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The Hollywood Film Festival(tm) salutes one of the greatest contributors to the art of filmmaking with its Tribute to Orson Welles, showcasing screenings of his rarely seen films Mr. Arkadin (1955), The Trial (1962), F for Fake (1973), and a documentary by Mr. Welles never seen before -- Filming Othello (1977).

Orson Welles was more than a director, producer, writer, and actor. He was also a cinematic pioneer, his work ambitious, unique, imaginative, daring and ultimately highly regarded and influential. In the words of Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles was "responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than anyone else in the history of the cinema."

Mr. Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father was an inventor and manufacturer and his mother a talented pianist. Mr. Welles was regarded as a prodigy from early childhood and his creative abilities were encouraged and nurtured. He made a successful career for himself on stage and radio starting at an early age, and he made his Broadway debut as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliett when he was 19. He collaborated on a number of projects with director/producer John Houseman, including a highly successful staging of Macbeth in Harlem with an all-black cast under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project. Mr. Welles and Mr. Houseman formed their own repertory company, the Mercury Theater, in 1937, and staged a highly acclaimed modern version of Julius Caesar which drew parallels to fascist Italy at that period in time.

Mr. Welles and the Mercury Players gained nationwide attention on CBS radio in their weekly dramatic program "Mercury Theater of the Air." The most famous and notorious show was their broadcast of the radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds on Halloween in 1938, "reporting" the landing of Martians in the U.S. The fictional news coverage of the "invasion" on the radio program seemed so real to many listeners that the broadcast caused a panic.

Mr. Welles was brought to Hollywood by RKO, and his contract included unprecedented creative freedom for an untried filmmaker. After failing to get two projects off the ground, he made his extraordinary debut in 1941, when he was only 25, with the film Citizen Kane, the study of a tycoon based on William Randolph Hearst, a film regarded by many as the best film ever made. (Mr. Welles produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in Citizen Kane. He and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz won the Academy Award for Best Writing. He also received nominations for Best Actor and Best Director, and the film was nominated for Best Picture.)

Mr. Welles's second film for RKO was The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel. While Mr. Welles was off in South America working on It's All True, the studio made severe cuts in The Magnificent Ambersons and shot a new ending. Though highly regarded by critics, and nominated for several Academy Awards, the film was not a commercial success, and Mr. Welles and RKO parted company soon after. Mr. Welles also produced and acted in the thriller Journey into Fearr at that time.

In 1948 Mr. Welles co-starred with his estranged wife Rita Hayworth in the film The Lady from Shanghai (Columbia Pictures), his film noir tour-de-force that ends with a famous hall-of-mirrors shootout. He then moved back to his love of Shakespeare with the first film in his Shakespearean trilogy, Macbeth (1948). The second and third films were Othello (1952) which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and Chimes at Midnight (1966) also known as Falstaff.

Soon afterward he wrote, directed, and acted in Mr. Arkadin (1955) also known as Confidential Report, a Citizen Kane-like film about the investigation into a powerful man's past, then directed and acted in the film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil (1958). In 1962 in Europe, he made the The Trial (1962), based on Frank Kafka's novel. His final completed film was F for Fake (1973), part documentary and part staged footage about Clifford Irving and his hoax Howard Hughes biography, as well as legendary art forger Elmyr de Hory.

Mr. Welles also worked throughout his career as an actor in scores of films, including such movies as Black Magic, Prince of Foxes, and The Third Man, as well as performing on stage, radio, and television. Some of the other films in which Mr. Welles appeared include Jane Eyre, Follow the Boys, The Stranger, Duel in the Sun, The Black Rose, Trent's Last Case, Trouble in the Glen, Three Cases of Murder, Napoleon, Moby Dick, Man in the Shadow, The Roots of Heaven, The Long Hot Summer, Compulsion, Ferry to Hong Kong, Battle of Austerlitz, The, Crack in the Mirror, Lafayette, A Man for All Seasons, Casino Royale, The Immortal Story, Oedipus the King, House of Cards, Waterloo, The Kremlin Letter, and Catch-22.

In the late 1970s Mr. Welles began work on a series of documentaries about his movies, including Filming Othello, a documentary about the filming of his movie Othello, which has never been seen before.

At the time of his death on October 9, 1985, Mr. Welles was working on The Other Side of the Wind, a film he had begun filming in the 1970s, about a famous filmmaker (played by actor John Huston) and his struggle to find financing for his film. Mr. Welles himself spent much of his career traveling around the world in search of backing for his film projects. He once said that film "is the most expensive mistress that anyone could have, and I've been trying to support her ever since [my first picture]. It's a love you never cure yourself of."