“Me, Christian McKay (Orson) and Zac Efron recently went to the site of the original Mercury Theatre where all the action in the movie takes place. It’s crazy how much has changed, but it made me proud that we’d recreated it so well on the Isle of Man. Also, it helped me remember that Zac Efron is much better looking than me.”

“As you can tell if you’ve already seen the film, we’ve gotten Cinna the Poet’s hair exactly right! Or, I should say, Leo Bill, the wonderful British actor who plays the part, got it right. Orson kept cutting and reinserting this famous scene where Cinna the Poet is ambushed by an angry mob, but lucky for us (and for the actor playing Cinna) he decided to keep it in…”

“I’m pretty excited to start showing you some of the actual original production photos that we based a lot of the film’s central images on. This one here is a big company shot from the real 1938 Caesar , and Orson is front and center holding court as Brutus. Our incredible costume designer Nic Ede deserves enormous amounts of credit for bringing these characters to life in our film… ”

“Orson was so punk rock. After the original broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds’ in 1938, CBS Radio and the FCC received millions of letters from terrified listeners. The letter pictured here was from the Trenton, NJ city manager – calling for IMMEDIATE investigations to prevent a “recurrence.” See the full letter plus a letter praising the broadcast HERE from the government archives.”

“Orson the radio man was an entirely different animal. He revolutionized the radio broadcast in America, giving it a beauty and a sense of drama that had never been seen before. One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Orson takes Richard to the radio station to record his program and show him around. We get to see this whole other side to his life…”

“Let’s take a little break from the theatre world and take a look at one of the most famous shots in all of cinema, Welles’ opening shot from the classic 1958 film, Touch of Evil. He shot the whole thing from a crane in one tracking shot – unheard of at the time… “

“Orson and his Mercury Theatre cohorts took some pretty daring liberties with the text, cutting whole pages and whole characters, setting it in fascist Italy, and focusing on making sure the show clocked in at under two hours. Here’s an actual page from the Mercury’s show script. Thanks go out to the University of Indiana for letting us see a lot of this amazing Orson stuff…”

“In the film it’s pretty easy to forget that Orson was only 22 years old during the production of Caesar, since he always carries himself like a seasoned veteran. And though he married socialite Virginia Nicholson when he was only 19, it didn’t stop him from spending “quality time” with most of the other women on his sets. In our film, Zac’s character figures this out pretty quickly…”

“Orson Welles at his desk, backstage at the Mercury Theater. Hopefully Orson himself would’ve been comfortable sitting down at the office on our set and going to work. Everyone in the art department did an amazing job getting the details exactly right.”

“It’s hard to believe that this is what movie trailers used to be, but it’s pretty fun to see so many of the actual faces that are in the film. Wonder what would’ve happened if I’d made Jack Black do something like this for School Of Rock…”