How Hollywood Buried Orson Welles

At twenty-five, Orson Welles made Citizen Kane — still regularly named the greatest film ever made. The studio that released it tried to burn the negative. That contradiction is the story of his entire life. This is a documentary about how Hollywood systematically buried the most gifted director it ever produced. Not by failing to recognize his genius — by recognizing it perfectly, and punishing him for it. We trace six stages of sabotage across forty years: the campaign by William Randolph Hearst to destroy Citizen Kane before anyone could see it; the mutilation of The Magnificent Ambersons while Welles was in Brazil on a wartime mission, including the deliberate burning of more than forty minutes of footage that remain lost today; the decades of exile, during which the greatest director in America funded his own films by acting in other people's; the 58-page memo he wrote to save Touch of Evil — begging the studio to make it more coherent, not less — which was ignored for forty years and finally followed in 1998, thirteen years after his death; F for Fake, the 1973 essay film he was decades ahead on, dismissed as a mess; and the Paul Masson wine commercials of his final years, the cruelest image of all — and the truth behind the famous 'drunk' outtake. The verdict is simple. Hollywood did not fail to see Orson Welles. It saw him clearly, and spent him — cut, exiled, ignored, and reduced to selling wine, until there was nothing left. But the films survived the men who buried them. Citizen Kane still tops the list. The executives are footnotes. ► If you found this video eye-opening, please like and subscribe to support our channel! ► Thank you for watching! See you in the next one.