Latest in Orson Welles

Coming off a Best Actor Oscar win for Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman had a lot of choices. But following up that remarkable portrait of Winston Churchill during the war years with another real-life figure  an alcoholic screenwriter from Hollywood’s golden era, could not be more of a polar opposite. The result however is…

Movies about the making of movies rarely find an audience. That long-standing Hollywood dictum will be defied this weekend with the Netflix release of Mank, but here's the rub: The central character is a critic who becomes a screenwriter who becomes a victim. That may be a clue as to why Mank this week is receiving…

For decades a majority of film historians and critics have placed Orson Welles’ seminal 1941 classic Citizen Kane at, or near, the top of just about every list of the greatest films ever made. I recently re-watched it in preparation for seeing David Fincher’s remarkable new film Mank . Mank tells the tale of…

It’s Terrific! That was the simple advertising line that adorned most posters and newspaper ads for the landmark film Citizen Kane when it was released in 1941. Let me say the same line applies to David Fincher’s masterpiece Mank, a film centering on the creation of the script for Kane and the man who shares official…

At the time, in November 1970, it must have seemed like an ideal match, a meeting of renegade titans: Orson Welles, the long-ago boy genius of theater and films who never got a job directing in Hollywood after 1958, and Dennis Hopper, whose out-of-nowhere smash with Easy Rider in 1969 made him the boy wonder of the…

BREAKING: After making the groundbreaking series House of Cards and Mindhunter at Netflix, David Fincher will direct his first feature film for the streaming service. He’ll helm Mank, a long gestating dream project for the filmmaker about the man who shared the Best Original screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welle…

EXCLUSIVE: The mission of the filmmaker should be "to preside over divine accidents," Orson Welles once told me. Indeed, his career and lifestyle seemed designed to foster accidents, divine or otherwise. A case in point was his final film, The Other Side of the Wind, which took 48 years to complete. It will finally…

EXCLUSIVE: Bharat Nalluri is attached to direct We Interrupt This Program, a drama financed by Echo Lake Entertainment that focuses on the internal battles between Orson Welles and producer John Houseman that nearly derailed the shocking radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. Without identifying they were…

Mark Cousins, director of Cannes Classics hit The Eyes Of Orson Welles, would be a distinctive character even if he wasn't a respected filmmaker, writer and historian—his body is emblazoned with tattooed tributes to the artists and thinkers who have shaped his outlook on life: Paul Cézanne, Marie Curie, Albrecht…

EXCLUSIVE: Echo Lake Entertainment and Sean Sorensen's Royal Viking Entertainment have teamed on Sorensen’s spec script We Interrupt This Program. While President Trump has turned “fake news” into a common term, the makers of this one believe they have a film focusing in the birth of pseudo news, and the panic it…

Morgan Neville, whose 20 Feet From Stardom won the Best Feature Documentary at the 2014 Oscars, will direct another original feature documentary — this time about the final 15 years of Orson Welles. It is a Netflix project and the company’s previously announced acquisition of Welles' final feature The Other Side Of The…

Netflix announced it has completed a deal for global rights and that it will finish and restore Orson Welles final film, The Other Side Of The Wind. The move has been in the works for a month after a campaign spearheaded by Frank Marshall (production manager on the original) and Peter Bogdanovich (part of the cast)…