(Editor’s note: The Italian film magazine Cabiria has pulled together reflections from Orson Welles scholars across the globe to mark the one-year anniversary of The Other of the Wind.
In this translation permitted by Cabiria, Massimiliano Studer, co-founder of Formacinema, and author of Alle origini di Quarto potere. Too Much Johnson: il film perduto di Orson Welles, looks at information found in Welles archives in the U.S. and Italy.)
The Other Side of the Wind. What the archives tell [i]
By MASSIMILIANO STUDER
This contribution is a brief, but hopefully stimulating summary of my research activities on the archives of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino (National Cinema Museum of Turin) and the University of Michigan, which hold important materials related to The Other Side of the Wind. My work on this film began when I was lucky enough to recover information that seemed to have been forgotten, but nevertheless was of fundamental importance to the study of Welles’s unfinished projects. The University of Turin’s Franco Prono informed me as I was writing a book on Too Much Johnson (1938)[ii] of a Welles archive at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino[iii], which had been inventoried by Carla Ceresa in 1998. A truly unexpected rediscovery, the archive contains a substantial body of documents regarding The Other Side of the Wind, including twelve versions of the script[iv]. Another three hundred papers, covering a period between 1971 and 1976, are comprised of letters, telegrams, transcription of telephone calls, contracts, notes, invoices, lists of materials and estimates.
One of the most interesting documents is a Memorandum of Agreement, dated 1 October 1973 and subsequently signed by the three producers (Les Films de l’Astrophore from France-Iran, Avenel from Lichtenstein, and Lolafilms from Spain) on 18 April 1974.[v] This document marks a substantial change in the production of the film. With this document, Welles’s film was transformed from an extremely independent film (small budget, reduced crew, Welles as the author of everything, semi-unknown actors) to one with great economic availability (thanks to the Franco-Iranian Astrophore), which, however, imposes and demands to control the creation of the film. This document also makes it possible to establish the approximate date of the script draft published by the Locarno Festival in 2005. In this draft, the character of Jake Hannaford says: “Hey – remember when you first appeared on that location of mine up in Bolivia?”[vi]. In a 1974 draft from Turin, “Bolivia” is replaced with “Iran”[vii]. One of the clauses of Memorandum of Agreement, in fact, provided for the need to shoot some scenes of the film in Iran.[viii] This change is directly linked with the entrance of Astrophore and establishes that the Locarno script was written sometime before October 1973.
The Welles archive of the University of Michigan, the most complete and extensive in the world, has allowed me to find one particularly valuable document which has long eluded Welles scholars: the script of the “film within the film”. The document is a typewritten text by Oja Kodar and Orson Welles, classified as “Synopsis of Hannaford film and character notes”[ix]. Composed of thirty pages, this script not only allows scholars to understand the official script of the film, but also allows audiences to better understand the edition produced by Netflix.
In general terms it can be said that the document focuses on two characters: Jake Hannaford (John Huston) and Carla, the name of the female character in Hannaford’s film (Oja Kodar). Both of them are at the center of the story and everything revolves around the characteristics of their personalities. In the version licensed by Netflix the “film within the film” contains no dialogue: what we see on the screen is a silent film. In the script, however, there are several lines of dialogue, but it is also made clear that Carla does not utter any line in Jake’s movie. Moreover, many passages contain notes about Jake Hannaford and his homoerotic relationship with the actor playing the leading male role of “Michael”, John Dale (Robert Random). This component the official edited edition does not express so clearly, at least as Kodar and Welles had outlined in the writing phase.
A reading of the scenes makes it possible to logically connect the salient narrative moments of the story, links that the official version of the film, perhaps intentionally, fails to adequately clarify. The second scene of the “film within the film”, for example, shows Carla calling from a telephone booth. The viewer, who watches the official movie, does not capture any narrative link between this and the initial scene in the Turkish bath. In the script, on the other hand, the Turkish bath scene has Carla write down a phone number on a piece of paper, which will then be used by her in the phone booth. This last scene also serves as an introductory prologue to present the three main characters to the reader, because it distinctly narrates the relationship that binds the driver Allan, played by Robert Aiken, to Carla and describes Michael, in the company of other boys, who curiously ogle the couple’s car.
The script of the “film within the film” has two scenes that totally absent in the edited version of Welles’s film. The first takes place inside an airport.[x] Carla is about to open a locker with a key, but it falls from her hands. A distinguished gentleman picks it up from the floor, asking Carla if it is hers. With a nod of his head, the woman replies yes, and once the door is open she pulls out a briefcase and walks away.
The second scene, after that in the airport, takes place inside a library where Carla is consulting technical manuals.[xi] The action takes place just before closing time: a bell signals the suspension of consultation services while the lights gradually dim. Kodar and Welles introduce a sweet old lady who persistently tries to talk, in hushed tones, to Carla. Carla has left a package behind (implied to be a bomb) and the lady is trying to return it to her. The dialogues are stilted and surreal, mainly due to Carla’s refusal to answer or take the package. The scene ends in an elevator, where Allan waits impatiently for Carla and asks her if everything has gone as planned.
Following the sequence shown in the script, we come to the description of the toy scene, identical to that shown in the edited version of the film. A jump of the story (marked by a triple x, in the text) then takes the reader inside the bar, where rock music is heard at high volume.[xii] Carla and Michael, completely wet from the rain, enter the place to find shelter. The scene of the orgy in the bathrooms is totally absent. Carla enters the toilet, but only to dry her wet clothes. At the end of the scene Carla and Michael leave the bar and enter the car where Allan is waiting for them. From this moment the script tries to outline the attraction between Carla and Michael, which will climax in their having sex inside the car. Building up to this, the script describes Allan’s unsuccessful attempts to discover Michael’s identity and understand his intentions over three pages, all while there is vague talk on the radio of an explosion.[xiii] The most interesting aspect of the text is that there is dialogue between the two male characters. The tone is, again, stilted, communicating the pretentious air found in the silent, edited version of the film. Also noteworthy is how much is devoted to describing the lengthy sex scene: ten lines and about fifty words[xiv]. Clearly, this was a scene that was built during the editing phase.
The next two pages are devoted to the describing Jake Hannaford’s personality and his repressed homosexuality.[xv] The terms used in the text to describe the sexual insecurities of Huston’s character are quite explicit and the analysis is very thorough, as if Welles and Kodar were trying to enter the character’s psychological depths.
The last part of the script is describes the scenes shot within an abandoned movie set: from this moment on, the words in the text are written in capital letters, as Welles notes that he is up against a deadline. In the opening of this segment, when Carla and Michael wake up inside the railroad car, a new character is introduced. He is never seen in the film, but is referenced by Jake’s voiceover, the Baron, and various cineastes; his shots are covered by titles saying “Shot Missing”. This is an old man, perhaps the guardian of the studios, who spies on the two young people through a hole[xvi]: he does not speak, he does not interact with them, and his identity is not revealed. In the last pages the chase between the two lovers is described inside the empty spaces of the abandoned set. The last part of this section describes the voice of Jake breaking into scene and directing the actors, as can be seen in the official version of the film. This intervention is compared in the script to the voice of God. After all, Jake, as God, decides at will the fate of the players[xvii]. The script closes with a last word, pronounced by Hannaford: “CUT — !”[xviii].
Unfortunately it is impossible to tell how much of this script was filmed by Welles. The materials that the director left behind for the project, running ninety-six hours, are invisible to scholarship and study. The version Netflix distributed had the great privilege of having access to some of these materials. However, there are many reasons to cast doubt on attributing paternity of this version to Welles. Certainly the philological approach has an aura of repulsive coldness, as it is an insidious enemy of these operations but strikes with the precision of a razor blade. It is especially useful for highlighting the contradictions of the Netflix version’s production and distribution. Consider, for example, the case of the “car sex” scene, part of those forty minutes edited by Welles. Netflix used these forty minutes as the blueprint for the work carried out by the brave and brilliant Robert Murawski. Originally this scene lasted seven minutes, but in the official version of the film, the scene has been trimmed to half this length, bringing the overall playing time to three minutes and thirty seconds.
A second point of concern is how much the available draft of Welles’s script was consulted, i.e. the one printed by the Locarno Festival in 2005 which Netflix made available online for a few hours in November 2018.[xix] After a long and arduous comparison of the text and film, it was possible to find many inconsistencies between the order of scenes shown in this version of the script and those edited by the Netflix team, led by Murawski. Some parts of the meeting between Billy Boyle (Hannaford’s devoted assistant, played by an exceptional Norman Foster) and Max David, the business-savvy Hollywood producer (played by Geoffrey Land, who manages to return the caricature of Robert Evans wanted by Welles), have been edited and arranged in ways often diverging from those indicated by the script, without any apparent logic.
Archival documents like these, as always, widen the horizon of research in unexpected ways. In the case of The Other Side of the Wind, documents like the script of the “film within the film” provide substantial nuances which were inevitably lost in the official edition of the film. Though foreign bodies to the published work, these documents are extraordinarily effective in describing the complexity of the project as Welles intended. They show how he wove the reality of production travails within his own ferocious and merciless satire of the New Hollywood.
* * *
(Massimiliano Studer is a PHD student at University of Udine (Italy) and his doctoral project is focused on The Other Side of the Wind. He also author of a book on Too Much Johnson (1938): Alle origini di Quarto potere. Too Much Johnson: il film perduto di Orson Welles. Translation from Italian by Massimiliano Studer; supervision for English language by Nicolas Ciccone. All rights reserved, 2019)
[i] Special thanks to the following people for their support and suggestions: Alessandro Aniballi, Esteve Riambaum, Catherine Benamou, Ray Kelly, Philip Hellman, Alberto Anile and Nicolas Ciccone.
[ii] See Studer, Massimiliano. Alle origini di Quarto potere. Too Much Johnson: il film inedito di Orson Welles. Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2018.
[iii] See Kelly, Ray. “Turin film museum contains trove of Orson Welles papers”. Wellesnet, February 1, 2018. https://www.wellesnet.com/turin-museum-orson-welles/ (last access: 16/10/2019).
[iv] Actually, there are 13 versions in the inventory, but two of them are identical.
[v] See the documents in Archivi del Museo Nazionale del Cinema-Orson Welles: ORWE0066 and ORWE0068.
[vi] Gosetti, Giorgio (edit by), Welles, Orson and Kodar, Oja. The Other Side of the Wind: scénario-screenplay. Locarno: Locarno International Film Festival/Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005, p. 188.
[vii] Archivi Museo Nazionale del Cinema-Orson Welles, ORWE0084, p. (162) 168.
[viii] In “Memorandum of Agreement”, Archivi Museo Nazionale del Cinema-Orson Welles, ORWE0068, p. 4. For the sake of completeness, it must be said that Welles did not shoot any scenes in Iran.
[ix] “Synopsis of Hannaford film and character notes” (from folder “Correct Cutting Copy” Mid-September 1974), Orson Welles – Oja Kodar Papers, 1910-2000, BOX 5, University of Michigan, pp. 1-30. The cited material is part of a considerable document cache deposited by Oja Kodar at this important US archive.
[x] Ivi, p. 7.
[xi] Ivi, pp. 8-10.
[xii] Ivi, pp. 12-14. The song chosen for the edition of Netflix is “Fruit and Icebergs” (1967) by Blue Cheer.
[xiii] Ivi, pp. 14-17.
[xiv] Ivi, p. 17.
[xv] Ivi, pp. 18-20.
[xvi] Ivi, p. 23.
[xvii] Ivi, p. 26.
[xviii] Ivi, p. 30.
[xix] Kelly, Ray. “The Other Side of the Wind screenplay available as free download”. Wellesnet, November 21, 2018. https://www.wellesnet.com/other-side-wind-script-free-download/ (Last accessed 17/10/2019).
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