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The Orson Welles Show

Decent Essays

Orson Welles’ career took place in the mid-thirties to late eighties in the twentieth century. He began his career at age fifteen, starting in Ireland, making his acting debut in the Gate Theater in Dublin. By eighteen, Welles started to appear in off-Broadway productions. It was then that he also launched his radio career. By age twenty, he had presented alternate interpretations of certain well-known plays and movies. At age twenty-two he was the most notable Broadway star from Mercury Theater and, because of this, BBC radio gave him an hour each week to broadcast whatever he pleased. That’s when, at age twenty-five, he broadcast War of the Worlds, which caused panic due to the “Martian invasions”. By the time he came into …show more content…

His Mercury Theater of the Air also set high and new standards for future radio drama productions.
His directing philosophy was that his way was the best way. Welles’ work was solely self-reliant and dependent on his representation of guise. This style/philosophy contributed to the way modern artists presently direct their films and movies. He began his most notable movie, Citizen Kane, with multiple test shots and killed his own character by using a very low angle, as if the viewer was right there, dead, with his character. Welles loved to introduce his films by starting with mysterious, bleak worlds. His main goal was to show future directors that deeply focused camera shots, shadows, askew angles, multiple action points, sound techniques borrowed from radio, and deeply focused shots worked in the favor of the production.
Orson Welles didn’t just impact the filming realm, but, by being an actor himself, showed that he possessed a very strong standpoint on what an ideal actor was. Orson said that, to him, acting “was like a sculpture. It’s what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you're doing that makes a performance. A performance deserves to be considered great or important. It’s always entirely made up of the actor itself and entirely achieved by what he has left in the dressing room before he came into the camera’s view. There’s no such thing as becoming another character by

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