Posted on the web site Wellesnet. I’ve added a few illustrations of my own to the original, conducted by Lawrence French. Having worked this year as a consultant on the completion of The Other Side of the Wind, I’m no longer sure that al...
Written in late 2006 and published in Discovering Orson Welles the following year. — J.R. The process-oriented methods that permitted at least four Welles features and a number of short works to be left unfinished are easier to understand than...
Published by Santa Teresa Press (in Santa Barbara) in 1994 (twenty years later, this book is still available on Amazon) and reprinted in Discovering Orson Welles in 2007, along with the following introductory comments: Critic Dave Kehr once said to...
From Cineaste 22, no. 3, 1996; reprinted with further comments in Discovering Orson Welles. — J.R. Biographies of Orson Welles reviewed in this article: Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow (New York: Viking, 1995). 640 pp...
From Cinematograph, vol. 4, 1991; reprinted in both Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism and Discovering Orson Welles. — J.R. I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’...
Published with the screenplay by Santa Teresa Press in the fall of 1987, and reprinted in my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles (along with the introductory paragraphs that follow, tweaked and abridged somewhat). The photograph of Welles’...
...in English in Persistence of Vision No,. 11, 1995. The version here, including my introduction, comes from Discovering Orson Welles. – J.R. This chapter -— the longest in my 2007 book Discovering Orson Welles, and in some ways my favor...
From Film Comment, November-December 1972 and Discovering Orson Welles (California, 2007) — the latter of which includes the following introduction. My apologies for some occasional glitches in the formatting, which I haven’t managed to...
This final chapter in my book Discovering Orson Welles is a lecture delivered in Valencia, Spain, on November 17, 2005, at a conference, “Don Quixote and the Cinema,” held at San Miguel de los Reyes, a convent built during the seventeenth century,...
...those implications have mainly eluded critics in both decades. As you well know, it wasn’t until Robert Stam published “Orson Welles, Brazil, and the Power of Blackness” in the seventh issue of Persistence of Vision (1989), with corroborating essays...
From my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles and the Chicago Reader (October 29, 1993). It seems a good time to revive this piece on the same day that I’m delivering the keynote lecture, on Welles, at the 14th annual conference that’...
This essay, a revised and updated version of my article “The Seven Arkadins,” was commissioned by the Australian DVD label Madman for their DVD of Orson Welles’ Confidential Report, released in 2010. — J.R. Mr. Arkadin “was...
From Sight and Sound, Summer 1986 and my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles (the source of the following notes in italics as well). I was living in Santa Barbara when Welles died on October 10, 1985, teaching what I believe was the first of...
From Sight and Sound, Summer 1986 and my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles. For the first half of this article, and a detailed account of how it came to be written, please go here. In my synopsis of The Big Brass Ring, I erroneously identify...
The following article was partially written as a way of conserving space while editing This Is Orson Welles (1991). A particular problem I had throughout that project was having more material that I wanted to use than I had room for. So I fig...