Unloving Cinema's Past

Every few months, Twitter rediscovers Orson Welles’s conversations with the actor Henry Jaglom in the late 1970s, in which the filmmaking colossus spits a number of sick burns at the creatures he believes to be destroying the art form that banished him. Alfred Hitchcock is self-seeking and lazy, and Woody Allen is pathetically insecure, says a bloated and alcoholic screen legend-turned-Hollywood outcast. The Jaglom conversations expose how easily an uncompromising sense of artistic ethics can slip into bitterness.