Orson Welles: the story on HearLore

Orson Welles

George Orson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, into a family that would soon fracture under the weight of alcoholism and grief. His father, Richard Head Welles, a bicycle lamp inventor who made a fortune before losing it to drink, and his mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, a concert pianist who studied with Leopold Godowsky, created a volatile home environment. When his parents separated in 1919, the family moved to Chicago, where Beatrice played piano at lectures to support her younger son and herself. The tragedy struck on the 10th of May 1924, just after Welles's ninth birthday, when Beatrice died of hepatitis. The Gordon String Quartet, which had made its first appearance at her home in 1921, played at her funeral. After his mother died, Welles ceased pursuing a musical career. It was decided he would spend the summer with the Watson family at a private art colony established by Lydia Avery Coonley Ward in the village of Wyoming in the Finger Lakes Region of New York. There, he played and became friends with the children of Aga Khan, including the 12-year-old Prince Aly Khan. Then, in what Welles later described as "a hectic period", he lived in a Chicago apartment with his father and Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician who had been a close friend of his parents. Welles attended public school before his alcoholic father left business altogether and took him along on travels to Jamaica and the Far East. When they returned, they settled in a hotel his father owned in Grand Detour, Illinois. When the hotel burned down, Welles and his father took to the road again. "During the three years that Orson lived with his father, some observers wondered who took care of whom", wrote biographer Frank Brady. "In some ways, he was never really a young boy, you know", said Roger Hill, who became Welles's teacher and lifelong friend. Welles attended public school in Madison, Wisconsin, enrolled in the fourth grade. On the 15th of September 1926, he entered the Todd Seminary for Boys, an expensive independent school in Woodstock, Illinois, that his older brother Richard Ives Welles had attended ten years earlier, until he was expelled. At Todd School, Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who was later the school's headmaster. Hill provided Welles with an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing him to concentrate on subjects that interested him. Welles performed and staged theatrical experiments and productions. "Todd provided Welles with many valuable experiences", wrote critic Richard France. "He was able to explore and experiment in an atmosphere of acceptance and encouragement. In addition to a theatre, the school's own radio station was at his disposal." Welles's first radio experience was on that station, performing his own adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. On the 28th of December 1930, when Welles was 15, his father died of heart and kidney failure in a hotel in Chicago, aged 58. Shortly before, Welles had told his father that he refused to see him until he stopped drinking. Welles suffered lifelong guilt and despair that he was unable to express. "That was the last I ever saw of him", Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming 53 years later. "I don't want to forgive myself." His father's will left Welles to name his own guardian. When Roger Hill declined, he chose Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a physician and friend of the family. Following graduation from Todd in May 1931, Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard College; his mentor Roger Hill advised him to attend Cornell College in Iowa. Instead, Welles chose travel. He studied for a few weeks at the Art Institute of Chicago with Boris Anisfeld, who encouraged him to pursue painting. Welles occasionally returned to Woodstock. He was asked in a 1960 interview, "Where is home?" and replied, "I suppose it's Woodstock, Illinois, if it's anywhere... If I try to think of a home, it's that."

When was Orson Welles born and where did he grow up?

George Orson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He grew up in a volatile home environment in Chicago after his parents separated in 1919 and later attended public school in Madison, Wisconsin.

What happened to Orson Welles's mother and father?

Beatrice Ives Welles died of hepatitis on the 10th of May 1924, just after her son's ninth birthday. His father, Richard Head Welles, died of heart and kidney failure on the 28th of December 1930 in a hotel in Chicago.

When did Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds?

The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast its adaptation of The War of the Worlds on the 30th of October 1938. This radio performance brought Welles instant fame and created widespread confusion among listeners who believed the fictional news reports of a Martian invasion.

When was Citizen Kane released and what awards did it win?

Citizen Kane received a limited release in 1941 and was voted the best picture of that year by the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle. The film garnered nine Academy Award nominations but won only Best Original Screenplay, shared by Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Why was The Magnificent Ambersons cut and when did it happen?

RKO Pictures cut The Magnificent Ambersons to 88 minutes over Orson Welles's opposition after negative audience responses to a preview on the 17th of March 1942. The studio removed nearly 50 minutes of footage and rewrote scenes to make the film a commercial success.

What was Orson Welles's role as a goodwill ambassador to Latin America?

In late November 1941, Orson Welles was appointed as a goodwill ambassador to Latin America by Nelson Rockefeller to promote hemispheric solidarity and counter Axis influence. He traveled to Brazil and other countries to produce films and radio programs, including It's All True, which was eventually canceled by RKO.

The Voodoo Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock

In 1935, John Houseman, director of the Negro Theatre Unit in New York, invited Welles to join the Federal Theatre Project. Far from unemployed, Welles put a large share of his $1,500-a-week radio earnings into his stage productions, bypassing administrative red tape and mounting the projects more quickly and professionally. "Roosevelt once said that I was the only operator in history who ever illegally siphoned money into a Washington project," Welles said. The Federal Theatre Project was the ideal environment in which Welles could develop his art. Its purpose was employment, so he was able to hire many artists, craftsmen and technicians, and he filled the stage with performers. The company for the first production, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth with an African-American cast, numbered 150. The production became known as the Voodoo Macbeth because Welles changed the setting to a mythical island suggesting the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with Haitian vodou fulfilling the role of Scottish witchcraft. The play opened on the 14th of April 1936, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously. At 20, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. The production then made a 4,000-mile national tour that included two weeks at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Next mounted was the farce Horse Eats Hat, an adaptation by Welles and Edwin Denby of The Italian Straw Hat, an 1851 five-act farce by Eugène Marin Labiche and Marc-Michel. The play was presented from the 26th of September to the 5th of December 1936, at Maxine Elliott's Theatre, New York, and featured Joseph Cotten in his first starring role. It was followed by an adaptation of Dr. Faustus that used light as a prime unifying scenic element in a nearly black stage, presented from the 8th of January to the 9th of May 1937, at Maxine Elliott's Theatre. Outside the scope of the Federal Theatre Project, American composer Aaron Copland chose Welles to direct The Second Hurricane (1937), an operetta with a libretto by Edwin Denby. Presented at the Henry Street Settlement Music School in New York for the benefit of high school students, the production opened on the 21st of April 1937, and ran its scheduled three performances. In 1937, Welles rehearsed Marc Blitzstein's political opera, The Cradle Will Rock. It was originally scheduled to open on the 16th of June 1937, in its first public preview. Because of cutbacks in the WPA projects, the premiere at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was canceled. The theater was locked, and guarded, to prevent any government-purchased materials from being used for a commercial production of the work. In a last-minute move, Welles announced to ticket-holders that the show was being transferred to the Venice, 20 blocks away. Some cast, crew and audience, walked on foot. The union musicians refused to perform in a commercial theater for lower non-union government wages. The actors' union stated that the production belonged to the Federal Theatre Project, and could not be performed outside that context without permission. Lacking participation of the union members, The Cradle Will Rock began with Blitzstein introducing it and playing the piano accompaniment on stage, with some cast members performing from the audience. This impromptu performance was well received.

The Mercury Theatre and The War of the Worlds

Breaking with the Federal Theatre Project in 1937, Welles and Houseman founded a repertory company, called the Mercury Theatre. The name was inspired by the title of the iconoclastic magazine The American Mercury. Welles was executive producer, and the original company included such actors as Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Arlene Francis, Martin Gabel, John Hoyt, Norman Lloyd, Vincent Price, Stefan Schnabel and Hiram Sherman. "I think he was the greatest directorial talent we've ever had in the [American] theater", Lloyd said of Welles in 2014. "When you saw a Welles production, you saw the text had been affected, the staging was remarkable, the sets were unusual, music, sound, lighting, a totality of everything. We had not had such a man in our theater. He was the first and remains the greatest." The Mercury Theatre opened on the 11th of November 1937, with Caesar, Welles's modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, streamlined into an anti-fascist tour de force that Joseph Cotten later described as "so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear". The set was completely open with no curtain, and the brick stage wall was painted dark red. Scene changes were achieved by lighting alone. On the stage was a series of risers; squares were cut into one at intervals and lights, designed by Jean Rosenthal, were set beneath it, pointing straight up to evoke the "cathedral of light" at the Nuremberg Rallies. "He staged it like a political melodrama that happened the night before," said Lloyd. Beginning on the 1st of January 1938, Caesar was performed in repertory with The Shoemaker's Holiday; both productions moved to the larger National Theatre. They were followed by Heartbreak House (the 29th of April 1938) and Danton's Death (the 5th of November 1938). As well as being presented in a pared-down oratorio version at the Mercury Theatre in December 1937, The Cradle Will Rock was at the Windsor Theatre from the 4th of January to the 2nd of April 1938. Such was the success of the Mercury Theatre that Welles appeared on the cover of Time, in full makeup as Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House, on the 9th of May, three days after his 23rd birthday. Simultaneously with his work in the theatre, Welles worked extensively in radio as an actor, writer, director, and producer, often without credit. Between 1935 and 1937 he was earning as much as $2,000 a week, shuttling between studios at such a pace that he would arrive barely in time for a scan of his lines before he was on the air. While he was directing the Voodoo Macbeth, Welles was dashing between Harlem and midtown Manhattan three times a day to meet his radio commitments. In addition to continuing as a repertory player on The March of Time in the fall of 1936, Welles adapted and performed Hamlet in an episode of CBS Radio's Columbia Workshop. His performance as the announcer in the series' April 1937 presentation of Archibald MacLeish's verse drama The Fall of the City was an important development in his radio career and made the 21-year-old Welles an overnight star. In July 1937, the Mutual Network gave Welles a seven-week series to adapt Les Misérables. It was his first job as a writer-director for radio, the debut of the Mercury Theatre, and one of Welles's finest achievements. He invented the use of narration in radio. "By making himself the center of the storytelling process, Welles fostered the impression of self-adulation that was to haunt his career to his dying day", wrote critic Andrew Sarris. "For the most part, however, Welles was singularly generous to the other members of his cast and inspired loyalty from them above and beyond the call of professionalism." That September, Mutual chose Welles to play Lamont Cranston, also known as The Shadow. He performed the role through mid-September 1938. The Mercury Theatre on the Air left|Welles at the press conference after "The War of the Worlds" broadcast (the 31st of October 1938) After the theatrical successes of the Mercury Theatre, CBS Radio invited Welles to create a summer show for 13 weeks. The series began on the 11th of July 1938, with the formula that Welles would play the lead in each show. The weekly hour-long show presented radio plays based on classic literary works, with original music composed and conducted by Bernard Herrmann. The Mercury Theatre's radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells on the 30th of October 1938, brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance, with the between-breaks dial-spinning habits of listeners, created confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has come into question. Panic was reportedly spread among listeners who believed the fictional news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a speech.

Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons

RKO Radio Pictures president George J. Schaefer ultimately offered Welles what generally is considered the greatest contract offered to a filmmaker, much less to one who was untried. Engaging him to write, produce, direct and perform in two pictures, the contract subordinated the studio's financial interests to Welles's creative control, and broke precedent by granting Welles final cut. After signing a summary agreement with RKO on the 22nd of July, Welles signed a full-length 63-page contract on the 21st of August 1939. The agreement was bitterly resented by the Hollywood studios and persistently mocked in the trade press. RKO rejected Welles's first two movie proposals, but agreed on the third, Citizen Kane. Welles co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in it. Welles conceived the project with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who was writing radio plays for The Campbell Playhouse. Mankiewicz based the original outline of the film script on the life of William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew and came to hate after being exiled from Hearst's circle. After agreeing on the storyline and character, Welles supplied Mankiewicz with 300 pages of notes and put him under contract to write the first-draft screenplay under the supervision of John Houseman. Welles wrote his own draft, then drastically condensed and rearranged both versions and added scenes of his own. The industry accused Welles of underplaying Mankiewicz's contribution to the script, but Welles countered the attacks by saying, "At the end, naturally, I was the one making the picture, after all, who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank's and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own." For the cast, Welles primarily used actors from his Mercury Theatre, including William Alland, Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane and Paul Stewart in their film debuts. Welles's project attracted some of Hollywood's best technicians, including cinematographer Gregg Toland. Welles and Toland made extensive use of deep focus photography, in which everything in the frame is in focus. Toland explained that he and Welles thought "that if it was possible, the picture should be brought to the screen in such a way that the audience would feel it was looking at reality, rather than merely at a movie." They composed "our angles and compositions so that action which ordinarily would be shown in direct cuts would be shown in a single, longer scene--often one in which important action might take place simultaneously in widely separated points in extreme foreground and background." Toland explained their use of deep (or pan) focus: Through its use, it is possible to photograph action from a range of eighteen inches from the camera lens to over two hundred feet away, with extreme foreground and background figures and action both recorded in sharp relief. Hitherto, the camera had to be focused either for a close or a distant shot, all efforts to encompass both at the same time resulting in one or the other being out of focus. This handicap necessitated the breaking up of a scene into long and short angles, with much consequent loss of realism. With pan-focus, the camera, like the human eye, sees an entire panorama at once, with everything clear and lifelike. Welles called Toland "the greatest gift any director, young or old, could ever, ever have. And he never tried to impress on us that he was performing miracles. He just went ahead and performed them. I was calling on him to do things only a beginner could be ignorant enough to think anybody could ever do, and there he was, doing them." When asked why he and Toland used deep focus, Welles explained: "Well, in life you see everything in focus at the same time, so why not in the movies?" It was the first film scored by Bernard Herrmann, who had worked with Welles in radio. Hermann recalled: "two full weeks were spent in the dubbing room, and music under our supervision was often re-recorded six or seven times before the proper dynamic level was achieved. The result is an exact projection of the original musical ideas in the score. Technically, no composer could ask for more." Filming Citizen Kane took ten weeks. Hearst's newspapers barred all reference to Citizen Kane and exerted enormous pressure on the Hollywood film community to force RKO to shelve the film. RKO chief George J. Schaefer received a cash offer from MGM's Louis B. Mayer and other major studio executives if he would destroy the negative and existing prints of the film. While waiting for Citizen Kane to be released, Welles produced and directed the original Broadway production of Native Son, a drama written by Paul Green and Richard Wright based on Wright's novel. Starring Canada Lee, the show ran from the 24th of March to the 28th of June 1941, at the St. James Theatre. The Mercury Production was the last time Welles and Houseman worked together. Although Citizen Kane was given a limited release, it received overwhelming critical praise. It was voted the best picture of 1941 by the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle. The film garnered nine Academy Award nominations but won only Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Variety reported that block voting by extras deprived Citizen Kane of Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor (Welles), and similar prejudices were likely to have been responsible for the film receiving no technical awards. Bosley Crowther wrote that Welles "has made a picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts. Mr. Welles has put upon the screen a motion picture that really moves." Cecelia Ager, in PM Magazine, wrote: "Before Citizen Kane, it's as if the motion picture were a slumbering monster, a mighty force stupidly sleeping, lying there...awaiting a fierce young man to come kick it to life, to rouse it, shake it, awaken it to its potentialities ... Seeing it, it's as if you never really saw a movie before." The delay in the film's release and uneven distribution contributed to mediocre results at the box office. After it ran its course theatrically, Citizen Kane was retired to the vault in 1942. In France, however, its reputation grew after it was seen there for the first time in 1946. In the US, it began to be re-evaluated after it appeared on television in 1956. That year it was re-released theatrically, and film critic Andrew Sarris described it as "the great American film" and "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since The Birth of a Nation." Citizen Kane is now widely hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. From 1962 to 2012, it topped the decennial Sight and Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. The fate of The Magnificent Ambersons is one of film history's great tragedies. It was Welles's second film for RKO, adapted by Welles from Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel about the declining fortunes of a wealthy Midwestern family and the social changes brought by the automobile age. Toland was unavailable, so Stanley Cortez was named cinematographer. The meticulous Cortez worked slowly and the film lagged behind schedule and over budget. In contract renegotiations with RKO over a film he was obliged to direct, Welles had conceded final cut. The Magnificent Ambersons was in production from the 28th of October 1941 to the 22nd of January 1942, with a cast including Cotten, Collins, Moorehead, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter and Tim Holt. RKO chief George Schaefer understood that presenting a downbeat period film without marquee stars was a risk, but he was reassured by a special screening of the film-in-progress Welles arranged for him on the 28th of November. Schaefer was an expert in film distribution and attended to the marketing strategy. Required to start filming the "Carnaval" segment of It's All True in early February 1942, Welles rushed to edit The Magnificent Ambersons and finish his acting scenes in Journey into Fear. He ended his lucrative CBS radio show on the 2nd of February, flew to Washington, D.C., for a briefing, and then lashed together a rough cut of Ambersons in Miami with editor Robert Wise. A finished 131-minute version, edited per Welles's detailed instructions, was previewed on the 17th of March 1942, in Pomona. Schaefer was present, and was rattled by the audience response: 75 percent of the preview cards were negative. The film was received more favorably by a preview audience in the more upscale Pasadena on the 19th of March, with only 25 percent of the preview cards negative. But the experience led Schaefer to authorize the studio to make whatever changes necessary to make The Magnificent Ambersons a commercial success. Wise, whom Welles had left in charge of postproduction, removed nearly 50 minutes of footage from Welles's cut, and several scenes , including the ending , were rewritten and reshot. Over Welles's opposition, The Magnificent Ambersons was cut to 88 minutes. Like the film, Bernard Herrmann's score was heavily edited by RKO. When more than half the score was removed and replaced by music by Roy Webb, Herrmann bitterly severed his ties with the film and promised legal action if he was not removed from the credits. Even in its released form, The Magnificent Ambersons is considered one of the best films of all time. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and added to the National Film Registry in 1991.

The Goodwill Ambassador and It's All True

In late November 1941, Welles was appointed as a goodwill ambassador to Latin America by Nelson Rockefeller, U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and a principal stockholder in RKO Radio Pictures. The mission of the OCIAA was cultural diplomacy, promoting hemispheric solidarity and countering the growing influence of the Axis powers in Latin America. John Hay Whitney, head of the agency's Motion Picture Division, was asked by the Brazilian government to produce a documentary of the annual Rio Carnival taking place in early February 1942. In a telegram on the 20th of December 1941, Whitney wrote Welles, "Personally believe you would make great contribution to hemisphere solidarity with this project." The OCIAA sponsored cultural tours to Latin America and appointed goodwill ambassadors including George Balanchine and the American Ballet, Bing Crosby, Aaron Copland, Walt Disney, John Ford and Rita Hayworth. Welles was briefed in Washington, D.C., immediately before departure for Brazil, and film scholar Catherine L. Benamou, finds it likely he was among the goodwill ambassadors asked to gather intelligence for the U.S. government. She concludes that Welles's acceptance of Whitney's request was "a logical and patently patriotic choice". In addition to working on his ill-fated film It's All True, Welles was responsible for radio programs, lectures, interviews and informal talks as part of his OCIAA-sponsored cultural mission, which was regarded as a success. He spoke on topics ranging from Shakespeare to visual art at gatherings of Brazil's elite, and his intercontinental radio broadcasts in April 1942 were particularly intended to tell U.S. audiences that President Getúlio Vargas was a partner with the Allies. Welles's ambassadorial mission was extended to permit his travel to Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. Welles worked for more than 6 months with no compensation. Welles's own expectations for the film were modest. "It's All True was not going to make any cinematic history, nor was it intended to," he later said. "It was intended to be a perfectly honorable execution of my job as a goodwill ambassador, bringing entertainment to the Northern Hemisphere that showed them something about the Southern one." In July 1941, Welles conceived It's All True as an omnibus film mixing documentary and docufiction in a project that emphasized the dignity of labor and celebrated the cultural and ethnic diversity of North America. It was to have been his third film for RKO, following Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Duke Ellington was put under contract to score a segment with the working title, "The Story of Jazz", drawn from Louis Armstrong's 1936 autobiography, Swing That Music. Armstrong was cast to play himself in the dramatization of the history of jazz performance, from its roots to its place in American culture. "The Story of Jazz" was to go into production in December 1941. Mercury Productions purchased the stories for other segments, "My Friend Bonito" and "The Captain's Chair", from documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty. Adapted by Norman Foster and John Fante, "My Friend Bonito" was the only segment of the original It's All True to go into production. Filming took place in Mexico from September to December 1941, with Norman Foster directing under Welles's supervision. In December 1941, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs asked Welles to make a film in Brazil that would showcase the Carnaval in Rio. With filming of "My Friend Bonito" about two-thirds complete, Welles decided he could shift the geography of It's All True and incorporate Flaherty's story into an omnibus film about Latin America, supporting the Roosevelt administration's Good Neighbor policy, which Welles advocated. In this revised concept, "The Story of Jazz" was replaced by the story of samba, a musical form with a comparable history and one that came to fascinate Welles. He decided to do a ripped-from-the-headlines episode about the epic voyage of four poor Brazilian fishermen, the jangadeiros, who had become national heroes. Welles later said this was the most valuable story. Required to film the Carnaval in Rio in early February 1942, Welles rushed to edit The Magnificent Ambersons and finish his acting scenes in Journey into Fear. He ended his lucrative CBS radio show on the 2nd of February, flew to Washington, D.C., for a briefing, and then lashed together a rough cut of Ambersons in Miami with editor Robert Wise. Welles recorded the film's narration the night before he left for South America: "I went to the projection room at about four in the morning, did the whole thing, and then got on the plane and off to Rio, and the end of civilization as we know it." Welles left for Brazil on the 4th of February and began filming in Rio on the 8th of February 1942. It did not seem that Welles's other film projects would be disrupted, but as film historian Catherine L. Benamou wrote, "the ambassadorial appointment would be the first in a series of turning points leading, in 'zigs' and 'zags,' rather than in a straight line, to Welles's loss of complete directorial control over The Magnificent Ambersons and It's All True, the cancellation of his contract at RKO Radio Studio, the expulsion of his company Mercury Productions from the RKO lot, and the total suspension of It's All True." In 1942 RKO Pictures underwent changes under new management. Nelson Rockefeller, the primary backer of the Brazil project, left its board, and Welles's principal sponsor at RKO, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. RKO took control of Ambersons and edited it into what RKO considered a commercial format. Welles's attempts to protect his version failed. In South America, Welles requested resources to finish It's All True. Given a limited amount of black-and-white film stock and a silent camera, he was able to finish shooting the episode about the jangadeiros, but RKO refused to support further production. "So I was fired from RKO," Welles recalled. "And they made a great publicity point of the fact that I had gone to South America without a script and thrown all this money away. I never recovered from that attack." Later in 1942, when RKO Pictures began promoting its new corporate motto, "Showmanship In Place of Genius: A New Deal at RKO", Welles understood it as a reference to him.

The Mercury Wonder Show and The Stranger

Welles returned to the US on the 22nd of August 1942, after more than six months in South America. A week after his return, he produced and emceed the first two hours of a seven-hour coast-to-coast War Bond drive broadcast titled I Pledge America. Airing on the 29th of August 1942, on the Blue Network, the program was presented in cooperation with the United States Department of the Treasury, Western Union and the American Women's Voluntary Services. Featuring 21 dance bands and a score of stage and screen and radio stars, the broadcast raised more than $10 million, more than $146 million today, for the war effort. On the 12th of October 1942, Cavalcade of America presented Welles's radio play, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, an entertaining and factual look at the legend of Christopher Columbus. "It belongs to a period when hemispheric unity was a crucial matter and many programs were being devoted to the common heritage of the Americas," wrote broadcasting historian Erik Barnouw. "Many such programs were being translated into Spanish and Portuguese and broadcast to Latin America, to counteract many years of successful Axis propaganda to that area. The Axis, trying to stir Latin America against Anglo-America, had constantly emphasized the differences between the two. It became the job of American radio to emphasize their common experience and essential unity." Written by Orson Welles in collaboration with Robert Meltzer and Norris Houghton, the radio play Columbus Day appears on pages 4, 13. Admiral of the Ocean Sea, also known as Columbus Day, begins with the words, "Hello Americans", the title Welles would choose for his own series five weeks later. Hello Americans, a CBS Radio series broadcast from the 15th of November 1942 to the 31st of January 1943, was produced, directed and hosted by Welles under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs. The 30-minute weekly program promoted inter-American understanding and friendship, drawing upon the research amassed for the ill-fated film, It's All True. The series was produced concurrently with Welles's other CBS series, Ceiling Unlimited (the 9th of November 1942 , the 1st of February 1943), sponsored by the Lockheed-Vega Corporation. The program was conceived to glorify the aviation industry and dramatize its role in World War II. Welles's shows were regarded as significant contributions to the war effort. Throughout the war Welles worked on patriotic radio programs including Command Performance, G.I. Journal, Mail Call, Nazi Eyes on Canada, Stage Door Canteen and Treasury Star Parade. In early 1943, the two concurrent radio series (Ceiling Unlimited, Hello Americans) that Welles created for CBS to support the war effort had ended. Filming had wrapped on the 1943 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, for which he received $100,000; that fee, in addition to the income from his guest-star roles in radio, made it possible for Welles to fulfill a lifelong dream. He approached the War Assistance League of Southern California and proposed a show that evolved into a big-top spectacle, part circus and part magic show. He offered his services as magician and director, and invested $40,000 in an extravaganza he co-produced with his friend Cotten: The Mercury Wonder Show for Service Men. Members of the armed forces were admitted free of charge, while the public had to pay. The show entertained 1,000 service members each night, and proceeds went to the War Assistance League, a charity for military service personnel. The development of the show coincided with the resolution of Welles's oft-changing draft status in May 1943, when he was finally declared 4-F, unfit for military service, for medical reasons. "I felt guilty about the war," Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming. "I was guilt-ridden about my civilian status." He had been publicly hounded about his patriotism since Citizen Kane, when the Hearst press began persistent inquiries about why Welles had not been drafted. The Mercury Wonder Show ran from the 3rd of August to the 9th of September 1943, in an 80-by-120-foot tent located at 900 Cahuenga Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood. At intermission on the 7th of September 1943, KMPC radio interviewed audience and cast members of The Mercury Wonder Show, including Welles and Rita Hayworth, who were married earlier that day. Welles remarked that The Mercury Wonder Show had been performed for 48,000 members of the armed forces. In the fall of 1945 Welles began work on The Stranger (1946), a film noir drama about a war crimes investigator who tracks a high-ranking Nazi fugitive to an idyllic New England town. Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Welles star. Producer Sam Spiegel initially planned to hire director John Huston, who had rewritten the screenplay by Anthony Veiller. When Huston entered the military, Welles was given the chance to direct and prove himself able to make a film on schedule and under budget, something he was so eager to do that he accepted a disadvantageous contract. One of its concessions was that he would defer to the studio in any creative dispute. The Stranger was Welles's first job as a film director in four years. He was told that if the film was successful he could sign a four-picture deal with International Pictures, making films of his own choosing. Welles was given some creative control, and endeavored to personalize the film and develop a nightmarish tone. He worked on the general rewrite of the script and wrote scenes at the beginning of the picture shot, but cut by producers. He filmed in long takes that largely thwarted the control given to editor Ernest J. Nims under the terms of the contract. The Stranger was the first commercial film to use documentary footage from the concentration camps. Welles had seen the footage in early May 1945 in San Francisco, as a correspondent and discussion moderator at the UN Conference on International Organization. He wrote of the Holocaust footage in his syndicated New York Post column on the 7th of May 1945. Completed a day ahead of schedule and under budget, The Stranger was the only film made by Welles to have been a bona fide box office success upon its release. Its cost was $1.03 million; 15 months after its release it had grossed $3.2 million. Within weeks of the completion of the film, International Pictures backed out of its promised four-picture deal with Welles. No reason was given, but the impression was left that The Stranger would not make money.

The Lady from Shanghai and Othello

In the summer of 1946, Welles moved to New York to direct the Broadway musical Around the World, a stage adaptation of Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days with a book by Welles and music by Cole Porter. Producer Mike Todd, who would produce the successful 1956 film adaptation, pulled out from the lavish and expensive production, leaving Welles to support the finances. When Welles ran out of money he convinced Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to send enough to continue the show, and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, direct and star in a film for Cohn for no further fee. The stage show soon failed due to poor box-office, with Welles unable to claim the losses on his taxes. Inspired by magician and cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, the show required 55 stagehands and used films to bridge scenes. Welles said it was his favorite of his stage productions. Regarding its extravagance, critic Robert Garland said it had "everything but the kitchen sink." The next night, Welles brought out a kitchen sink. In 1946, Welles began two new radio series, The Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air for CBS, and Orson Welles Commentaries for ABC. While Mercury Summer Theatre featured half-hour adaptations of some classic Mercury radio shows from the 1930s, the first episode was a condensation of his Around the World stage play, and is the only record of Cole Porter's music for the project. Several original Mercury actors returned for the series, as well as Bernard Herrmann. Welles invested his earnings into his failing stage play. Commentaries was a political vehicle, continuing the themes from his New York Post column. Again, Welles lacked a clear focus, until the NAACP brought to his attention the case of Isaac Woodard. Welles brought significant attention to Woodard's cause. The last broadcast of Orson Welles Commentaries on the 6th of October 1946, marked the end of Welles's own radio shows. The film that Welles was obliged to make in exchange for Harry Cohn's help in financing the stage production Around the World was The Lady from Shanghai, filmed in 1947 for Columbia Pictures. Welles intended it to be a modest thriller, but the budget skyrocketed after Cohn suggested that Welles's then-estranged wife Rita Hayworth star. Cohn disliked Welles's rough cut, particularly the confusing plot and lack of close-ups, and was not in sympathy with Welles's Brechtian use of irony and black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. Cohn ordered extensive editing and re-shoots. After heavy editing by the studio, approximately one hour of Welles's first cut was removed, including much of a climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse. While expressing displeasure at the cuts, Welles was particularly appalled with the score. The film was considered a disaster in America when released, though the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors (the use of mirrors being a recurrent motif of Welles's, starting with Kane) has become a touchstone of film noir. Not long after release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce. Although The Lady from Shanghai was acclaimed in Europe, it was not embraced until decades later in the U.S., where it is now regarded as a classic of film noir. Prior to 1948, Welles convinced Republic Pictures to let him direct a low-budget version of Macbeth, featuring highly stylized sets and costumes, and a cast of actors lip-syncing to a pre-recorded soundtrack, one of many innovative cost-cutting techniques Welles deployed in an attempt to make an epic film from B-movie resources. The script, adapted by Welles, is a violent reworking of Shakespeare's original, freely cutting and pasting lines into new contexts via a collage technique and recasting Macbeth as a clash of pagan and proto-Christian ideologies. Some voodoo trappings of the famous Welles/Houseman Negro Theatre stage adaptation are visible, especially in the film's characterization of the Weird Sisters, who create an effigy of Macbeth as a charm to enchant him. Of all Welles's post-Kane Hollywood productions, Macbeth is stylistically closest to Kane in its long takes and deep focus photography. Republic initially trumpeted the film as an important work but decided it did not care for the Scottish accents and held up general release for a year after early negative press reaction, including Lifes comment that Welles's film "doth foully slaughter Shakespeare." Welles left for Europe, while co-producer and lifelong supporter Richard Wilson reworked the soundtrack. Welles returned and cut 20 minutes from the film at Republic's request and recorded narration to cover gaps. The film was decried as a disaster. Macbeth had influential fans in Europe, especially the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who hailed the film's "crude, irreverent power" and careful shot design, and described the characters as haunting "the corridors of some dreamlike subway, an abandoned coal mine, and ruined cellars oozing with water." During this time, Welles was channeling his money from acting jobs into a self-financed film version of Shakespeare's Othello. From 1949 to 1951, Welles worked on Othello, filming on location in Italy and Morocco. The film featured Welles's friends Micheál Mac Liammóir as Iago and Hilton Edwards as Desdemona's father Brabantio. Suzanne Cloutier starred as Desdemona and Campbell Playhouse alumnus Robert Coote appeared as Iago's associate Roderigo. Filming was suspended several times as Welles ran out of funds and left for acting jobs, accounted in detail in MacLiammóir's memoir Put Money in Thy Purse. The American release prints had a technically flawed soundtrack, suffering from a dropout of sound at every quiet moment. Welles's daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith, restored Othello in 1992 for a re-release. The restoration included reconstructing Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's original score, which was originally inaudible, and adding ambient stereo sound effects, which were not in the original. The restoration went on a successful theatrical run in America. David Thomson writes of Welles's Othello, "the poetry hangs in the air, like sea mist or incense." Anthony Lane writes that "Some of the action was shot in Venice, and I occasionally wonder what crept