ORSON WELLES HAD EVERYTHING — AND LOST IT ALL BEFORE THAT FINAL MORNING

On the morning of October 10th, 1985, Oja Kodar arrived at a rented house in Las Vegas and found Orson Welles dead at his typewriter. He was seventy years old. The script was still in the machine. At twenty-five he had made what many consider the greatest film in the history of cinema. He had the contract no director had ever been given — full creative control, final cut, no studio interference. He used it to make Citizen Kane. Then RKO cut fifty minutes from The Magnificent Ambersons and destroyed the footage. The Hollywood career was over before it fully began. For the next forty years he financed his own films by acting in other people's. He applied for grants. He pitched to studios. He made wine commercials so he could keep working on the films nobody would pay for. The Other Side of the Wind took fifteen years to shoot and was still unfinished when he died. It wasn't released until 2018 — thirty-three years after that morning in Las Vegas. He never stopped working. He never stopped believing the next film was worth making. The heart stopped before the work did. Tonight we tell the full story of what he had, what was taken, and what he was still fighting for at seventy years old at a rented typewriter in a rented house with everything gone except the work.