Despite The System: Orson Welles vs. the Hollywood Studios

Despite The System: Orson Welles vs. the Hollywood Studios

by Clinton Heylin (Author)

Synopsis

In Despite The System Clinton Heylin shows brilliantly how Welles was undone by real people, with real motives, and yet still succeeded in forging a body of work that, whatever its flaws, is without equal in the history of cinema: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch Of Evil, et al. Using shooting scripts, internal memos, on-the-record interviews and private correspondence, Heylin grippingly reconstructs the career and life of a man who, by his own admission, was both a compulsive faker and perhaps the one true genius of the silver screen.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Edition: Main
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Published: 20 Apr 2006

ISBN 10: 1841956856
ISBN 13: 9781841956855

Media Reviews
Heylin's opinionated book is a powerful vindication of Welles. * * The Observer * *
Never less than provocative . . . It is twenty years since Welles' death and Despite the System justifies the existence of yet another book on his career by setting the record straight on a number of key matters . . . Heylin convinces us that the wonder of Orson Welles is not how small a legacy he left but how he ever managed to achieve so much. * * The Times * *
it has earned a place on the film buff's bookshelf. * * The Tribune * *
After at least five great books on Orson Welles and numerous important essays and documentaries, you'd think that there'd be little left to say about the great director. Despite the System shows that this is not the case. Clinton Heylin has taken one theme in Welles' switchback career - his conflict with Hollywood - and made a clear, engrossing, sometimes contentious, book of it. -- Mark Cousins
Author Bio
Clinton Heylin is the renowned author of the definitive Bob Dylan biography, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades among many other works, including Can You Feel The Silence? Van Morrison: A New Biography; Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios; Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge; and The Act You've Known for All These Years: The Life, and Afterlife, of Sgt. Pepper. He lives in Somerset.