Recommended Reading : Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles

Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (David Thomson, 1997)

This biography of Orson Welles is an admirer’s look upon a career of failures, fakeries, lies, and some of the most important films in History. David Thomson is clearly a Welles enthusiast and even if his tone is sometimes forgiving of the tempered director he also likes to bring a little gossip on the table of the man-child enfant terrible. While spending numerous pages on the creation of Citizen Kane and its writing, structure, team he almost never mentions the context of creation of his other pictures. Even if Kane is the first film by Welles and his most important, a little more element on the other completed projects could have been a great import in the book.

After closing the book, I felt like I didn’t learned much more about the films and life of Orson Welles and I would rather much recommend the book he co-wrote with Peter Bogdanovich; This is Orson Welles instead. Still, it brings some light on a life that has been almost a myth to many cinephiles around the world.