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Subj: What you actually need to know about Welles (and Cotten) ... Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 03:03:56 pm EDT (Viewed 528 times) | Reply Subj: I can safely say that I didn't understand any of this. By and large, Orson Welles passed me by, Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 11:14:00 am EDT (Viewed 499 times) | ||||||
... Is not that much, with regard to this story, but let me see if I can offer my insights, and explain how that knowledge was intended to apply to these characters. Before he was reduced to an obese old man hawking frozen peas and California wines, Welles was both a wunderkind and an enfant terrible, whose viable film career effectively began and ended with Citizen Kane, since it remains one of the greatest films in history, but it also made the mistake of taking aim at the most powerful man in media of that time. Welles was light years ahead of his time (one of his ideas was a second-person film version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which the camera would literally take the place of the story's "point of view" character), but he was also an incredible asshole, who could be propelled into abusive treatment of anyone in his orbit by even the slightest negative feedback or obstacles (a number of bad reviews for some of his plays inspired him to single-handedly do several thousand dollars' worth of damage to an entire hotel floor, where his actors were staying). Cotten is an intriguing figure, not only because of how universally it's agreed, in retrospect, that he was woefully underappreciated in his time as a strong character actor, but also because he's one of the few people with whom Welles never seemed to have an infamous falling-out, which is all the more notable because, in at least two of Welles' films (Citizen Kane and The Third Man), he and Welles played estranged best friends, and in three films (The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey Into Fear and, again, The Third Man), the notoriously attention-whoring Welles basically ceded the spotlight to Cotten as the lead character. I like Welles because he was so creative that, as near as I can tell, it literally drove him fucking nuts, and I like Cotten because, in many ways, he and Welles had what almost seems to me like an impossible friendship. If it makes more sense to you, the two characters who staged this play wanted to follow it up with a similar retrospective on Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado. | |||||||
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