Brilliant.

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2007)

WELLES, Orson. In 1938 a young, chubby man had a radio show in New York, in which he listed recipes for housewives. His listeners often called in, and they exchanged tips. One day, one by one, call after call came in about how little green men were killing women, raping animals, and offering free cakes. This last part particularly caught the young man's attention, and by the time a call came about how delicious the cakes and cookies were, he stormed out of the KCNYMA building and looked around for cakes, shouting "Leave some for me!". What he found on the street weren't Martians distributing cakes, but three journalists and a cameraman who were laughing hysterically. It was a practical joke. The footage of this hungry young man screaming for food at the sky was a unique hit during pre-main-feature reels shown in theaters across the nation. This young man was Orson Welles.
It was this incident which spawned the phrase "to make an Orson out of yourself".
This remarkably gifted actor, writer, director, producer, and devourer of small antelopes will best be remembered for "Citizen's Cake", a classic about a powerful magnate who like a magnet drew chocolate and vanilla to his enormous never-saturated belly. With this delicious masterpiece, which is still served in many cinemas with a cream topping, Welles also managed to make a movie that was well ahead of its time. Sadly, it is now well behind the times, like most 30s, 40s and 50s classics, and people only watch it to see the $200,000 cake which the cinematographer captured so superbly in all its fattening glory. "Citizen's Cake" was also the first movie to be served with a main course and desert. Welles has revolutionized the world of motion-pictures with his unique-yet-simple idea of combining film with food.
His next movie, "The Magnificent Chocolate Pudding With A Cherry On Top Which Amberson Made" (previously filmed in 1925 as "The Pampered Tummy") won rave reviews for its stark, brutally neo-Breugelian depiction of a family of obese farmers during the Great Depression who refuse to put down their expensive chicken-legs and eat salads like everyone else. When it premiered in 1942, it was served with mayonnaise sauce and then apple-pie for desert, causing the likes of Charles Laughton and Edward G.Robinson to jump out of their seats and applaud until the palms of their hands bled (or until they got hungry again). When the movie opened nation-wide, many theater-owners gladly re-furnished their theaters to include tables on which roasted pork meat was served during the first half of the movie. During the second half of the movie, in which the farming family is faced with a salad-dressing they don't want, Welles decided on serving to audiences a special fish dish with little cookies shaped like dead Japanese soldiers. Considering that this was 1942, Welles couldn't have come up with anything more brilliant.
Just when it seemed that he could do no wrong, his career took a downward slide. Welles was never content with being predictable so he discarded the idea of making yet another food-serving movie. He mused long about what next great invention he can bring to the world of cinema, and he came up with an idea that was as brilliantly original as it was ridiculously unprofitable: he was going to start a movie without finishing it.
"Bits And Pieces" was the working title (official titles don't exist for unfinished movies) of a semi-drama about a family of zombies who decide to go to college so they may get socially accepted by their human neighbours, some of whose relatives they had eaten in the past. When the youngest zombie decides to drop out, the other zombies excommunicate him from Zombie Church, forcing him to join the humans, who are planning revenge. The humans are about to tell the young zombie of the secret zombie-killing machine that they built, but just at that moment the movie ends, leaving the viewer disappointed and upset. Critics loved Welles's concept, and praised "Bits And Pieces" for its "post-Eisensteinian reaffirmation of neo-Brechtian values that condone anti-Viscontian attacks on social pseudo-Marxism". The audiences, on the other hand, looted the theaters when they didn't get their money back.
Totally oblivious to the financial disaster of that movie, Welles decided to expand on his unique brand of cinematic ideas by making another incomplete picture - only this time even the part that is filmed won't be edited in the proper order of the "story's" events. The working title was "What? Where? Why?" and was perhaps a drama roughly about some people doing some things. It was a major flop, but the critics were once again happy, calling his work "the most accomplished unaccomplished work of part-art to ever partly semi-grace the screen".
Welles's next project was even more unlike any other ever before: he started a movie that was not only going to be unfinished, unedited, and unwatchable, but a movie without a script and without sound. The working title for it was "The...". European critics called it "the most satisfying cinematic creation of the 40s". Fans didn't call it anything: no one went to see his movies anymore. And they couldn't even if they wanted to because they weren't shown anywhere. At Cannes the film won for Best Movie Of All Time Even Though It's American and for Best Existentialist Movie That We Love Because We Won't Admit That We Don't Know What The Hell It's Really About And Call It Existentialist Because That Sounds So Very Mighty Impressive.
Welles then decided on the ultimate "non-movie": a film without editing, sound, a script, and even without actors and dialogues. Only Welles himself appears in the movie, in two brief scenes in which he stands semi-nude on a city dump and looks as if though he is about to say something.
I hit the word-limitÂ… (e-mail: vonj88@yahoo.com)