any of them. i like american, french, italian films, silent german films, and not many english films except powell and pressburger. eastern films, latin films, and black films by ethnic directors bore me to tears. maybe one day i'll find one that will open my eyes to others, but i doubt it. i don't like rap generation films, which is one of the reasons i canned HBO/CINEMAX, and got the ENCORE/STARZ package. they are almost as closed minded as me.

and i think spike lee sucks. i don't like films that use their message like a baseball bat to beat me over the head, which is the same beef i have with john steinbeck books. every time i open a steinbeck book, 8 pages in i feel his socialist message wrap around my neck and begin to choke me. why can't he just write his story and not shove his politics in my face?

enough said before i piss off a bunch of people.

having said that, i feel cleansed now.