Why exactly is Orson Welles "controversial?"?!
Question: I read and watched almost everything he has done, and me, or no one alive today can deny his talent. Citizen Kane didn't do particularly well in theaters, but is that the only controversial part of his film making?
Answers: I read and watched almost everything he has done, and me, or no one alive today can deny his talent. Citizen Kane didn't do particularly well in theaters, but is that the only controversial part of his film making?
I think his controversy came from being exile from Hollywood and reliance on independent production meant that many of his later projects were filmed piecemeal or were not completed.
In 1941, he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in Citizen Kane, often chosen in polls of film critics as the greatest film ever made. Citizen Kane is the only film of Welles for which he possessed sufficient funds and complete creative control to the final cut, and the rest of his career was often obstructed by lack of funds, incompetent studio interference, and bad luck, both during exile in Europe and brief returns to Hollywood. Despite these difficulties Othello won the 1952 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Touch of Evil won the top prize at the Brussels World Fair.
Although Welles remained on the margins of the main studios as a director/producer, his larger-than-life personality made him a bankable actor. In his latter years he struggled against a Hollywood system that refused to finance his independent film projects, making a living largely through acting, commercials, and voice-over work. Welles received a 1975 American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement
He's not really controversial now, but at the time of his writing, some of his ideas were so unconventional that many people objected to them. Some people even labeled his books "heretical". The funny thing is, now his books seem quaint and almost funny. We have gone so far past the scope of his writing that you feel like you're reading about some weird blend of the past and the future.
He really ticked off a lot of people with the Halloween Martian invasion radio program based on War of the Worlds.
Also, when he made Citizen Kane he made the studio leave him entirely alone -- he made the decisions in conjunction with his team. From what I have read, they wouldn't even work if studio guys were around. That was absolutely unheard of, completely revolutionary at that time.
Interesting question. Except for "Citizen Kane" (which got Welles in trouble because it was about William Randolph Hearst, a target that no one else would go after in a popular entertainment), the rest of his films weren't controversial in themselves. Most were adaptations of established works. If anything got Welles in trouble, it was his insistence on making films his own way, with his own vision. The Hollywood establishment of the time (this was decades before independent filmmaking) didn't trust him because of that, and so labelled him "controversial."
Note to "North": I think you're confusing H.G. Wells with Orson Welles.