Kudos to Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter for his excellent review of two recent Orson Welles books: Todd Tarbox’s Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts and My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom, edited by Peter Biskind.
Hot the heels of Matthew Asprey Gear’s superb online piece for sensesofcinema.com, McCarthy gives equal weight to Biskind’s best-seller and Tarbox’s work, which has not gotten anywhere near the mass media attention it deserves.
“What is so important and – for those of us who strongly connected with the man and his work during his lifetime – moving about Orson Welles and Roger Hill is that, for the first time, I felt I was hearing the true, unadulterated voice of Orson Welles,”
McCarthy wrote. “Consummate actor that he was, he had many voices for many occasions and the Jaglom lunches seem to have provided good opportunities to vent and kvetch. But to his foster father Hill, Welles had nothing to prove, nothing to sell, nothing to gain or lose. Theirs was a relationship of lifelong love, amity and mutual respect, and coursing through their talks is a quality of friendship and generosity of spirit rare in this life.”
He added, “Appearing 30 years after the fact, the two books had simultaneous conception periods. By mutual consent, Hill began recording conversations with his old student in 1982, mostly by long-distance telephone and occasionally in person, as an aide to both men in writing their memoirs. Jaglom began taping his lunches with Welles the following year, purportedly at the older man’s request.”
McCarthy, who was an extra in The Other Side of the Wind and Filming Othello, hails Tarbox and Jaglom’s books as adding to our understanding of Welles.
“With these two deep-dish volumes and Peter Bogdanovich’s book-length career interview This Is Orson Welles, we do have 1,200 pages of some of the best conversation by a film artist on the planet.”
Read all of McCarthy’s article at The Hollywood Reporter.
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