[quote] He was controversial, to say the least, and didn't have the best reputation for people who worked for him.

But he was respected by many fellow actors & directors who worked with him, described him as generous & remained loyal to him. Norman Lloyd, who died last month, was the oldest continually active actor in Hollywood (and an executive producer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) adored him.

Welles’ spendthrift ways led to him doing ads & making talk show rounds throughout the 70s to pay for his lifestyle of food, drink & globe trotting, he was like by talk hosts because he was a storyteller. His whole life was about story telling in one way another.

He wasn’t much of a family man. The first time his children met each other was at his funeral. He was definitely on the spectrum. He pioneered what became routine in modern theater, but hit a wall due to lack funding for theater projects. So he turned to film, where he was highly successful and pioneered techniques now routine in filmmaking. He cajoled backers into funding him, concocting fantasies of what he was going to shoot, then shot what he wanted. It didn’t do his reputation any good as he continually ran out of film funding and had to scrabble to find new resources.

He was highly influential & though he could be tiresome I think he was less tiresome than Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is a rock em-sock em-robots type of director, doing garish live action, violent cartoons which led American cinema to depths of comic book superheroes & elevated writers of simple-minded noir trash. Welles was an international raconteur who partook of & admired cultures around the world, especially Mexico, Spain & Brazil. He didn’t get along with people he felt didn’t take their jobs seriously while he himself took jobs solely to make money. He like everyone else - flawed & not always on best behavior, only bigger than everyone else in his successes & failures. He was cynical about Hollywood, but he was also effusive when he felt someone new had real talent. He tried to be good, but his imagination got in the way of being realistic.

He went on crash diets & took diet pills, which further added to his crankiness. His addiction to food & drink was perhaps to fill the hole where his family had existed …or not existed, as his parents broke up when he was four; his younger brother institutionalized for learning disabilities. Orson lived with his mother until age nine, when she went into the hospital & died. He was sent to live with a family he barely knew, then returned to his father, who’d become a severely depressed alcoholic and seemed to have suffered a series of breakdowns. Then his father died alone in a hotel room when Welles was 15 — after Orson had broken with him in an attempt to force him to stop drinking. Welles felt guilty about his death afterwards. His father left him money & stipulating that Orson could choose whomever he wished as caretaker. Orson asked an admired schoolteacher & mentor to fill the role and was turned down.

He was an atheist but didn’t really deride other people’s religion. He made an observation I find true - it’s often non-religious people who are the most superstitious.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho borrowed much from A Touch of Evil, which must’ve grated on Welles, since Psycho became canonical midcentury film history, while most moviegoers never saw or heard of A Touch of Evil & believed Welles had been insignificant in film since the 1940s. Hitchcock was the fat, funny success who continued making television series & films while Orson was the fat failure who did Dean Martin roasts. But in the end, Welles told us much about inside Hollywood’s Golden Age, which is interesting from a historical perspective (even if he did cotton to the conspiracy theory that Carole Lombard’s plane was shot down by the Nazis).

He really was the Brain, trying to explain the world rather than take it over, and like the Brain, he couldn’t do it.