I'm a huge Welles fan, but I find it weird to talk about him as a "workaholic."
Not because he didn't spend a lot of time working (he did! Especially when he was young), but because so little of that time actually resulted in him accomplishing anything. His life story is full of half-finished and only-pushed-out-the-door-because-someone-forced-him-to projects.
Some of these are notorious, like Ambersons, but there are plenty of others. It's All True (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%28film%29), for instance, a vaguely documentary-ish film he spent two years working on in Latin America during World War 2. He shot so much film for It's All True that the studio that eventually inherited it ended up dumping hundreds of thousands of feet of the damn stuff into the ocean just to get it off their books. But even with all that time and footage, he was never able to turn out a finished film.
Or his Don Quixote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_%28unfinished_film...), which he started working on in 1955, spent more than a decade shooting, and which, unfinished and unreleased, he was still tinkering with when he died thirty years later.
Or The Big Brass Ring (http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Brass-Ring-Screenplay/dp/09482...), a massive, turgid lump of a screenplay that he spent years flacking around Hollywood near the end of his life. (Another director actually managed to film it in 1999. Don't worry about trying to track it down. It is terrible.)
The article doesn't mention any of these projects. In fact it really doesn't mention anything he did after Ambersons. But when he walked away from Ambersons he was only 26 years old! He had more than 40 more productive years ahead of him. While he filled those years with work, though, he lacked focus, lacked discipline, and that lack sabotaged him over and over and over again. He never learned the lesson that "great artists ship." And that's why the story of his life reads as much like a tragedy as it does a tale of genius.
Not because he didn't spend a lot of time working (he did! Especially when he was young), but because so little of that time actually resulted in him accomplishing anything. His life story is full of half-finished and only-pushed-out-the-door-because-someone-forced-him-to projects.
Some of these are notorious, like Ambersons, but there are plenty of others. It's All True (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%28film%29), for instance, a vaguely documentary-ish film he spent two years working on in Latin America during World War 2. He shot so much film for It's All True that the studio that eventually inherited it ended up dumping hundreds of thousands of feet of the damn stuff into the ocean just to get it off their books. But even with all that time and footage, he was never able to turn out a finished film.
Or his Don Quixote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_%28unfinished_film...), which he started working on in 1955, spent more than a decade shooting, and which, unfinished and unreleased, he was still tinkering with when he died thirty years later.
Or The Other Side of the Wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Wind), also unfinished, which was how he spent the first half of the 1970s.
Or The Big Brass Ring (http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Brass-Ring-Screenplay/dp/09482...), a massive, turgid lump of a screenplay that he spent years flacking around Hollywood near the end of his life. (Another director actually managed to film it in 1999. Don't worry about trying to track it down. It is terrible.)
The article doesn't mention any of these projects. In fact it really doesn't mention anything he did after Ambersons. But when he walked away from Ambersons he was only 26 years old! He had more than 40 more productive years ahead of him. While he filled those years with work, though, he lacked focus, lacked discipline, and that lack sabotaged him over and over and over again. He never learned the lesson that "great artists ship." And that's why the story of his life reads as much like a tragedy as it does a tale of genius.