Despite The System: Orson Welles vs. the Hollywood Studios - Tapa blanda

Heylin's opinionated book is a powerful vindication of Welles. * * The Observer * * Never less than provocative . . . It is twenty years since Welles' death and Despite the System justifies the existence of yet another book on his career by setting the record straight on a number of key matters . . . Heylin convinces us that the wonder of Orson Welles is not how small a legacy he left but how he ever managed to achieve so much. * * The Times * * it has earned a place on the film buff's bookshelf. * * The Tribune * * After at least five great books on Orson Welles and numerous important essays and documentaries, you'd think that there'd be little left to say about the great director. Despite the System shows that this is not the case. Clinton Heylin has taken one theme in Welles' switchback career - his conflict with Hollywood - and made a clear, engrossing, sometimes contentious, book of it. -- Mark Cousins

In Despite The System Clinton Heylin shows brilliantly how Welles was undone by real people, with real motives, and yet still succeeded in forging a body of work that, whatever its flaws, is without equal in the history of cinema: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch Of Evil, et al. Using shooting scripts, internal memos, on-the-record interviews and private correspondence, Heylin grippingly reconstructs the career and life of a man who, by his own admission, was both a compulsive faker and perhaps the one true genius of the silver screen.