The failure of Royal Road Entertainment’s Filip Jan Rymsza and director Peter Bogdanovich to deliver a completed, full-length version of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind in time for the 100th anniversary of Welles’ birth on May 6, 1915 is an unfortunate embarassment. At least F.X. Feeney‘s long-awaited study of the genius filmmaker, “Orson Welles: Power, Heart, and Soul,” has been written and published on time and readable as we speak, and selling for a mere $15. F.X. only sent me a copy last night so I’ve yet to get into it, but Welles biographer Joseph McBride has written that “among the many virtues of Feeney’s book is that it conveys, as no book ever has before, what it must have felt like to be Orson Welles…he manages to give us that sense through his deep empathy, understanding, and close yet still clear-eyed identification.” Here’s F.X. reading from a portion:

A reading of "Orson Welles: Power, Heart and Soul" by author F.X. Feeney from The Critical Press on Vimeo.