The Theatre of Orson Welles PDF Download

Author: Richard France
Publisher: Lewisburg, Pa. : Bucknell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Author: Richard France
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134979932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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This volume is the only publication available of the fully annotated playscripts of Wells' W.P.A Federal Theatre Project and Mercury Theatre adaptations, including the "Voodoo" Macbeth, the modern-dress Julius Caesar and Welles' compilation of history plays, Five Kings.

Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Traces Welles' portentous childhood; his youth in New York, where he worked with director John Houseman; his notorious radio career; and the making of "Citizen Kane."

Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN: 9780670024919
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Traces the life and career of the legendary director, discussing the making of "Citizen Kane," his contributions to such films as "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "The Lady from Shanghai," and his efforts in radio comedy, spectacular theater, and newspaper politics.

Author: Alan Gallop
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445612534
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Orson Welles' 1938 radio production of The War of the Worlds is now remembered as one of the most sublime, if accidental. hoaxes ever concocted. This is what really happened.

Author: A. Brad Schwartz
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 0809031639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With sirens blaring in the background, announcers in the field described mysterious creatures, terrifying war machines, and thick clouds of poison gas moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached Manhattan, some listeners sat transfixed, while others ran to alert neighbors or to call the police. Some even fled their homes. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles's adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic The War of the Worlds. In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles's famed radio play and its impact. Did it really spawn a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times reported? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent to Orson Welles himself in the days after the broadcast, and his findings challenge the conventional wisdom. Few listeners believed an actual attack was under way. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welles's broadcast became a major scandal, prompting a different kind of mass panic as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerability in a time of crisis. When the debate was over, American broadcasting had changed for good, but not for the better. As Schwartz tells this story, we observe how an atmosphere of natural disaster and impending war permitted broadcasters to create shared live national experiences for the first time. We follow Orson Welles's rise to fame and watch his manic energy and artistic genius at work in the play's hurried yet innovative production. And we trace the present-day popularity of "fake news" back to its source in Welles's show and its many imitators. Schwartz's original research, gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking new look at a crucial but little-understood episode in American history.

Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099502836
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic survey of Orson Welles life and work, Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex artists of the twentieth century, looking closely at the triumphs and failures of an ambitious one-man assault on one medium after another theatre, radio, film, television, even, at one point, ballet in each of which his radical and original approach opened up new directions and hitherto unglimpsed possibilities. The book begins with Welles self-exile from America, and his realisation that he could only function happily as an independent film-maker, a one-man band; by 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete, Mr Arkadin, the biggest conundrum in his output, and his masterpiece Chimes at Midnight, as well as Touch of Evil, his sole return to Hollywood and, like all too many of his films, wrested from his grasp and re-edited. Along the way he made inroads into the fledgling medium of television and a number of stage plays, including Moby-Dick, considered by theatre historians to be one of the seminal productions of the century. Meanwhile, his private life was as dramatic as his professional life. The book shows what it was like to be around Welles, and, with a precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him, in which lies the answer to the old riddle: whatever happened to Orson Welles? "

Author: Patrick McGilligan
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062112503
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1017

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“A remarkable, eye-opening biography . . . McGilligan’s Orson is a Welles for a new generation, [a portrait] in tune with Patti Smith’s Just Kids.”—A. S. Hamrah, Bookforum No American artist or entertainer has enjoyed a more dramatic rise than Orson Welles. At the age of sixteen, he charmed his way into a precocious acting debut in Dublin’s Gate Theatre. By nineteen, he had published a book on Shakespeare and toured the United States. At twenty, he directed a landmark all-black production of Macbeth in Harlem, and the following year masterminded the legendary WPA production of Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock. After founding the Mercury Theatre, he mounted a radio production of The War of the Worlds that made headlines internationally. Then, at twenty-four, Welles signed a Hollywood contract granting him unprecedented freedom as a writer, director, producer, and star—paving the way for the creation of Citizen Kane, considered by many to be the greatest film in history. Drawing on years of deep research, acclaimed biographer Patrick McGilligan conjures the young man’s Wisconsin background with Dickensian richness and detail: his childhood as the second son of a troubled industrialist father and a musically gifted, politically active mother; his youthful immersion in theater, opera, and magic in nearby Chicago; his teenage sojourns through rural Ireland, Spain, and the Far East; and his emergence as a maverick theater artist. Sifting fact from legend, McGilligan unearths long-buried writings from Welles’s school years; delves into his relationships with mentors Dr. Maurice Bernstein, Roger Hill, and Thornton Wilder; explores his partnerships with producer John Houseman and actor Joseph Cotten; reveals the truth of his marriage to actress Virginia Nicolson and rumored affairs with actresses Dolores Del Rio and Geraldine Fitzgerald (including a suspect paternity claim); and traces the story of his troubled brother, Dick Welles, whose mysterious decline ran counter to Orson’s swift ascent. And, through it all, we watch in awe as this whirlwind of talent—hailed hopefully from boyhood as a “genius”—collects the raw material that he and his co-writer, the cantankerous Herman J. Mankiewicz, would mold into the story of Charles Foster Kane. Filled with insight and revelation—including the surprising true origin and meaning of “Rosebud”—Young Orson is an eye-opening look at the arrival of a talent both monumental and misunderstood.

Author: John Russell Taylor
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema
ISBN: 9781557833495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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(Applause Books). At the age of twenty-six, Orson Welles made the film which remains immovable at the top of the critics' polls for the ten best films of all time Citizen Kane . John Russell Taylor's riveting biography of Welles examines the way the Welles legend has been constructed through the years, and how his death has shattered some of the illusions of not only his friends but his enemies. (Taylor is film critic for the London Times and the authorized biographer of Alfred Hitchcock.)

Author: Josh Karp
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250007089
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
In the summer of 1970 legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe and decided it was time to make a comeback movie. Coincidentally it was the story of a legendary self-destructive director who returns to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe. Welles swore it wasn't autobiographical. The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day, and Welles planned to shoot it in eight weeks. It took twelve years and remains unreleased and largely unseen. Orson Welles' Last Movie is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of the bizarre, hilarious and remarkable making of what has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen."