By JOSEPH McBRIDE
And now comes the authorship question about The Other Side of the Wind. Orson Welles shares screenwriting credit with his longtime personal and creative partner, Oja Kodar, who also plays the Actress in the film-within-the-film directed by Jake Hannaford (John Huston). Welles receives sole directing credit. But recently critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who served with me as a consultant on the postproduction, has claimed that Kodar directed parts of the film. While it has long been clear that Kodar indeed had a major influence on the conception of Other Wind and in particular on both the conception and execution of the film-within-the-film, are Rosenbaum’s latest claims accurate? Is Kodar’s writing credit accurate? And just as importantly, did Kodar, as Rosenbaum claims, direct the sex sequence in the car, arguably the film’s single most striking set piece?
Rosenbaum has been a friend and confidante of Kodar for thirty years and has made it clear publicly that he sees his role as consultant and historian as being a voice for Kodar, who lives in Croatia and is reticent about making public statements. In an October 21 appearance at the Chicago Film Festival with producer Filip Jan Rymsza after a screening of the film, Rosenbaum said that “this is a film that has a co-author, namely Oja Kodar. Because it’s important to point out that not only did she collaborate on the script, and act as a kind of art director for much of the film-within-the-film, she also directed three sequences. The three sequences being the sex scene in the car, the scene in the ladies’ bathroom before that [aka ‘the bathroom orgy’], and the final scene on the beach with the sort of like toppling penis.” Rymsza objected, “I think the forced-perspective stuff [on the beach], the very end of it, that was predominantly Orson. I know that she did bits and pieces of the . . . there was nine hours of bathroom footage,” but the producer did not comment on the direction of the car sex sequence. For the record, the credited art director who worked on the film-within-the-film was Polly Platt.
Welles’s planning of this longtime project preceded his meeting with Kodar in 1962. He finished the first draft of what he called The Sacred Beasts shortly after the July 1961 suicide of Ernest Hemingway, on whom Hannaford is loosely but explicitly based. As time went on, and that project languished unmade, Welles was said to have combined The Sacred Beasts with story material by Kodar (a creative process he also followed with his 1973 film F for Fake). The film à clef deconstructing the macho man exemplified by Hemingway evolved from a story about an aging movie director obsessed with a handsome young bullfighter into one about an aging movie director obsessed with his handsome young leading man (a change that Welles made abruptly on the first day of shooting, August 23, 1970, when he told me and the rest of the cast and crew that he was not allowed to take us across the border to Tijuana to film the bullfights).
Kodar claims credit for retitling the project The Other Side of the Wind, which is also the title of the film Hannaford is making, and Rosenbaum credits her with adding the homosexual element to Hannaford’s Don Juan character. I doubt that, for it was always key to the concept of the project, and most Welles films involve homoerotic relationships. Kodar even once strenuously denied to me (at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2005) that Hannaford is a latent homosexual, even though Welles explained that aspect of the character to me in detail before we began filming.
Although I reserve final judgment on the script authorship question because I have not visited the University of Michigan archives to read all the existing drafts (none of which, according to Rosenbaum, contains actual writing by Kodar), I was given Welles’s 1971 screenplay at the time (which served as the basis for the 2005 published version) as well as additional pages he wrote along the way, sometimes after I suggested comments by my character, the film historian Mister Pister. As I wrote in my first book on Welles, Orson Welles (1972), when I met him on the day before shooting began, “I asked if he had been working on the script of The Other Side of the Wind when I had walked in. He laughed and said there wasn’t any script, the film would be improvised. Seeing my surprise, he said that he had written a script which would have run for nine hours on the screen, but had put it aside because he realized that he was writing a novel. ‘I’m going to improvise out of everything I know about the characters and the situation,’ he said. He had a large cardboard box crammed with notes sitting next to his typewriter.” But in the end most of the dialogue was written in advance for the actors; most of mine was finalized by Welles after we discussed what I would say in each scene. I have also discussed the Sacred Beasts project at length with actor Keith Baxter, who was to have played a major role and provided me with his memoir of the unmade project.
When I was trying to get Other Wind finished in the late 1990s in conjunction with cinematographer Gary Graver, I doubted whether the scenes from the film-within-the-film, which is largely a satire of what Welles considered the artsy, pretentious work of Michelangelo Antonioni, should be allotted a substantial amount of running time. I worried that dwelling too much on those languid, mostly plotless interludes — despite their visual beauty in 35mm color — would backfire against the film by turning large parts of it into the kind of filmmaking it is trying to mock. Rosenbaum and I had a running (friendly) argument over this question; he contended that Welles was attempting a radical experiment with a dual narrative. Supporting that was a comment that Welles made to Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times in 1973 that the film-within-the-film would comprise “about 50 percent of the whole movie.” The script does not make clear how long those segments should be and indeed does not describe them, although there is a written treatment for “Hannaford’s” film that I have not seen.
Happily, I have been proven wrong about the film-within-the-film. Editor Bob Murawski, who channeled Welles’s editing style brilliantly, managed to make those sequences play in an expressive, riveting way and integrate them into the framing story effectively, with the help of the lively, often mournful musical score by Michel Legrand. The film-within-the-film is our principal window into the twisted psyche and sexual obsessions of Hannaford, whose persona otherwise is highly guarded, although it unravels during the course of Welles’s film.
After Graver and I managed to get the cable network Showtime to commit to a deal to finish Other Wind in 1998-99, Kodar and Peter Bogdanovich abruptly fired me, thinking they no longer needed me, and the deal soon collapsed. Rosenbaum claimed publicly at an Indiana University conference on Welles in 2015 that I had been fired because Kodar objected to my desire to go against Welles’s wishes and cut back on the film-within-the-film. I was so surprised by his comment — since Kodar had never said that to me — that I did not respond to the audience at the conference. But when I asked Rosenbaum after his talk if Kodar had told him that, he admitted she had not; it was just his surmise. I also asked if he had seen any script material she had written on the film, and he said he had not.
Pauline Kael wrote a notorious 1971 New Yorker article, “Raising Kane,” claiming that Welles wrote none of the screenplay of Citizen Kane and that his joint credit with Herman J. Mankiewicz was unmerited and coerced. Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris, and I were among those writing rebuttals to Kael’s article at the time. Rosenbaum, however, wrote in Film Comment in 1972 that Kael’s “basic contention, that the script of Kane is almost solely the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz, seems well-supported and convincing” — a comment he is now “hugely embarrassed by . . . a howler if there ever was one.” Film historian Robert L. Carringer, in a 1978 article for Critical Inquiry, definitely disproved Kael’s false claim by doing what she did not do — he examined the existing screenplay drafts. His study demonstrated that the screen credit to Mankiewicz (in first position) and Welles is accurate and fair. And yet we continually read articles and books parroting Kael’s lie, which she always refused to correct.
Kael called me on the phone on February 20, 1971, the day the first installment of her two-part New Yorker article appeared. Her ostensible purpose was to apologize for mocking me, although not by name, in her article, in which she ridicules “schoolbook . . . articles” on Kane that use hifalutin’ language — both quotes she mocks are taken from my 1968 essay on the film that first appeared in Film Heritage and was reprinted in my 1972/1996 book Orson Welles. She said her editor, William Shawn, did not like her penchant for attacking other critics and forbade her to do so by name in the magazine. I said I didn’t mind being criticized but thought her article was unfair to Welles and one-sided, since she hadn’t interviewed him but relied only on Mankiewicz partisans. She said she found no need to interview Welles since she knew what he would say and admitted she had written “a brief for Mankiewicz.”
When I mentioned that I had been acting in Welles’s new film project, The Other Side of the Wind, Kael responded, with her usual glibness, that it was a bad title because she didn’t know what it meant. I tried to explain that the title was supposed to be a parody of pretentious art-house filmmaking, but she didn’t get or appreciate the joke.
After brooding over Kael’s phone call, I concluded she had made the call to try to disarm me so I wouldn’t write a rebuttal to her article, so that was one of the reasons I eventually wrote my attack on “Raising Kane” in Film Heritage. I wrote a further essay on the controversy that appeared in the 2012 Harvard University press anthology A New Literary History of America and in my own 2017 collection, Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies.
While I was pitching The Other Side of the Wind around Hollywood, Kodar and I had a luncheon meeting with Michael Schlesinger, who was then an executive at Sony. Schlesinger is an enlightened film maven who shepherded the documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles to completion at Paramount in 1993. Schlesinger told me he was fired and escorted off the Paramount lot by armed guards after his bosses saw the documentary and reacted in horror when they realized that a large part of it was a silent film about people of color, centering on impoverished fishermen protesting for their labor rights in Brazil. Schlesinger was sympathetic to our Other Wind pitch but could not persuade his bosses at Sony to back the film.
When I mentioned at that luncheon that I thought the film-within-the-film should be cut down considerably, Kodar’s head abruptly swiveled in my direction. She fixed her eyes on me. I knew something was amiss, but she said nothing about it then or later. I eventually was informed that she considers that material her baby and that she actually thinks of Jake’s sex fantasy as a serious art film rather than the absurd parody Welles and Graver told me they considered it to be. Although I have acknowledged the benefits of Kodar’s liberating influence on Welles’s approach to eroticism in his work, I also think her sensibility helped lead him into some overly airy and pretentious writing in the scripts on which they collaborated or were written under her influence, also including the partially filmed The Dreamers (based on two stories by Isak Dinesen) and the unfilmed House Party. Isak Dinesen she is not; nor was Welles, although he of course had his own distinctive artistic vision and through his visual genius was able to partially transform their joint flights of sometimes pseudo-poetic fancy (even the script of Other Wind sometimes is too arch for its own good) into something far more substantial.
This brings us to the nitty-gritty of the filming process on Other Wind. I was on the set for a total of forty-five days from the first day of filming in 1970 to the last in early 1976. I watched Welles and Kodar interacting, and she was clearly supportive of him and deferential (as well as friendly to me). She freely made comments and suggestions but never seemed to be obtrusive or try to dominate a creative relationship that, at least on the set, seemed to center around Welles. Naturally, since they were personally involved — unlike Welles and Mankiewicz — it is impossible for an outsider to know how much influence she had on Welles behind the scenes. I am willing to believe it was considerable. She deserves a great deal of credit for helping him sustain his career against considerable odds in his later years and helping prod him in some fresh directions. But was she an equal creative partner?
That would be a large claim and a hard one to support. Since Rosenbaum has been trying to make it lately, it seems to me that the burden is on him, and on her if she chooses, to document the extent of her creative partnership if co-authorship is to be accepted. I believe that the auteur theory — which Welles is partly attacking in Other Wind for dangerously aggrandizing directors — does not leave enough room for the realities of joint authorship in filmmaking and that screenwriters, cinematographers, actors, and others contribute greatly even to the work of major directors. But though giving Kodar and Graver and indeed Bob Murawski (who shares editing credit with Welles) their due as key creative contributors to Other Wind is important, it does not necessitate exaggerating their roles into co-authorship status.
In the bravura car sex sequence, Kodar’s seminude character straddles a largely passive young man (Bob Random) and humps him as the car is driven through a rainstorm by a silent but seemingly angry driver (Robert Aiken) who may be her boyfriend. Based on what Kodar told Rosenbaum, the critic plausibly argues she serves in that sequence and the rest of the film-within-the-film as Hannaford’s “sexual surrogate.” The sex sequence in the car ran seven minutes in the fine-cut version edited by Welles and included in the assembly Graver, Kodar, and I showed widely to potential investors. I considered that the best part of the film I had seen and one of Welles’s greatest and most unusual achievements. It was cut down to only three minutes for the 1995 documentary film Orson Welles The One-Man Band, which Kodar, who controlled Welles’s unfinished film material, directed with Vassili Silovic. But the sequence has been trimmed to four and a half minutes by Murawski and the producers for the final version of Other Wind.
As I wrote in my November 2018 Sight & Sound article on the film, “My one major reservation about the final edit is the diminishing” of that sequence. In the process of shortening it, “some of Graver’s striking changes of colour have disappeared. The cinematic equivalent of an orgasm in Welles’s spectacular version, the sequence loses some of its frenzied intensity and instead becomes about the woman’s frustration.”
Rymsza said in his Chicago Film Festival appearance with Rosenbaum, “Jonathan will never forgive us that we shaved off a minute and a half” from that sequence (actually they cut two and a half minutes, most of it taken from the foreplay section, which is arguably more erotic than the orgasm itself). When Rosenbaum said the full seven-minute edit by Welles would be included as an extra in the Blu-ray/DVD edition of the film, Rymsza responded, “Yeah, it will be.” That was good to hear; it would be a boon for Welles scholars and would enable viewers to make up their own minds about the creative decision to cut it down for the final version of the film, in which it follows the already long “bathroom orgy” sequence, a late find among the ninety-six hours of film material. I knew nothing about the shooting of that orgy sequence at the time of production, so I can’t comment on Rosenbaum’s claim that Kodar directed it, but editor Steve Ecclesine said he worked for six months with Welles on editing it; Rymsza, however, says Murawski mostly edited the final version of the orgy over one weekend. Allowing both of these parts of the film-within-the-film to play fully together would have been worth it, even though that would have meant the framing story would have taken a longer back seat in the flow of the dual narrative.
I was not present for any of the filming of the car sex sequence, which was shot over a three-year period in the driveway of Welles’s home in Los Angeles and in the backyard gardens of the home he shared with Kodar in Orvilliers, France. But I spoke at length with Graver about the filming of Other Wind, and that sequence, with good reason, was one of his proudest achievements. He made it abundantly clear to me, as have others who worked on the sequence, that Welles directed it. It was an elaborate visual stunt to film a frenzied scene in a moving car in the rain in static circumstances, employing all of Welles’s filmmaking magic.
The tour-de-force sequence has a great deal of ultra-Wellesian fast editing, with elaborate lighting effects to show a variety of bold colors flashing surreally across Kodar’s body and face (some of those color effects are missing in the final edit of the film). We see her breasts and beads bobbing against them as she thrusts her hips atop the passive male figure more and more frenetically. “Give me your animal face, baby!” Welles told Kodar during the shooting, and she assumed what she has called a “praying mantis” demeanor. Welles became so amused and excited by the opportunity to shoot a softcore porn sequence — something he told me he had always wanted to do, but not under his own name — that he would shout, “Russ Meyer rides again!” The comically stolid driver, who throws Kodar out into the rain at the end of the sequence, is played by Robert Aiken, who was Graver’s co-writer on his 1970 softcore film Sandra: The Making of a Woman and appeared in Meyer’s 1968 Vixen! and 1970 Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (Graver, who also made hardcore films, for a while dated Erica Gavin, who plays the sexually ravenous lead in Vixen!). Meyer, a maverick like Welles, had his own jagged, propulsive form of editing, but Welles went much further into extreme fragmentation and shards of lighting effects, turning softcore porn into genuine erotic art.
Graver told me, “We started on September 6, 1970, with my car, a ’67 Mustang. To protect ourselves from the water from the hoses, Orson put a big tarp over one side of my car and attached it with gaffer’s tape. I didn’t know it then, but the gaffer’s tape pulled the paint off my car. We started with ‘poor man’s process,’ where you shake the car [with moving lights seen through the windows]. Orson had a trio of friends helping — Ed Scherick, a producer; the actor Bud Cort; and Rift Fournier, a TV writer-producer. Rift’s in a wheelchair, so we gave him two sun guns and pushed him, and he looked like headlights coming toward the car. Everybody was outside waving lights and things, and we had the hoses on the car. I was sitting really close to Orson in the car, there was hardly room; we were touching each other. We shot it without sound, so he was yelling to the crew where to put the lights, put a green gel on, put on a red gel — and we’d do different takes, change the angles over and over again. . . .
“Years later, Orson and Oja had a house in Orvilliers, outside of Paris, with a big backyard. Orson bought a Volkswagen Beetle. He said to me, ‘Take the camera and go through Paris at night. Have some girl driving.’ I had an all-girl crew in France. So I went all through Paris filming the streets, the City of Lights, in 16mm. We developed it. Then in the backyard of his house, we built three big screens, like billboards or drive-in screens. He had a carpenter do it, painted them all white. Then he got three projectors and had three French girls running them, so now we could look out the window of the car and streetlights going by, rather than actually going out in the street filming it. We could control the rain, control the lighting, and the backyard was big enough to actually drive cars around in it. We had his film editor, his accountant, even a conductor from the London Symphony Orchestra, anybody we could get, driving cars past. [Line producer Dominique Antoine also helped with that filming, along with two countesses.]
“The final sacrifice I made for that sequence, besides being wet, came because we didn’t have Bob Random. We had finished with him in California, in one session. But I was the same build and had the same hair, and it was dark. Orson got in the back seat with the camera and had me focus it and expose it. I took off my shirt and sat in the front with Oja sitting on top of me. I leaned my head back, and all of Oja’s close-ups were made of me, the back of my head.” Graver also discussed the car sex sequence with Andrew J. Rausch in their 2008 book, Making Movies with Orson Welles: A Memoir: “Oja was on top of me and Orson was filming from outside the window and then from the back seat. Orson had the Volkswagen cut in half to make it easier to film those interior shots. He kept having the car cut down further and further so he could get certain shots from the angles he wanted. By the time we were finished, there was nothing really left of the car but a windshield and a seat!”
Robert Aiken added further vivid details in a 1999 article about working with Welles in which he described the way Welles would conjure up the car sequence in his Los Angeles driveway, telling him, ‘Bob. you’re driving at 80 m.p.h. and you pretend to ignore the lovemaking of Oja and Robert next to you. And no ‘kabuki’! Just think it!” After directing Oja to “open your dress a little more, dear . . . let’s see more of you,” Welles “whooped” his line about “Russ Meyer rides again!” Graver got into position with his camera, “prone and pretzel-like,” while grip Michael Stringer turned on a sun gun in the back seat. “‘Rain!’ thundered Orson. Glenn [Jacobson, another grip] fumbled with the hose. ‘Hurry . . . hurry!’ Orson impatiently blared. We are ready to go now. Orson is in his ‘no-nonsense’ mood. . . . Gary’s wife, Connie, began to move the red and yellow gelatins slowly back and forth before the backlight. Then Orson sat on the back of the car and with obvious ease rocked it violently. ‘Action!’ he clamoured. ‘Action!””
As I reported in my book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (2006), “Welles sometimes even encouraged [Kodar and Graver] to go off and shoot material by themselves for the film-within-the-film,” including parts of the ending on the beach. He probably thought it would be fun to see what they came up with and aesthetically helpful, since those sequences were what he called “a film made with a mask.” But he directed most of the film-within-the-film himself, and edited it himself, and though Kodar exerted substantial creative influence over that material, evidence is lacking for her directing entire sequences on her own.
Bob Random, whom I asked to comment on what he remembered about the direction of the film-within-the-film, replied by email on November 4, “If Oja was involved with any direction of the movie, I wasn’t witness to it during my three months of shooting. I wasn’t involved in the ‘bathroom orgy’ so have no knowledge about that. From this actor’s point of view, Orson as a director was spontaneous and very supportive.”
When I asked Rosenbaum by email on October 30 why he claimed that Kodar, not Welles, directed the car sex sequence when the evidence indicated the contrary, he said he was just relying on what Kodar told him. He added that she did not claim to have been involved in the editing of the sequence. I responded, “You ought to be careful you don’t become the Pauline Kael of The Other Side of the Wind.”
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Film historian Joseph McBride is the author of twenty books, including What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006), Orson Welles (1972; revised and expanded edition, 1996), and Orson Welles: Actor and Director (1977). McBride is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching film history and screenwriting since 2002. He was a cast member on The Other Side of the Wind in the 1970s, worked on a failed attempt to complete the movie for Showtime in the late 1990s, and was a consultant on the recent completion financed by Netflix.
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