In 1971, the 43rd Academy Awards awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award to Orson Wells in recognition of his "extraordinary artistic creativity in filmmaking," nearly three decades after Wells' genius debut, Citizen Kane, was snubbed at the Oscars.
During these three decades, Hollywood was a place of suspicion and distrust for Wells, starting with his second work, "The Abbesons", he could hardly control the final editing rights, and the unrecognizable film made Wells angry and desperate, and he traveled to Europe several times and returned to the United States several times, but his infinite creativity was dissolved in fragmented film and countless unfinished works.
Wells pretended not to be in Los Angeles and let his friend Director John Houston take the award on his behalf, and he didn't want to "act like a fool" to take the stage to receive this fake consolation award, as if thirty years of feuds had never happened.
Indeed, after the award was awarded, Wells's creative situation in his later years did not improve much.
Orson Wells
In 1975, the American Film Institute (AFI) awarded Wells a lifetime achievement award, and the 60-year-old Wells gave face to the newly established society, not only appearing on stage, but also showing two clips from his upcoming new work "The Other Side of the Wind". The film tells the story of an old director who tries his best to complete his last Hollywood movie, but wastes a lot of time in endless social activities.
There is no doubt that this is exactly the helpless realization of Wells's life, as Truffaut wrote to the point in the article: "The real tragedy of Wells is that he has spent so much time and time with producers of boundless power for thirty years, who have asked him to smoke cigars, but they are not willing to give him even a hundred feet of film." ”
Like Wells's cursed creative destiny, "The Other Side of the Wind" once again failed to complete, fell into a copyright dispute, and eventually left Wells forever until his death.
<h1>Fade in: Start at the top</h1>
CC poster of "Fake"
Wells said to himself in "The Forgery": "From that peak I was on the decline." This is not really an evaluation of his well-known film career, that peak refers to Wells in Dublin when he was 16 years old, hungry and cold, he bragged that he was a famous New York star, and the theater owner believed him and officially took the stage.
Wells, who has spent his life entangled in money, power, and copyright in the hope of gaining creative freedom, perhaps the pinnacle of his nostalgia is the feeling that everything is fresh, the state of mind that ambition can aspire to without restraint. However, this idealization is almost unattainable, especially when you are dealing with the big Hollywood producers who are good at calculating costs and box office returns.
As Wells's last complete creation, The Forgery, a documentary full of experimental and eccentric forms, once again highlights Wells's genius beyond the times. He re-edited a BBC documentary about the Hungarian counterfeit painter Elmyr de Hory, teasing the world's definition and pursuit of the vulgarity of artists and the ironic relationship between artistic value and authorship.
Stills from "Fake"
The young and sloppy Horry was able to make ends meet because a painting imitating Picasso was bought as a genuine work, and after that, his fake paintings were collected as authentic works by major museums around the world, and the agents swept away his income, and uninformed people admired his imitations as real works, while he was prosecuted for the crime of forgery all his life, fled everywhere, and was impoverished.
Wells seems to see a little shadow of himself in Horry, and he also started his acting career with a little deception, and the production company only wanted to squeeze profits from this talented self-proclaimed artist, but never gave him the freedom to create.
Horry's forgery can be multiplied by a single signature, while Wells's signature does not represent him at all most of the time. When he angrily wrote a 58-page memo recovering his own editing rights because of the severe deletion of "The Lady of the Past", he was already a desperate filmmaker who had fallen from the top to the bottom.
<h1>Flashback: The man who plays with the medium</h1>
The most mythical story of Wells's overnight fame is the serious panic caused by the radio drama "World Wars" to society. Wells used the method of theatrical documentary to make the audience believe it, panicked and fled, unbeknownst to him, he made the headlines the next day, and was thus photographed by Hollywood, and obtained a contract of superiority from Raiden Hua, thus making his feature film debut "Citizen Kane" that shocked the history of film under the condition of having the final editing rights.
Wells, who has dabbled in theater, radio drama, film, and television, worked as a television host, wrote columns for the New York Post, and in his later years also attended talk shows and starred in commercials. His artistic experience covers almost all types of media, and in the creation of the film, he carries forward the depth of field lens to form his own authorial traces, brings theatrical performance from the stage to the screen, integrates the use of sound in radio dramas into the innovation of film sound, uses editing to confuse the boundary between reality and fiction, and makes people feel that this person who is familiar with the audiovisual media form in the palm of his hand has an endless wealth of imagination and creativity.
Stills from Citizen Kane
However, this genius who toyed with the medium and the audience, his fate was also manipulated by the media. Citizen Kane was greatly dissatisfied by the news that newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hirst was based on the life of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hirst, who used his media empire to boycott the release of the film and put pressure on the Oscars, the film eventually had a difficult release, but the commercial failure was expected, receiving 9 Oscar nominations, but only the best original screenplay award was scrawled.
The doom of Wells's film career also began.
<h1>Stacking: Where is home? </h1>
Othello poster
After a series of works such as "The Abbesons" (1942), "The Stranger" (1946), "Miss Shanghai" (1947), "Macbeth" (1948), suffered serious interference, deletions, and box office failures, the disheartened Wells decided to leave the United States for Europe in 1948.
This point in time coincided with the anti-communist wave in Hollywood, and in the spring of 1948, the famous "Hollywood Ten" convicted everyone of contempt, and everyone in danger was afraid that their names would be blacklisted. According to later evidence, Hearst manipulated the media for many years to make a big deal out of his hostility to Wells, which led the FBI to believe that Wells was a communist and investigate him. It is likely that the main reason Wells left the United States was because he was on the "Hollywood blacklist."
Poster of Mr. Akadin
From 1948 to 1956, eight years of exile were exchanged for two very representative works of Wells's creative career, Othello (1952) and Mr. Akadin (1955). During this period, Wells, in order to gain the free power of the director, constantly sold his own performances to support his own films. During the three-year filming of Othello, he took over four films, including "The Third Man", which had few scenes but was famous for its stunning appearance.
Stills from The Third Man
The re-acquaintance with Wells, led by Bazin, the father of the French New Wave, gave him unparalleled praise in his artistic creation; the bloody Othello won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival; and the French Film Handbook school of film critics named "Mr. Akadin" one of the twelve greatest masterpieces in the history of cinema. In Europe, which respected art more, Wells's work finally paid off.
However, Othello was delayed until 1955, when "Mr. Akadin" was caught up in the dispute over the final editing rights, and finally five versions with different narrative structures appeared around the world. If you see the director's note - "If there is a gap between the viewing version and the expected value, I do not have the final editing rights by the standard of imagination." I will certainly feel indignant and sad for him.
Wells returned to the United States in 1956, and his most important work for the next three years was The Lady of the Dead (1958), which was full of bold innovations but was once again redacted. Today, the long shot of the film's opening 3 minutes and 20 seconds, the scene scheduling is extremely complicated, interlaced with character relationships, multiple clues and bomb suspense, has become a textbook classic shot.
It is inconceivable that Wells would have been so ahead of its time at an extremely limited cost. However, the version we are now able to see is a restoration and re-cut by industry insiders based on the Wells Memo manuscript.
In the unrecognizable version cut out under the control of Universal, the avant-garde long shots are illustrated with textual descriptions, accompanied by superfluous and useless music, and the fragmented and jumping narrative is integrated into a conventional single-thread narrative with re-shot close-up shots and illustrative scenes. Wells was stripped of the last creative power, and the studio's clever self-made changes did not give the film a box office success.
Trailer poster for "Lady Of the Past"
Once again, "The Lady of the Past" cut wells' heart, and he returned to Europe. During this decade, Don Quixote, which he had been preparing since the fifties, progressed intermittently and became another unfinished work of his life; he acted in films throughout France, Italy, Hong Kong, Yugoslavia, and played roles and contributed voices in films far less talented than his director; he ambitiously melted five of Shakespeare's historical plays into one furnace and brought Shakespeare's Midnight Bells to the screen; he met the last muse of his life, Oja Kodar. , never separated since.
In 1970, this European in the eyes of Americans, the American in the eyes of Europeans, finally returned to the United States and never left. Where is his hometown? Wells once mentioned in an interview that it was his childhood hometown of Woodstock. This answer is reminiscent of the "rose bud" that Kane remembered before his death in Citizen Kane, which was Kane and Wells's indelible childhood memory.
<h1>Fade out: The departure of a genius</h1>
John Houston and Orson Wells
On the night of October 9, 1985, Wells finished recording the last television interview of his life, returned home to work late into the night for a stage play he was rehearsing the next day, and then in the early hours of the morning, Wells had a heart attack and died quietly.
His whole life seems to have been seen as a metaphor or even a prophecy in comparison with Citizen Kane. Isn't the kane who carries the nostalgia of childhood, who is arrogant and omnipotent, and who has been destroyed by superhuman supernatural talents, the mirror image of Wells, not the self-psychoanalytic analysis and foresight of Wells?
They even passed away strikingly. Like Kane, Wells, who died in solitude, held a very brief funeral for only his closest relatives and friends. It wasn't until a month later that other friends in Hollywood organized a public memorial service.
Orson Wells is dead. Like Kane, this simple sentence put an end to their incredible lives. The re-understanding of them has since opened up more and more updated perspectives.
Today, Wells' limited film works have become more and more stable through the repeated observation and inheritance of generations of film fans, and his legendary and classicism beyond the times has been more and more stable, and its influence is infinitely far-reaching. A "Citizen Kane" is enough to make Wells immortal in film history.
Since 1952, Citizen Kane has been the first for more than half a century in the "Ten Greatest Films" selected by Sight and Sound magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI) every decade.
In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) selected the "Top 100 Films of the Century", and "Citizen Kane" topped the list. In addition, those works that were once cut to pieces, after being re-cut and restored, have once again amazed future generations of fans to be amazed by Wells' advanced consciousness and bold expressiveness.
During the break on the set of "The Other Side of the Wind"
In order to achieve ideal free creation, Wells spent almost the rest of his life in the war to raise funds to appear in various films, so that until his death, he still left a large number of unfinished works and countless scripts.
In 1992, Spanish director Jess Franco cut a version of the don Quixote negative left by Wells, which was released with a mediocre response.
In 2015, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the great director's birth, Wells's posthumous work "The Other Side of the Wind", which was screened at the American Film Institute Awards but ultimately failed to be completed, will be restored and released, and released on Wales' birthday on May 6. Involved in the restoration was Wells's old friend Peter Bogdanovich, who was directed by 45 minutes of cut footage left by Wells and a jumble of notes on the remaining 10 hours of original footage.
Manuscript of the script for The Other Side of the Wind
The response to the release of "The Other Side of the Wind" is no longer important, what is important is that fortunately there are still people who make up for everything that Hollywood owes wells, so that the genius's once hollowed-out ideas can be seen again, so that the images that should be immortal will not rot in the warehouse, and eventually turn into ashes like the rose buds that Kane was burned to the ground.