New Orleans Film Festival 2009

The Year is 1937 and Orson Welles, enfant terrible of the theatre world (before embarking on his film career), is about to stage a Broadway production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Seventeen-year-old Richard Samuels (Zac Efron, newly graduated from High School Musical) dreams of treading the boards on Broadway and inveighs to impress Welles with an impromptu audition for the latter's Mercury Production Company. After landing a bit part in the production, young Samuels soon discovers that Welles, a man with large appetites and an even larger ego, is spending as much of his energies romancing the ladies (unhindered by his martial status) as he does tending to the the demands of his theatre company. Young Samuels also gets into the spirit of the thing by commencing an affair with a young production assistant (Claire Danes). Fortunately, Director Richard Linklater found in Christian McKay an actor who inhabits the Welles persona (nails it, if you will), skirting easy caricature. Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo, Jr. adapted the screenplay from the novel by Robert Kaplow of the same name.