Movie Review/ New to DVD: Magician

There's an anecdote told at one point during Magician, the new documentary on the life and career of Orson Welles, that is told in brief, really only in passing, without any of the accompanying commentary that runs throughout so much of the film.

In 1938, Welles directed a movie called Too Much Johnson. He also directed a play called Too Much Johnson. His idea was to integrate the two, creating a unique, perhaps even ground-breaking production that would seamlessly combine the mediums of cinema and theater. There was only one problem: Mr. Welles didn't discover until opening night that the theater where the play was to be performed didn't have any film-projection facilities. As planned by Welles, the movie and the play were so intricately linked that neither one made any narrative sense without the other. The show must go on, so the actors performed the play anyway, the audience predictably couldn't understand the storyline with half the plot missing, and the play bombed miserably with the few confused audiences who saw it.

The more you examine this anecdote, the more you may find that it perfectly summarizes Welles's career as a whole. Welles's conception of Too Much Johnson exemplifies true artistic innovation, but the execution of his idea suffered from an almost comical combination of bad luck and bad planning.

Well before he was thirty years old, Welles had mastered -- yes, that's not just hyperbole, he had really mastered -- not just one but all three major 20th Century art-forms: theater, radio, and cinema. He was a skilled stage magician, a brilliant theater director, a ground-breaking filmmaker, a radio producer whose productions would be mentioned in history books for generations to come, a movie star, an Oscar-nominated scriptwriter, and a radio actor of unprecedented demand and popularity. What's more, all of these accomplishments were rightfully earned, rather than the achievements of today's celebrities who so often show potential in one area and suddenly coast on the fame-train for the rest of their careers.

Yet despite all of this, much of Welles's biography reads like a litany of one failure after another. His first feature length motion picture is to this day regarded as the greatest movie of all time, which he directed, starred in as the lead, and helped produce and write. His final movie role was "as the voice of the evil planet" in the animated Transformers movie of the 1980s. Welles himself accurately summarizes his career in one sound-bite that appears in Magician: "I started my career as a star, and I've been working my way down ever since."

If you've heard of Welles (sadly, many young people haven't) then you're probably familiar with the beginning of his downward spiral, how his first and greatest film, Citizen Kane, managed to piss off the most powerful media boss on the planet, by making far-too-thinly disguised insults toward newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Magician covers Welles's early successes, as well as his colossal Citizen Kane / Hearst blunder, in an opening segment that feels rushed. Why? Because we've heard it all before. Everyone who knows about Welles knows about the Hearst debacle. If you know who Welles is, you already know about Hearst, Kane, and The War of the Worlds. Magician addresses these episodes for completionism's sake, and them moves on. Documentarian Chuck Workman is more interested in the rest of the story, which is mentioned less often but turns out to be equally interesting.

In one sense, I should take care to not over-praise Workman's film. Yes, Magician is both informative and highly entertaining, but biographies of filmmakers do have it pretty easy, don't they? Workman shows clips from every one of Welles's movies, from the iconicly famous masterpieces to the obscure, unfinished films that were never even released, and even a few of Welles's acting appearances in other people's movies. Every one of these clips is entertaining, and who deserves the praise here, Workman or Welles?

Workman's true gifts here are as an archivist, researcher, and editor. He interviews not just celebrity admirers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, but also digs up Welles's unfamous friends and lovers who would otherwise be completely lost to obscurity. Thoroughly modern interviews made just for this documentary are mixed seamlessly with older interviews of actors and directors who have long since passed -- Charlton Heston, Sydney Pollack, and, of course, Welles himself.

And Welles does have that astounding screen presence, whether in movie clips or interviews. Welles never stopped being in demand as an actor, but as a filmmaker, every movie he ever made, or even attempted to make, whether good, bad, or brilliant, inevitably came accompanied with failure, mishaps, and just plain bad luck. I'm strongly tempted to provide examples, but why spoil the best stories in the movie?