Despite the system : Orson Welles versus the Hollywood studios

Orson Welles was all too aware, in his later years, that posterity would judge his life to have been essentially a failure: that it would construct a neat parabola of decline that would arc down from his youthful masterpiece, "Citizen Kane", to the wine adverts he used to fund his latter-day imbibing.

In "Despite The System" Clinton Heylin shows brilliantly how Welles was undone by real people, with real motives - and by the circumstances found in a single time and place, Hollywood at the end of its golden era - and yet still succeeded in forging a body of work that, whatever its flaws, is without equal in the history of cinema.

Through shooting scripts, internal memos, on-the-record interviews with protagonists, and Welles' private correspondence and conversations, Heylin grippingly reconstructs the career and life of a man who, by his own admission, was both a compulsive faker and perhaps the one true genius of the silver screen.