"What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career" challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles's career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welle's artistically rich yet little know later period in the United States (1970-1985) when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970-1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's satire of Hollywood during the Easy Rider era. McBride gives a unique, inside perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles's widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker's entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles's Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile.

Joseph McBride is the author of twenty-two books, including acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg, two other books on Welles, and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. A former reporter, reviewer, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood, McBride is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.