Pandit

Akash P. Pandit

Professor Rennie Mapp

ENWR 1510-051

The Culture of Celebrities

7 December 2014

The Developing Power of Technology and the Growth in Power of the

Modern Celebrity: Orson Welles and the Impact of Digital Media on

Celebrity Culture

Orson Welles should be regarded as the father of modern day

celebrity culture and the pioneer of the use of digital media as form of mass

manipulation and propaganda to further his own image and works. The

legendary aura surrounding the man who went from being an acclaimed

performer of Shakespeare; to critically acclaimed orator, who grasped the

hearts and fears of his radio listeners with his chilling broadcast of War of

the Worlds; and who went to direct, co-write, produce, and star in Citizen

Kane, a movie considered by many to be the greatest film ever made, cannot

be underestimated as he developed the first inkling of modern day celebrity

culture. An analysis of Welles’ life is crucial to the understanding of the

development of not only celebrity culture and fame in the late 1930s but

also in understanding the power that the advancement of technology has on

the ability of a celebrity to influence society.

Welles began his ascent into stardom as a young man, who was put to

work by President Roosevelt’s Federal Theatre Project during the Great

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Depression, by directing an adaptation of Macbeth, which the young man

altered by setting in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe and

debuted as Voodoo Macbeth. This began his rise to fame, as the play quickly

became the most widely acclaimed play in the nation and Welles was

dubbed a prodigy. (Walsh 15) However, he was also leveled with much

criticism as he had chosen to cast an all-black cast for his rendition of the

Shakespeare classic, during a time when racial tensions had begun to rise

due to increasing poverty and disparity. Welles was such a proponent of his

cast that he himself flew out to Los Angeles to perform in blackface due to

an injury suffered by his lead actor.

Welles began to use his recent successes to increase the clout of his

own image by breaking away from the Federal Theatre Project and forming

his own repertory company, the Mercury Players. (Walsh 16) He truly shot

to stardom due to his production of Caesar, a groundbreaking Broadway

adaptation of Julius Caesar set in the modern day, and which ends with

Caesar being killed not by a mob but by the secret police. This marks Welles

first foray into modern celebrity culture as he began to use his status as a

celebrity and a well-known figure to criticize political actions of the period,

a well-established maneuver of modern celebrities in order to manifest their

political leanings to the public. This also establishes the phenomenon

surrounding celebrities that Carrier establishes in his critic of Herwitz, that

it was not “the rapt contemplation of the art object that characterized the

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ways of awe... This is false nostalgia...orchestrated his market...devoted a

great deal of attention to cultivating his patrons.” (Carrier 118)

This analysis of celebrity culture can be easily applied to Welles as he

sought to manipulate his newfound stardom into a political movement as

Newbury states “claims for a marginalized audience’s transgressive

appropriation of celebrity only make sense when we fully understand the

specific quality of the ideological contest wages through a given figure.”

(Newbury 274) This aspect of celebrity status is clearly present in Orson

Welles’ life as Caesar sought to critique the government and society as a

whole, as a man of power was brought down not due to a disagreement with

an opponent but with his own government. This same critique was also

brought up by Welles at the latter part of his career as he was identified to

be a Communist sympathizer by the McCarthyism post WWII, as he sought

to bring to the attention of the public how public figures were being

brought down not due to legitimate reasoning, but by fear and antipathy

within the government.

Welles also presents a unique opportunity to study and understand

the phenomenon of modern celebrities as he became first true star to move

past live stage shows and with the advent of radio and television, truly

became the first star of a digital era. He became the first celebrity, aside

from President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, to take the radio and turn it from

a means of news dissemination to a method of augmenting their status as

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celebrities while also proliferating their own viewpoints into mass

acceptance in the public mind. The best example of Welles’ genuine star

power was his petrifying radio drama of H.G. Well’s classic, The War of the

Worlds. Welles was able to exploit his preeminence as a respected stage

actor to convince and terrify hundreds of listeners into believing that a

Martian invasion was occurring. This incident is acute indication of the

power that the phenomena of a celebrity can have on mass public thought

as evidenced by Newbury, who states that “the celebrity signifies most

importantly the triumph of unreality...whose interests are privileged within

the world of the image and how they came to be dominant are less

important than the fact of the imagistic world itself.”(Newbury 278)

This incident absolutely entrenched Orson Welles as a bona fide

luminary in pre-WWII society as he was now able to command respect in

any room and conversation that he entered as well as being able to inject

his personal viewpoints into societal discourse, as many people began to

view him in the same stratosphere as politicians, world leaders, and

mobsters. However, unlike any other celebrity before him, Welles was not

content to remain in the public eye for only a few years and then fading

away into obscurity; rather, he decided to venture into the new media of

film and became “something even better than a living legend: a certifiable

genius.” (Simon) He did this through a now-common trait of diversifying his

fame by appearing in more than one form of media and allowing his image

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to spread throughout society and passing the power of extending his status

onto the public.

Citizen Kane is the eminent, paramount example of Orson Welles’

ability to project his image to the public as his artistic credential and

celebrity status had allowed him to secure an unprecedented movie contract

that allowed him unrestricted creative and administrative license. He

utilized this to create a cinematic masterpiece that is regarded as the most

innovative and controversial film of prewar Hollywood, by not only

directing, but also producing, writing, and starring as the titular character.

This was an unprecedented move in the celebrity industry of the time as

Welles decided to take on the traditional definition of celebrity, by

branching out from one rigid discipline and expanding into all relevant

disciplines needed to create this new form of media. As Schatz presents on

the film “It was Orson’s image, and his uncanny ability to attract attention

to it..., the fact that, before or since, no one in Hollywood has carved out

such freedom for himself.” (Schatz 90) This movie presented a unique shift

in celebrity culture and idolization as Welles became one of the first people

to shift into pushing his image and works throughout all forms of media

available for consumption to the masses, rather than being tied down to one

specialty of brand recognition. This is also a vindication for the

advancement and introduction of technology in the phenomenon of celebrity

creation, as celebrities were now free to explore and venture into areas of

content creation that were previously denied to them. (Hoberman 168)

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The greatest denouement of Orson Welles’ life as a celebrity was his

decision to distance himself from his works, move away from the public eye,

and regain semblance of a normal life after the McCarthyism and Red Scare

that affected the country during and post World War II. This can be certified

to be Welles greatest achievement in the advancement of the celebrity as a

power player in society and in generation of culture, as he decided to leave

the entertainment industry while at the height of his stardom and power ,

due to obvious issues with loyalty from his audiences and his own

government as well as the proposed limitations that film studios wished to

place on him in order to control and censor his content.(Hoberman 169)

This can be considered to be the greatest advancement in celebrity

power since the creation of copyright protections for written works as it

allowed celebrities to control the creation of content available to society

and allowed them to dictate how and when their images were to be used

and for what purposes. This along with his ability to embrace technological

advancements and his ability to diversify his modes of creation, are what

allowed Welles to become the first truly modern celebrity that can be

associated with a genuine acquirement of power from the will of the people,

as he allowed the people to dictate his success. Orson Welles was truly the

greatest phenomenon of not only his generation, but of all time, as he

transcended all boundaries within culture and society to go from a clichéd,

unemployed, starving actor to the most powerful character in entertainment

, to becoming a remnant of an era gone by where radio and films were the

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dominant form of mass culture and aggrandizing the power of the celebrity

as an icon for societal shifts.

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Works Cited

Carrier, David. "The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption." Journal of Aesthetic Education 45.2 (2011): 117-19. Project Muse. Web. 7 Dec. 2014. 

Hoberman, J. "Pop Before Pop: Welles, Sirk, Hitchcock." Artforum International 5 (2011): 168. Academic OneFile. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

Newbury, M. "Celebrity Watching." American Literary History (2000): 272-83. Project Muse. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

Schatz, Thomas. "Orson Welles and Citizen Kane." Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.

Simon, John. "The Magician." American Scholar 62.4 (1993): 622. Religion and Philosophy Collection. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane. Madison, Wis.: U of Wisconsin/Popular, 2004. Print.