Me and Orson Welles: The Film
"One of the best films I have ever seen about the theater."
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
"One of the year's ten best."
—David Denby, The New Yorker
"Art is a fairy tale we choose to believe in, and this movie, a fiction confected about real people, is too good not to be true."
—The New York Times
Me and Orson Welles: Film Trailers
U.S. trailer
U.K. trailer
Me and Orson Welles: Film Reviews
A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal
Philip French, The Guardian/Observer
Ten Best Films of 2009, The New Yorker
Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor
Me and Orson Welles: Background
Kaplow wrote "Me and Orson Welles" in 1993 and 1994 during one of two sabbaticals he took from teaching. The story is a valentine to his father, Jerome, to whom the book is dedicated. The former Checker Cab Co. executive served as a model for the book's protagonist, Richard Samuels, a 17-year-old senior at Westfield High during the fall of 1937.
As narrated by Samuels over the course of a week, Welles is about to inaugurate his Mercury Theater on Broadway with a production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The budding director/actor, in a moment of characteristic capriciousness, recruits Samuels off the street to play the bit part of Lucius, a servant of Welles' Brutus. The teenager learns in the action that follows that heroes can have feet of clay; falling in love with a beautiful, ambitious production assistant is hard on the heart; and fame can be a corrupting force. [From a piece by James Poyner published by Salon.]
