Writers on Film

Citizen Kane. The Magnificent Ambersons. And the film history forgot.

In July 1939, Orson Welles signed a contract with RKO Pictures granting him complete creative control over his films. Less than three years later, he was thrown off the lot.

At RKO, he made two of the most celebrated films in cinema history. He also made Journey Into Fear, a film that has been debated, dismissed, and misunderstood ever since.

Beneath it all lies the mystery: Who actually directed Journey Into Fear: Welles or credited director Norman Foster? Rumors have persisted for decades that Welles ghost-directed the picture, that the good parts were his and the flaws belonged to Foster. The truth is considerably more complex.

Drawn from studio memos, archival correspondence, and production records, this forensic account of the film’s production history uses Journey Into Fear as a case study to illuminate the broader workings of the Hollywood studio system: how it functioned, how it shaped the films it produced, and how it first empowered Welles before ultimately betraying him.

A case study in genius, compromise, and the machinery of Hollywood.

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Bilge Ebiri is a film critic writing in New York magazine and Vulture.

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Nicholas Bell from Eye on Cinema and Fish Jelly YouTube channel joins me to talk Ink, Bucking Fastard and Wild Horse Nine, live from the Venice International Film Festival.

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When it came to filmmaking, Richard Fleischer had big shoes to fill. His father, Max, was one of America's most influential animators. However, Richard's own passions led him not to the animator's desk but to the director's chair.

After garnering an Academy Award for Best Documentary with Design for Death (1948), Fleischer became known for an eclectic mix of pictures such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Boston Strangler (1968), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Soylent Green (1973), and Conan the Destroyer (1984), directing such luminaries as Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Joan Collins, Lee Marvin, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In Richard Fleischer: Journeyman, author Jason A. Ney reveals how Fleischer navigated Hollywood's shifting standards, kept a good-humored outlook on his career, and earned lasting appreciation from those who worked with him. In addition to drawing on Fleischer's archived personal papers, Ney conducted original interviews with his family members as well as dozens of his professional collaborators, which gives the book a behind-the-scenes feel.

This comprehensive biography is the story of a genre-spanning director, a son of a pioneering animator, and a multifaceted man whose art continues to influence filmmakers today.

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From one of cinema’s wisest and most penetrating observers, an arresting new perspective on the sweep of film history.

David Thomson has been called “the greatest living writer on the movies.” Here is a career capstone of sorts—a one-volume history of film and screens as illuminating and provocative as his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film. In tracing the progress, from the Lumiere Brothers to the Coens, Thomson glories in the great movies, but admits to increasing unease over what the medium has done to us—promoting fantasy, misleading models of sexual identity, the cult of authority, power, and happy endings.

This revisionist history is as alert to technology and business as it is to art and fun in tracing our pursuit of the lifelike instead of life. By turns trenchant, lyrical, and comic, Thomson uncovers our addiction to voyeurism and villainy, and a habit of passivity that has betrayed our political and cultural identity. In a survey that reaches from Metropolis to Rear Window to Anora, this will redirect ideas about film everywhere. As The New York Times has put it, “Thomson proves anew that he is irreplaceable.”

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