Amidst the tangle of obsessions, sexual hangups, and interior panic that characterize Henry Jaglom's angst-ridden comic films, Orson Welles has remained a constant figure. Acting along with Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson, he helped Jaglom launch his first feature film, A Safe Place (1970), and in 1985, he made what turned out to be his last public appearance in Jaglom's current film, Someone To Love (1987). Jaglom in turn, as a consequence of his lifelong admiration of Welles, has faithfully recorded their film consultations over the years in The Jaglom/Welles Tapes: How the Studios Silenced a Genius. He has also used his New York feistiness and almost naive concern with decent human values to champion Welles's failed or aborted projects. Without success, he exhorted his powerful Hollywood producer friends to support Welles's adaptations of The Dreamers (Izak Dinesen's gothic tale) and King Lear, as well as Welles's last original script, The Big Brass Ring. In fact, Jaglom's staunch advocacy of Welles, whom he considers Hollywood's most brilliant director, extended to his outspoken condemnation of the industry's treatment of Welles at the otherwise sedate Hollywood memorial ceremony after Welles's death. Never one to shirk truth-telling no matter the personal cost, Jaglom is doggedly insistent in pursuit of his goals. The story of how he induced Welles to act in his first feature film, A Safe Place, is characteristic. With a letter of introduction from his friend, Peter Bogdanovich, he flew to New York to see Welles at the Plaza Hotel. According to Jaglom, Welles was seated in purple silk pajamas, looking like a big grape, and proclaimed, don't do first films without scripts. Jaglom then asked, But will you at least sit there and listen to me for an hour? Welles royally crossed his arms and equivocally acquiesced-I'll sit here but I won't listen. then the resourceful Jaglom made up a part for Welles on the spot. Since he knew how much Welles liked magic, he told him he could be a magician. And you'll make something disappear-yourself. The guru of American cinema and thereafter Jaglom's lifelong friend-advisor, perked up. Can I wear a cape? he asked, and that clinched it. In a highly unconventional anti-Hollywood film that probes the perilous interior world of a pubescent girl's fantasies and neuroses, Orson Welles became the quirky rabbi/magician/ grandfather who guides her through her troubled adolescence. Once again, in Someone to Love, Welles plays an oracular role. Jaglom himself is the protagonist, a film director named Danny, who invites a group of singles (most of whom are actually Jaglom's friends) to an abandoned historic theater in Santa Monica in order to xplore why each is alone and always seeking someone to love. Periodically, Danny turns to the back of the theater where Welles, playing himself, delivers his provocative philosophy of life. Without the usual embellishments of makeup and the film magic he adores, Welles poses impudent misogynistic reflections on the reasons for Jaglom's generational anxieties . . . the feminist movement, for example. In this let's-make-a-movie movie, where characters and author transgress their roles, Welles is a spatially disconcerting icon-he is both in a seat in the theater and a disjunctively imposed montage. Jaglom has him open the film with an ironic post-mortem statement (Film is always old-fashioned. It is already dead by the time it is on the screen.) and tartly pronounce the film over with the buzz word of his own foiled movie career, Cut! when he thinks Jaglom's film should end because it is getting too sweet.