You know, there's a specific category of celebrity
that I find absolutely fascinating. Oh, yeah.
It's the kind where if you ask three different
people who this person is, you get three completely
incompatible answers. Like they live three different
lives. Or just that their cultural footprint
is so, so weirdly shaped. We're talking about
George Orson Welles today. And I realized that
for my nephew, Welles is just the voice of a
robot in the old Transformers movie. Unicron.
A planet -eating robot, which, to be fair, he
voiced with absolute Shakespearean conviction.
Right. But then for my dad, he's the sell -no
-wine -before -it's -time guy from those old
TV commercials. A bit of a punchline. Yeah, a
punchline about a heavyset guy holding a glass
of cheap wine. But if you open a film textbook,
he is God. He is the creator of Citizen Kane,
the greatest film ever made. And that disconnect
is exactly the problem, isn't it? We tend to
see Wells as two different people. There's the
boy wonder genius who conquered the world at
25. And then there's the failed tragic showman
doing magic tricks on talk shows. But the mission
of this deep dive is to see if we can prove that
they are actually the same person. The showman
and the genius. They're inseparable. You don't
get Citizen Kane without the huckster who bluffed
his way onto the Irish stage. And you don't get
the tragedy of his later years without the uncompromising
artist who refused to play by Hollywood's rules.
So let's unpack this. Because the story usually
starts with, he made Citizen Kane, but... He
didn't just pop out of the womb holding a movie
camera. No, and to understand the man, you have
to look at the boy wonder years. He was born
in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And frankly, his
childhood sounds less like a biography and more
like a gothic novel. How so? Well, he was hailed
as a prodigy almost immediately, but the household
was intense. His mother, Beatrice, was a concert
pianist, very refined, very demanding. I read
she taught him Shakespeare before he could even
properly read. She did. She treated Orson less
like a child and more like a small intellectual
equal. But the real chaos came from his father,
Richard. I've seen him described as an inventor.
He was, yeah. He made a fortune inventing a type
of bicycle lamp. But he became an alcoholic,
stopped working, and spent the rest of his life
just drinking and traveling the world. So Orson
is toggling between this high culture pressure
from his mother and this dissipated, wealthy
drifter vibe from his father. It's a recipe for
either a genius or a complete disaster. Or both.
It was both. And tragedy hit early. His parents
separated. Then his mother dies when he's just
nine. His father, who's already an alcoholic,
just spirals. He dies when Orson's 15. So at
age 16, he's an orphan. An orphan with a small
inheritance and absolutely zero supervision.
Most 16 -year -olds with no supervision would
probably buy a car or get in trouble. Wells decides
to go to Ireland. Why Ireland? He said he wanted
to paint. He went on a sketching tour of the
countryside, but he ran out of money. And this
leads to the first great con of his career. The
bluff. The ultimate bluff. He walks into the
Gate Theatre in Dublin. Now picture this. He's
16, but he's big. He's got this booming voice
that makes him sound 40. He strides in and demands
to see the managers, Hilden Edwards and Michael
McLeomore. And he doesn't ask for an internship,
I take it. No. He tells them he is a star from
the Theatre Guild in New York. A big name. He
lies right to their faces and demands a lead
role. They bought it. Well, not really. Edwards
later said he didn't believe him for a second,
but he was so impressed by the sheer audacity,
the performance of being a star, that he hired
him anyway. That's incredible. And that is the
template for the rest of his life. He bluffs
his way in, and then he has the talent to back
it up. Speaking of bluffing, we should probably
clear up one myth right now. I feel like every
biography mentions he's related to Gideon Wells,
Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy. Right, that's
another one of Orson's embellishments. It's a
great story, fits the great man narrative perfectly,
but genealogical research shows no direct relation.
He never let the truth get in the way of a good
backstory. Never. So he conquers Dublin, comes
back to the U .S., and lands in the middle of
the Great Depression. This is where he hooks
up with the Federal Theater Project. This context
is crucial, right? The WPA. Absolutely. The government,
through the Works Progress Administration, was
paying artists to work. It was a relief program.
But Wells didn't treat it like charity. He treated
it like a laboratory. He's in his early 20s,
and he's given government money and resources
to put on massive shows. Which brings us to the
famous one. The Voodoo Macbeth. Now, I want to
dig into this because on paper, this sounds like
a disaster waiting to happen. It really does.
A 20 -year -old white director going into Harlem
in 1936 to direct an all -black cast in Shakespeare.
It sounds like a vanity project that should have
crashed and burned. But this is where you see
Wells' specific genius for context. He realized
that Macbeth isn't really about Scotland. It's
about... Witches, prophecy, and this raw supernatural
ambition. So he just swapped the geography. He
swapped the cosmology. He replaced the three
Scottish witches with Haitian voodoo priestesses.
And he didn't do this small scale. He hired 150
people. 150 people on stage. On stage. He had
an entire African drumming corps. It was a spectacle.
And remember, the federal theater project was
supposed to be about employment. These people
needed jobs. But Wells treated them like the
Royal Shakespeare Company. And the community
responded. They responded hugely. On opening
night, the police had to close off 7th Avenue
because 10 ,000 people were trying to get into
the Lafayette Theater. 10 ,000. For Shakespeare.
It was a blockbuster. It proved that you could
take high art and make it populist and dangerous.
It wasn't homework. It was an event. But not
everyone loved how dangerous he was becoming.
There's the story that Cradle will rock. This
feels like the moment he really became a rebel.
Oh, absolutely. The Cradle Will Rock was a musical
by Mark Blitzstein, and it was incredibly pro
-labor, practically communist, attacking the
steel industry. Not exactly subtle. Not at all.
This was 1937. The government got cold feet and
tried to shut it down. They sent federal guards
to padlock the theater on opening night to prevent
the actors from taking the stage. So most directors
would just cancel the show. Wells and his partner,
John Houseman, said absolutely not. They rented
another theater, the Venice, 20 blocks away.
They marched the audience, literally led a parade
of ticket holders through the streets of New
York. But the actors couldn't perform, right?
Union rules. The union said they could not appear
on stage at a non -sanctioned venue. It was a
whole thing with equity. Uh -huh. So Wells found
a loophole. Of course he did. The composer, Blitzstein,
sat on stage at a beat -up piano. The actors
bought tickets, sat in the audience, and when
their cues came, they stood up in their seats
and sang their parts out to the crowd. That is
incredibly punk rock. It was electric. It broke
the fourth wall in a way that had never been
done. It solidified Wells as not just a director,
but a leader, a general, and it led him to form
his own company with Houseman. The Mercury Theater.
The Mercury Theater, where he continued to poke
the bear. His first production was Julius Caesar.
Which is usually, you know, guys in togas. Right.
But Wells put them in modern fascist uniforms.
He used lighting that looked like the Nuremberg
rallies, these stark, brutal cathedrals of light,
as he called them. He made Shakespeare explicitly
about the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. He was
using the theater to comment on the news in real
time. And he was doing all of this while working
a second full time job in radio. More than full
time. He was working so hard he forgot how to
sleep. He would literally hire an ambulance to
shuttle him between the theater rehearsals and
the radio studios. An ambulance? Just so he could
weave through traffic with the sirens on to save
time. It's a special level of commitment. And
he wasn't just doing bit parts in radio. He was
a star. He was the shadow. Who knows what evil
lurks in the hearts of men. That was Wells. He
had this rich, authoritative voice that made
him a fortune. But he also innovated the medium.
He invented the first -person narrator in radio
drama during his adaptation of Les Miserables.
Before that, radio plays were just people talking
to each other. Wells realized you could have
a voice inside the listener's head telling the
story. Which brings us to the night that changed
everything. Halloween, 1938. The War of the Worlds.
The Panic Broadcast. Now, we know people panicked.
But I've always wondered, why? It's a story about
Martians. Why did people buy it? Because Wells
understood how people consumed media. He didn't
just read the book. He adapted it into a series
of fake news bulletins. The genius was in the
format. Right. If you were listening at the very
start, you heard the intro saying, this is a
play. But most people weren't listening then.
They were listening to a very popular ventriloquist
act on a rival channel. Edgar Bergen and Charlie
McCarthy. That's the one. And when that show
went to a musical break, people spun the dial.
It's called dial spinning. So they tune in five
minutes late. And what do they hear? They hear
a ballroom orchestra playing some bland dance
music, which is then suddenly interrupted by
a special news bulletin about strange explosions
on Mars. Then back to music. Then another interruption
about a meteor landing in New Jersey. It mimicked
the rhythm of actual breaking news. Exactly.
It sounds like the Hindenburg disaster coverage
from the year before. It felt raw and spontaneous.
And because the location, Grover's Mill, New
Jersey, was a real place, people freaked out.
Was the panic as big as the legend says? I heard
that's debated. Historians do debate that. The
newspapers at the time definitely blew it up
because they hated radio. Radio was stealing
their ad revenue, so they wanted to paint it
as dangerous and irresponsible. But regardless
of the actual numbers, the perception of the
panic made Wells famous internationally overnight.
I read that even Hilder mentioned it. He did.
He used it in a speech in Munich to mock the
decadence and corrupt condition of democracy,
basically saying Americans were so gullible they
believed a radio prank about Martians. But for
Wells. Being called a menace by newspapers and
mocked by Hitler was the best PR he could possibly
get. Hollywood came calling. RKO Pictures. And
they didn't just offer him a contract. They gave
him what's still known as the greatest contract
in Hollywood history. Made it so special. He
was 24 years old. He had never directed a single
film. And they gave him complete creative control
and, crucially, final cut. Explain what Final
Cut means for people who don't know. It means
the studio could not change a single frame of
his movie without his permission. The director,
not the studio, had the last word. Even the biggest
directors of the era, like John Ford or Frank
Capra, didn't have that. And I assume the rest
of Hollywood was thrilled for him. They hated
him. They absolutely despised him. They called
him the boy wonder with a sneer. The tray papers
were printed in editorials hoping you would fall
on his face. They were sharpening their knives.
before he even rolled a single foot of film.
But he didn't fall. He made Citizen Kane. He
made the masterpiece. Okay, let's get into Kane.
Because it's easy to say it's great, but I want
to understand why it looks and feels so different.
Even today, if you watch it, it feels sharper,
more modern than other 1940s movies. That sharpness
is literal. It's a technique he and his cinematographer
Greg Tolan perfected called deep focus or pan
focus. Explain that for us. So standard Hollywood
practice at the time was to tell the audience
where to look. If the hero is speaking, he's
in focus and the background is blurry. If someone
walks in the door behind him, the focus racks
or shifts to them. The director is basically.
grabbing your head and saying look here now look
over here and wills didn't want to do that he
hated it he called it lazy he argued the human
eye sees everything in focus so why shouldn't
the camera he and tolan figured out a way using
special lenses and massive amounts of light to
keep a wine glass six inches from the lens and
a man walking through a door 200 feet away both
perfectly crisp at the same time why does that
matter for the story though is it just a cool
trick No, it changes everything. It changes how
you engage with the scene. Think about the famous
scene where Kane's parents are signing the papers
to give them away to the banker. Right, the parents
are in the front of the room signing the contract
at the table. They're in the foreground, deciding
his fate. But in the deep background, through
the window, you can see the child, young Kane,
playing in the snow. He's perfectly in focus.
You, the viewer, can watch the parents destroying
his childhood, or you can watch the child living
it totally oblivious. You have to choose where
to look. It forces you to make the connection
between the foreground and the background. It
makes the viewer an active participant in creating
the meaning of the scene. It's revolutionary.
And he did the same thing with sound. Yes. Overlapping
dialogue. In most movies of the era, actors waited
politely for the other person to finish their
line. Wells said, in real life, people interrupt
each other. They talk over one another. So he
had his actors do that, creating this dense,
chaotic wall of sound that felt so much more
real. Not to mention the score. The first film
score by the great Bernard Herrmann, who later
did Psycho. Wells and Herrmann spent weeks in
the gubbing room, treating the sound mix with
the same precision as the visuals. But for all
the technical brilliance, the movie had a massive
problem. And his name was William Randolph Hearst.
The newspaper tycoon, the inspiration for the
character of Charles Foster Kane. Wells and his
screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, didn't just
borrow from Hearst's life, they skewered him.
They portrayed him as a lonely, hollow tyrant
dying in his castle, Xanadu. And Hearst, being
one of the most powerful media figures in the
world, Didn't take it lying down. He declared
war. He banned his newspapers from mentioning
the film, not just from reviewing it, from even
accepting advertising for it. He had his gossip
columnists dig up dirt on everyone involved.
And other studios got involved. Yes. Louis B.
Mayer, the head of MGM and the most powerful
man in Hollywood, actually offered to pay RKO
the full cost of the film, place a healthy profit
if they would just burn the negative and never
release it. Burn the negative. That is a visceral
reaction. It shows how threatened the establishment
was by this. kid from New York. And the tragedy
is the boycott worked because Hearst controlled
so many theater chains. Citizen Kane struggled
to get distribution. It wasn't a box office hit.
It lost money. So the boy wonder had made a masterpiece,
but he hadn't made a profit. And in Hollywood,
that's the only sin that matters. And this sets
up the fall because if Kane was the peak, what
follows is. Well, it's just painful. The Magnificent
Ambersons. This is the great crime scene of cinema
history. It's the holy grail of lost films. Wells
adapted this beautiful nostalgic novel by Booth
Tarkington about the decline of a wealthy family
as the automobile age begins. He shot it. He
edited a rough cut. And then he made a fatal
mistake. He left town. He went to Brazil. The
U .S. government asked him to be a goodwill ambassador
to Latin America. It was the middle of WWII.
They were worried about Nazi influence in Brazil
and Argentina. So Wells flies to Rio to make
a documentary called It's All True. He leaves
RKO alone with his footage of Ambersons. And
RKO is under new management by this point, right?
People who didn't like his genius contract. Exactly.
The people who hired him are gone. The new guys
hate him. They hold a preview screening in Pomona,
a suburb of L .A. The audience reaction is bad.
Why? People are laughing at the tragic parts.
They aren't used to Wells' dark, ironic style.
The studio panics, they take the film, and they
chop out nearly 50 minutes. 50 minutes? That's
almost half the movie. They butchered it. They
gutted the entire heart of the film. And then,
because the original ending was too depressing,
it was about the inexorable decay of the Ambersons'
world, they hired a commercial director to shoot
a new, upbeat, happy ending. Without Wells' knowledge
or consent. He was in Rio getting these frantic
telegrams about it, totally powerless. And here's
the part that hurts the most. The cut footage.
The 50 minutes of missing Wells material. What
happened to it? They melted it down for the nitrate
content to support the war effort. It's gone.
It doesn't exist. We will never see the real
Ambersons. That's devastating. Wells said, they
destroyed Ambersons and the Ambersons destroyed
me. It was the turning point. And meanwhile in
Brazil, things are going much better with his
incurred. It's all true. He was filming incredible
stuff. He captured the Rio Carnival in glorious
Technicolor and a heartbreaking story about poor
fishermen called John Goderos. But back in Hollywood,
the new RKO management used his absence to paint
him as irresponsible. They created a narrative.
A false one. They told the press he was just
partying in Rio, throwing money away, filming
without a script. It was a smear campaign. Was
any of it true? Not really. He was working under
brutal conditions, often with a non -professional
crew. But the narrative stuck. RKO fired him.
They evicted his production company, Mercury,
from the studio lot. They even changed the corporate
motto on the studio water tower to showmanship
in place of genius. Wow. That is a direct shot.
It was a public execution of his career. In a
matter of months, he went from the guy with the
keys to the kingdom to an unemployable pariah.
So what do you do when Hollywood locks the gate?
You start hustling. And this is the era of Wells
I find the most interesting. The independent
years. He essentially invents the model of the
modern independent filmmaker. He realized nobody
was going to give him a budget again, not a real
one. So he had to pay for his movies himself.
This is why he started acting in so many other
people's movies, even bad ones. Exactly. If you
see Wells in a random movie in the 50s or 60s,
he's not there because he likes the script. He's
there to get a check to buy film stock for his
own projects. He's fundraising. He did try to
play nice with the studios one or two more times,
though. There was The Stranger. Right. In 1946,
he wanted to prove he would be a good boy, a
director for hire. He directed The Stranger,
a thriller about a Nazi war criminal hiding out
in Connecticut. He brought it in ahead of schedule
and under budget. It was actually his only real
box office hit on release. And that film has
a dark footnote, doesn't it? It does. It was
the first commercial film to use actual footage
from the concentration camps. Wells had seen
the raw footage at the UN conference and insisted
on including it. And then the lady from Shanghai,
this is the one with Rita Hayworth. Who he was
married to at the time that they were splitting
up. A very messy situation. He made this film
basically to pay back a debt. to the tyrannical
head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn. And he
antagonized him at every turn. Oh, he delighted
in it. He took Rita Hayworth, the most famous
redhead in the world, the love goddess, and he
cut her famous hair off and dyed it platinum
blonde without the studio's permission. Talk
about biting the hand that feeds you. It was
symbolic. He was deconstructing the star system,
taking their most valuable asset and changing
her. The climax of that film, the shootout in
the Hall of Mirrors, is iconic. It's pure...
Visual metaphor. Everything is an illusion. Everything
is fractured. Just like his career at that point.
But the studios didn't get it. They recut that
one too. So he goes to Europe. And we get the
saga of Othello. This production is legendary
for the chaos. It took three years to film. Not
because it was a huge epic, but because he kept
running out of money. So he would just... He'd
shoot a scene in Morocco, run out of cash, halt
production, go act in a movie like The Third
Man. Where he wrote the famous cuckoo clock speech,
by the way. He did. He wrote it himself. He'd
get paid and then call the cast back two months
later to shoot the reverse angle of a conversation
in Rome. That sounds like a nightmare for continuity.
It was. There are scenes where a character walks
through a door in Italy and enters a room in
Morocco filmed a year apart, but Wells made it
work through brilliant, jarring editing. He turned
the limitations into a unique style, and it paid
off. Othello won the Grand Prix at Cannes, the
precursor to the Palme d 'Or. He did return to
Hollywood for one last big swing. Touch of evil.
This is 1958. And again, it was almost an accident.
He was originally hired just to act as the villain,
the corrupt cop Hank Quinlan. But the star, Charlton
Heston, told the studio, Wait, you have Orson
Welles on set? Why isn't he directing this thing?
And the studio, Universal, said, OK. Reluctantly.
And Wells delivered a gritty, nasty, absolutely
brilliant film noir. The opening shot alone is
one of the most famous in history. A three -and
-a -half -minute continuous take following a
car with a bomb in the trunk as it crosses the
U .S.-Mexico border. It builds unbearable tension.
But, let me guess, the studio interfered. Like
clockwork. They watched his cut, didn't understand
it, thought it was too confusing, and re -edited
it behind his back. They reshot scenes. Wells
was so furious he wrote a blistering 58 -page
memo explaining in minute detail exactly why
they were wrong and how to fix it. Did they listen
to him? They ignored it completely. It wasn't
until 1998, long after he died, that the legendary
editor Walter Murch found that memo and restored
the film to Wells' original instructions. It's
the same pattern over and over. He creates goal
and the industry turns it into lead. Which is
why his late career is so poignant because he
largely stops trying to please them. He makes
chimes at midnight in 1965. This was his Shakespeare
mashup based on Falstaff. Right. He took the
character of Sir John Falstaff and combined text
from five or six different Shakespeare plays
to tell his story. Falstaff, the fat, jolly knight
who is best friends with Prince Howe until the
prince becomes King Henry V and rejects him.
That feels deeply autobiographical. Completely.
Welles, of course, played Falstaff. He saw himself
in the character, this giant, joyous, life -affirming
figure who is ultimately cast aside by power
and politics. And he loved that film. He called
it his favorite movie. He said, if I wanted to
get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's
the one I would offer up. And then we get F for
Fake in 1970. This is a movie I tell everyone
to watch and they always look at me confused.
It's hard to explain. It's a documentary, but
not really. It's a film essay. It's about an
art forger named Elmer DeHory and a fake biography
of Howard Hughes. But really, it's about Wells
himself. It's about the nature of art and lies.
It brings us back to the very beginning, The
Magician. The con man. Exactly. He starts the
film performing magic tricks for kids. He talks
about how he lied his way into the Irish theater.
He's admitting that art is a lie, a trick to
make you see the truth. It's incredibly fast
paced, very MTV style before MTV existed. It
showed that even in his 60s, he wasn't an old
master. He was still the most modern filmmaker
alive. But the public didn't really see F for
Fake. They saw the Paul Masson wine commercials.
The sellout years. The famous outtakes. We have
to address the criticism. People mocked him.
They said he was debasing his genius to hawk
frozen peas and cheap wine. It's easy to mock.
But you have to look at the finances. Every dime
he made from those commercials, from those terrible
TV guest spots, went into his film cans. He was
self -funding The Other Side of the Wind, his
unfinished final film. He wasn't buying yachts.
He was buying film stock. He never, ever stopped
trying to make movies. That hustle was in service
of the art. We should also pivot to something
that often gets left out of the artist's conversation,
his politics. Because he wasn't just a filmmaker.
He was a loud political activist. Loud puts it
mildly. He was a radical progressive in an industry
that was becoming increasingly conservative.
He wasn't just voting Democrat. He was a passionate
supporter of FDR. He traveled to nearly every
state in 1944 to campaign for him. He wrote speeches.
He even filled in for Roosevelt on the radio
when the president was sick. And he was extremely
aggressive on civil rights, which was not exactly
a safe stance in 1946. No. There's the Isaac
Woodard story. This is a crucial part of his
legacy. Woodard was a black war veteran still
in his army uniform who was pulled off a bus
in South Carolina and beaten so badly by the
local police that he was permanently blinded.
And most of white America ignored it. The story
was buried. Wells went on his national ABC radio
show, which was supposed to be a light entertainment
show, and devoted broadcast after broadcast to
hunting down the police officer who did it. He
named the town. He described the officer. He
said on air, I will not rest until I know who
you are. That's incredibly brave for a commercial
broadcaster in that era. It was. And it worked.
The NAACP credited him with forcing the Justice
Department to finally investigate. But it also
put a massive target on Wells' back. When the
Red Scare started and the FBI began making lists,
Wells was an easy name to write down. His political
activism contributed to his alienation from Hollywood.
On a lighter personal note, he was also a literal
magician. A lifelong obsession. During WWII,
he took a break from movies and ran the Mercury
Wonder Show. It was a giant circus tent he set
up in Hollywood where he performed magic and
variety acts for servicemen. He sawed Marlene
Dietrich in half. He made Rita Hayworth disappear.
As one does. He truly believed that cinema was
just the ultimate magic trick. It's all smoke
and mirrors to create an illusion. So how does
the story end? The final years. He spent his
final years as a kind of grand figurehead, holding
court at Ma Maison, his favorite restaurant in
LA, regaling people with stories. He was always
working on the other side of the wind, which
finally got pieced together and released in 2018.
He was a regular on talk shows like Merv Griffin
and Johnny Carson. He was. And on the night he
died in 1985, he had just appeared on The Merv
Griffin Show. He went home, sat at his typewriter
to work on stage directions for a shoot scheduled
for the next morning, and his heart gave out.
He died working. He died trying to get the next
shot. Always. When you look back at this career,
the highest highs, the lowest lows, the sheer
volume of work, finished and unfinished, what
is the takeaway? What is the legacy? The tricky
thing with Wells is he leaves no school. You
can't really copy Wells because he was a total
one -off. He was too large for the system. But
his fingerprints are on everything. Every time
you see a complex long take in a movie or a nonlinear
narrative or a deep focus shot, that's Wells.
He seems like such a tragic figure in some ways,
the man who peaked at 25. That's one way I see
it. A man who started at the very top with This
Isn't Kane and spent the rest of his life struggling
to climb back there. But I prefer to see him
as a man who refused to stop creating, even when
the industry turned its back on him. He proved
you don't need a studio permission slip to be
an artist. I think the quote from his friend
and collaborator Joseph Cotton sums it up best.
Yes. It's beautiful, Cotton said about Wells.
He did not want a funeral. All losses are restored
and sorrows end. If you want to see the genius
of Orson Welles beyond Citizen Kane, go watch
Touch of Evil for the sheer craft and style.
Or watch F for Fake if you want to see his mind
at work. It's dizzying. Or Chimes at Midnight.
If you want to see his heart. That's the one.
That's it for this deep dive into the life of
the ultimate showman. Thanks for listening. Thank
you.