Zac Efron in Linklater's 'Me and Orson Welles' Trailer

I don't often invoke the quotes of other critics when discussing a movie but when Roger Ebert says Me and Orson Welles is "possibly the best movie about the theatre I've ever seen" that deserves a little notice. The upcoming Richard Linklater film stars Zac Efron as a teenage actor cast in Welles' theatrical production of Julius Caesar back in the 1930s. British actor Christian McKay portrays Welles. Orson is a subject I know more about than nearly anything else, particularly around this time of his life and career. His Caesar was contemporarized to mirror the rise of fascism in Europe and was performed in modern dress. The production was staged about a year before his War of the Worlds radio broadcast and about two years after a then-20-year-old Welles mounted his famous Voodoo Macbeth. That production of Caesar alone would make for an interesting movie (Ian McKellen's Richard III used similar concepts), but this is obviously a behind-the-scenes coming-of-age tale. Here's the new trailer for Me and Orson Welles, which will hit the Toronto Film Festival in about a month:
Trailer courtesy of Trailer Addict Because I spent two damn years researching the young Welles once upon a time, I'll be really interested in how all of this is portrayed, not that I'm going in expecting the John Houseman version he wrote about in his memoirs. There's another Welles theatrical movie called The Cradle Will Rock that Tim Robbins directed. Angus MacFadyen played Orson in that film, although the best one is the animated Welles that appeared on The Critic. "Rosebud Frozen Peas: Full of country goodness and green pea-ness."

Comments

[anybody]

I may be wrong but didn't this film hit TIFF last year? I think I remember seeing it on the list when I was selecting my ten... isn't it just hitting the theaters in a month?

[Weyward]

There's a forthcoming collection of essays called "Weyward Macbeth" that examines Welles's production among many "non-traditional" versions of "Macbeth" in the United States --

http://us.macmillan.com/weywardmacbeth