A healthy bundle of seven restocks came in from Germany today, including Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles,” “Strings” by Anders Rønnow Klarlund,” Jack Hill’s “Switchblade Sisters,” Sam Raimi’s “A Simple Plan,” John Dahl’s “Red Rock West,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Blue Steel,” and Gregg Araki’s “Kaboom.”
Though it includes real-life figures like Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and John Houseman, “Me and Orson Welles” is actually based on a novel of the same name. According to author Robert Kaplow, he conceived of the story after seeing a picture of Welles in Theatre Arts Monthly with fifteen year old actor Arthur Anderson, who played Lucius in the Mercury Theater’s 1937 adaptation of “Julius Caesar.” However, Zac Efron’s character, Richard Samuels, is not based on Anderson. As Kaplow put it: “The story of Richard is invented, but set in the skeleton of this real thing that happened with these real people, although I’ve re-orchestrated it, so to speak.”
“Me and Orson Welles” was not Richard Linklater’s first film depicting real people (1998’s “The Newton Boys” was based on a quartet of bank robbing brothers) or his first picture based on a novel (that would be Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly”), however it is the only one of the director’s 18 feature films to combine the two. The film was named as one of 2009’s top ten independent films by the National Board of Review, and Christian McKay’s performance as Welles — which, astonishingly, was his first film role — earned him a slew of accolades, including BAFTA, Spirit Award, and New York Film Critics Circle Awards nominations for Best Supporting Actor.