LAKE PLACID – Had he lived, Orson Welles would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, and there’s a very good chance Larry Jackson would have been invited to the party.

As a filmmaker, Jackson truly has done it all. He served as the production manager on “The Other Side of the Wind,” Welles’ unfinished masterpiece that may one day find its way to the viewing public. He worked as the production manager for the East Coast shoot of “Filming Othello,” a documentary Welles directed. He wrote, directed, produced and distributed “Bugs Bunny Superstar,” a documentary about Looney Tunes narrated by Welles. He helped Robert Redford plan the creation of the Sundance Institute. As an executive in charge of production, he oversaw the creation of “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Mystic Pizza.”

Today, Jackson teaches at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, and, through his company, Persistence of Vision, develops feature film projects and counsels up-and-coming filmmakers on the ins and outs of the film industry.

On Friday and Saturday, Jackson will introduce screenings of two of Welles’ films, “Touch of Evil” and “Chimes at Midnight,” at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts as part of the Adirondack Film Society Screening Series’ celebration of the Orson Welles centennial.

Jackson, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, credited Welles with inspiring his interest in the arts. At the age of 8, Jackson saw Welles play a preacher in John Huston’s “Moby Dick,” and it showed him the possibilities of the art form.

“I asked my dad, ‘Who was this man?'” he said. “He said, ‘Well, he’s an actor named Orson Welles who is best known for scaring the pants off of America with a radio broadcast in 1938 and for making a movie called ‘Citizen Kane,'” and from that point on, I wanted to see everything I could that had to deal with this extraordinary, magical man. That opened me up to cinema.”

After graduating from Cornell University, Jackson became the managing director of the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971. Although Welles was unaffiliated with the theater, he had given its backers permission to use his name via telegram, and the theater’s lawyer informed Jackson he would need to secure an actual contract with Welles, who had been living in Europe for a number of years. In 1973, after telling Welles’ secretary he would meet Welles anywhere in the world if he could have just 20 minutes of his time, Jackson flew to Madrid to meet his idol.

“This is the guy who formed my whole interest in cinema, who has been my hero since I was 8 years old, and I walk in, and he’s seated at the table with his producer and his girlfriend, and it’s like I’m still alive, but I’ve been called to the throne of God,” Jackson said. “I was just so excited, I said, ‘Orson, thank you so much for agreeing to see us,’ and the famous eyebrow lifted with the arch that he became so known for, and he said, ‘You may call me ‘Mr. Welles.’

“I thought, ‘Is this already over?’ And then he cracked a smile and said, ‘I’m just pulling your leg. Call me Orson. Sit down.'”

Welles eventually told Jackson he planned to return to America to direct “The Other Side of the Wind” and offered Jackson a job on the film.

“There I was, having started out with John Huston’s ‘Moby Dick’ and a cameo by Orson Welles, and I was working for months on a picture directed by Orson Welles and starring John Huston,” he said. “It was heaven.”

Although it was Jackson’s friendship with Welles that got him his start in the film industry, it was his friendship with AFS Artistic Director Kathleen Carroll that led to this weekend’s screenings. The two have been friendly for decades, and Jackson said he helped AFS select the films for this weekend’s screenings for very specific reasons.

“‘Touch of Evil’ is a great film, one of the best film noirs ever made and very underappreciated because it was cut by about 20 minutes by Universal when it was released,” Jackson said. “Orson had sent the studio a 58-page memo on how the film should be constructed because they were cutting it and changing it, and he had no control over that.

“They largely ignored everything he had to say, but a decade or so ago, the 58-page memo surfaced, (and) together with Orson’s daughter and (producer) Bingham Ray, sound engineers Walter Murch and some others, they decided to do a reconstruction of ‘Touch of Evil’ according to those notes so that it could be pretty close to the film that was originally intended.

“‘Chimes at Midnight’ was Orson’s favorite work of all of his films, not ‘Citizen Kane.’ ‘Chimes at Midnight’ was the one he said he was most proud of, so I thought that would be most appropriate that that be one of them.”

Although it has been 30 years since Welles’ death, our culture’s fascination with him continues, and Jackson said it’s easy to see why.

“He was always a man against the system,” Jackson said. “He was never trying to go with the flow. He was always trying to reinvent something. He was a maverick in everything that he did.

“He didn’t want to do things in an institutional way, and I think that kind of stick-to-your-guns, stick-to-your-beliefs, renegade attitude appeals to a lot of us in an increasingly institutionalized and homogenized society.”

For more information on the screenings, visit www.lakeplacidarts.org.