Based on long-lost recordings between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom, My Lunches with Orson presents a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur.
There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.
Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew-FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more-and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse-sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above- because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.
Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles-if such a creature ever existed.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction: How Henry Met Orson by Peter Biskind 1
Part One 1983
1."Everybody should be bigoted." 31
2."Thalberg was Satan!" 46
3."FDR used to say, `You and I are the two best actors in America.' " 58
4."I fucked around on everyone." 67
5."Such a good Catholic that I wanted to kick her." 75
6."Nobody even glanced at Marilyn." 81
7."The Blue Angel is a big piece of shlock." 87
8."Kane is a comedy." 96
9."There's no such thing as a friendly biographer." 101
10."The Cannes people are my slaves." 116
11."De Mille invented the fascist salute." 124
12."Comics are frightening people." 130
13."Avez-vous scurf?" 140
14."Art Buchwald drove it up Ronnie's ass and broke it off." 150
Part Two 1984 1985
15."It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar." 159
16."God save me from my friends." 168
17."I can make a case for all the points of view." 175
18.Charles "Laughton couldn't bear the fact he was a homosexual." 189
19."Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl!" 200
20."Jack, it's Orson fucking Welles." 208
21."Once in our lives, we had a national theater." 220
22."I smell director." 230
23."I've felt that cold deathly wind from the tomb." 238
24."Jo Cotten kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass." 252
25."You either admire my work or not." 259
26."I'm in terrible financial trouble." 264
27."Fool the old fellow with the scythe." 281
Epilogue: Orson's Last Laugh by Henry Jaglom 287
Appendix 291
New or Unfinished Projects 291
Partial Cast of Characters 293
Acknowledgments 301
Notes 303
