By RAY KELLY
New Hollywood directors unsuccessfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to fund Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind in 1973, new research reveals.
Author Massimiliano Studer (Orson Welles E La New Hollywood: Il Caso di The Other Side of the Wind) has uncovered correspondence from director Orson Welles to F for Fake executive producer François Reichenbach and others involving possible funding via The Director Company, the early 1970s production company formed by Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin in association with Paramount Pictures.
Studer, who in 2018 publicized an overlooked archive of Welles material at the National Cinema Museum in Turin, has found letters about The Directors Company distributing F for Fake and financing The Other Side of the Wind.
“The letters kept in Turin, however, tell of an announced shipwreck, caused both by the greed and incompetence of some personalities of Paramount, the company that had started The Directors Company, and the nature of the project of The Other Side of the Wind — a film probably inadequate to meet the rigorous standards of commercial success imposed by the Hollywood production house,” Studer said.
In a January 13, 1973 letter addressed to the Antegor Studio in Paris, Welles wrote that Bogdanovich organized a private screening of F for Fake, then known simply as ?, for 250 people, including Coppola and Friedkin, who reacted enthusiastically to the film. (The letter reveals that F for Fake was completed by late 1972.)
“What influence Paramount would have over such a distribution and theatre-owning group I cannot say: I agreed to this because the role Bogdanovich would play in such a manoeuvre would have to be very positive because of his enthusiasm. It also turns out that his group is not tied irrevocably to Paramount and that they are free to operate independently from Paramount,” Welles wrote. “On this basis, he and the Paramount executive are going to New York next week for a projection of the film. I will try to get more specific information when I next talk to him. He believes that his anger with the Paramount executives had a constructive result in that they have agreed to finance The Other Side of the Wind without reading a script or hearing anything about it. You need not tell me that this is unlikely. I am simply passing on what Bogdanovich has told me on the phone.”
Welles was upbeat in a letter to Reichenbach two days later of the clout of The Directors Company.
“Coppola, who directed and produced The Godfather, Friedkin, who directed and produced The French Connection, and Peter Bogdanovich, who directed and produced The Last Picture Show, have formed a company, not only for the production of their own films but for films which they will not themselves direct. They have enormously important financial backing and represent the strongest combination in movie business today. This is not at all a personal opinion; ask anyone who is smart about the money side of show business and they will bear out this opinion. ”
“We are in a particularly strong position with this new group because of my friendship with Bogdanovich who, as you probably know, has been working for some four years now on a book about me. He is — if I may use an immodest phrase — a Welles enthusiast, as are both Friedkin and Coppola. Rather than peddling our picture around amongst the bosses of the major studios, it seemed to me that this young, highly successful and highly pro-Welles group were ideally suited to our interests.”
But, Studer notes, the financing deal failed to materialize.
In a four-page letter addressed to Bogdanovich and dated January 21, 1973, Welles expressed doubt that funding from The Directors Company and Paramount would ever materialize.
“Peter Bogdanovich, optimism is the enemy of the time and lawyers are the enemies of the optimism… Two or three weeks ago you told me that you had shaken hands with one of the Great White Chiefs, receiving his assurance that you had a deal. What was the film about, he asked. Never mind, you had told him, you don’t need to know. (Or words to that effect). I refer you now to the second half of my opening sentence — to the question of lawyers. They are your lawyers and Paramount’s lawyers and what I am wondering is can we honestly consider that these legal thinkers are going to settle for that hand-shake?”
Studer noted that the unidentified Paramount executive’s question — “What was the film about?” — may have inspired the screening room scene in The Other Side of the Wind between Hannaford associate Billy Boyle and studio executive Max David.
Welles acknowledged that Max David was based on Paramount executive Robert Evans.
In one of The Other Side of the Wind scripts, Studer noted, Max David is described as “the latest (and who knows ?, maybe the last) big chief of one of the last of the big movie companies.”
Based on what Studer has uncovered, Bogdanovich had real-life experience to draw from when he was finally cast as successful New Hollywood director Brooks Otterlake, asked by an older filmmaker to champion The Other Side of the Wind before an uninterested studio boss.
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(Read “Orson Welles and the Directors Company: a Maestro inside the New Hollywood” by Massimiliano Studer at cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/13661)
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