Recently I was thinking about the legendary actors who, in their older years, become shills for life insurance companies or denture adhesives. Even Orson Welles, whose film, Citizen Kane, is regarded by many critics as the best film ever made, succumbed to gulping goblets of wine on the small screen to proclaim that Paul Masson would “Sell no wine before its time.”

Showtime has put together a documentary, airing Monday, October 27, 11:35 a.m., entitled Orson Welles: The One Man Band, that will remind people of why this man was more than just a hawker for cheap wine.

Narrated by actor/director Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles follows Welles’ acting life from his humble beginnings in 1937 when Welles began working with John Housman to form the Mercury Theater. In 1938 The Mercury Theater went to radio to broadcast their version of War of the World, in which Welles and the gang told the story as if it were an actual news report. With that one radio show Welles sent panic across the nation as many paid no attention to the in-between warnings that this was just a radio show. People ran to churches, had heart attacks; some allegedly even committed suicide (so the rumor goes) with the fear that the end of the world had started. From the very beginning, Welles power to fuel his imagination and entertain, as well as get people to think, is evident. Orson Welles examines the career of the man who was more famous than his works.

In 1941 Welles released his first movie, over which he had 100% control (something unheard of at the time), which upon its release lost the film studio $150,000. Although commercial failure, Citizen Kane remains a film classic.

The documentary follows Welles through his other films (most of which were commercial failures) up to Touch of Evil in 1958, where Welles plays a corrupt detective and Charlton Heston plays, would you believe, a Mexican. Another flop, the film earned Welles a prize at the Brussels World’s Fair.

After several other commercial failures, Welles won the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award — not bad for a guy whose films made no money but had a profound effect on filmmaking.

Let this documentary be a lesson to all of us who go to the movies to see people like Ben Affleck ahem act or ‘directors’ like Michael Bay turn out putrid messes of mindless video fodder.

Once upon a time there was a place called Hollywood where a King named Orson once walked through his palace, only to be removed from his throne and exiled to Europe by a bunch of men who decided art that didn’t make any money was useless. Orson Welles:The One Man Band is a documentary that helps viewers learn how good films (and good actors and directors, for that matter) were, at one time, very important and how cruel a place Hollywood is to filmmakers whose works are full of integrity but lack the box office draw. Tube into Orson Welles:The One Man Band on Monday, October 27 at 11:35 a.m.