Infamously, the last showbiz assignment for cinema giant Orson Welles was to voice a robotic villain in the animated 1985 junkball Transformers: The Movie. This 90-minute biographical drama bounces between that grim epoch and the more glorious past of young Welles (played by Anthony Botelho). Welles is at the helm of the upstart theatre company the Mercury Players, accidentally pranking the United States with a docudrama-like radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, and finally unleashing his masterpiece Citizen Kane on an America in the grip of a powerful media baron who could subvert the film’s distribution without breaking a sweat.

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This article was published 5/7/2018 (1106 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Infamously, the last showbiz assignment for cinema giant Orson Welles was to voice a robotic villain in the animated 1985 junkball Transformers: The Movie. This 90-minute biographical drama bounces between that grim epoch and the more glorious past of young Welles (played by Anthony Botelho). Welles is at the helm of the upstart theatre company the Mercury Players, accidentally pranking the United States with a docudrama-like radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, and finally unleashing his masterpiece Citizen Kane on an America in the grip of a powerful media baron who could subvert the film’s distribution without breaking a sweat.

Enabling the flashbacks of the older Welles (Rod McTaggart) is a super-fan (Cora Matheson) working as a lowly production assistant on the "Transmogrifiers" recording studio.

Writer-director Joel Pettigrew fashions the interaction as an inquiry into the futility of trying to make art, but the show’s kick is largely in its imaginative staging of the circumstances behind Welles’ greatest hits. This is a smart, fun show with a nostalgic kick, but as its makers know, it’s designed primarily for people who still believe Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made. 

— Randall King