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“... He was Marvel’s media liaison and their own biggest in-house fan, a schmoozer. Imagine if Orson Welles had never bothered to direct films again after The Lady from Shanghai, just bullshitted on talk shows, reliving his great moments. Like Welles, Stan Lee’s great moments were beset by authorship ...”

“... In such a mood your memory itself becomes a double agent, and you may be ready, like the hero of Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin, to hire a private eye to explore your own past or, like the hero of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, to welcome the devil as your research assistant. You could also just read one of the formidably intelligent works of ...”

“... best-known films, The Home and the World. Daney is at his brilliant best when writing about Orson Welles, whose films ‘begin where others end; when all has been won, the only thing left to do is unlearn everything … yesterday Quinlan, today Falstaff.’ ‘Everywhere, always, power is in the wrong hands. Those who possess it don’t know ...”

“... of a group of young critics at the Cahiers, busily tearing apart the old French cinema, promoting Welles and Hitchcock; worked as Rossellini’s assistant, and plotted his first movie. After the first three films, he experienced a sense of sterility and disarray, took to seeing two or three Hitchcock movies a week (‘There’s no doubt at all, he’s the ...”

“... entertainments which actually earned him his living. His few brushes with seriousness came when Orson Welles cast him in a production of Moby Dick, when he played the Dauphin in St Joan, and when he appeared in Shaffer’s The Public Eye; he sustained close friendships with Robert Bolt and the German scholar Erich Heller, and was never happier than ...”

“... leading the way for Jules Verne and H.G. Wells – not to mention the great 20th-century hoaxer, Orson Welles. He wasn’t to be trusted. But what was never in question was his talent – or genius, as he rightly preferred to call it. Born into a down-and-out theatre family and left an orphan at the age of two, Poe was adopted by a childless Richmond ...”

“... for him to become a cuddly family entertainer: for all his changes of pose, he is as type-cast as Orson Welles. The generally interesting thing about his style-setting is the influence he has had on the rock-music industry. Jerry Hopkins, an insider, takes this modern institution for granted, but the Gillmans, on the outside, have thought of some of the ...”

“... memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the combination of class circumstances into which he was ...”

“... Bowles earned his living mainly by writing film scores, incidental theatre music (for such as Orson Welles, William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams), ballets and music reviews. His interest in fiction developed only after his marriage to Jane Bowles (née Auer), and specifically out of the experience of assisting her to shape her gloriously original ...”

“... is a set of inventive answers to this question. I think of Marlene Dietrich’s epitaph for the Orson Welles character in Touch of Evil: ‘He was a great detective and a lousy cop.’ He understood crime, that is, but didn’t care about the law. The detectives in The Wire are, mainly, goodish detectives and excellent cops, but the law doesn’t help ...”

“... a bit of the Vienna we see in The Third Man was artfully re-created in English studios, and that Orson Welles, in particular, spent very little time in the unsimulated sewer. Both story and film make a point of their Vienna not being the old, happy one. Greene writes of the ‘smashed dreary city’, ‘a city of undignified ruins … where the Prater ...”

“... the technique of cinema advanced the sequences of framed ‘pictures’ which make Eisenstein and Orson Welles such a gift to compilers of illustrated film histories (and connections with painting easy) became a less important part of film vocabulary. Technology has brought a fluidity to shots like the one which follows Ray Liotta through a restaurant ...”

“... as decadent. When T.S. Eliot came for a private audience Pacelli lectured him on literature. When Orson Welles came he pretended to a vast knowledge of Hollywood gossip. Similarly, he claimed to be fluent in almost every European language, though Evelyn Waugh noted that all he could really do was parrot a few well rehearsed little speeches and that it ...”

“... Interesting, perhaps; but significant? No more than the fact that Fox once delivered a book to Orson Welles, passed Harpo Marx in the hallway of a friend’s apartment building, or spent an hour dancing with the young John Wayne, all of whom are mentioned in her memoir – unlike Courtney Love, Fox’s granddaughter by the daughter she put up for ...”

“... of the screen, now reduced to voiceovers and chat show appearances (someone who can only be Orson Welles), before going on to interview him and eventually becoming his companion and lover, while telling her parents she was joining a filmmaking collective in upstate New York. It’s left to the reader to decide whether this tall tale is simply a ...”