By RAY KELLY
Throughout Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, leading man John Dale never utters a single line of dialogue.
But Bob Random, the Canadian actor who played Dale, is hardly silent as the one-year anniversary of the film’s debut at the Venice Film Festival approaches.
He said his emotions upon watching the finished film on Netflix were similar to those the day Welles cast him as Dale in 1970.
“I felt proud from the moment Orson chose me and I worked for him. It’s been a personal feather-in-cap since 1970,” Random recently told Wellesnet. “Seeing the long-awaited finished film hasn’t changed anything for me.”
In the months following its Netflix debut, The Other Side of the Wind was placed on nearly four dozen Best of 2018 lists, including Sight & Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and Film Comment. It received awards from the National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics and others.
“I’m very pleased that some of the critics loved the film-within-a film. Artistically that is also my favorite part,” Random said. “It reminds me of a foreign film in that the plot is thinnish but it’s chock full of exotica — and erotica. It’s unpredictable from one scene to the next.”
Random said he was not surprised by which of his scenes made it into the finished film. “In the ’80s Gary (Graver, the film’s cinematographer) sent me a tape of all the film that had been shot with Oja (Kodar) and me.”
However, seeing the finished film fully explained to Random why Welles had a life mask cast of the young actor’s face.
“What was surprising — and kind of weird — was all those dummies!,” Random said. “When Orson had me sit for a life mask — I still have one — I didn’t know why and didn’t ask. Later, I heard that he planned to make dummies and shoot them as revenge for John Dale walking out on the film.”
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