Young Orson The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Patrick McGilligan is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He also edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle), the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Kenosha, where Orson Welles was born."[Young Orson] takes the directorial hero from his birth to the threshold of 'Citizen Kane.' I've only just started it and can so far confess to fascination and pleasure; the wealth of detail and the measured tempo are up to the Shakespearean complexity of Welles's character." -- New Yorker "McGilligan's Orson is a Welles for a new generation...McGilligan's book vibrates with uncertainty and risk, and it hums with the possibility that talented people actually can realize their dreams in the forms they choose." -- BookForum "No one writes biographies of film legends like Patrick McGilligan... It is a meticulous recreation of Welles's life and achievement up to 1941." -- Daily Beast "Welles's native brilliance and his ascent from producing plays as a boy at the Todd School to his conquest of New York theater and radio as an adult has seldom been documented with more clarity." -- Library Journal (starred review) "To read this book is to be taken with just how much meaningful work [Welles] packed into his youth, and awestruck by the self-assurance with which he approached his burgeoning career... With McGilligan's superb biography, we have the definitive portrait of Welles in his youth." -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "Engrossing ... Exhaustively researched but well-paced and stuffed with beguiling detail, this is a vivid, sympathetic portrait of Welles's youthful promise and achievement, before the misfires and compromises of his later years." -- Publishers Weekly "A richly detailed, often nuanced study of Welles' life and work. It's a welcome addition to the burgeoning shelf of books on one of America's most distinctive talents... Although Young Orson reads easily, it is powered by an evenhanded, almost scholarly rigor." -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Must reading for anyone interested in the history of film." -- Mark Levine, Booklist (starred review) "Exhaustively researched but well-paced and stuffed with beguiling detail, this is a vivid, sympathetic portrait of Welles's youthful promise and achievement, before the misfires and compromises of his later years." -- Publishers Weekly "An indefatigable reporter and masterful biographer, McGilligan has unearthed endless revelations that will change our view of Welles's. This book is a constant joy to read, showing that the truth about Welles's upbringing and youthful artistic triumphs is even more remarkable than the legend." -- Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? and Searching for John Ford "No other biographer has done such a superb job of investigating Orson Welles's Midwestern origins and dazzling early success. McGilligan convincingly refutes untruths and myths that others have accepted. This is by far the best book on the most formative period of Welles's life." -- James Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles "A prodigious and illuminating account of the extraordinary life of Orson Welles up to when he turned from theater and radio to launch his fabled movie career. McGilligan blends valuable new reporting with insights from existing sources to draw a bold portrait of the master that can fairly be called definitive." -- George Stevens, Jr., producer and founder of the American Film Institute "In many ways,Young Orson is my favorite of all the Welles biographies to date. The overall portrait of Welles's character and background that emerges, uncharacteristically sympathetic, is both dense and persuasive - and a page-turning pleasure to read." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia
“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.