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Regardless of how they are invoked, "Citizen Kane" and its director, Orson Welles, are positioned not as distant patriarchal icons of a vanished system but as representative of vibrant artistic struggles against crusty conventions. Arthur examines the plethora of films, documentaries and books on Welles that have flooded the market in recent years.

At the end of Casanova's Big Night (1954), a lame burlesque of romantic swashbucklers, a freeze frame halts an executioner's ax as it swings toward the hero's lowered head. A voice-over narrator intervenes informing the audience of a disagreement between the studio and the film's star over how to end the story: "You've seen our ending. Now we show you one written, produced, and directed by Bob `Orson Welles' Hope." The crux of the joke is clear, if painfully stale: rather than a simple exit, Hope's overweening ego and spendthrift ways demand something more extravagant, in the manner of Hollywood's disinherited `boy genius' (in retrospect, the joke was on Hope since Casanova proved to be the last of his big-budget outings at Paramount). Film audiences of the time were likely aware that Citizen Kane had been spoofed in cartoons within months of its release, and that the zany revue Hellzapoppin' (1941) contributed a clever bit in which a character strolls by a replica of Kane's inimitable sled, remarking, "I thought they burned that." Intertextual quips were a form of industry revenge, and they had been both swift and plentiful.

Forty years later, in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, the eponymous director-who earlier jealously ogled a Kane poster in the office of a potential backer-discovers Welles (or rather an impersonating actor) enthroned in a gloomily-lit booth at the back of Musso and Frank Grill. He sidles over to receive the blessing of the entertainment industry's now-reigning Outcast: "Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dream." Wood, an obvious stand-in for Burton himself and, by inference, his entire filmmaking cohort, is inspired by the exchange and persists in his singular `vision.' The historical transaction inscribed in these two scenes, from object of ridicule to patron saint of an independentminded New Hollywood, is exceedingly rich in design and symbolic meaning. Moreover, the process of rewriting Welles's myth on screen, the outline and social-esthetic impact of his career, passed from the master's own exertions to successive generations of ardent auteurs steeped in movie history and obsessed with claiming a place, however marginal, within that tradition. That Welles himself fashioned the template for contemporary legend-mongering is nowhere more evident than in his 1975 acceptance speech at an AFI lifetime tribute: "There are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of ours who still trudge stubbornly along the lonely, rocky road and this is, in fact, our contrariety...This honor I can accept only in the name of all the mavericks." The occasion, ably rehearsed in Frank Brady's Citizen Welles, proved to be a telling disaster insofar as the recipient's sly public appeal for future production funds went unanswered.

If Welles's public image and later films, particularly Touch of Evil, have become familiar touchstones, Citizen Kane remains at the center of a project in which obligatory allusions to or quotations from American film's modernist wellspring constitute a virtual rite of passage for post-Sixties directors, a fan club including such otherwise disparate talents as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Gus Van Sant, and Todd Haynes. What they appropriate or scenically recast, in what manner and in what context, has helped define their cinematic allegiances and aspirations. Thus in Nixon (1995) Stone recalibrates for an aging counterculture Kane's critique of impotent power, while Van Sant and Haynes force to the surface Welles's latent theme of homosocial intrigue in My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Velvet Goldmine (1998), respectively. It is a case of the proverbial elephant and blind seers, distinct personalities extracting a spectrum of qualities from what is after all a notoriously, self-consciously open-ended text. Nor are all homages equally insightful or earned-the warehouse crane shot, for example, at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is largely gratuitous since Rosebud and Spielberg's ark are almost antithetical as metaphors.

The point is that regardless of how they are invoked, and in contrast to the ostensibly analogous citation of The Searchers or Vertigo, Citizen Kane and its director are positioned not as distant patriarchal icons of a vanished system but as representative of vibrant artistic struggles against crusty conventions of style and narration, struggles with which younger filmmakers immediately identify and from which they derive jolts of creative empowerment. Welles's debut, then, can be said to function as a sort of Primal Scene for contemporary American cinema and it is at the least a happy coincidence that Scorsese, Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Henry Jaglom, and William Friedkin were all born within three years of its release. Although it is highly unlikely that Kane was the first film viewed by any of them, its implicit declaration of esthetic 'rebirth' meshes neatly with the reformist energies of commercial directors following the collapse of the studio system.

Fifteen years after his death, we are suddenly awash in Wellesiana, inundated by Orson. In addition to a barrage of recent biographies, critical monographs, and journal articles, a surprising number of Internet sites, documentaries, made-forcable productions, and one full-scale spectacle have been busy rehashing, reviving, reinterpreting, or merely exploiting Welles's legacy (in a rather skimpy group of thirtythree movies listed by a popular website, www.us.imdb.com, as "referencing" Citizen Kane, twenty-three were made after 1990). Without pretending to comprehensive coverage, what follows is a brief survey of highlights-and lowlights-in this intriguing phenomenon. There are more than a dozen sites devoted to Welles. Some are merely advertisements, including one for an unreleased documentary, Citizen Welles, which also plugs T-shirts, coffee mugs, and videos (www. citizenwelles. com). Operated by the Welles estate, www.bway.net/-nipper/home. html has assembled useful information on the Mercury Theater period but also posts several exotic links to Bernard Herrmannrelated sites. Then there is the hapless www.film.tierranet.com/directors/o. wells, a Spanish language affair with English and French translations. Its "News" page reports that the upcoming Ridley Scott film, RKO 281, will star Edward Norton (Welles), Marlon Brando (Hearst), and Madonna (Marion Davies). Just below this fantasy-league casting call, a blurb for Cradle Will Rock solemnly tells us that the opening of Marc Blitzstein's theater piece was "played without clothing or scenery because of the prohibition it suffered" (no wonder it had such an enthusiastic reception).

By far the most rewarding site is www.unknown.nu/mercury/, featuring a streaming audio catalog of forty-four radio programs directed by Welles in 1938-9 for three different series (he made a total of roughly eighty shows). We can undoubtedly look forward to weighty academic tomes devoted to this work but for now the discovery of subtle formal articulations in storytelling between radio work and films will suffice. To be sure, individual programs are uneven in quality and too often Welles plays the part of Callow Youth, a role for which he evidently had zero chops. In a "Campbell Playhouse" version of The Magnificent Ambersons, complete with station breaks and commercials, he performs as both narrator and Georgie, the latter in a thin, whiny voice that defies sympathy. Nonetheless, the sinuous interrelating of voice-over commentary, diegetic chorus, and dramatic dialog provides an overture to techniques employed not only in the filming of Ambersons but in later films as well. The director's frequently ad-libbed introductions and items such as a bizarre interview with the warden of Sing Sing, appended to The Glass Key, are worth the price of admission.

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Negotiating the skittery line between fictional and nonfiction discourses is a hallmark of Welles's overall career, from The War of the Worlds and Kane's "News on the March" through F for Fake (1973) and Filming Othello (1978). Not unexpectedly, recent documentaries, compilations, and fictional treatments all continue to mine the truth/ illusion chasm in search of unexplored, or simply discarded, angles on the meaning and significance of his art. This line of inquiry is already apparent in Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel, and Bill Krohn's 1993 reconstruction of It's All True, segueing from an informative half-hour documentary on the cultural politics surrounding the director's South American misadventure to a turgid, distinctly un-Wellesian edit of his Brazilian "Jagandeiro" segment-marred by hokey sound effects and a terrible musical score. This dynamic surfaces again in Michael Epstein and Thomas Lennon's 1996 PBS documentary, The Battle Over Citizen Kane. As in other nonfiction treatments, we are given the usual coterie of collaborators reciting favorite stories, interlarded with scraps of shopworn newsreel footage and excerpts from the director's long 1982 BBC interview.

The worst offender in the doc-spinoff sweepstakes is Gary Graver's straight-toDVD Working With Orson Welles (1998), a blatant self-advertisement for the cinematographer's low-end career that trades on his loyal if undistinguished work on late projects. It is hard to decide which aspect of this slapdash effort is more unseemly: a parade of second-echelon actors telling largely unfunny production anecdotes while (badly) imitating the master's voice; softcore shots of a cavorting Oja Kodar, possibly taken as promotional fodder during the filming of F for Fake; or Gary himself, an obviously sincere yet unoriginal acolyte in the "gruffly-lovable-he-was-some-kind-ofa-character" school of remembrance. Only slightly less trivial is Around the World With Orson Welles (1999), a DVD compiling five roving-reporter travelogues from a 1955 Welles-directed BBC television series. The opening installment, "St. Germain Des Pres," has a fascinating off-kilter structure that is, unfortunately, absent in subsequent episodes. Newspaper columnist Art Buchwald is introduced typing a story in the office of The International Herald Tribune; it appears to focus on Welles's peregrinations around Paris's Left Bank. Although he is shown intermittently pounding the keys, what follows is either a filmic illustration of Buchwald's story or yet another example of nested narrators. Welles takes over, interspersing jazz-backed glimpses of street life, voiceover exposition, and on-screen interviews with famous or merely oddball denizens of Parisian culture. Cocteau, de Beauvoir, and dancer Juliette Greco are caught in passing. A pair of Lettreist poets perform a bookstore reading of nonsense verse. Self-styled urban rustic Raymond Duncan is gently interrogated on his philosophy of nonconformism. Despite the overuse of staged setups making it look as if Welles and his subjects were in different locations, the piece bristles with a spiraling energy that is unmistakably authentic.

The two made-for-cable features, Benjamin Ross's RKO 281 and George Hickenlooper's The Big Brass Ring (both 1999), together summarize as they extend the current state of revisionist Orsonography. The former, based on The Battle Over Citizen Kane and scripted by John Logan, veers in the direction of rankly sour demonizing. As incarnated by Liev Schreiber-who at times gets the voice right but little else, missing entirely the director's awkward carriage and childlike sense of pleasure-this Welles is a monster, not simply heedless egotist but a pathologically vindictive bastard. Not only does he bully and humiliate the delicate drunkard Herman Mankiewicz (John Malkovich), the genesis of Citizen Kane and the passion with which it is pursued through ordeals of internal and external interference is bluntly attributed to a sexually-charged dinner table slight by William Randolph Hearst (a typically terrific James Cromwell). Leaning heavily on our current cultural hang-up with the business machinations of Hollywood moviemaking, as spiced by tawdry gossip, the film enlists a roster of historical personages-from Louella Parsons to Gable and Lombard to Louis B. Mayer-to witness a parable focused on outsized, illmatched power addicts.

Ostensibly a story about Welles and Hearst, RKO draws moralistic parallels between two embittered 'marriages' of convenience: the sado-masochistic frictions of Welles-Mankiewicz versus the sweetly pathetic attachment of Hearst and Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith). Even granting his ruthless behavior and anti-Semitism, Hearst is confected here as a warmer, more humane Charlie Kane. As in the wider framework of fictional film allusions, visual quotations and lines of dialog are lifted from Kane then replanted in dramatic situations or characters that flip their original import. Hence Hearst gets to pronounce the fateful epigraph "Rosebud" (his nickname for Marion's nether region); Marion yells at Hearst, "You will not walk out on me this time"; Hearst exclaims "I'm a man who could have been great but was not." Mankiewicz admonishes his cowriter, "You don't give a fuck about anyone but yourself," a sentiment later reprised in a key discussion of "love on one's own terms." By the same token, everyone's favorite production nuggets wend their way through the miseen-scene: Welles studying Stagecoach with Gregg Toland; tearing up studio floorboards for a worm's-eye camera angle. Regrettably, a sense of the method undergirding artistic achievement is all but ignored.

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Certain subtexts and historical assumptions plied in RKO are strangely reminiscent of a strain of psychobiography popularized by writer Fawn Brodie, now employed to channel the unconscious motives of everyone from Ronald Reagan to, well, Orson himself (is that you, David Thomson?). Although the film is scarcely smart enough or ambitious enough to make it stick, its suggestion that Welles's initial contact with Hearst and his lover triggered a deep-seated oedipal resentment is, if not entirely new, the germ of a respectable dramatic enterprise.

Fathers, sons, surrogates, and sexual betrayals are at the core of The Big Brass Ring, adapted by Hickenlooper and film critic F.X. Feeney from a 1979 script by Welles with Oja Kodar (see Frank Brady's biography for a grimly humorous account of the writing process and subsequent string of failures in getting it produced). Not having read the original script, published in an obscure edition, it is hard to say how much of the film's strident revisionism is Welles's doing or that of his adaptors. Intended as a "bookend" to Kane, Hickenlooper takes this premise further by not only updating the tale of familial/political turmoil and switching locations to the American Midwest but also by building a web of associations linking biographical details with inner conflicts embedded in a number of Welles's films. A Kane-like TV reporter (Irene Jacob), bearing a strong resemblance to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, investigates the shady background of independent gubernatorial candidate Blake Pellerin (William Hurt). His political mentor Kim Mennaker (Nigel Hawthorne), a disgraced former senator who raised Pellerin and his half-brotherand may have been his real father's loverdangles a secret that could ruin the candidate's career. The plot is extremely convoluted, with a triple set of black-and-white flashbacks ambiguously depicting the brother's sexual corruption and a Vietnam-era exchange of identities that shields Pellerin from military service.

Once again, allusions to Welles's oeuvre litter the textual landscape: Pellerin prides himself on being a wealthy "man of the people"; Mennaker burns a cherished manuscript in a fireplace; Pellerin suffers a loveless marriage to a dissolute woman. There are a slew of low angles and pseudo-deepfocus shots along with several impressive tracking movements. Like RKO 281, Brass Ring engages the knowledgeable viewer in a game of spotting both flagrant and recondite references. More suggestively, the Pellerin and Mennaker characters merge in a doubly refracted allegory of the public/private Wellesian male, Charlie Kane or Hank Quinlan or Gregory Arkadin haunted by a distant family trauma but equally the figure of self-immolating genius, at once seeker and behind-the-scenes manipulator, who has never quite recovered from the trauma of Citizen Kane. There are too many confusing tabloid twists, too many thematic loose ends, yet the melancholic atmosphere that shrouds Brass Ring hints at a labyrinthine connection between Welles's love of impersonation and the mortal dread concealed by linear storytelling turned inside out.

There is relatively little of Welles as theater director in Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock (1999), a footloose reconstruction of the 1937 WPA Federal Theater Project staging of Blitzstein's Brecht-inspired labor opera. At its best it shapes a mosaic portrait of an incongruous era when political rabble-' rousing was not deemed anathema to popular entertainment. Except, of course, by the film's agitprop villains: the clownish hacks of HUAC, the shabbiest show in town, and Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack), who famously jackhammers Diego Rivera's (Ruben Blades) New York mural. In simultaneously representing, embodying, and endorsing an ethics of democratic ensemble collaboration, Cradle sets in motion a rather ambitious agenda that proves not always cohesive or fully realized. In this context, Welles (Angus Mcfayden) is practically devoid of progressive beliefs; he manages to diss Stalin as "elitist" over champagne at the 21 Club but his vision of a "people's theater" is reduced to the boast that it should "piss off all the right people." Spouting the dubious side of a polemical opposition between theater as a form of religious calling and theater as a determinate mode of skilled labor, Welles is indirectly challenged first by an anonymous immigrant on an employment line-"I dig ditches, pour slag, act; it makes no difference"-then by the theater company's resident union organizer (Jamie Sheridan) who believes an artist's work should be governed by the same rights and demands as industrial labor.

Somewhere in the middle of this argument stands WPA theater guru Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), the film's real heroine and only character without crippling contradictions. According to Welles's producer-partner John Houseman in his memoir RunThrough, Flanagan urged that "the theater is more than a private enterprise; it is also a public interest which, properly fostered, might come to be a social and an educative force." Writer-director Robbins is at pains to demonstrate not only the historical salience of this view but, by implication, its potential for reinvigorating a brain-dead commercial cinema. A valiantly utopian theatrical finale reconciles the clanging exigencies of rich and poor, immigrant and WASP, young and old, straight and gay. The extension of this heady prescription to encompass cinema becomes evident in a sort of visual tagline as Robbins pans from an impromptu street demonstration cum 'funeral' in period costume to present-day Disneyfied Times Square. The worthy question posed by the ending would seem to be: Is there a place for socially-conscious art in our `conglomerated world'?

If theater director Welles is relegated to a minor, loutish role, film director Welles once again takes centerstage in Cradle's stylistic design. It commences with a Kane-like newsreel cueing the period's pressing social and political issues-faux newsreels also kick off RKO 281 and The Big Brass Ring-then choreographs a spectacular long-take Steadicam shot meant to rival the opening movement of Touch of Evil. While not as zealous at gleaning visual or verbal references, here the bracketing of Welles's legacy as a catalog of exciting but politically empty effects does him perhaps a greater disservice. To be sure, his commitments never strayed very far from those of New Deal liberalism and he evidently had little truck with Hollywood Communists. Yet he was an instinctive populist and ardent antiracist who despite a storied arrogance reveled in collaborative exchanges with almost anyone in his path. Cultural historian Michael Denning, in "Towards a People's Theater: The Cultural Politics of the Mercury Theatre," persuasively argues for the intersection of Welles's artistic practices and Popular Front initiatives of the Thirties. It is hardly surprising, however, that such considerations are smothered by a more easily digested mythic gruel of `Outcast Genius.' As Kim Mennaker proclaims in The Big Brass Ring: "Posterity is a whim, a shapeless litter of old bones, the midden of a vulgar beast." We should be thrilled that there is currently a multitude of Welles on view, but take heed of how much remains in shadow.

Thanks to Robert Kaltz, who has forgotten more Hollywood minutiae than I'll ever know.

Distribution Sources:

Working with Orson Welles: DVD, color and black and white, 94 mins. Distributed by Image Entertainment, 9333 Oso Ave., Chatsworth, CA 91311, phone (818) 407-9100, www.image-entertainment.com.

Around the World with Orson Welles: DVD, black and white, 134 mins. Distributed by Image Entertainment.

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RKO 281: VHS, color, 87 mins. Distributed by HBO Home Video.

The Big Brass Ring: A Showtime cablecast.

Cradle Will Rock: VHS, color, 133 mins. Distributed by Touchstone Home Video.