Orson Welles, one of history's great workaholics
vox.com
vox.com
His voice shook the theater and is unmistakable to me to this day.
One of the greatest voice casting decisions of all time and one of his last roles.
' You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy." He elaborated, "I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen." '
On the flip side, it's an example of how far you can push yourself when you're truly passionate about something.
(Paraphrasing) “Lots of people talk about workaholics, but hardly anyone mentions workaholism”.
Once you couch it in the latter term, it loses its patina of virtuousness.
Not because he didn't spend a lot of time working (he did! Especially when he was young), but because so little of that time actually resulted in him accomplishing anything. His life story is full of half-finished and only-pushed-out-the-door-because-someone-forced-him-to projects.
Some of these are notorious, like Ambersons, but there are plenty of others. It's All True (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%28film%29), for instance, a vaguely documentary-ish film he spent two years working on in Latin America during World War 2. He shot so much film for It's All True that the studio that eventually inherited it ended up dumping hundreds of thousands of feet of the damn stuff into the ocean just to get it off their books. But even with all that time and footage, he was never able to turn out a finished film.
Or his Don Quixote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_%28unfinished_film...), which he started working on in 1955, spent more than a decade shooting, and which, unfinished and unreleased, he was still tinkering with when he died thirty years later.
Or The Other Side of the Wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Wind), also unfinished, which was how he spent the first half of the 1970s.
Or The Big Brass Ring (http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Brass-Ring-Screenplay/dp/09482...), a massive, turgid lump of a screenplay that he spent years flacking around Hollywood near the end of his life. (Another director actually managed to film it in 1999. Don't worry about trying to track it down. It is terrible.)
The article doesn't mention any of these projects. In fact it really doesn't mention anything he did after Ambersons. But when he walked away from Ambersons he was only 26 years old! He had more than 40 more productive years ahead of him. While he filled those years with work, though, he lacked focus, lacked discipline, and that lack sabotaged him over and over and over again. He never learned the lesson that "great artists ship." And that's why the story of his life reads as much like a tragedy as it does a tale of genius.
If you view projects as something where you need to surpass your previous work, surpassing something like Citizen Kane, which consistently is named one of the best movies of all time, seems daunting. I can see why that could lead to the same sort of paralysis or the same problem of "only working on Big problems/projects" that Hamming mentions in the repeatedly linked here "You and your Research". (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)
He was a genius, but was unable to compromise to make commercial reality, and like many workaholics, his star burnt oh so brightly, but went out predictably fast.
He never got the same creative freedom as he got while creating Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane wasn't a blockbuster of it's time as many theaters refused to play when they came under pressure from Hearst. Following which he spent his time in England.
His battle with Hearst has been documented in quite a few places[0].
"Not true there was a cabal preventing Orson from making more films. He simply never fulfilled himself after that magnificent start; his own fault - lack of self-discipline."[1]
See also this comment[2] right here in this HN story which goes into some more detail about Welles' chronic string of failed projects.
While Hearst may have done some damage, I think ultimately it was possible to Welles to recover, but he unfortunately spiraled down the drain instead.
[1] http://imdb.com/name/nm0936404/bio
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9503266