2. Orson Welles
Of all American directors, Orson Welles might be the most mythical, the one most associated with cinematic excellence, and a symbol for artistic integrity whose fight for control of his productions brought him down from a filmmaking wunderkind to a broken shell of a man. In a review of his last directorial effort, noted critic Roger Ebert summed his up career brilliantly by saying he "can make better movies than most directors with one hand tied behind his back. His problem, of course, is that for 35 years the hand has remained tied. His career is a study in lost possibilities." A jack of all trades, Welles not only directed movies but produced them, wrote them, starred in them, and he was also was active in the theater and was responsible for the most infamous radio broadcast in history. His success at a young age led to an unprecedented move by Hollywood, who gave the 26 year old director complete artistic control of a motion picture, which went on to become Citizen Kane, by far the most important American film after Birth of a Nation. Since Citizen Kane was a loose attack on William Randolph Hearst, one of the wealthiest men in the world who tried his best to stop the movie from ever being released, the film flopped and his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was tampered with by the studio who tacked on a different ending from what Welles intended. Although Welles arguably got the last laugh with the ongoing acclaim of Citizen Kane, Hearst succeeded in effectively ruining Welles's career. He never had complete control over his productions and although he made many more classic films, legal issues and distribution problems have resulted in them being criminally underseen and many have still not been released on DVD. Just with Citizen Kane, Welles introduced a host of innovative techniques that would be endlessly emulated such as non-linear storylines, original uses of lighting, deep focus, and innovative sound techniques. Although he was in many ways a tragic figure who became more and more marginalized by Hollywood later in his career, Welles remains the ideal director in the eyes of many, someone who was enormously creative, innovative, resourceful, versatile, uncompromising, and artistic. Circumstances beyond his control unfairly unharmed his career but he contributed more to cinema than all but a few filmmakers in history.