9. Orson Welles - Transformers: The Movie
In many ways Mr Welles is the Godfather of the Pay-Check Movie. His very first movie Citizen Kane (1941) may well be the most influential film ever made, having inspired every director from François Truffaut to Steven Spielberg. However, poking fun at Randolph Hearst - the era's equivalent of Rupert Murdoch - marked his card as a bit of a trouble-maker. Thus, after 1958's Touch Of Evil, he couldn't get a Hollywood studio to finance his movies. As a result he had to take work where he could to raise money for his projects: this included television commercials, talk shows and offering his narrating skills to the heavy metal band Manowar, famed for greasing their naked torsos and wearing loin cloths in their promotional photographs. His acceptance speech when he received his Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute was one long pitch for money. Welles appeared in a ridiculous number of films in addition to his own. Some of them, such as The Third Man (1949), Compulsion (1959), Catch-22 (1970) and The Muppet Movie (1979) were superb, but the majority were pointless fluff. It's hard to acknowledge just one of these movies as being motivated by the paycheck since, by his own admission, they all were. There is, though, one entry in his filmography which stands out like a screaming target and it is The Transformers: The Movie (1985). Long before Michael Bay launched his assault on our senses with his appalling movies about giant robots hitting each other and destroying cities in the process, Orson Welles joined Eric Idle, Leonard Nimoy and Casey Kasem (he did the voice of Shaggy in the Scooby Doo cartoon series) in voicing the characters in an animated version which brought the Hasbro toys to the big screen for the very first time. Back then it was unheard of for a renowned actor to stoop so low as to perform voice work for a cartoon. Nowadays, if you want to rake in the big Pixar bucks, it's the rule. In this, his final film performance, he provided the voice filled with brooding menace for Unicron, the destroyer of worlds. "I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed," was his falteringly dismissive description of his role in the movie. His vagueness about the narrative was compounded his withering summary, I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys. Spitting Image dedicated a sketch to the memory of Orson Welles which suggested that he was such a genius that he deliberately conducted his career in reverse. When we consider the disparity in quality between his first movie and his last it's hard to argue with this twisted logic.