Chattanooga Pulse

In 1940, RKO Pictures occupied the bottom rung of the top tier of American movie studios.  While MGM was releasing film after film with big name stars attached and Paramount had brilliant directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Billy Wilder hard at work, RKO was producing schmaltzy, assembly-line musicals and B-grade horror films by the bucket load.

The heads of the studio met and realized a paradigm shift was in order for RKO and that without one, the studio would collapse.  So they did what most reasonable people do when pressed for change: They gambled.

The gamble was on an impetuous 25-year-old thespian named Orson Welles.  RKO offered Welles total control of all studio resources to make one film—and as soon as he stepped on the studio’s property, he ushered in a total restructuring of visual storytelling.  The resulting movie was Citizen Kane, and it is considered by many to be the best film ever made.

Comparing Welles’ innovation in Citizen Kane to anything else is tricky business.  He was the first American filmmaker to tell a story in non-linear fashion.   He translated stage techniques to the silver screen, putting physical distance between actors to mirror emotional distance.

Working with Gregg Toland behind the camera, Welles pioneered deep-focus cinematography, allowing people and objects from three to 30 feet away from the camera to be seen clearly in a single frame.

Even so, the tragic thing about Welles is that, aside from Citizen Kane, his genius went underappreciated for the rest of his life.  Working prints of his films were carelessly lost by studios, ravaged by fire, and choppily re-edited by greedy studio heads.  Post-“Kane,” the only truly pure Welles film is the documentary F for Fake that he had to edit himself to keep his vision intact.

Richard Linklater’s new film Me and Orson Welles is the first film in the Chattanooga Arts and Education Council’s Spring Independent Film Series and it is a vision of a young Welles’ work in the New York theater scene, particularly his production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  No doubt an exaggerated account, it shows Welles’ dramatic genius at work—warts and all.

Zac Efron (High School Musical) plays 17-year-old Richard Samuels, a young man bored with school and with dreams of Broadway.  He has a chance encounter with the Mercury Theatre Company outside their run-down theatre and finds himself in the midst of a conversation with their director, Orson Welles (Christian McKay in an acclaimed performance).

Richard notices that Welles has a moldable ego and plays off his competitive spirit to land a role in the production.  Welles casts him as Lucius and pairs him with a beautiful production assistant named Sonja (Claire Danes), a young woman willing to do just about anything to break into the biz, to help him learn the tricky language of the Bard.

Rehearsals start and it becomes obvious that Richard has no acting ability whatsoever.  The whole cast worries, but Welles, confident in his directing prowess, is too busy conducting radio interviews and bedding young women to notice.  Richard takes a liking to Sonja; she sleeps with Orson to get further ahead.  Passions flare and the show must go on.

The Orson Welles production of Julius Caesar was a thoroughly edited one (he changed the setting from ancient Rome to fascist Italy) and quite melodramatic (Cinna the poet was lynched not by a mob but by a secret police force).  No surprise that it was an audience favorite, provoking a three-minute applause and rave reviews.  Welles had clearly changed the game by bringing Shakespeare to Broadway—a prelude to his forthcoming revolution of the film medium.

Still, it seems no one knew the genius of Orson Welles better than Orson Welles.  Word has it that this megalomania made him insufferable to work with, and it could be why during the last 20 years of his life, he was relegated to acting in champagne commercials, hosting cheap Bible prophecy “films,” and whoring his inimitable deep voice out as “the voice of God” in one cheap movie after another.

The mighty sometimes fall but are remembered for their peaks of greatness.  Me and Orson Welles is sure to show the flawed genius of Orson Welles in all its maniacal splendor.  His is a name that should not be forgotten.

Me and Orson Welles
Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Claire Danes
Rated PG-13
Running time: 114 minutes