By RAY KELLY
After decades of legal battles, the negative of Orson Welles’ Don Quixote is now in the hands of the late filmmaker’s longtime companion Oja Kodar.
The Italian website Quinlan. it recently reported that the negative will soon be deposited at the Munich Film Museum, but that is apparently not the case.
“Don Quixote is still in our storage — for now,” Kodar’s nephew and represenative, Sasha Welles, told Wellesnet. “It is not going to Munich.”
The Munich Film Museum has been the repository of many unfinished Welles movies that the late filmmaker left to Kodar.
Sasha Welles, who was traveling when contacted by Wellesnet on Friday, did not elaborate on his aunt’s plans for the footage, which she fought for more than 25 years to secure.
Mauro Bonanni, who worked as an editor on Don Quixote from April 1969 until March 1970, had been in possession of some 65,000 feet (more than 12 hours) of negative. He refused to hand it over to Kodar in the early 1990s, prompting her to launch a lengthy legal battle.
Bonanni took possession of the negative with Welles’ authorization in 1974 when it was at risk of being destroyed after an agreement with the lab where it was housed lapsed.
Welles remained interested in Don Quixote even thirty years after filming began in 1955. According to Bonanni, months before Welles’ death in October 1985, the legendary filmmaker called his former editor and proposed resuming the editing process.
In the years following Welles’ death, Kodar looked for someone to complete Don Quixote. Finally, she agreed with a plan to have it completed in time for for the 1992 Universal Exposition of Seville. Jess Franco was to deliver a finished film for Patxi Irigoyen’s El Silencio. (The result was a disastrous mix of poor quality Don Quixote footage mixed with scenes from the Welles travelogue Nella terra di Don Chisciotte.)
Bonanni and Juan Cobos, a close friend of Welles and an assistant on Chimes at Midnight, had concerns about the project from the start and refused to participate.
In letters to El Silencio, Bonanni proposed assembling a group of Welles scholars from around the world to compile and present a comprehensive version of Don Quixote. Bonanni made a 90-minute cut, which was screened for the Italian press in 1992, according to Orson Welles, Author of Don Quixote, Reconsidered (Adalberto Muller, Cinema Journal; Fall 2016)
Bonanni’s claim of ownership was first rejected by a court in Rome. Later, a Capitoline appeals court upheld the lower court ruling. Ultimately, Bonanni took his case to Corte Suprema di Cassazione, Italy’s highest court of appeal, and lost, la Repubblica reported.
The decision could not have surprised Bonanni, who predicted his loss in a June 2015 interview. “(The judge) does not understand what my contribution was … I will lose the case, they will take the negative and all this is over.”
The Bonanni negative is not the only Don Quixote footage in existence. Other holdings include:
- Filmoteca Española in Madrid has 40 minutes edited and dubbed by Welles. It was used by Franco as part of his 1992 completion.
- Cinémathèque Française in Paris has 45 minutes of scenes and outtakes from the film, assembled under the supervision of director Costa-Gavras. The Cannes Film Festival screened the footage in May 1986. Some 80 minutes of footage was shown at a screening in June 2015.
- Pordenone’s Cinemazero in Italy is rumored to be in possession of footage. Cinemazero apparently located trunks of Welles footage that went missing in the 1970s from an Italian warehouse. The trove included Don Quixote. Cinemazero was involved in the release of the long lost Too Much Johnson and The Merchant of Venice.
What happens next with Don Quixote is anybody’s guess.
The excitement surrounding the completion of The Other Side of the Wind may put Kodar in a stronger position to wrangle a deal to produce a documentary using the Don Quixote footage or (again) attempt a completion.
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