King Orson: A New Chronicle of Welles, the Director and the Man: The New Yorker From 1983 until just before his death, in 1985, at the age of seventy, Orson Welles met his friend, the director Henry Jaglom, for lunch nearly every week at the Hollywood restaurant Ma Maison. Welles was then in poor health and dire straits. He hadn't completed a dramatic feature since "Chimes at Midnight," in 1966. His essay-film "F for Fake," an ironic self-portrait, from 1973, had failed commercially, and he was struggling - with the help of Jaglom, who was serving as a sort of agent - to find funding for films and, for that matter, to make a living. At Welles's request, Jaglom recorded their conversations, the transcripts of which have now been edited by Peter Biskind in the new book "My Lunches with Orson." "His only proviso," Biskind explains in his introduction, "was that the recorder be out of sight, concealed in Jaglom's bag, so he didn't have to look at it." Welles was obviously uninhibited by the invisible device: the book is a trove of classic-era Hollywood gossip. If it were only that, it would be, at best, candy; instead, it's a treasure, both as a portrait of the artist and as a copious record of his ideas - it is, in fact, a key source for understanding Welles, the director and the man. First, it's a shocking vision of the aging but still cunning lion in a very, very cold winter. The book is a kind of horror story: Welles's lonely travails should quash any nostalgia for an ostensibly more cinema-friendly bygone age. The movies that he directed early on - even "Citizen Kane" alone - should have assured him the equivalent of a permanent artistic annuity. No one said a Hollywood career would be easy; but it should have been possible, and a new generation of young moguls who had made quick fortunes in the seventies and early eighties could have financed the projects of this aging master. Instead, Welles spends much of his last years flailing - seeking out actors whose involvement would have made his projects more sellable. He was especially hopeful that he could realize "The Dreamers," an adaptation of stories by Isak Dinesen, which Welles had been shooting in bits and pieces over the course of several years, and "The Big Brass Ring," a political thriller that, as Biskind explains, Jaglom saw as "the bookend to "Kane." " Instead, Welles, in serious financial trouble, desperately tried - and failed - to get contracts for endorsements. By contrast, John Houseman, his former associate in the Mercury Theatre who, having become in later years a bigger star, was a nemesis of sorts and the target of some of Welles's most acerbic remarks, made a fortune from commercials. Welles's envy of Houseman gives rise to one of his most painful laments: Houseman has had twenty commercials on camera. I've had one. I'm in terrible financial trouble.... If Wesson Oil would let me say that Wesson Oil is good, instead of Houseman, I'd be delighted, but nobody will take me for a commercial.... A real mystery: why they prefer Houseman, with his petulant, arrogant, unpleasant manner.... It's a very weird and terrible situation. I don't know where to turn... If I got just one commercial, it would change my life!... There is no "meantime." It's the grocery bill. I haven't got the money. It's that urgent.... Get me on that fuckin" screen and my life is changed. One of the book's most poignant episodes is a meeting that Welles and Jaglom had with an HBO executive, who is given the pseudonym Susan Smith. Welles proposes a mini-series, a story about a Latin American resort where shady financiers and deposed dictators cavort, but is obviously winging it. Smith is interested, but the justifiably proud Welles - who was perversely unwilling to "sell it," as Smith seems to want him to - becomes amazingly contentious, angry, and arrogant; every time Smith opens her mouth, Welles responds with bluster, condescension, wild frustration, and, ultimately, dismissal. Had it been otherwise - had Welles beaten David Chase to cable - the very notion of what constitutes greatness on television might have been defined differently from the start. Having gotten his start in radio (a subject on which he riffs comically with Jaglom), Welles - whose work on such films as "F for Fake" and "Filming "Othello" " (his last finished feature, from 1978) was vertiginously open-ended and reflexive - might have made something astonishingly original of the serial format. Second, if this teeming, discursive book of a mere three hundred pages were filleted to its slender core of aphoristic brilliance, it would be a chapbook of cinematic wisdom to rival Robert Bresson's "Notes on the Cinematographer," but with a decidedly historical perspective. Some of Welles's choicest remarks target classic Hollywood and, especially, its producer-centric tendencies: "The truth is, I was not very fond of the movies of the late thirties, the few years just before I went to Hollywood. The so-called "Golden Age." " In particular, he has it in for the producer who made producers supreme, the short-lived "boy wonder" Irving Thalberg, who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Love of the Last Tycoon," and Louis B. Mayer, the M-G-M studio head who gave Thalberg the keys to the kingdom: Thalberg was the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood. Before him, a producer made the least contribution, by necessity.... But Mayer made way for the producer system. He created the fellow who decides, who makes the directors" decisions, which had never existed before. The diatribe runs for pages: "The director became the fellow whose only job was to say, "Action" and "Cut." Suddenly you were "just a director" on a "Thalberg production." " And Thalberg, Welles added, was "Satan!... He would reduce people; and, having reduced them, flatter them. He was obviously a weaver of spells who was able to convince everyone that he was the artist. Thalberg was way up here, and the director was way down there. The result was that he negated the personal motion picture in favor of the manufactured movie. Such remarks bring to the fore the very question that underlies the book: Who, after all, was Orson Welles, and why was he such a big deal? When Welles came to Hollywood, in 1939, at the age of twenty-four, he was already famous for his radio work - not least for the great "War of the Worlds" hoax - and heralded as the next big thing without having made a movie. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1940 short story "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles," members of the Hollywood old guard, high and low, see him as a "menace" and a "radical." The movie industry was at the apogee of its vertical integration and industrial organization. Great directors were working there, for the most part under tight constraints. Welles was the great liberator: with "Citizen Kane," he demonstrated the artistic power of the director unleashed, and became personally identified with the art of directing itself. He wasn't the only one-man show around; Charlie Chaplin, who owned his own studio, was writing, directing, and performing in movies that seemed like the total personal creations they were (and the book makes clear Welles's sense of rivalry with Chaplin, whose film "Monsieur Verdoux" was based on an idea by Welles). But Chaplin, for all his genius, was a man of the nineteenth century; Welles was modernity and modernism personified, the living future of the art form. In "Citizen Kane," images seemed unchained, a sort of immediate imprint of the imagination and a mighty music that didn't so much tell a story as display his mercurial emotions. That great début, about a media mogul who, starting at age twenty-five, uses a newspaper to project his voice and his vision worldwide, takes the cinema itself as its premise and evokes a wild new world, one of vast echo chambers of outsized personalities, which, as it turns out, is the world we live in. With his grandly clashing passions - and with his extravagant images, scripts, and, for that matter, performances (starting with his own) - Welles is the most Shakespearean figure in the history of cinema. Shakespeare adaptations are a constant throughout his career - including his efforts at a "King Lear," to be shot in 16 mm. ("mostly close-ups"), that he discusses in the book. But - as is obvious from "Citizen Kane" itself - he knew that his ambitions and his abilities contained the seed of a great fall, one that wouldn't so much resound as it would pathetically dwindle. After "Kane," he made many great films (including "The Magnificent Ambersons," "The Lady from Shanghai," "Macbeth," "Mr. Arkadin," "Touch of Evil," "The Trial," "Chimes at Midnight," and "F for Fake"). But, early on (even with "Ambersons," his second film, mutilated by the studio), his difficulties multiplied, due to unfortunate coincidences, the nature of the studio system, and his own personality. His 1952 "Othello" was largely self-financed with his earnings as an actor, and throughout the book he refers to his troubled relations with producers on his smaller-budget movies of the fifties and sixties (who did such things as stiffing the actors and sticking Welles with hotel bills). At the time of his death, Welles was planning to shoot and star in his version of "Lear" ("the part I was born to play") but knew that this and other low-budget movies he planned would "be judged by the standards of the time when I had more money." He judges his own artistic legacy and his place in the history of cinema with Olympian discernment. The two movies that Welles talks about at length - and that, in his mind, he pairs - are "Citizen Kane" and "F for Fake" (the 1973 essay-film, loosely sketched around a portrait of the art forger Elmyr de Hory). The tragedy of my life is that I can't get the Americans to like it.... Anyway, I think, "F for Fake" is the only really original movie I've made since "Kane." You see, everything else is only carrying movies a little further along the same path. I believe that the movies - I'll say a terrible thing - have never gone beyond "Kane." That doesn't mean that there haven't been good movies, or great movies. But everything has been done now in movies, to the point of fatigue. You can do it better, but it's always gonna be the same grammar, you know? Every artistic form - the blank-verse drama, the Greek plays, the novel - has only so many possibilities and only so long a life. And I have a feeling that in movies, until we break completely, we are only increasing the library of good works. I know that as a director of movie actors in front of the camera, I have nowhere to move forward. I can only make another good work. The "tragedy" of the poor reviews and box-office failure of "F for Fake" wasn't just aesthetic but also practical and financial: "Because that would have solved my old age. I could have made an essay movie - two of "em a year, you see? On different subjects. Various variations of that form. Instead, Welles was forced to become a celebrity - a talk-show regular who had become better known for his commercials from the nineteen-seventies for Paul Masson wine than for any movie but his first. His genius, as the book shows, was fuelled with an energy that seemed, at times, tragically centrifugal: its torrent of ideas, opinions, memories, grudges, insights, theories, speculations, complaints, and pleas are the living trace of a mind born in overdrive and which, suspended in a kind of content-free fame, is reduced to spinning its wheels. Yet even here, on the subject of celebrity, he offers a moment of genius, one of the greatest and saddest anecdotes on the subject that I've ever heard. What I do like is when they come up to me and don't know who I am. I was in the airport in Las Vegas last year, and a man on crutches, an older man, looked at me with that finally-found-his-favorite-movie-star expression, and started limping toward me. Of course, I met him halfway, and he said, "Milton Berle! I'd know you anywhere. So I signed Milton Berle for him. True story. I swear. I finally figured out that he meant Burl Ives, who is a big fat bearded fellow. And out came "Milton Berle." And, at that moment during Welles's lunch, Jack Lemmon shows up in the restaurant. Welles bellows, "There he is!," and more dishing follows. P.S. In the mid-forties, as Welles tells Jaglom, he wrote a column in the New York Post that followed his political activity (he tells Jaglom that he was "a well-known Hollywood Red"). Here's his printed exchange of invective with The New Yorker's John McCarten, from 1945. I wonder whether Welles's journalism has been collected. It should be.