Welles, pt. 2

I ordered two Orson Welles movies this weekend: The Stranger, 1946 and The Trial, 1963. I've never seen either one and I'm looking forward to it. I hope they get here before Friday so Gav, Clif, and I can watch them on our annual trip to AZ.--------------------------------------------------------------------->
These movies are really pretty obscure, I think, and that fact got me thinking: Isn't it strange that a character as big and iconic as Orson Welles has only two works, Citizen Kane and War of the Worlds, that are well known "Orson Welle's Features"? Both were created by the time he was 25, and I doubt many of you have actually heard his production of War of the Worlds. But Orson Welles is the "movie director" to most, right? Only Hitchcock is more famous as a "Filmmaker." So what happened to him as an artist? I'm only to age 15 in the bio (which is great), so I can't go deeper right now than the obvious and trite "He got screwed by Hollywood." He did, for sure.
Hollywood didn't know how to handle him. Like the French New Wavers, who worshipped Welles, said, he was an auteur before people thought of directors in that way. Some studio in Hollywood gave him a contract promising "complete artistic control" over two films. They didn't realize that he was a weirdo who was concerned with more than just making them money. It may seem hard to believe now, but I think a director who asked for control, and then took liberties with that control, was something the studios hadn't dealt with before Welles. He was a powerful figure who made a lot of demands. He delivered, artistically, with Citizen Kane, but financially it was a big time flop. Hearst, a man whose influence must have surprised even Welles, blocked the film from theaters and from the press, in effect destroying whatever faith the studios had in him.
FACT (unless Welles was lying, which apparently he often was): He lost his virginity at 9.