13. Orson Welles changed history by using his own money to finance his films
Hollywood of its own so-called Golden Age was famous for its use of what was known as the studio system. Actors and directors were employees of the studios, giving the largest of the studios the power to decide what films were made, what views they presented, and who appeared in them. One of Hollywood’s most successful studios – United Artists – was founded by stars Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, in part because it allowed them freer artistic expression in their own films, though the studio was soon itself part of the hide-bound system of Hollywood in the era. Independent films were rare, for the simple reason that having the money to make them was rare, a situation that worsened during the years of the Great Depression.
Orson Welles, whether admired for his body of work or not, did not change the studio system, but he certainly challenged it, by reaching into his own pockets to produce his films in defiance of the studio systems of the day. In them, he pioneered the use of sound in ways still emulated by filmmakers, including pioneering techniques that added a third dimension to the experience of viewing and hearing motion pictures. His radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938 did not create the legendary panic so often associated with it, but Welles changed the world by insisting that it did, and in so doing he instilled his own legend in American history. Welles was an actor, director, producer, broadcaster on radio and television, entrepreneur, raconteur, and eventually a caricature of himself, remembered by a younger generation, if at all, as an obese wine advertiser solemnly intoning that he would sell “no wine before its time”.