This Is Orson Welles

This Is Orson Welles is a 1992 book by Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles, two major film directors, one the legendary creator of "Citizen Kane", the other a former journalist-turned-popular-moviemaker of "The Last Picture Show" fame. Welles is included as co-author because he had a more than usual say in the shaping of this book of interviews of himself: Bogdanovich would edit and arrange the material of recorded conversations after it had been transcribed and submit versions of each section to Welles.

Origin of the book

Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles met toward the end of 1968. Bogdanovich was then a writer of monographs on Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock, and had directed Boris Karloff in the low-budget film "Targets". They hit it off and eventually decided to do a book of interviews together, which began in Welles bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and resumed as Bogdanovich joined Welles on location for Mike Nichols' film "Catch-22" in Guaymas, Mexico, then continued sporadically at various places in Europe and the United States.

In 1974, Orson Welles cast Bogdanovich next to John Huston in the role of Brooks Otterlake, a successful director, in the as yet unreleased film The Other Side of the Wind. Welles filmed partly in Bogdanovich's home, where he and actress Oja Kodar resided for a while. In the second half of the 1970s both directors "drifted apart a bit".Peter Bogdanovich 'This Is Orson Welles', HarperPerennial 1992, page xxvii, Introduction: A Nice Little Book by Peter Bogdanovich.]

The reasons the book came out so long after the interviews where conducted were mostly personal. After the murder of Bogdanovich's girlfriend Dorothy Stratten, the book, says Bogdanovich, "was lost somewhere in the depths of a storage facility while I was going through a personal and financial crisis (leading to bankruptcy and a kind of general breakdown in the summer of 1985, just a few months before Orson died)." Peter Bogdanovich 'This Is Orson Welles', HarperPerennial 1992, page xxxi.]

Oja Kodar received Bogdanovich's tapes in 1987 -approximately twenty-five hours of interview. The material was edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Some of the taped conversations were later released in truncated form on audiocassettes.

References