By RAY KELLY
Digital scanning of the 16mm and 35mm negative of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind will be completed early next week as producers prepare to edit the late director’s unfinished 1970s comeback film.
Concurrent with the 4K scan of the negative by Technicolor in Los Angeles, the original 1/4-inch audiotapes were synched with more than 10,000 logged shots, according to producer Filip Jan Rymsza.
“There’s way more material than anyone thought and the 4K scans confirm what we observed in Paris – the negative is in pristine condition and the scans look absolutely stunning,” Rymsza said. “Seeing these materials is enough to make any cineaste’s heart skip a beat.”
Rymsza recounted the laborious process of reassembling 1,000 rolls of film and then hand-synching the sound to shots with missing slates in a statement to Indiegogo contributors today.
Here is his letter in its entirety:
Dear Contributors,
The last of our film elements arrived in Los Angeles in late March and we’ve been organizing and reconstructing them since mid-April.
All told, we had to reconstitute over 1000 rolls of 16mm and 35mm film. Each roll had to be reassembled (in key-number order) before it could be scanned – a delicate, manual undertaking that took roughly 3 hours per roll. I’m enclosing a photo of this process and happy to report that this phase is now complete.
Concurrent with the reassembly, Technicolor has been scanning the film and processing our dailies. This phase will be completed early next week.
As materials were being scanned and processed, our assistant editors have been prepping them for editorial — breaking them down into individual shots and logging them according to scenes names and numbers. To date, they have logged over 10,000 shots!
On the sound front, the original 1/4” audiotapes have been ingested, broken down and logged… and are being synched with the aforementioned shots. In many cases, the shots are missing slates, so the sound has to be hand-synched.
Overall, it’s been a time-consuming and labor-intensive enterprise, with discoveries and unique challenges at every turn, but, that said, it’s been an absolute thrill.
There’s way more material than anyone thought and the 4K scans confirm what we observed in Paris – the negative is in pristine condition and the scans look absolutely stunning. Seeing these materials is enough to make any cineaste’s heart skip a beat.
I’ll update you again as we get into editorial.
Sincerely,
Filip
Rymsza’s Royal Road Entertainment is producing the completion of The Other Side of the Wind with Frank Marshall for a 2018 release by Netflix.
After years of negotiations, Rymsza has succeeded where others had failed. He reached agreements with the various rights holders and freed Welles’ negative from a French film vault.
The 1,083 reels of negative footage, dailies, rushes and other materials ― once housed by LTC Laboratories outside Paris — were flown to Los Angeles on March 13, for a 4K scanning by Technicolor. Those materials were followed by Welles’ workprint, which contained more than 40 minutes of scenes he had already edited.
Director Peter Bogdanovich, who co-starred in the film and was tasked by Welles to complete it in the event of his death, will consult on the editing.
Welles began filming The Other Side of the Wind in August 1970, finished principal photography in January 1976, and struggled to complete the movie until his death in October 1985. He was stymied by issues ranging from IRS woes to the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the negative remained locked away in Paris.
In the years after Welles’ death, his cameraman, Gary Graver, who died in 2006, and cast member and film historian Joseph McBride worked with Showtime to finish the movie. But, they failed to broker a deal acceptable to the Welles Estate and the film’s two co-owners, Welles’ companion, Oja Kodar, and Les Films de l’Astrophore led by the late Mehdi Boushehri, brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. (The saga was extensively reported in Josh Karp’s book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind.)
The Other Side of the Wind takes place at the 70th birthday party of maverick movie director Jake Hannaford (the late John Huston), who is struggling to make a comeback film during the rise of New Hollywood. The party is attended by young directors, like Brooks Otterlake (Bogdanovich), hangers-on and critics – many of whom are patterned after people in Welles’ life. Hannaford dies at the conclusion of the party and his final hours are recounted in the movie using a mix of still photos, and 8mm, 16mm and 35mm color and black-and-white film shot at the party, along with scenes from his unfinished movie. Rounding out the cast are Kodar, Cameron Mitchell, Mercedes McCambridge, Susan Strasberg, Edmond O’Brien, Norman Foster, Paul Stewart and Robert Random. The executive producers are Bogdanovich, Jon Anderson, Olga Kagan, Jens Koethner Kaul, Carla Rosen-Vacher and Beatrice Welles.
Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos has an expressed an interest in screening the completed film at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2018 before it is streamed to the service’s 104 million subscribers worldwide.
Academy Award winner Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal) will direct a feature length companion documentary for Netflix on Welles’ return to the U.S. in the 1970s and filming The Other Side of the Wind. The documentary is tentatively titled They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.
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