OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND - John Huston on making the film

[Harvey Chartrand]

Jaime oh Jaime!
There yo' go again.
I did not say that a good movie couldn't be made from a bad screenplay.
I said a "great" one, Jaime. Great one.
I love many films that have lousy screenplays, mainly for their camp or nostalgia value, or because of a director's touches or a particular actor (like Welles in FERRY TO HONG KONG, a real piece of shit but he's wonderful in it).
Nor did I write that TOUCH OF EVIL was a great screenplay. I indicated that it was the last good screenplay Welles ever wrote that made it to the screen.
Can you dig where I'm coming from?
Welles bestrode the world of maverick filmmaking like a colossus, but he was not infallible.

[etimh]

marzol: brilliant examples and points on this topic of screenplays in the context of finished films.

Tony: what exactly are the criteria that you are judging TOSOTW by that makes it "cringe inducing?" Welles' other work? Films made within the generic confines of the Hollywood studio system?

With all of the context and historical insight we possess, I find it hard to grasp that people don't understand that TOSOTW is an EXPERIMENTAL film. Its shooting script was not meant to read as a conventional "screenplay," any more than the finished fragments look like any conventional narrative Hollywood product.

Despite what even Welles himself would declare, I think that he had moved into a realm beyond "independent" filmmaker into the class of avant-garde experimentalism. Of course no studio exec would give him money to finance these projects. Its like saying that no studio would give Cassavetes or Brakhage money for their films. Far from "losing it" in the 70s, this was one of the most provocative moments in Welles' career and its just unfortuante that he himself felt obliged to maintain any faith in the "system."

Tim

[jaime marzol]

i also feel that welles was at his peak in the 70s, and that it's too bad the he felt the need to bow to convention to get money.

harvey said:
No director in the entire history of world cinema was ever that good. No director has ever made a great film from a bad screenplay. There are no exceptions to this rule.

a great film from a bad screenplay? raging bull, best film of the 80s according to ebert, is a great film from a terrible screenplay

[The Night Man]

Having seen in all about an hour and a half of material from TOSOTW (the most recent batch being the "previously unseen" footage assembled by Gary Graver for the Hollywood Cinematheque's Welles retrospective in 2004), I really wonder what can be made of it at this point. Unfortunately, some of the material I've seen is in fact painful to watch.

Granted, one can't judge a finished product from roughly assembled footage, but who could possibly put this film together now? Welles himself might very well have been able to spin it into gold, but Welles is gone.

Who but Welles could have created F FOR FAKE out of the raw material that was available? All one has to do is to watch the not uninteresting but ultimately pedestrian Elmyr de Hory doc which utilized much of Reichenbach's interview footage, and which now accompanies Criterion's F FOR FAKE, to see what conscientious but uninspired History-Channel-types would have made of it.

Even Welles himself had come to the late conclusion that TOSOTW required a new approach, but we'll never know now what that approach might have been.

Personally, I'd sooner see a film assembled from what exists of DON QUIXOTE, which strikes me as much stronger material overall.

[jaime marzol]

yes, we discussed that in another thread a while back. TOSOTW will never be a film. if you seperate by cuts the car sex sequence, you can see frames that are nothing but one quick flash, a streak, a few dots, a shadow, but when it all plays together something bigger comes out of those bits and pieces. only welles could have assembled it. only welles could have assembled f for fake.

my interest is TOSOTW in seeing the chunks he edited together, slowing them down, play them backwards and forwards stydying his technique, the rythm between the cuts, where he placed the cuts. seeing side by side different takes of the same scene. and imagine if one scene was shot over and over between 1969 and the mid seventies, the same scene shot 9 times. imagine the evolution. the same roles played by different actors, their ages changing, the evolution of the choreography. all that frenetic energy welles used up would not have gone to waste if some one with the right approach assembled all this footage as a source of study, not as a finished narrative in 3 acts. it could be wild. like an archiological expedition, but most hollywood producers are not interested in archeology. stefan drossler drops by here now and then. maybe he'll read other opinions posted here about how to present TOSOTW, and he'll come up with a brainstorm.

[L French]

I'm a bit suprised to read how many people here think the script and excerpts of OSOTW aren't good Welles -- mainly because I myself find it be such fascinating material, and in many cases really brilliant material.

Having read about half of the script and seen over an hour of excerpts from OSOTW, I firmly believe this would have been a very great Welles picture - if it had been finished. I must admit that at an earlier time, when I had not seen as much of the OSOTW material, I had severe doubts about the quality of the picture, but as I came to see more and more of the excerpts and read more of the script, I realized it was simply because I had seen many of the clips out of context, so I naturally couldn't make sense out of them.

But once you get the connections between the scenes that are missing, you can appreciate what Welles was doing to a much greater degree. You also obviously have to realize this was going to be a sixties picture, done with a editing style akin to Alain Resnais, so certain aspects of the film would no doubt appear to be dated.

Here's a perfect case in point. When I first saw the script excerpt below, I had no idea what Jake and Zarah were talking about, and I felt it was a bad scene because of that lack of information. It was especially difficult to understand, because of the quick editing style Welles employed. But now, after realizing the context of what the characters are supposed to be talking about -- namely John Dale's attempted suicide, and that earlier in the story Jake has saved John Dale from this suicide attempt, the whole scene not only makes perfect sense, but becomes (for me anyway) a sublimely Wellesian scene of great power, that is beautifully played by both John Huston and Lilli Palmer. And it's all done in very beautiful and precise cross-cutting, as the two actors were never in the same studio at the same time.

___


In this excerpt from OSOTW script, it is later at Jake's birthday party and Jake is talking to his old friend, the German actress Zarah Valeska, who is seen reclining on a sofa. Jake refers to Zarah as “Mother” and everyone at the party has just witnessed rushes from Jake's film in progress, where Hannaford's bullying of John Dale has led the young actor to walk off the set of the picture.

Besides Jake and Zarah, many members of Jake's entourage are present as is the Red Indian Actress (Oja Kodar) and they all chime in with their opinions on John Dale's future in the bussiness...




JAKE starts to recounts to ZARAH VALESKA the story of how he saved JOHN DALE from his attempt at committing suicide. Jake is not drunk, but he's been drinking heavily.


ZARAH
I’m bored with the whole story. Would-be
suicides ought to be treated like drunks.

JAKE
We were conned, Mother. It was a fake.

ZARAH
Why make such a fuss over them? If they
don’t care, why should we? Because we
care about life, I suppose.
(Pause) It turns out he doesn’t belong to you.

JAKE
Belong?

ZARAH
The old Chinese business -- You save a
life, you own that life.

JAKE
Finders, keepers?

MAGGIE
Who cares?

MATT
Jake isn’t a Chinese, Maggie...

PAT
And Dale wasn’t no suicide.

ZARAH
You know, they’re only people.

JAKE
No he was an actor, and he wasn’t drunk,
he was auditioning.

ZARAH
Jake, that boy didn’t run away. He was
thrown away.

JAKE
Yes, Mother. And sweet holy Jesus what a
relief that was. Like getting rid of an
aching tooth or the monkey off your back.

MAGGIE
Like getting rid of a suffering toenail.

JAKE
Yes and my foot was getting sore.

ZARAH
How are you going to finish the picture?

PAT
That boy is all washed up, Miss Valeska.

ZARAH
The picture -- isn’t that what matters?

BILLY
We’ve got that footage of him bringing
the clothes to her in all that wind, right
Maggie?


JAKE stands up to make an announcement to the assembled crew.


JAKE
Gentlemen – Ladies. We are presenting an
award to the other half of "The Other Side
Of The Wind." The better half.


Motions to his leading actress, the RED INDIAN.


JAKE
A bone for Pocahontas. A little curio we
picked up somewhere. A bit of our old
paleface craftsmanship – an Indian bone.
The inscription goes back to before all
this was movie country. Just after gold
was found, the Indian population dropped
pretty quickly. And in ten years about
ninety thousand of them just disappeared.
Well in those good old days, are gallant
honky pioneers used to cut off Indian
ears and pickle them in whiskey for
souvenirs. And on little pieces of bone
like this they’d write funny little jokes –
“I’m off the reservation at last.” And so
are you my dear. Perhaps you’d like to
present this to our leading man.
Right up his ass!

[dmolson]

There is a huge disconnect for me when I've been able to see the few scenes from TOSOTW. As LFrench mentioned, there's a context that isn't included in the snippets -- I have probably seen just a couple minutes, both the car scene and what was shown at that awards show. Seeing it recently, I felt that it was very '70s, but there was a kinetic energy about it. Can't say I was overwhelmed by it, but I didn't hate it or was bored by it, either. Like most here, to see even the smallest scene perks up the ears and eyelids and sparks the imagination -- what could have been!
I'm perhaps so engrossed by his work pre-mid60s (I do love the Trial but have yet to see a great copy of it; Falstaff is also amazing and my favourite shakespeare adaptation) that his later, more modernist efforts/projects -- often at the side of Oja, whom when I first heard of her brought (unfairly for sure) to mind 'Yugoslavia's Yoko' -- jars me. Certainly, as an artist, OW changed his vision and his brush strokes like few other filmmakers. But I'm still excited about the possibilities that still exist even from those on brittle celluloid, of seeing 'undiscovered Welles'. Even in its disjointed nature and scattered story, Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report is a romantic experience to watch. It's failures are not those of the average director, and its moments of magic lift it above the rabble.

[Tony]

Didn't Welles edit part of TOSOTW? At ths point, I think the best solution might be a 3 or 4 dvd set, with everything he filmed, broken into many small chapters, and a very detailed accompaning book, which has the complete script and history of the picture. Wasn't there a guy named Frank who was the production manager on the pic? I think he was there for the whole shoot, possibly. Someone like him, someone who was part of the team, should be asked to help assemble the material. And then the guy who edited TOE and Apocalypse Redux- Walter Murch: if he can't figure it out, nobody can. Anyways, assemble a team of knowledgable and experienced people- not necessarily Bogdanovich, who was only an actor on the pic- and have them put together a dvd extravaganza. Criterion might be the company, but Image would do it cheaper. And point out exactly what the story was, what footage Welles actually edited, what he roughly edited, how it might fit together beyond that- so you can have 3 or 4 or maybe an infinite number of possible edits- and also have a cdRom maybe that you can edit yourself- you know, very postmodern- a "do it yourself Other Side of the Wind" and people could have a lot of fun and be very creative with it. You know, TOSOTW is a picture that has been waiting for the computer/DVD/cdRom revolution- it is, after all, a pure post- modern work, one of the first, and there is no author or final version of a work in postmodernism, or indeed any work at all, or any author of a work, just as Welles so intuitively said in "F For Fake" when he was talking about Chartes (and before any principals of postmodernism had benn articulated).

This is my idea for The Other Side Of The Wind- a picture that has been just waiting for today's world. Maybe I was wrong the other day- maybe Welles was not burned out, but instead only ahead of his time- about 30 years ahead of his time. One thing is for sure: TOSOTW must be put out in some respectable form- not like the disasters of Don Quixote (organized by Oja Kodar) and Othello (organized by Beatrice Welles): these two must somehow be convinced to let go of this one, and place it in the hands of experienced professionals; that is, if they want to serve Welles' legacy in the best way possible.

What do you guys think?

[The Night Man]

yes, we discussed that in another thread a while back. TOSOTW will never be a film.

All well and good, but it could in fact become a film - a badly-cobbled-together one that might end up being relatively widely seen. The Jess Franco QUIXOTE is practically unknown to the world at large, and thus fairly harmless, but a bad Showtime (or equivalent) version of TOSOTW will do Welles' reputation no good.

TOSOTW must be put out in some respectable form- not like the disasters of Don Quixote (organized by Oja Kodar) and Othello (organized by Beatrice Welles): these two must somehow be convinced to let go of this one, and place it in the hands of experienced professionals; that is, if they want to serve Welles' legacy in the best way possible.

But Oja Kodar is the one who controls the rights and she wants a film to be the end result. Beatrice in this instance (oddly enought) seems to be the voice of reason, calling for a presentation like IT'S ALL TRUE. And let's face it, any company that might release a DVD of TOSOTW is going to want a film. Otherwise it's just something for scholars and Welles fanatics such as ourselves, and there's no profit to be made in that. I have a bad feeling about this project ever coming to any good end.

I've also seen that sequence with Huston and Lili Palmer, L French, and frankly I thought it was a mess. Welles may ultimately have been able to work his magic on it, but the material as it was assembled (by Gary Graver, I believe) looked to me clunky and unconvincing.

[L French]

Here are Orson Welles comments to a group of American tourists in Spain in 1966, telling them about the film he was planning to make, which at the time was to be called "The Sacred Beasts," which later became "The Other Side of the Wind."

As can be seen from Welles comments, one of the main points he specifically planned for, was to improvise the film with his actors, despite having written a script. So once again Welles was way ahead of his time. Ironically if he had completed OSOTW in early 1975, right after his AFI award, he might have beaten Robert Altman's "Nashville" to the gate, as one of the first films that was both scripted and then heavily improvised by the actors.

As Tony suggests, perhaps people are still merely not up to speed with Welles advanced ideas -- even 30 years after the fact. After all, most people still routinely expect a film to have a clear cut beginning, middle and end -- and in that order... but that clearly was never Welles intention for OSOTW.

++++++++++++++


ORSON WELLES: The central figure in this story belongs to that league of machos—those very masculine guys with a lot of hair on their chests. He's a film director who can hardly see though the bush of hair on his chest. He was frightened by Hemingway at first, but now he's a tough movie director who has killed three or four extras on every picture he's made—whatever the picture is—three or four of 'em die. And he's full of charm. Everybody thinks he's great. In our story, he's riding around following a bullfighter and living through him. You know, he's become that lovely young fellow in the beautiful costume, and that fellows danger is his danger, and that fellows success is his success, and so on. He's become obsessed by this young man, who has become, in a way, his own dream of himself. He's been rejected by all his old friends and he's finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur— a peeker, a second hand guy, a fellow who lives off other people's danger and death.

And of course, the way we're going to shoot it is without a script. I've written a script, and I know the whole story, everything that happens. But what I'm going to do is get the actors in every situation and tell them who they are and what has happened up until this moment, and I believe that they will find what is true and inevitable. So we'll photograph that and go onto the next moment. We're going to make the picture as through it was a documentary, and the actors are going to improvise. I really know what I would make if I were photographing it and giving them the script page by page, but I'm going to hide the script—I don't want them to know that. I think if the actors are right— and they have to be people of a certain kind of substance—they have to be actors used to being people. Because it's all important people, people who are images (a terrible word) and all of that. So we get all those kind of actors together and say, "here's what you did yesterday, here's what you did twenty years ago, here's what you think about him," and then start shooting.

[jaime marzol]

sacred beast is quite a curiosity. i feel fortunate to have been able to get my paws on a copy

[The Night Man]

As Tony suggests, perhaps people are still merely not up to speed with Welles advanced ideas -- even 30 years after the fact. After all, most people still routinely expect a film to have a clear cut beginning, middle and end -- and in that order... but that clearly was never Welles intention for OSOTW.

Very true, and all the more reason to worry about what may end up being done with what was likely Welles' most experimental work. Among all his uncompleted projects, this is probably the one that will suffer most from the lack of his own hand for the finishing.

[Eve_h]

Jaime Marzol wrote:

"stefan drossler drops by here now and then. maybe he'll read other opinions posted here about how to present TOSOTW, and he'll come up with a brainstorm."


Since the forum hasn't yet received a reply from Droessler, here's a bit of writing by him [a passage from 'The Unknown Orson Welles' (p.87/88) in German which I 'tried' to translate], which doesn't really contain any news in view of the question raised by Jaime Marzol, but it nevertheless observes a few problems any kind of a possible release of TOSTOW has to face ...

(first I have to apologize to Stefan Droessler for the dreadful 'translation' of the passage)


"... In the case of 'The Other Side of the Wind' the basis for possible working concerning the material seems to be quite favourable (compared to other 'unfinished' projects by Welles, my annotation):
shooting is nearly finished, just a few shots are missing (which won't require the participation of the leading actors), the negatives are stored, there's a working print from Welles with about 40-50 minutes also edited by him and there's a screenplay (however the film-in-film-scenes aren't 'completed').

The biggest problem with the project is, that Welles wasn't producing the film on his own, but that the Paris-based production company 'Les Films de l'Astrophore' of the Iranian Mehdi Bousheri did chiefly finance the film and will only consent to a completion, if they get the money back they put into the film.

In the spring of 2002 Peter Bogdanovich initiated an agreement between Bousheri, Oja Kodar and Showtime, which ought to aim at the completion of the film under the direction of Peter Bogdanovich - it was stopped by Beatrice Welles, who together with the attorney Thomas White appealed against the project and wants to contest Oja Kodar's right to authorship.
To avoid the high cost for legal proceedings it's only possible to realize a documentary about 'The Other Side of the Wind', for which in turn, Showtime wouldn't give as much money as for a film.
So far there's no solution in sight at the moment (the book was published in 2004), which would make further work on the film possible.

The Munich Film Museum released a tape with most of the edited sequences of the working print by Orson Welles and - with explanatory in-between-titles - documented the structure of the screenplay.
Already at that point difficulties did arise which have to be solved in case of any kind of handling the material:
The furiously edited sequence in which Billy Boyle and Max David are viewing a scene from the new film of Jake Hannaford in the projection room, has to be - according to the screenplay - cross-edited with three other storylines (Jake Hannaford on the way to his birthday party, the bus with his staff on the way to his birthday party, the leading lady Oja Kodar in her red sports car on the way to the party) - a hardly resolvable task.
Likewise in this sequence problems can be observed with shots taken by Welles, which are also to be found in 'The Deep'-material: At the first encounter between Oja Kodar and Bob Random the day-time is changing again and again, even in the shot-countershot-montage the image jumps at one point from glistening sun to a full moon night. These changes are in no way justified by the plot or the screenplay, but it's obviously a matter of wrong connection, resulting from shooting over the years at different places, which made innumerable subsequent shots necessary. ..."

[jollytinker]

I can't open my third eye.


I've discovered various excerpts of the 'wind' sript on this forum and elsewhere ... do any of you folks have additional pages that haven't been posted on here or a link, I'd love to read them..
thanks to any and all

[Gordon]

I apologize if this has already appeared in Wellesnet.

The script of The Other Side of the Wind has been assembled by Cahiers du Cinema and the Munich Film Museum. It will be available for sale at Locarno. Do not know how it can be ordered by those not attending.