Word: orsones
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...HANKS is too golly-gosh ever to be mistaken for Orson Welles, but he may nevertheless inherit the mantle. Having got a lock on decent-guy-in-difficult-circumstances roles, Hanks is taking a stab at writing, directing and starring in his own movie. He's wrapping That Thing You Do, with (clockwise from top left) ETHAN EMBRY, STEVE ZAHN, TOM EVERETT SCOTT, LIV TYLER and JOHNATHON SCHAECH, the story of a rock band in 1964. (You were perhaps expecting vampires and crack?) "There was a lack of cynicism," says Hanks of that era. "In 1964, everybody still believed...
...surprised that people believe legal immigration is the cause of all their problems? After all, this is the same crowd of people that merely 58 years ago believed Martians were invading the earth. When Orson Welles dramatized War of the Worlds over the radio, 20 percent of the six million people listening believed that New Jersey had just been burnt to the ground by Martians. The highways were jammed with people trying to leave; the telephone lines to the police were busy with people asking them to confirm the report...
...Randolph Hearst. Yet so controversial was Kane before its release in 1941, and so overwhelming its pressure on Welles' reputation, that it can be seen as the apex of his career, perhaps of Hollywood's Golden Age. It surely makes the man worth one more biography, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking; $29.95), and the film worth a long documentary look, The Battle over Citizen Kane by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, on PBS's The American Experience next Monday. These solidly researched works revive a thrilling era in American theater and film--a five-year...
Kane's beguiling arrogance and neediness come straight from its creator. As Callow meticulously shows, George Orson Welles knew acclaim and misuse from early childhood. Declared a genius at three, staging Shakespeare in a toy playhouse at five, walking on water in his wading pool--the legend goes something like that--he was adrift in a strained family. His opera-loving mother died when he was nine, his suavely alcoholic father three years later. Welles would memorialize his mother in Kane and find father-sponsors in his prep-school principal, Broadway's John Houseman, RKO's George Schaefer. He would...
...year later, Welles arrived in Hollywood with a fussy, je-suis-l'artiste beard and an RKO contract giving him total control over his films. To an industry in robust middle age, Welles was a pampered brat. They called him Little Orson Annie, the Christ Child. One local wit said, "There, but for the grace of God, goes...