Orson Welles: not a self-destructive failure

From Dennis Lim’s discussion of the new film “Me and Orson Welles” in the New York Times:

“In grappling with an artist who revolutionized every medium he worked in but spent his final decades as a Hollywood outcast and a pop-culture punch line, Welles’s biographers … differ on whether he was a radical genius who fell victim to a callous and conservative system or a self-destructive failure who squandered his abundant gifts.”

A more persuasive viewpoint is to see that Welles was a typical conceptual innovator, achieving his greatest work at a young age, then declining in accomplishments through the rest of his life.

For more on that insight into Welles, see David Galenson’s article “Age and Creativity” (PDF, 2006) in the Milken Institute Review.