Based on long-lost recordings, 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.
|
|