Very well executed

Excellent, a Must See

The first must-see film of the year.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

"Working with Orson Welles" is a low-budget production put together by Gary Graver, who worked as a cameraman for Welles in the last 15 years of his life. Welles was a complicated man, and the last years of his life were filled with excess, unfinished projects, and inability to find a distributor for anything he did finish. In one pathetic part of his biography, he goes out to dinner with Steven Spielberg in the hopes that Spielberg can help him find a distributor, only to have Spielberg fawn over him and want to talk about the Citizen Kane years. Welles was a sad case, a man who peaked in his twenties, who needed the discipline of the studio system but couldn't work within it.In spite of all of this, or maybe because of this, he was a tremendous character and fantastic raconteur. Having seen the man interviewed for several hours on a documentary years ago, I came away loving him and believing there was no one like him.The people who were interviewed for this documentary - Peter Jason, Peter Bogdonovich, Cameron Mitchell, Curtis Harrington, Susan Strasberg, Stacy Keach, etc., did so out of a love for Welles. I don't believe, as a previous reviewer said, that they were hangers-on who did the documentary for their own self-aggrandizement. This is not a Turner Classic Movies documentary with glossy production values. It probably cost all of $5. One could tell listening to their stories that they really cared about Welles. And the stories are great.Unfortunately, there was no footage of the films Graver spoke of, particularly "The Other Side of the Wind," which would have been great.I enjoyed it.A piece of trivia: The beautiful woman who worked in many of these later films, Oja Kodar, was a lover of Welles while he was married to his last wife. When Welles died, Kodar and Mrs. Welles came to an agreement about how the estate would be settled - apparently Kodar was mentioned in the will. On her way to sign the final papers, however, Mrs. Welles was killed in a car accident.

As Orson Welles reached the last two decades of his life, he became kind of a pathetic, old-garde ham . His achievements over, his career squandered, he was stuck with a lot of third-tier, late-stage hangers-on. In this thinly veiled piece of self-promotion, they try to ride his coat-tails. Pretty puzzling considering they worked on Welles projects from '71 forward (!?), long after he made anything even interesting as a curio. These oily associates are just above carny's on the food chain. There is no insight in their stories or even the technique of this video. Watching these people relive, and yes, re-enact their interactions with Welles (with fawning devotion) is just phenomenally uninteresting. You can tell that they've bored friends and party-goers with these fetishised, over-practiced memories; certainly their prerogative, but to do it on film is pretty icky. And none of them seem to realize that the exciting story about meeting Orson Welles that they treasure is exactly the same as all the others. Teen girls talk about boy-bands like this. Peter Bogdanovich is now a full-time director-impressionist for DVD commentaries. You could fill an encyclopedia with what this guy doesn't know about film-making.

Spoilers herein.Documentaries about filmmakers are pretty dreary experiences in most cases, but this one is worth seeing even if you don't know Welles work well. It is all the more strange because the man behind this project is a troubled soul indeed, someone apparently without much talent himself. But it works because we have actorsIt works because Welles' genius was in the storytelling itself. He understood that so thoroughly well that he could exploit learned technologies, accidents, opportunistic talent, and a multitude of whims in such a way that each added to the visual narrative. Stories. And that's what we have here, mostly stories told about Welles by theater people. Because they are theater people themselves, they are pretty good at telling these stories, especially as they have already told and refined them hundreds of times.The Bogdonovich sequence really brought the whole thing down. He wrote a book on Welles, a project that Welles initiated and sanctioned. But he asked Bog to handle it precisely because he had all the crippled intellectualism Welles made fun of (on which Bog himself unknowlingly remarks). The book was intended like the `David and Goliath' task: a goof. Other low points were Graver's insistent display of his own adolescent films.Graver's own work since leaving Welles is an odd saga. He's done porn, and soft porn. One of those I was able to find (`Scorned 2') and apart from the cheezy smut saw some elaborate ideas on narrative folding as translated through a chemically-damaged mind. He's done some more competent folding as well. I imagine there is a punctuated substance abuse problem there. What we need is a documentary on this documentary. And please, can we see something of `Other Side of the Wind,' and `The Deep'? Can we have the raw footage placed online so that thousands of clever edits can spring forth from Macs?Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.