In the summer of 1970 legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe and decided it was time to make a comeback movie. Coincidentally it was the story of a legendary self-destructive director who returns to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe. Welles swore it wasn't autobiographical. The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day, and Welles planned to shoot it in eight weeks. It took twelve years and remains unreleased and largely unseen. Orson Welles' Last Movie is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of the bizarre, hilarious and remarkable making of what has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen."

Journalist Josh Karp shines a spotlight on the making of The Other Side of the Wind—the final unfinished film from the auteur of Citizen Kane in Orson Welles’s Last Movie, the basis of Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville’s Netflix Original Documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. In the summer of 1970, legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe and decided it was time to make a comeback movie. Coincidentally, it was the story of a legendary self-destructive director who returns to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe. Welles swore it wasn’t autobiographical. The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day, and Welles planned to shoot it in eight weeks. It took six years during his lifetime—only to be finally completed more than thirty years after his death by The Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovich, who narrates the film, and released by Netflix. Orson Welles’s Last Movie is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of the bizarre, hilarious, and remarkable making of what has been called “the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen.” Funded by the shah of Iran’s brother-in-law, and based on a script that Welles rewrote every night for years, the film was a final attempt to one-up his own best work. It’s a production best encompassed by its star—the celebrated director of The Maltese Falcon, John Huston—who described the making of the film as “an adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing.”

At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles’s career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s satire of Hollywood during the “Easy Rider era”; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles’s widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker’s entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles’s Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles’s life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles’s later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride’s revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.

"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"--Dust jacket flap.

In 1958, soon after his arrival in Los Angeles, Gary Graver caught a showing of die recently released Touch of Evil. Upon viewing the B classic, Graver decided he wanted to be a director and spent many years honing his craft, as both a cinematographer and a director, not to mention writer, actor, and producerùmuch like his idol, Orson Welles. In 1970, when Graver learned that Welles was in town, he impulsively called the director and offered his services as a cameraman. It was only the second time in Welles's career that he had received such an offer from a cinematographer, the other from Gregg Toland who worked on Citizen Kane. Book jacket.

Orson Welles will leave you agreeing with Marlene Dietrich, who also said (using Welles' words from Touch of Evil): "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?"