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1. "God, How They'll Love Me When I'm Dead!"
- The University Press of Kentucky
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3 The enemy of society is the middle class, and the enemy of life is middle age. Youth and old age are great times—and we must treasure old age and give genius the capacity to function in old age—and not send them away. —Welles in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich, 1970 “God, how they’ll love me when I’m dead!” Welles was fond of saying in his later years, with a mixture of bitterness and ironic detachment. But that’s a half-truth at best. More than two decades after Welles’s death, his career is, in a very real sense, still flourishing. But it is a disturbing irony that Welles is more “bankable” now than when he was living. Of course, this is nothing new in the arts. When the pesky presence of the living artist is out of the way, it’s easier to appreciate and market his work. Vincent van Gogh may have sold only one painting in his lifetime and died in poverty, but for the price of one Van Gogh painting now, you could run your own international corporation. Jane Austen didn’t make much money writing her six novels, but she flourished as the film industry ’s most popular (and still underpaid) writer in the 1990s, and her small body of work continues to be recycled. Show business cynics have quipped that Elvis Presley’s death at age forty-two was “a good career move.” Elvis was revitalized in death, his bloated, middle-aged silhouette magically slimmed and his raspy voice restored to its youthful luster. As Welles expected, his death in 1985 opened the floodgates for the release of some of his films, and fragments of films, that had been languishing unseen, as well as for revivals and restorations of classic Welles films. Scripts he was not able to film have been redone for shooting by others or published in book form. Documentaries and docudramas about his life and work have proliferated. Welles predicted this gold rush to his “GOD, HOW THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD!” Chapter One McBChap01.indd 3 8/1/06 5:40:18 PM 4 WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES? friend and fellow director Henry Jaglom, saying, “Just wait till I die. Everything will happen. They’ll be coming out of the woodwork. They’ll dig up old scripts that I had something to do with, or they’ll create stories about my life. These things will suddenly become saleable.” v v v Although I didn’t fully recognize it when I met Welles in August 1970, his return to Hollywood earlier that year to live more or less permanently in the United States was a crucial turning point in his career. He came back to town thinking it might be an ideal time for him to find backing for his highly personal, iconoclastic film projects. The “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and early 1970s produced such landmark movies as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, M*A*S*H, the first two Godfather films, The Conversation, and Chinatown. That brief flowering of personal filmmaking within the commercial system was born not only out of the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s but also from the economic collapse of the studio system in that period. Hollywood was hit with rampant unemployment as studios divested themselves of valuable real estate and were taken over by faceless conglomerates for whom individual artists were nothing but commodities. But the financial crisis at first led to a desperate and uncharacteristic willingness to experiment. The studios briefly turned over creative control from square and clueless older executives to a new generation of iconoclastic filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. Some of the more irreverent middle-aged filmmakers, such as Robert Altman and Arthur Penn, also came into their own during that period. But a youth movement whose mottoes included “Never trust anyone over thirty” had relatively little room for older directors. Nor was the vaunted “independence” of the younger filmmakers easily transferable to someone with such heavy historical baggage as Welles was dragging around, chained to his troubled past like Marley’s ghost. He would find even less support from the new, decentralized, supposedly “freer” Hollywood system than he had when he worked within the old studio system. Partly by necessity and partly by design, Welles pursued his own maverick brand of filmmaking in his later years, largely financing his own...