Oh, to fail like Orson Welles

Just think what we might have had if RKO Pictures hadn’t abandoned the production of Orson Welles’ film of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”! Can you see Kurtz’s grotesque palace of skulls hidden deep in the Congo? Or the haggard face of Marlow, played by Welles himself, in thick, disfiguring makeup and with a preternaturally deep, weary voice? We have stills and storyboards from the 1939 production, which, as Francois Thomas and Jean-Pierre Berthome relate in “Orson Welles at Work” (Phaidon: 320 pp., $79.95), was canceled because it posed too many difficulties. Among the problems was that the film required too many complicated special effects -- no computer-generated imagery in those days, alas -- that ballooned its budget. Eventually another Welles project was greenlighted instead: a film based on the life of William Randolph Hearst.

“Orson Welles at Work” is a guide -- though hardly an encyclopedic one -- to all the films that Welles finished and also those he might have finished if he had had the money (or the discipline). The book is an elegant reminder that false starts and unfinished projects were a trademark of Welles’ style; his career is bookended by “Heart of Darkness” and “The Smiler With the Knife” at the beginning, “Don Quixote” near the end.

These pages enshrine Welles’ genius -- beautiful black-and-white production stills and pages of scripts showing his scribbles (“start slow walk,” “cigar”) or else larger revisions such as his reorganizing some of Shakespeare’s dialogue in “Macbeth” to his liking. The book celebrates Welles’ youth, looks, vanity, ambition -- to think, after “Kane,” he managed productions of “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Journey Into Fear” and a South American documentary all at once -- and recklessness, which so many biographers say was Welles’ undoing.

Undoing? For all the disappointment people may say characterizes Welles’ career, and no matter how much he may be regarded as a study in talent misguided or overindulged, I flip through “Orson Welles at Work” and think, oh, if we could all fail so well.

-- Nick Owchar