
Orson Welles, one of history's great workaholics - dctoedt
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/6/8554571/orson-welles-work-ethic
======
bane
It may sound silly, but I was first introduced to Welles in the original
Transformers animated movie where he provided the voice for Unicron, one of my
all-time favorite villains, who spends most of the movie as a planetoid.

His voice _shook_ the theater and is unmistakable to me to this day.

One of the greatest voice casting decisions of all time and one of his last
roles.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNsOGt3bHk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNsOGt3bHk)

~~~
FourYew
Was his last role, and he didn't seem to pleased about it.

' You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy." He
elaborated, "I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other.
Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear
myself apart on the screen." '

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ojbyrne
It seems telling that this article leaves out the fact that he became morbidly
obese, which seems like something that often accompanies workaholism.

~~~
kayman
I feel these types of articles glorify work-o-holics, as if to indicate if
you're not working 24/7, 365 days a year, you're not trying hard enough.

On the flip side, it's an example of how far you can push yourself when you're
truly passionate about something.

~~~
noblethrasher
I like how Joss Whedon put it:

(Paraphrasing) “Lots of people talk about workaholics, but hardly anyone
mentions workaholism”.

Once you couch it in the latter term, it loses its patina of virtuousness.

~~~
rhizome
If my personal experience is any judge, knowing (or dating) someone who works
for Apple (and I'm sure several other high-drive companies) is half the
journey to learning of the existence of "workaholism."

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smacktoward
I'm a huge Welles fan, but I find it weird to talk about him as a
"workaholic."

Not because he didn't spend a lot of time working (he did! Especially when he
was young), but because so little of that time actually resulted in him
_accomplishing_ anything. His life story is full of half-finished and only-
pushed-out-the-door-because-someone-forced-him-to projects.

Some of these are notorious, like _Ambersons_ , but there are plenty of
others. _It 's All True_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%28film%29)),
for instance, a vaguely documentary-ish film he spent two years working on in
Latin America during World War 2. He shot so much film for _It 's All True_
that the studio that eventually inherited it ended up dumping hundreds of
thousands of feet of the damn stuff into the ocean just to get it off their
books. But even with all that time and footage, he was never able to turn out
a finished film.

Or his _Don Quixote_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_%28unfinished_film...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_%28unfinished_film%29)),
which he started working on in 1955, spent more than a decade shooting, and
which, unfinished and unreleased, he was still tinkering with when he died
thirty years later.

Or _The Other Side of the Wind_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Wind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Wind)),
also unfinished, which was how he spent the first half of the 1970s.

Or _The Big Brass Ring_ ([http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Brass-Ring-
Screenplay/dp/09482...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Brass-Ring-
Screenplay/dp/094823816X)), a massive, turgid lump of a screenplay that he
spent years flacking around Hollywood near the end of his life. (Another
director actually managed to film it in 1999. Don't worry about trying to
track it down. It is terrible.)

The article doesn't mention any of these projects. In fact it really doesn't
mention anything he did after _Ambersons_. But when he walked away from
_Ambersons_ he was only 26 years old! He had more than 40 more productive
years ahead of him. While he filled those years with work, though, he lacked
focus, lacked _discipline_ , and that lack sabotaged him over and over and
over again. He never learned the lesson that "great artists ship." And that's
why the story of his life reads as much like a tragedy as it does a tale of
genius.

~~~
electronvolt
I think he also may have gotten caught in the trap of early success.

If you view projects as something where you need to surpass your previous
work, surpassing something like Citizen Kane, which consistently is named one
of the best movies of all time, seems daunting. I can see why that could lead
to the same sort of paralysis or the same problem of "only working on Big
problems/projects" that Hamming mentions in the repeatedly linked here "You
and your Research".
([http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html))

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myth_buster
I'm a great fan of Welles and I think politics took one of the great creative
geniuses from us. As for workaholism, if you love what you are doing, you
wouldn't want to do anything else. It's a global minima as opposed to being a
local manima and one needs effort to move from there.

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patmcguire
"He didn't sleep for two days, and he slept, ate, and directed from a couch in
the center of the theater." Urgh, lazy wording.

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dctoedt
@dang, out of curiosity, why the title change? The title as posted is that of
the article.

~~~
sctb
We changed the title to another phrase from the article which advertises the
content without the linkbait-y reference to "you".

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vermooten
General note: he made ONE great film (Kane), a few good ones (Ambersons, F For
Fake, Chimes) and the rest were howlers or just dull. I can't watch Lady From
Shanghai because of of his awful accent, plus it's s bit dull. Touch of Evil
was almost good but 45 minutes too long. Genius? Nah.

~~~
myth_buster
I disagree. I believe his narration of "War of the worlds" was incredible and
the opening sequence of "Touch of Evil" is one of the best ever.

He never got the same creative freedom as he got while creating Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane wasn't a blockbuster of it's time as many theaters refused to
play when they came under pressure from Hearst. Following which he spent his
time in England.

His battle with Hearst has been documented in quite a few places[0].

[0] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kane2/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kane2/)

~~~
iiiggglll
It is true that the common wisdom says Hearst destroyed Welles' career as
revenge for Citizen Kane, but I'm not sure it's that cut and dried. For
example, Robert Wise (who worked with him in his early career and eventually
went on to surpass him in terms of success and output) disagreed with the idea
that Welles was held back:

"Not true there was a cabal preventing Orson from making more films. He simply
never fulfilled himself after that magnificent start; his own fault - lack of
self-discipline."[1]

See also this comment[2] right here in this HN story which goes into some more
detail about Welles' chronic string of failed projects.

While Hearst may have done some damage, I think ultimately it was possible to
Welles to recover, but he unfortunately spiraled down the drain instead.

    
    
      [1] http://imdb.com/name/nm0936404/bio
      [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9503266

~~~
myth_buster
This is an interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. I'm not sure I would
take Wise's word on it but anyways this gives me an intriguing angle to dig
deeper.

