While much attention has been focused on “My Lunches With Orson,” Peter Biskind’s upcoming book based on taped conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Jaglom has more to say about his friend in a new book “The Best Film You’ve Never Seen.”
Jaglom is one of 35 film directors interviewed by Chicago Sun-Times editor Robert K. Elder about movies that have been lost or overlooked. He selected Welles’ 1973 film “F for Fake” for discussion with Elder.
He described “For for Fake” as a film “about a painter, Elmyr de Hory, who paints copies of the great masters and passes them off as authentic — and about a writer, Clifford Irving, who is doing a book about this painter. Later in life, Irving wrote a book he claimed was the autobiography of Howard Hughes, which in fact was a fake, and he ended up in jail because of it. Ultimately, it is about the creative act and the confession that all creative acts are fraudulent. I think it’s one of the greatest films never seen.”
“Orson showed it to me, in his house, on the video. I just fell in love with it; I thought it was sensational. Orson considered it his greatest accomplishment, and I said, ‘“Why?’ He said, ‘Because I found a way to beat the process. I made a film for no money.’ And he thought that everybody was going to acclaim it, and he’d be set for the rest of his life. It never even got distribution. He was more dejected by that than by any of the other things that happened in the other films. He really thought that he created a whole new form. It is the film as the ultimate confessional as he shows us all of these boxes within boxes of people being fakes. It is a confession of a filmmaker who essentially — like all filmmakers, storytellers, and artists — is a fake. It is the most autobiographical of Orson’s films, for me.”
Jaglom, who directed Welles in “A Safe Place” and “Someone to Love,” said “F for Fake” reinforced his belief that “film is a magic place where you can do anything, and you should not be bound by any rules.”
“The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love” was published in paperback by Chicago Review Press.
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