The Nighthawks Podcast Salutes Orson Welles

Yes, Always.

A larger than life figure of the 20th Century, Orson Welles’s definitive biography is so jam packed that it was released in three volumes. While the Nighthawks can’t add anything new to the conversation about an artistic powerhouse, but it didn’t stop them from trying.

Taking just a sliver of the man’s life, the Nighthawks explore the years of Orson Welles’s life life and legend in two pieces of work in the years between 1938 and 1941: War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane.

In the next three episodes Matt and Trevor discuss and attempt to dispel some of the rumor and myth surrounding the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. How big was the “panic” and what did it actually look like? And how does the radio show play for a modern ear?

The success of War of the Worlds led to the production of Citizen Kane and the legendary contract that Orson Welles managed to secure from RKO. In another episode Matt and Trevor are joined by Oscar Czar Cameron Maris to try to make heads or tails of a movie that some people say is the greatest American film ever made.

Rounding out our trilogy of Welles, the Nighthawks and Cameron dissect the Citizen Kane homage film Mank from director David Fincher. An inside baseball look at the inside of Citizen Kane, Mank is the movie about the writing of Kane and its troubled scribe Herman J. Mankiewicz.

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