When Orson Welles wrote an obituary for the LA Times

Steve Wasserman, the former Los Angeles Times books editor, has some fun remembering his friend Orson Welles in a piece for the LA Review of Books. He tells how the Times in 1979 was about to drop the ball on the death in Beverly Hills of director Jean Renoir when Wasserman, then a deputy editor of the LAT's Sunday Opinion section, decided to somehow get in touch with Welles. They had never met to that point, but Wasserman figured (correctly) that Welles would want to give Renoir a grand sendoff in the section. The tale of the young editor and the old director making first contact is amusing. When the piece came in, hand delivered to the paper's Globe Lobby guard Gus, it was much longer than promised but "every sentence had oxygen in it," Wasserman writes. "The lede was unforgettable." More at LARB.

Wasserman name-checks Ma Maison, the long-ago Melrose restaurant that played such a big part in LA's culinary future.