In 1931, a sixteen-year-old American traveling Ireland by donkey cart walked into Dublin's Gate Theatre, claimed to be a Broadway star, and talked his way onto a professional stage. This episode traces how that audacity, forged by a childhood marked by his mother's death when he was nine and his alcoholic father's death when he was fifteen, drove Orson Welles to revolutionize theater, radio, and film before the age of 25.

The discussion covers the Voodoo Macbeth staged with 150 African-American performers, the anti-fascist Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre, the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast that bent reality with sound alone, and the unprecedented RKO contract with final cut that produced Citizen Kane. It then follows the studio's recutting of The Magnificent Ambersons while Welles was in South America, his years funding Othello with  ...