Word: welleses
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BOOKS: Getting to the (false) bottom of Orson Welles
Unlike previous biographies, Citizen Welles gets to the bottom -- or should one say, false bottom -- of the man. At one level the book projects an old- world Promethean hero thundering against authority and convention. But conveyed with equal weight is an impresario of the self in the American maverick tradition...
Brady encircles his outsize subject with equal parts of anecdote and scholarship. He does not attempt the intimate tone of Barbara Leaming's authorized 1983 biography or try for the high-skid finish of Charles Higham's Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985). Citizen Welles...
The biographer, who teaches film courses at St. John's University in New York City, also provides valuable evidence that blunts film critic Pauline Kael's assertion that Herman J. Mankiewicz, not Welles, was mainly responsible for the final script for Citizen Kane. Mank, as he was known, does get...
Fabrication, contrivance and artifice were subjects he knew something about. "I discovered at the age of six," Welles once told an interviewer, "that almost everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors." His 1973 movie F for Fake is about the ambiguity of artistic charlatanism and, says Brady, stands...