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The Orson Welles series (7 linear ft.) consists of textual material including correspondence, scripts, and personal papers, as well as photographs related to Orson Welles’s work and life outside of the Federal Theater Project, and Mercury Theatre/ Mercury Productions. Papers related to films in which he acted (such as The Third Man ), films he directed (such as Touch of Evil ) theatrical work done in Europe, and personal material related to his family and friends are part of this series.

The Orson Welles series has been organized primarily by production type (e.g. Theater, Radio, and Film) and then chronologically by project. Completed films, theatrical productions, and radio broadcasts are dated according to their first public showing or general release date. Unfinished or unreleased projects are dated according to the year in which most of the work on the project took place.

Correspondence and business papers for each project are located together under the project name. An important exception to this organizational scheme was necessitated by the fact that Welles frequently worked on several projects simultaneously and a single letter or memo may address several projects. Sets of memos and correspondence are filed with the project to which they are most closely related. For example, Welles directed the editing of Macbeth and filmed Othello in between acting roles, including his roles in Prince of Foxes and Black Magic , so discussions of his acting work may occur in the Othello and Macbeth correspondence and production documents.

The relatively small Theatre subseries (approximately one linear inch) relates to theatrical work Orson Welles did before the Federal Theatre project and materials related to Welles’s European theatrical work in the 1950s including The Blessed and the Damned which consisted of two plays by Orson Welles ( Time Runs and The Unthinking Lobster ) and An Evening With Orson Welles , which featured Time Runs , Eartha Kitt singing songs in a variety of languages, and a scene from Othello.

The Film subseries (0.7 linear ft + oversize) contains materials related to the non-Mercury Productions films in which Orson Welles was involved--as director, producer, or actor. This subseries contains photographs, script materials, production correspondence and documents, and newspaper clippings from films such as The Third Man (1949) and The Stranger (1946).

The Name and topical file (roughly 4 linear ft + oversize) consists mostly of correspondence that is not directly related to a particular Welles film, theatre, or other project. An original set of 1973 transcripts of interviews with Orson Welles conducted by director/actor Peter Bogdanovitch that would become the basis of the 1992 book This is Orson Welles are included in this series. Accompanying the transcripts is an April 3, 1973 letter from Bogdanovich's secretary Rita Lowen to Richard Wilson. A few pages of the transcripts are missing, but the set seems to be an otherwise complete record of 11 tapes of interviews.

The most voluminous part (3 linear ft) of the Name and topical file consists of fan mail written to Orson Welles from people all over the world, primarily between 1948 and 1952. A few pieces of personal correspondence between Orson Welles and Richard Wilson unrelated to any particular project as well as several folders of correspondence about the Orson Welles Archive now held at Indiana University are also included in the Name and topical file.

The Personal material (0.5 linear ft + oversize) in the Orson Welles series includes correspondence with Welles’s guardian and father-figure, Maurice A. Bernstein and his wife Hazel. This correspondence is particularly rich and contains: a synopsis of script by Maurice and Hazel Bernstein, childhood drawings by Beatrice Welles, as well as text of letters Orson Welles wrote to Bernstein from Ireland in 1931-1932. Other materials in the personal series, including Welles’s personal appointment book for the year 1947, an album of photographs of Beatrice Welles, tax information, information related to awards and tributes, and a photograph collage of Rita Hayworth represent interesting fragments of Welles’s personal life.